Tamil Terrains

What happens when a two-thousand-year-old language rooted in a classical poetics of land moves, along with some of its peoples, through colonial and postcolonial upheaval, war, and forced or voluntary migrations?

Questioning traditional concepts of time, place, labour, love, purity, and gender, this prismatic collection of poems, translations, transcreations draws connections between ancient Sangam landscapes and migrant labour songs; classical Tamil love poems and the wounded memories of colonial plantation workers and undocumented refugees.

Building community with each other, Tamil translators living on Indigenous terrains in North America reflect on the violence of settler colonialism, descendants of Tamil indentured labourers in Malaysia and Singapore confront erasures inflicted upon them, and those rooted in Tamil's traditional homelands encounter the intimacies and distances of a migrant tongue.