Tamil Terrains

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Edited by: Geetha Sukumaran, Nedra Rodrigo

What happens when a two-thousand-year-old language rooted in a classical poetics of land moves, along with some of its peoples, through colonial and postcolonial upheaval, war, and forced or voluntary migrations?

Questioning traditional concepts of time, place, labour, love, purity, and gender, this prismatic collection of poems, translations, transcreations draws connections between ancient Sangam landscapes and migrant labour songs; classical Tamil love poems and the wounded memories of colonial plantation workers and undocumented refugees.

Building community with each other, Tamil translators living on Indigenous terrains in North America reflect on the violence of settler colonialism, descendants of Tamil indentured labourers in Malaysia and Singapore confront erasures inflicted upon them, and those rooted in Tamil’s traditional homelands encounter the intimacies and distances of a migrant tongue.

AUTHOR

Geetha Sukumaran

Geetha Sukumaran, a poet and translator, is a doctoral candidate in Humanities at York University, Toronto. She holds an MPhil degree in Tamil literature. Her research interests include contemporary Tamil poetry, women’s writing, trauma literature and translation. Her current research focuses on the literature and oral narratives of women from conflict zones that connect with culinary practices, war trauma and religion. Her Tamil translation of Sylvia Plath’s poems was published in 2013 and her own poetry collection in Tamil was published in 2014.

AUTHOR

Nedra Rodrigo

Nedra Rodrigo was born in Sri Lanka and came to Canada during the civil war. She is a translator, poet, workshop organizer at the York Centre for Asian Research, and arts educator for youth in the York Region District School Board. She is also the founder of the Tamil Studies Symposium at York University. She is the founder and current host of the bilingual, inclusive literary event, the Tam Fam Lit Jam. Nedra’s poetry and essays have been published in various anthologies. Her translation credits include the poetry of R Cheran, Puthuvai Ratnathurai, and V I S Jayapalan in the collection Human Rights and the Arts in Global Asia; the memoir In the Shadow of a Sword, published by SAGE YODA Press, India (2020); Kuna Kaviyazhakan’s “Forest That Took Poison,” shortlisted for the inaugural Global Humanities Translation Prize; and the Prison of Dreams quintet. She lives in Toronto.