Teardrop Collective is a bunch of artists and group organizers based mostly in Toronto, who discover the tales of queer and trans, Deaf and listening to individuals of Tamil, Sri Lankan, and South Asian ancestry within the diaspora. Over the previous a number of years, Teardrop has produced many intergenerational group arts occasions associated to and impressed by the event of Leopards and Peacocks, a brand new play by Teardrop’s inventive director Gitanjali Lena. These occasions embody a web-based studying of Leopards and Peacocks; Thrive Sessions, facilitated community-engaged discussions reflecting on the setting, politics, and themes of the play; Aunties Legacy Project, a group arts workshop collection with Tamil elders in Scarborough; “Ghosts Don’t Need Passports,” a design set up on the 2022 Summerworks Festival exploring visible concepts in Leopards and Peacocks; and a number of in-person and on-line script growth workshops.
In this piece, Gitanjali Lena and Teardrop producer Hari Somaskantha change letters reflecting on what it has been prefer to facilitate this work on-line and offline in methods which might be as protected, trauma-informed, and joyful as attainable.
Dear Thambs,
I like that we’re doing this reflection collectively. We did a hell of quite a bit these final three years. Pandemic years, even! I don’t replicate sufficient so right here we go.
Let’s begin by contemplating what trauma is to queers and Tamils. Trauma—what a enjoyable matter. Trauma has dropped into on a regular basis parlance, which is each good and dangerous. It is overused, misused, and has wildly completely different meanings for various individuals, particularly in queer group. How do Tamils speak about ache, trauma, numbness, sudden responses to triggers, and all the other forms of trauma that may manifest for racialized individuals within the diaspora who’re additionally surviving struggle, genocide, and state violence? What’s the lexicon for trauma in Tamil?
Instead of trying up trauma theories, I requested a bunch of pals I respect to inform me in a non-clinical approach how they personally body and perceive trauma as queer and trans individuals of colour. From a neurological perspective, trauma creates a neural pathway—that’s laborious however not inconceivable to rewire in our brains—at occasions once we expertise violence. We go into combat or flight (or freeze or rage) response once we expertise trauma after which use the identical neural pathway once we are reminded or triggered. Traumatic experiences additionally change our worldview about risk-taking. There are locations we received’t go and actions we received’t do anymore, like how individuals who have skilled shelling and bombing can’t hear fireworks with out freaking out.
We know there are tremendous painful locations the place id and trauma meet. Trauma might be the response. The ache of that response is commonly dulled by avoidance, apathy, or types of addictions inside racialized communities as a result of remedy is dear, time-consuming, and steeped in Western values of wellness. Queerness impacts trauma from exterior locations of how we’re learn and the way individuals relate to us. Being nonbinary and/or trans additionally means regarding our bodies in a different way so gender nonconforming individuals retailer bodily trauma in a different way.
Racialized communities have a lot much less entry to programs of help and wholesome methods of being that may undo the neural pathways of trauma. When trauma occurs to white woman our bodies, the world reacts. But when it occurs to Black our bodies, it’s fully neglected. No one cares as a result of in white supremacist society, we’re collectively desensitized to the excessive ranges of violence repeatedly inflicted upon Black and Indigenous our bodies. Doing the work to handle trauma might be retraumatizing, and I by no means need Teardrop Collective to retraumatize individuals by means of our inventive choices.
Another individual mentioned they expertise trauma as a splitting or a fracturing that disconnects them from themselves, from different individuals, and from the world. To have skilled trauma, then, is to inhabit a splintered state within the physique in a world that feels unsafe, attempting to keep away from connections, or fearing connections that one now responds to as unsafe.
When we speak about Tamil trauma, we aren’t speaking a couple of single traumatic incident, a collection of the identical sorts of incidents, or incidents that solely occurred to at least one individual. We are speaking about tons of traumatized individuals all reacting on the similar time to their very own triggers. Some individuals type attachments to sources of trauma as a part of their identities (e.g., activists, nationalists) or worse, repeat the behaviors of their abusers to others in group and household. As younger individuals, femmes, individuals assigned feminine at delivery, queer individuals, non-binary individuals, and people who find themselves disabled or in a different way abled, we all know how our trauma responses and therapeutic choices are completely different due to all of the systemic “-isms” we expertise along with generational and private trauma.
