Angela Britto: Naan Poitu Varan : Representations of Nation by Tamil Diasporic Writers
The diasporic impulse to engage with a home that is simultaneously real and imagined, is reflected in the literary works that are studied in this paper. This desire for home necessitates a re-presentation of the nation in Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai and When Memory Dies by A. Sivanandan, two contemporary novels by diasporic Tamil writers. Is the reconstruction of the nation subverted or asserted in their narratives? Is their re-presentation that of a Tamil nation? Is it a site of belonging or alienation? Furthermore, how does the artifice of literary representation contribute to the project of nationalism and reproduce its tropes and tools? These are some questions that this paper aims to explore.
Both novels subvert the nation by interrogating single historicizing narratives of nationhood designed to create a nationalist consciousness. This acknowledgement of multiple narratives is also the recognition of the heterogeneity and hybridity of the nation: the multiplicity of voices, perspectives and traditions that reside within its geographic borders.
The physical movement of the individual away from the nation and the imaginative return to it, demonstrates the circularity that characterizes the diasporic relationship to home(land). It is this circularity that is expressed in “naan poitu varan” and the diasporic desire to go and come back, in some form. Thus, in their complex representations of home, Tamil diasporic writers are no longer on the periphery, the opposite of native writers in a binary, but are positioned alongside each other as distinct frameworks through which to view the nation.
Biogrpahical Statement:
Angela Britto is a graduate of the University of Toronto in English and Diaspora Studies. Her academic interests are South Asian, Caribbean, postcolonial and diasporic literatures and cultural pluralism in the arts. Her current research projects include representations of nation in Sri Lankan literature, the Tamil diaspora in Toronto, and aesthetic intersections in diasporic popular culture
