Niro Kandasamy - A Sense of Viidu: The (Re)creation of Home by the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Australia

Niro Kandasamy , Nirukshi Perera and Charishma Ratnam

Bringing together multiple subject positions and approaches, this volume seeks to explore the ways in which diasporic Tamils who are refugees and migrants from the war shape their homes in Australia. As Ratnamohan, Krishna, Mares and Silove point out in their chapter, home encompasses both inner psychic space and anthropological place. The contributions explore both senses of home through lenses ranging from memoir and fiction to ethnography, cultural analysis and trauma studies, exploring specific diasporic formations (the Tamil weekend) and groupings (Tamil-Australian activists, women displaced by the war). As the editors recognise, diasporic Tamils are not a unified or singular category. Dislocations over three decades of the war compounded and ramified to produce their own exclusions as well as new political and affective communities. Tamil-speaking Muslims expelled from the Jaffna peninsula in the early years of the war by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam constitute a distinct category of those displaced by the war. In Australia, Tamil asylum seekers and refugees caught in indefinite offshore detention test the limits of diaspora as an analytic term. New configurations like the latter in turn produce their own forms of cultural expression. Shaminda Kanapathi, effectively imprisoned by the Australian state on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, for more than six years, is a frequent voice forManus Alert, an irregular form of digital telegram by which the men held on Manus reach out to the wider world. Marking the sixth anniversary of offshore detention in July 2019, Kanapathi, who was in his early twenties when he sought refuge in Australia, made an impassioned plea in the national press calling for his long deferred future to be finally allowed to begin:

We are hoping against hope that this new government can finally recognise and admit this appalling waste of human life and offer us hope with positive action towards providing us with a future, a safe home to build our dreams. (Kanapathi 2019)