I found my childhood house along with many sensations: the smell of fruits fallen to the ground, the taste of the water from the well, the sound of the temple bells.īut the joy of discovering a world in accordance with my memories was followed by a feeling of uneasiness: what connects me today to that territory? To what extent is that distant land part of my identity? Faced with the desolate landscape of the Jaffna lagoon, I realized that the answers are to be found elsewhere, within the diaspora, in this huge archipelago connected across seas and borders. This awareness which is at the origin of the National Museum of Eelam, was definitively obvious to me when I returned to my homeland 30 years later. Tamil identity confined to my private sphere burst into the public space and asserted itself on a political ground. We were many to share the same destiny, the same indignation. It was in 2009, when I took part in the demonstrations against the massacres of civilians perpetrated at the time by the Sri Lankan army, that I became aware that I belonged to a people. My attachment to Tamil culture was expressed almost exclusively in the family sphere. And while a climate of suspicion prevailed among refugees in the early 1990s - mistrust fuelled by fratricidal fights between armed groups on the island - my parents limited interactions with other refugees. The songs to the glory of our “Uncles the Tigers” did not make me vibrate. As a child, I did not identify myself with the red flag with a tiger. Though I am part of this diaspora, I grew up on the fringes of this community. Everywhere, attention is being made in rebuilding a Tamil social and cultural framework. Children can learn the language and culture of their elders in schools with unified curricula and examinations. Shops, temples, cinemas, sports clubs and Tamil cultural centers are open in cities where the diaspora lives. From Paris to Oslo, from Zurich to Toronto, an extremely dense network of associations has been forged in a vast transnational structure. Far from the shores of the Indian Ocean, Eelam persists within the diaspora, as if each refugee had taken away a tiny fragment of it in exile. The Sinhalese power continues its policy of predation and endeavors to eradicate every trace of Eelam, to make the memory of the struggle disappear. The National Museum of Eelam explores this vast diaspora’s memory.Īfter the defeat of the guerrillas in 2009, the three-decade-war ruins are being gradually erased. By the end of the conflict, about a third of the Tamil population lived abroad. Hundreds of thousands of us fled combat zones and the climate of terror. Four years passed between my departure from Jaffna and my arrival at Charles-de-Gaulle airport. While the Tamil Tigers guerrillas (LTTE) laid the foundations of an independent state in the North and the East, I left my hometown for India and then France. Since the withdrawal of the British in 1948, the Sri Lankan State established itself as a Sinhalese and Buddhist nation, excluding minorities from power. I was born in Jaffna in the early 1980s when the youth from the Tamil minority took up arms against the discriminatory policies and the violence perpetrated by the central government. The country at war that my mother, my brother and I had left, was called Sri Lanka, or Ceylon. I first heard the word Eelam in the 1990s. These people are the Tamils of Sri Lanka. A people whose aspirations, memory and identity have been trampled. Combined with a brief narrative, each object tells the story of a people torn from their land and scattered in the metropolises of the five continents. These are the sorts of objects that make up the collection of the National Museum of Eelam - banal and without any market value. Statuettes of Ganesh (La Courneuve): Statuettes of Ganesh given to the guests at the wedding ceremony of Santhia and Viknesh, celebrated on at the temple located in La Courneuve.Ī plastic statuette made in India, a handful of earth in a packet, a used toy. Poster (Paris): Poster plastered on the walls of the 10th arrondissement in Paris in tribute to Thileepan, an emblematic figure of the independent Tamil movement, who died after a hunger strike in 1987. Which objects constitute the collection of a national museum in exile? How can diasporic stories express more than history books will ever be able to? These questions are beautifully expressed by Jeyavishni Francis Jeyaratnam and Simon-Pierre Coftier’s project National Museum of Eelam in homage to the Tamil diaspora.
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