Irrespective of the ignorance of a few, a seed was planted:
was Tamil-ness solely contained within the “-pillai,” the “-nathan,” and the “-rajah” and not the “Martyn”, the “Emmanuel,” or the “Joseph”?
Darkest Guy, Whitest Name
Fredrick Martyn
Listen to this reading, narrated by Vasana Ranasinghe
In middle school, my friends would jokingly call me “the darkest guy with the whitest name.” As a brown boy named Fredrick Stephen Martyn, I had to admit the nickname was not inaccurate. A child of Tamil immigrants from Sri Lanka to Canada, my skin was darker than most of my classmates’. But as a result of Portuguese missionaries in sixteenth century Jaffna, I was also the child of Catholics. And this meant a name so ‘white’, it could probably land me a phone interview for a job at Abercrombie & Fitch.
There is no doubt that my Anglo-sounding name has afforded me privilege. I have yet to hear its butchered pronunciation or be introduced with a “Fred?... Am I saying that right?”. The familiarity of my name in predominantly white spaces has often contributed to a perception that I am ‘brown but not too brown’ and has opened doors closed to others with more traditional Tamil names. However, in acknowledging the benefits I have reaped from my ‘white’ name, I’d often wonder growing up if it also made me less Tamil.
I can remember as a child , the attendance call at my first weekend Tamil class, in my Toronto suburb of Scarborough. “I’m Sharmini.”“I’m Niroshan.” “I’m Kavitha.” “I’m Fred. ” My classmates exchanged glances. “Ah...Christian,” clarified the teacher, explaining my faith as the reason for my untraditional name. That same day we began to learn how to write our names. To my disappointment, I learnt that the “F” sound did not exist in the Tamil alphabet.
In Toronto, I attended a predominantly white high school, where most of the students had never even heard of Tamils. Outside of my close friends, many of my classmates only learned about Tamils in Grade 10 when a large group protesting the brutalities of the Sri Lankan Civil War obstructed traffic on Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway. “Fred, tell your people to move off the highway bud,” one guy joked. Before that in fact, some of my fellow classmates did not even think I was South Asian. A few thought I was Black. I suspected it was because my name was not ‘brown’, my skin was a lot darker than the handful of Indian students in my school, or because they just wanted me to be Black, since I could count only three Black students in the entire student body. When I’d explain my heritage, it would on occasion be met with a half-joking retort like “Nah, the guy that works for my dad is a Tah-meal from Siri Lonka and his name is super long. Not like yours. Fred, you’re definitely black.” Irrespective of the ignorance of a few, a seed was planted: was Tamil-ness solely contained within the “-pillai,” the “-nathan,” and the “-rajah” and not the “Martyn”, the “Emmanuel,” or the “Joseph”?
My parents came to Canada as immigrants from Sri Lanka in the 1970s, through the points system for skilled workers. In Toronto, they encountered the racial challenges that came with being among the first Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants to the country. Still, they were fortunate to have left Sri Lanka on their own terms, compared to the majority of Tamils who came to Canada following the outbreak of riots and warfare in the 1980s. This was another experience I felt I did not share with many of my Tamil peers. Compared to many of the kids in my Tamil class, I felt spared. Spared from mourning the loss of loved ones, spared from war stories and spared from intergenerational trauma. ‘The Tamil struggle’? My Tamil struggle was just that I had to spell my name as ‘Predrick’ in Tamil class.
I began to think that being Tamil boiled down to a checklist of things, and I, with my sparse list, clearly did not make the cut. While many of my Tamil peers grew up enjoying their parents’ favourite Tamil movies and Carnatic tunes, I grew up savouring my Appa’s reruns of Three’s Company and my mother’s records of Jim Reeves and Boney M. During weekend worship, I was not surrounded by other Tamils in a Hindu temple but rather, Filipinos, Italians and Haitians in a church. I would often question the relevancy of being a Tamil Catholic from Sri Lanka, as Tamils were a minority in Sri Lanka, and Catholics were a minority among Tamils. So what if I did a few Tamil things here and there, like polish the brass of our living room kuthuvilakku, or crave my mother’s idiyappam and sothi. Wasn’t I still more of a white guy? I had many of the requisite characteristics, including some of the privilege, to fit the part. Feeling inadequate as a Tamil person and feeling that I needed to choose one identity over the other, I became content in my adolescence with the North American parts of myself dominating my identity.
This began to change in adulthood, after I accepted a job opportunity to live and work in Sri Lanka. I assumed I would come out of the placement with a greater appreciation for my roots, but more so, I looked forward to the opportunity to gain a unique work experience. The other participants in the program were, like me, second generation North Americans with roots in Sri Lanka, including Tamil, Muslim, Sinhala and Burgher. In Sri Lanka, we all became fast friends.
One of my friends was the child of a Jaffna-born Tamil woman and a white American man. She was “whiter” than me, not only in name but in lineage and appearance and as well. Her mother’s Tamil family was Christian, and like mine, left Sri Lanka before the 1983 riots. Yet despite checking off even fewer boxes than me on my “Tamil checklist,” she embraced her Tamil heritage in a way I did not. The same person who would proudly make her white Ohio grandmother’s apple crisp on Poya days, would also spend her evenings learning Tamil recipes and reading history books on Jaffna. While I spent my free time after work, feeding stray dogs at Wellawatte Station, she would be studying for her next Tamil language class and practising our ancestral tongue with the Wellawatte market mango seller. Even with locals often mistaking her for a European tourist or a Burgher, she was a proud Tamil, and her perceived “whiteness” did not stop her from engaging with her Tamil roots.
