Jeyanithe A. Karunanithy: Circulation of Trauma narratives and the (re)construction of an ‘asylum world’: The paradox of transnational living for Tamil asylum-seekers in Canada

What does it mean to be an asylum-seeker in times of global refugee crisis? This paper explores three key issues to comprehend this question:

  1. the role of the state in the everyday life
  2. the politics of trauma and asylum and
  3. the strategies of identity re-construction. Having faced with arbitrariness, paradoxes and uncertainty (McDowell 1996), asylum-seekers survive fear from international terrorism, mass migrations, ongoing political violence and socio-economic inequity (Drozdek & Wilson, 2007). Tamils living in Sri Lanka have suffered severe socio-economic devastation after three decades of warfare exacerbated by a 1983 pogrom (Tambiah 1997; Cheran, 2000; Hyndman, 2003). Tamil refugees are experiencing tightened immigration control since 9-11, as they hope to find ‘refuge’ in Canada, their preferred destination. Under the circumstances of refugee dilemma, the paper is primarily concerned with the circulation of Tamil asylum-seekers and construction of an ‘‘asylum diaspora’’as a socio-cultural and political form of transnational identity, and various challenges and interruptions offered to this elusive identity by the paradox of institutional practices of state, refugee law and psychiatric practices (e.g., the discourse and diagnosis of PTSD as Nirjhawan, 2005 emphasised).

Considering the notion of Canada ‘as an internationally recognised state for its multicultural policy valuing diversity and pluralism’ (Berry, 2001; Brunger, 1994), the first part of this paper analyses the process of ‘‘imagining community’’ (Anderson, 1986) and Canada’s socio-political space saturated by elements of surplus domination due to its Eurocentric/racist/colonial context (Bannerji 2000). The paper also relates to the argument that the construction of an ‘‘asylum Diaspora’’ driven by long-distance-nationalism is one of such consequences of a tough experience of marginalised people in exile (Fuglerud, 1999). Based on anthropological fieldwork between 2008 and 2010, invovling asylum-seekers, medico-legal authorities, representatives of refugee advocacy organisations, settlement workers, IRB officials, interpreters and archival material, the second part of the paper examines the development of an ‘asylum world’ comprising of ‘‘status pending’’ persons who present a complex spectrum of post-traumatic (psychological) state, against the backdrop of an emerging discourse on transnational (political) state and the formation of transnational identities, relating to its implications for transnational kinship and institutional ties globally. The personal narratives of forty refugee claimants reveal the ways of Canadian state’s practices -marked by heavy ‘bureaucratization’ and ‘medicalisation’- trigger the suffering of asylum-seekers who are already at the social margins of ‘illegality’ and ‘deportability’.