Lately, I have been thinking and feeling about the future. As someone who struggled with anxiety and depression as a teenager, only to be later diagnosed at the age of 26 as living with bipolar disorder, the future has always made me uneasy. I find it difficult to map out a trajectory beyond two weeks, let alone: “Where do you see yourself in x years?”. Yet, I am not going to write about my own future here. I would like to share from what I have been thinking and feeling about the future ahead of all of us.

With everything that is going on in the world and in the island nation of “Sri Lanka”, the future does seem bleak. Among the several genocides that are ongoing globally, my heart and mind have been focused on Palestine and Sri Lanka, and specifically the region within it that encompasses the aspirational state of Tamil Eelam. While many of us have found ourselves unable to look away from the gruesome imagery of the brutality of it all, I have come to realise that my capacity for empathy towards these struggles already exists. I do not need to be processing all the images of suffering, staying up to date on the daily brutalities, to remind myself of this. Instead of looking away, I have tried to slow down and sit with articulations of these struggles that have been made by those affected by it.

Palestinian Time

There is an essay by Rami Rmeileh, a Social and Cultural psychologist and a doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter – Institute of Arab and Islamic studies, titled “In the Shadow of Palestinian Time and the Camp’s Alleyways” that articulates the phenomena of “Palestinian Time”. It reads:

In that time, Palestinian time, temporality is cyclical, influenced by past displacement, present confinement, and an ongoing struggle for liberation.

By cyclical I refer to the past as omni-present, nurturing hope for a future where space, kinship and time are to be grown in and of Palestinian soil. Our attempts as refugees to exercise control over our space and time are an act of solidifying our existence, of refusing erasure.

Rmeileh (2023), “In the Shadow of Palestinian Time and the Camp’s Alleyways”

How do we imagine futures when the past is omni-present? It can feel so fatalistic. All-encompassing. The trajectories of our lives predetermined by the trauma of the past. Genocide has no past tense. It is a continuous present. It must not be allowed to future. Then, we must actively disallow it. The ways in which we do so are seen in the activism and advocacy of those who are fighting against the very erasure of their being. Beyond this, however, I feel that, particularly as artists and poets, we must grapple with how our imaginations themselves are being violated and confined by the perpetrators of genocide.

In the essay “Who Will We Be When We Are Free? On Palestine and Futurity”, Sophia Azeb, assistant professor of Black Studies in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, asks at the very outset:

What if we became Palestinians, together, in catastrophe? That we have been formed and effaced in catastrophe, that our community — the Palestinians, so broadly imagined — comes to know itself and ourselves as Palestinian(s), again and again, through the forever-catastrophe? What if it is also true that our Palestinianness continuously manifests itself in our suspended state of catastrophe? Might we understand ourselves as always in the process of becoming Palestinian?

Azeb (2019), “Who Will We Be When We Are Free? On Palestine and Futurity”

This notion of “becoming Palestinian” has left me wondering what it means to “become Tamil”. I will articulate what I mean by this in a future newsletter, but, for now, perhaps we can ask these questions also of what is happening to our ideas of identity, community and memory, whether we are from Palestine, Eelam, or Sri Lanka. Let’s return to Azeb’s essay:

When Mahmoud Darwish asks, “what does it mean for a Palestinian to be a poet and what does it mean for a poet to be Palestinian?” he also frames for us a way to complicate our attachment to our catastrophe as the foundation of our community. What does it mean for a Palestinian and a poet to be free? What does it mean to be Palestinian?

Azeb (2019), “Who Will We Be When We Are Free? On Palestine and Futurity”

This is a question that, in some form, I find myself grappling with whenever someone asks me to consider migrating to an elsewhere. What would I write about if I were not living amidst the structural violence of the Sinhala supremacist ethnostate? Would it truly free me? Would I be able to write poetry, music and create the kind of art that only affluent White people get to? It’s a certain form of privilege. And it certainly manifests in very real ways for Sinhalese artists, in the local artworld as well as internationally. This is another strain of thought that I will articulate in a future newsletter. Maybe, for now, it would be helpful to write about ways in which I see futuring in my own artistic practice, and that of an Eelam Tamil artist whose work I have been following.

