Current Projects
SCHOLARLY
1. ஐயோ/AIYO
A born-digital book project adapted from my dissertation that explores the experience of chronic pain (fibromyalgia) and chronic fatigue (myalgic encephalomyelitis) as a queer Eelam Tamil woman graduate student whose patient-scholar expertise and orientations to pain are often ignored. This project challenges the Eurocentric, ocularcentric view of fibromyalgia by recovering medical, social, and cultural histories of pain particular to Sri Lanka, specifically Batticaloa. In the spirit of Tamil obliqueness, this project does not argue: it presents readers with the perspectives, mythologies, phenomenological attitudes, sensory hierarchies, and intergenerational trauma that saturate the diasporic Eelam Tamil experience, and asks readers to draw their own conclusions.



Taking my initial diagnosis and a disbelieved ruptured appendix as its primary departure points, this project restores a Tamil decolonial praxis to the theorizing of வலி (pain) and வித்தியாசம் (difference)—expressing it in English as the word-blend misability—and critiques Euro-Western biomedical industry and higher education.
This project is a capacious cybertext that additionally simulates the experience of chronic pain and fatigue for readers through rasa (indescribable aesthetic essence); reading orders inspired by Cortázar’s Hopscotch; and interactive and interruptive content.
An excerpt can be found here.

Creative
2. Black Tiger White Van
A creative nonfiction manuscript exploring the vicarious trauma of growing up in the shadow of the Tamil genocide, as well as the simultaneous, disorienting experiences of navigating queer disabled identity; coping through (and with) suicidal ideation and self-injury; and the painful legacy of shattered codependent friendships that were toxic in many ways. This book project tells and retells stories to make sense of these experiences, using archival research, lyric forms, fanfiction, redacted news, folklore and familial histories, images, and deformations of the text itself.
Black Tiger White Van is represented by Mary Krienke at Sterling Lord Literistic.
Photo: Chandragupta Amarasinghe. COLOMBO, JULY 1983

CREATIVE
3. Untitled
A prose poetry chapbook coming to terms with my Appa’s early death from terminal complications of a chronic illness.
This project is represented by Mary Krienke at Sterling Lord Literistic.
Photo: Vyshali Manivannan, THE WAKE. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0