Race Matters - History, Unwoven: The Complex Threads of a Sri Lankan Uprising [Ep 116]

Below is a transcript of a poem read on this episode of the Race Matters podcast (listen here). It is a meditation on grief, displacement of Tamil peoples, data, and surveillance in colonial borders. This podcast episode, produced by Shareeka Helaluddin, looks at Sri Lanka, and the ongoing economic and humanitarian crisis unfolding. She speaks to people on the ground in Sri Lanka and its diaspora to unravel the very complex and oft-unknown histories that led to the critical point, the shadow of colonialism that still impacts, what the diaspora should be mindful of and what a meaningful, people-centred accountable future of Sri Lanka could look like. It also includes comments from journalist and researcher Shiran Illanperuma, Tamil refugee activist Renuga Inpakumar, and Queer Tamil mutual aid organiser and law student Niroshnee Rajan.

My name is a spell

My name is a spell

It can't be held

In the mouths of oppressors

Reminiscent of territories

Of bodies, invaded

The database collects my name

But cannot understand it

Yet the database decides

Where I will go in this life

Life, is a series of borders

Built and policed by those

Without access to themselves

But if we can be sorted, ordered, owned

By walls, by data

Then so can they

Eventually, borders creep

But our inner worlds

Cannot be stolen, like land

Land is a source

Of our innate, ancestral power

The soil and water

That nourished my infant body 

Lives on in me

Even here at the borderlands

Where my Tamil is broken

And our people

Indefinitely imprisoned

To be imprisoned for seeking safety

For fleeing a genocide

For escaping the erasure of language, culture

For leaving a broken country

For resisting the regime that broke this country

For being born in a country broken by Empire

For being ripped from our homelands

For sacrificing ever being home again, whole again

Is to be imprisoned for existing

Existing is not possible

Without building worlds

Made up of music

Sound and stillness

In frequencies their ears can't hear

Our 'selves' are fluid

Complex, interwoven with 'other'

And at the same time non existent

Not to be contained in 1's and 0's

The seeds of liberatory systems

Systems we live in

Could bend and break under

The pressure of presence

Of a stillness so deep

It feels close to death

Perhaps even colonisers could access

Their own stillness,

could speak our names

If only they stayed quiet

Long enough to hear it