Longing for the end of nation states

I created this concrete poem in April of 2022, amidst the escalating political, economic and agricultural crisis in Sri Lanka. I was also meant to be applying for a visa to travel to Canada where one of my artworks were to be exhibited. This was also a time in which there were serpentine queues for petrol, gas, and passports — often several kilometres long, and several elderly folk dying just trying to secure resources for their families. In the process of my application, I decided to find out how well I would score on their CRS (Comprehensive Ranking System). Without an undergraduate degree or any “real” paper qualification, unsurprisingly, I did not score that high. This, coupled with a malicious emotional and psychological attack upon myself and comrades that was dealt out by an individual in the Tamil diaspora, left me feeling utterly hopeless for a future in an elsewhere.

Enough has been said about what it means to have a passport such as the Sri Lankan passport. The many ways in which the citizens of certain countries of the world do not even realise that the word “visa” can mean something other than a credit card. When I was in Basel on a residency last year, I had to cross the border over to Germany to pick up a second-hand suitcase. I boarded the tram and fully expected that there would be a checkpoint. Some form of immigration control. Nothing. The tram went across the invisible border seamlessly. It infuriated me. That citizens of the EU had this privilege, and those of us in South Asia are still subjected to scrutiny of our passports, our travel history, our financial status, all just to move to and fro, not even migrate. Does this world really have a future in store for us?

I ask dua for a world in which there are no more nation states. No ethnostates. No states. The nation state as it is imagined and enacted in the contemporary world relies on its securing of the monopolies of extraction, adjudication, and violence. So long as that is the case, and so long as they only uphold democracy when it is majoritarian, there will always be oppression. I do not believe in democracy as it is presently practiced.

In the future of my dua, all nation states will transition into a more radical form of consociationalism. In the present day, where it is practiced, consociationalism is a form of democratic power sharing yet it shares that power among elites that represent the various groups within the nation. Can we not imagine and enact a form of consociationalism that instead appoints the most oppressed from each group to positions of power? That all policy decisions will be made based on the least harm it would inflict upon any group?

In the future of my dua, it is possible.

In the future of my dua, through the processes of arriving at consensus, one by one, every nation state will choose to cease to be a state.

In the future of my dua, “When any limb aches, the whole body reacts”.

Al-Nu’man ibn Bashir reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “The parable of the believers in their affection, mercy, and compassion for each other is that of a body. When any limb aches, the whole body reacts with sleeplessness and fever.”

Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6011, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2586

Grade: Muttafaqun Alayhi (authenticity agreed upon)

Elias (2012), “Hadith on Brotherhood: Believers are one body in compassion”

In the future of my dua, we are all free.

But enough about me.

Rescuing the past to take back the future

I’m interested in an idea of what it means to be Tamil that can also look to the future based on some of the things about that liberation movement that were quite unusual and interesting.

Vernissage TV (2023), “Christopher Kulendran Thomas: For Real / Kunsthalle Zürich”

Some years ago, a Sinhalese artist and past collaborator reached out to me, asking: “Do you know this fellow? Christopher Kulendran Thomas”. It was the first time I had heard the name. I was being inquired of him as he had purchased artwork created by this Sinhalese artist, legitimately through a Sri Lankan gallery that represented him, and then reframed the work so as to critique it. And what was the critique? That artworks that we celebrate as being critical of the Sri Lankan state are in fact actually state serving. This argument has also been made by political geographer Sinthujan Varatharajah, where they noted how important “soft power” is to such a nation state, and ways in which its “dissident” artists help that cause. Even I have been asked, in front of an audience, if I feel that my work is “state serving”. Much like capitalism, nation states too are very much capable of co-opting that which attempts to critique it.

In 2016, Christopher Kulendran Thomas put into motion a futuring project he called “New Eelam”. One part of it was a video work that framed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as a militant Marxist group that attempted to build an autonomous community: Tamil Eelam. What is fascinating about his framing is how he (re?)contextualises their use of the early internet, in that it might have inspired nonhierarchical forms of self-government. His project also included an actual startup, one that reimagined real estate in the contemporary world, allowing its users access to “collectivized housing” across the world. As of late, however, the website for New Eelam redirects to a venture called Earth. I am not going to read into the name change.