Even inside the diaspora, we’ve got fault strains on our our bodies and our minds in relation to experiences we’ve had. We cross bloodlines, oceans, and timelines with our ache. The stuff that occurred to our mother and father, aunties, uncles, and grandparents is the previous haunting us. We even have our responses and queer traumas within the current—and if we’ve got nervousness, we worry future trauma.
Another pal mentioned previous trauma turns into “like a silent companion” to your subsequent way of life. It lives in all of the splintered-off components which have developed fiercely protecting methods however nonetheless maintain us trapped in undigested, previous, uncooked materials (e.g., a sexual assault, verbal violence, a automotive crash, ongoing state violence). The previous turns into the neural map that retains getting projected onto the current. Trauma clouds new experiences earlier than we are able to understand it for ourselves, a sticky vitality that feels prefer it’s sheltering you by retaining reminders at entrance of your thoughts, so that you keep away from a repeat of the destructive previous. But the reminders are like blinding warning lights that maintain us from connecting, therapeutic, and experiencing conditions and interactions with freshness and curiosity.
We need our viewers to have the ability to convey their trauma twin sib—the a part of themselves that does carry trauma—to the artwork and present it safer areas during which they will hear the screaming voices, consolation their youthful selves, and be immersed in new methods of seeing acquainted objects, individuals, interactions, and sensations.
As an artist, I by no means wish to keep away from the painful, scary stuff. But as a Teardrop Collective founder, I wish to follow care in what we provide publicly. I wrestle with that pressure in all of our work. From what work we selected to share with which audiences, to how we handle battle in facilitated discussions, to how we deal with suggestions in digital areas, to what accessibility helps we offer at occasions. We can not ship individuals away again to their households and jobs feeling ripped open and never compassionately and punctiliously resourced.
What d’you concentrate on how we deal with our performers, viewers, funders and presenters, and the venues we select to work with?
geets
Even inside the diaspora, we’ve got fault strains on our our bodies and our minds in relation to experiences we’ve had. We cross bloodlines, oceans, and timelines with our ache.
Hellooooo!
It’s been such an journey, Geetha, actually! It feels a bit of surreal, how far we’ve come since our summer season 2019 dialog whenever you first pulled me into Teardrop <3. It appears like all through the pandemic, we’ve got wanted to rethink objectives and cancel/reschedule issues. We are a younger collective, nevertheless it appears like we’ve gotten a style of a lot!
Trauma, eh? We can’t assume everybody has launched themselves to that phrase, “trauma.” And we will not assume how anybody has been impacted by trauma, addressed their trauma, or begun work towards therapeutic from it. I requested Appa, and, with some assist from Google, he says there are a couple of phrases that kinda describe the English time period “trauma” in Tamil (all context- and tone-based, as are most issues in Tamil) however no direct translation: kaayam (English: wound), mana-ullachal (English: thoughts/psychological stress), adi-vedhanai padukaayam (English: most deepest-severe wound), and purra-adhirchi punn (English: severely stunning/surprising ache). Colloquially, individuals may name it vedhanai, that means fear.
Numerous trauma has to do with residence and household (Tamil: kudumbam). From what I’ve noticed, our group’s relationship to house is highly effective, nostalgic, bitter, anguished, and protecting unexpectedly. For queer, non-binary Tamils—particularly me—Sri Lanka as a house is one thing I didn’t even suppose existed. In that approach, “back home” is imagined, malleable, and ever-evolving—one thing I and quite a lot of folx are nonetheless discovering.
In that very same thread, creating residence and homey areas (e.g., bodily, digital, and emotional/religious) is paramount to our work, particularly when some don’t suppose they will (or truly can’t) return to Sri Lanka or worry a future the place going residence is probably not attainable. There’s a combined bag of systemic limitations and political, socio-economic conditions that Tamils have been going through because the struggle, and the perceived and really actual lack of land, animals, and human kin.
Our areas create invites to seek out residence, even when briefly (e.g., for land, language, cultural practices, or to create new ones as a collective diaspora). Cultures are created when there’s a shared understanding of values, practices, and meaning-making. Teardrop Collective strives to generate that within the sorts of occasions we provide, the individuals we collaborate with, and the tales all of us maintain, whether or not spoken or felt. We are in a position to do that much more so on-line and thru the assorted social media, occasions, and on-line peer teams that an individual can interact with if they’ve web.
What do you suppose we’ve realized up to now?
Take care,
Hari