Representing the unrepresented: precarity of refugeehood in Vanni: a family’s struggle through the Sri Lankan conflict

ABSTRACT

Vanni: A Family’s Struggle through the Sri Lankan Conflict (2019), is an ethnographic novel about the Sri Lankan civilians who were caught between the army and the LTTE during the final months of the Civil War. The novel is read in the light of Butler’s concepts of precarity, grievability and alternate frames to demonstrate how the affordances of the graphic novel negotiate the representation of trauma, loss and vulnerability of refugeehood, in order to provide for alternate frames that make visible those lives that have been deemed losable and ungrievable by the mainstream narratives. The paper analyses how Vanni, through its participatory methodology and ‘distillate fiction’ (Dix and Kaur 2019, 33), becomes a ‘human document’ (Stott 1986, 8) that contributes to an attitudinal change in the perception of the Sri Lankan refugees. It may be noted that one of the authors is a practising cartoonist whose graphic intervention, which involves the perspectival revision of a selected panel, provides a way of conducting the argument in the paper. The leverage of praxis allows the author to pick the affordances of the frame and analyse how the suppression or expression of the elements of visuality contributes to the totality of the message.

KEYWORDS:

• Alternate frames
• Butler
• precarity
• Sri lankan refugees
• Vanni

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Butler defines the living as those whose lives are acknowledged as precarious and worthy of protection.

2. For a detailed analysis of the narratives on the Sri Lankan Civil War, see Preethu P (2020).