Here is how one of his recent exhibitions in London was written about:

Upstairs, there’s transparency, the city, the white cube; downstairs, there’s reflection, a jungle, a black box. The jungle comes first. Through a yellow curtain, framed diagrams of Tamil Eelam buildings face a floor-to-ceiling projection of a jungle representing the forests of Tamil Eelam. In the middle of the space, a wooden scaffold supports a fragmented bank of monitors. Mannequins in ghillie suits stand guard in the shadows.

Called “The Finesse,” the work incorporates portions of a Tamil Tigers propaganda video from the 1990s, in which a soldier puts the value of decentralized information systems and the ironies of Western democracy in plain terms. (Quaintly enough, she portrays Yahoo as a reality-distorting media behemoth.) In a later section, AI-generated “deepfake” footage has Kim Kardashian describe the consuming effects of social media on our society and our brains. The video cuts out suddenly, at key points, to reveal the viewer’s own body, reflected with the slowly panning trees on the glossy screens. You are implicated; you are also enmeshed, a part of the electronic jungle. In what might be the video’s climax, a slow-motion, smeary animation of a figure in a fluorescent ghillie suit starts raving to deep, pulsing bass. Collective reality, generated through technology? It’s happening now.

The other video, “Being Human,” cuts out, too — the same trick in a different register. Upstairs, the galleries are conventionally appointed with groups of abstract paintings, terra cotta bas-reliefs, and kinked steel sculptures on plinths. “Being Human,” a reworked version of a 2019 video, is projected onto a glass wall bisecting one of the rooms. When the image drops away, yet more art appears on the walls behind — indistinguishable, in any meaningful way, from the art on your side of the scrim.

The video mixes the story of how Kulendran Thomas’ uncle founded a short-lived human rights center in Tamil Eelam, with monologues on politics and contemporary art from CGI avatars resembling Taylor Swift and painter Oscar Murillo. In a flesh-and-blood appearance, Tamil curator and artist Ilavenil Jayapalan advances an argument against the nation-state: Since countries such as Sri Lanka and the United States use the protection of human rights as cover for power grabs and repressions, he says, then the concept of human rights should be undone.

In a way, Kulendran Thomas’ approach is refreshing. Although some artists treat art as an opportunity for moralizing, morality belongs on Kulendran Thomas’ list of humanist fictions, along with democracy, creativity and individuality.

He has begun to rework the humanist reality — beginning, as artists do, with creativity. The twisted sculptures in the show, the sprightly watercolors, even the thick paintings gouged like tank-torn battlefields — most are bloodless iterations produced by an AI weaned on JPEGs of contemporary art, then executed by Kulendran Thomas’ studio. There is also at least one work of inoffensive market formalism, a welded steel polygon, credited to Kingsley Gunatillake, that Kulendran Thomas had purchased from a Sri Lankan gallery, then imitated.

Diehl (2022), “An Artist’s High-Tech Dream of a World With No Nations”

It is unfortunate that his body of work has thus far not been engaged with by many living in Sri Lanka. His work has yet to be shown in any context within the country, as far as I know. I must admit I was hoping that those who were able to see this exhibition in London would write about it, given their lived experiences and grasp of the context, which this writer is clearly lacking. By focusing on the use of deepfake celebrity cameos, the writer entirely misses the crucial ways in which these works are challenging, in Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ own words: “history as always a fiction told by states”.

In one of the works, we see a woman LTTE cadre talk about the vision and mission of the resistance movement. To someone versed in the context, it does not read as documentary footage, but rather a speculative documentary poetics at play. The writer may have not caught that, as it is phrased simply as “portions of a Tamil Tigers propaganda video from the 1990s”, which lends it a certain verité. What does it mean to speculate history, as a person who has been violently displaced, as a community who is violently thwarted from memorialising its resistance movement? What does it mean to take back the power to re/write history? When it is an artist who is making these gestures, we tend to allow it, though we might critique it. But what if it were an academic? Or an advocate? A politician? A diplomat? Or just a person with no such authority or power at all?

What if it were you?

I suppose I can end here.

I leave these questions open for you to ponder or cast aside.