Illustration by Dhivya Sri (@dhiyvavisuals)
Editor's Note
By Luxvna Uthayakumar
When Vanessa Vigneswaramoorthy stepped down from the role of Editor-in-Lead in February of 2020, I had many hesitations. For one, I am an artist and designer. Creating visual stories is my way of communicating with an audience. But editing, managing, and assembling the work of talented writers and artists all over the world is not something I imagined myself doing let alone leading an award-winning magazine through an ongoing pandemic!
February was also the month where everything began 'normal' before the world turned on its head. Back then, I wasn't sure if the theme of "learning to unlearn" was fitting for our current issue of Tamil Futures. But with everything that happened after February, I think it's safe to say it was foretelling.
Together, we witnessed the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. The death of George Floyd sparked renewed global movements for Black justice and the tragic loss of Regis Korchinski Paquet called for abolishing the police whose orgins go all the way back to slavery. As I am editing this note, the remains of over 215 Indigenous children were unearthed and more mass graves were finally acknowledged to exist in Canada. Following the news, statues of the people responsible for these atrocities toppled to the ground. We are waiting for many endings to come in some ways.
In all of these events, there seems to be a common thread: we've been presented with historical moments where we can pause to ask ourselves "Is what we've been taught serving us for the better?".
Some of us have realized that the things we've learned (force-fed identities, patterns of trauma and abuse, the silencing of our rage, and more), have taken our personal power away. Others saw how we understood ourselves only in relation to how we've struggled to confirm the white, cisgendered man's capitalistic idea of worthy lives. Yet others felt in all the lessons we've been taught, we were never given a chance to question what we learned from teachers who didn't know any better than we did.
In last year's issue of Tamil Futures, we had the privilege of hearing the many ways Tamil-identifying individuals defined their Tamilness. This year, we wanted to hear more. We asked our contributors to tell us about the lessons they had to unlearn in order to find the most true versions of themselves. We hope that as you read this year's issue of Tamil Futures, you find a piece of yourself, too.
Before you go, I'll leave you with this:
We do not simply survive when we decide to unlearn. When we unlearn, we cut away what no longer belongs to us, and we take back a life that’s rightfully ours.