Migration is a ghostly experience of epic proportions. To understand migration in all of its human dimensions, one cannot stay in one place and time. Sometimes, one cannot even remain the same person. Migration sets in motion an imperative that is hard to satisfy: it requires continuous journey, continuous time travel, continuous exorcism.

In Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts, I write about Father Joseph*, the chaplain of the Sri Lankan Tamil Catholic mission in Montréal since 2001. Hailing from the coastal town of Mullaitivu in the Northern province of Sri Lanka, he exorcised ghosts as a parish priest there during the civil war, a practice he continues to do for seafarers at the Port of Montreal. I also describe Selvamani*, a refugee who fled Sri Lanka’s civil war in 1985, emigrating first to Chennai and then to Montréal, who reflects on how wartime “ghosts” render her sick whenever she travels too close to Sri Lanka. These narratives of multi-generational Tamils from diaspora and homeland, also featured in S. Shakthidharan’s “Counting and Cracking,” attest to how migration can be a calling and condition, dually characterized by hopes and realities of renewal and pain. 

Language learning and narrative expression offer ways to cope with, comprehend, and also celebrate migration and the circumstances leading to it. Just as Sri Lanka is now exploring how multilingual education in Tamil and Sinhalese can promote reconciliation between the country’s major ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils across the diaspora are collaborating with local government officials and arts organizations to showcase their distinctive voices – whether by implementing heritage language classes in Tamil or by creating plays, novels, and films about their journeys (sometimes in collaboration with other South Asian artists and producers). Tamil and Sinhalese are two languages that cast long shadows over one another in the expressive cultures of Sri Lankans; yet, their joint use is still jarred by unexorcised memories of the horrors of Black July in 1983 and the decades henceforth, when neighbors were pitted against neighbors, friends against friends, and soldiers against soldiers to cause the massive scale yet untold number of deaths of Sri Lankans, mostly Tamil. Disagreements over language rights partly incited this conflict, sparked by British colonial interventions in electoral politics in the 1940s and leading to hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils emigrating out of the country since the 1980s. Now, we bear witness to homeland and diasporic Sri Lankans coming together to recount different tales, told in multiple languages, ushering in a new chapter in the epic narrative of the centuries-long history of Tamil migrations around the globe.

*Pseudonyms were used to protect the identity of research informants.

Sonia N. Das is an Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at NYU and author of a book on the colonial and post-colonial legacies of Tamil migration to Québec, Canada, and who plans to research how comedians’ performances in South Asian and diasporic languages invite debate and dialogue on issues of politics and mental illness.