As the months passed on the island, I began to more closely consider my parents’ story. The irony: them leaving Sri Lanka in search of a better life in Canada, and I going back to live there. About four months into my time on the island, I was fortunate to have my mother visit me. During our first meal together in a local kadai, my mother pointed out an observation. While she would vertically nod “yes,” I would now instinctually bob my head from side to side, like everyone else in the kadai. I asked her, half-jokingly, if she felt she had become less ‘Tamil’ or ‘Sri Lankan’ because of her vertical head movements, both a literal and figurative nod to her Canadian identity. “Why?,” she responded. “I am a Sri Lankan Tamil and I am a proud Canadian. Doing something from one doesn’t make me less of the other. Both of us are Sri Lankan Tamils and both of us are Canadians, just in slightly different ways.” She was right. In making the realization that I might be becoming more ‘Tamil’ or ‘Sri Lankan’ I realized it was not minimizing my sense of being Canadian. After our meal, we went to the front of the kadai to pay. There, my mother quickly discovered that the clerk had overcharged us. She disputed the bill, flawlessly blending her Tamil and North American motherly influences: “Thambi...can I speak to your manager?”
A few weeks later, my Akka sent the family Whatsapp group a collection of old photographs she had found at home. One of the photos depicted my Appa in his early Toronto days in the 1980s. Sporting a tight shirt, flowing hair and thick beard, he looked like the frontman for a Tamil Bee Gees cover band. My Appa had now spent more of his life in Canada than in Sri Lanka. I thought about how my Appa is the type of person to get excited about a bowl of kool like many Tamil dads I know, but just as excited about a new lawnmower, like many Canadian-born dads I know. The next time I spoke to my Appa, I asked him if he had ever felt less of a Tamil because of his name or religion. “Not really mahan,” he said. “Growing up, even though my name didn’t sound very Tamil, I was still Tamil enough to fear the anti-Tamil riots.”
My parents had forged their own sense of Tamil-Canadian identity, different from the Tamil experience of their parents, different from the Canadian experience of their children, and different from the Tamil-Canadian experience of many of their Tamil-Canadian peers. My biracial friend had done the same with her Tamil and American identities. Through my friends and family, I saw you could be both steadfastly Tamil and steadfastly North American in a way that was authentic to one’s self, without one identity minimizing the other. And so, I began to care less that my name wasn’t conventionally Tamil. Or that I didn’t go to temple, and instead attended church. Or that the most frequently heard tune in my family home was not a Tamil song but John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads.’ These thoughts were all just self-imposed barriers to engaging with my Tamil identity.
Now, whenever someone tells me that I’m not very Tamil, citing my name or some other aspect of myself, it does not bother me. I no longer question my validity as a Tamil person.
For the remainder of my time in Sri Lanka, I tried to be more engaged. When I visited Hindu temples, I paid more attention. After all, these were my ancestral churches. In Jaffna, I spent time at the Holy Family Convent, where most of the women in my family attended school. Here, a community of Tamil Catholics was palpable. Back in Colombo, I began regularly attending Sunday service at the Holy Family Convent Church in Bambalapitiya, which my mother had also attended as a young girl. Living in the predominantly Tamil neighborhood of Wellawatte, I was not only learning about aspects of Tamil culture but Sri Lankan culture in general, from my Muslim, Sinhala and Burgher friends.
After I returned to North America, I began to view the conflict in Sri Lanka less as something I was far removed from and more as an undeniable part of my history. I later found myself asking those around me about their experiences in Sri Lanka and how that shaped them and their communities. In doing so, I discovered that I was not as far removed as I had initially thought, as I learnt about my own family members’ and close friends' experiences with loss, trauma and violence. Two months after I left Sri Lanka, the 2019 Easter bombings devastated various gathering places on the island, including two Catholic churches. Among the hundreds of casualties were many church-going Tamils. My previous thought resurfaced; how relevant was it to be a Tamil Catholic from Sri Lanka? The unexpected feeling of closeness that I felt to the tragedy answered my question.
Now, whenever someone tells me that I’m not very Tamil, citing my name or some other aspect of myself, it does not bother me. I no longer question my validity as a Tamil person. And although it should not matter, I am reminded that there are in fact plenty of Tamils that share my “untamil” name. My cousin. My uncle. My grandfather. All Fred Martyns. And all proud Jaffna Tamils. The Tamil surname suffix ‘pillai’, meaning ‘child of’ is used to honour familial predecessors, similar to the ‘son’ in ‘Johnson’. One could argue sharing my grandfather’s name performs the same function. I now feel more comfortable engaging in Tamil and Sri Lankan spaces, despite differences in experience. And I am increasingly grateful to call Toronto my home, a city with one of the largest, most active Tamil diaspora communities in the world. For me, there is no standardized Tamil checklist. Everyone’s list is different, and dynamic. But nonetheless, all are true in their own right. So, what’s on my list? Is it understanding my family’s path from Jaffna to Toronto? Or practising my Tamil through WhatsApp calls with my mother? Or just feeling a sense of pride in being Tamil? Or none of the above? To be honest, it’s hard to answer that question concretely. I’m still writing my list.
About Fredrick Martyn
Fredrick Martyn (he/him) is a writer and resident physician. Born and raised in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, he has lived in Western New York, Washington, D.C. and Colombo. His humour, poetry, journalism and essays can be found in various places on the internet.