Post-Traumatic Stress and the Refugee: A Conversation with My Parents
Shailaja Maheetharan
Content Warning: Discussions of war and its impact on mental health
I was thirteen years old, packing my bag for school and absentmindedly whistling when my Amma told me to stop. Getting my rebuttal ready, I asked her why I wasn’t allowed to whistle. But instead of the backwards reasoning that I thought was coming my way, I saw an emotion that I didn’t recognise flit across my mother’s face. She explained how the sound brought her memories of soldiers and policemen walking past her on the roads when she was a child in Sri Lanka—memories of fear and persecution that she would rather forget. I try my hardest not to whistle when she’s in the room now.
I was eighteen years old, wasting away the hours in my living room during the height of the COVID-19 quarantine period. My Appa gasped at a notification he received on his phone; I looked over to see a photo of a certificate. He excitedly explained that his sister in Australia found his kindergarten certificate that he had thought had been burned in the war. I watched his face as his now glassy eyes scanned the certificate closely—he's a Cambridge Ph.D.-graduated engineer, but the emotion that a simple Arithmetic award certificate from his childhood had brought him was something I had never witnessed before.
I hold these stories close to my heart, as it is through these instances that I started to understand how much the Civil War in Sri Lanka had truly affected my parents: a mother, in her mid-fifties, recounting an experience as mundane as walking down a street with cautious sadness, and a father, going on sixty, being moved to tears over a kindergarten certificate—it was dawning on me just how much the war had taken from them. As a second-generation war immigrant, it is my exposure to these everyday reminders that drove me to write this piece; for the first time, I sat down and talked with my parents about the impact of the war on their psychological well-being. Rather than censoring their traumas for the sake of keeping up appearances the way they had always done, they began telling me their story.
The 30-year Civil War in Sri Lanka was fought between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil separatist groups. The threats associated with the war that were posed to the Tamil population led to my parents making the difficult decision to flee their motherland in the 80s, moving to the UK in the interest of their own safety. With the devastating sights of war fresh in their minds, they set out trying to adapt their existing liturgies to a completely foreign environment. It is here that their long journey as war immigrants began, treading the fine line between being perceived as “lazy” and being accused of “job-stealing” whilst desperately trying to sell their patriotism to their native peers.
A recurring theme in our conversation was the idea of security and the anxiety associated with its distortion or outright absence. Along with my mother’s distaste for whistling, she went on to explain how her post-traumatic stress had perverted her exposure to everyday stimuli in the UK. She spoke of limiting her interactions with persons of authority to this day, her developing teenage brain having learned to associate uniform with opposition and mistreatment while navigating the double prejudice of living in Sri Lanka as a Tamil woman. She also spoke of the anxiety she felt whenever a helicopter passed overhead and her past experiences training her to listen out for an imminent shell explosion.
But her next statement was what really brought the scale of the trauma she had faced into perspective.
We were always aware of Amma’s obsession with keeping things clean and tidy to her exact standards, refusing our help with chores unless they were going to be done “her way”. I would watch her push her exhausted body, troubled with back pain and arthritis, through a seemingly endless list of tasks, and when I would ask her what she was doing, I was met with her simple, repeated answer: “You know my OCD problem, Shaila”. I had always sensed that her symptoms were representative of a need for control after such traumatic upheaval in her developing years, and my conversations with my mother confirmed my suspicions. But she also spoke candidly of her experiences in refugee camps, explaining how the poor hygiene of the cramped environments plagued her mind into thinking her surroundings were constantly unclean, even after returning to her home, with her repetitive cleaning and organising practices allowing her to exert control over her environment and keeping herself calm to this day.
My mother lives with her OCD every day. Her behaviours have become second nature to her, integrated into the workings of our household. The methodical cleanliness of her coping mechanism serves as a daily reminder of the trauma that she fled, scrubbing and wiping and cleaning away any evidence that something was wrong.
The desperation for a grasp on security would only be heightened by the temporary nature of wartime life. From keeping suitcases packed in case of an emergency evacuation to the rushed weddings and milestone events trying to beat the advancement of opposing forces, time became an increasingly volatile currency as the war progressed. The thought that you could lose everything you had worked for in a single second was a significant and persistent source of anxiety for the vast majority of Eelam Tamils in my parents’ generation; it was as if timers had been set on their lives: timers that weren’t visible to them but that they were all too aware of.
In our conversations, my Appa explained how this was met with two outlooks, which continued to influence how migrants lived their lives in their host countries: some became obsessed with saving and preserving memories and assets, and others took the opposite approach after they had grown sick of everything being taken away from them time and time again. My parents fell into the former category, developing anxieties over money and insisting on immortalising even the most mundane of events, as they reflected sadly on the photos and accolades from their childhoods that they had watched burn in front of them. Much of their headspace was focused on forming a lasting legacy that could sustain the lives of their three children, sacrificing their dreams and wishes to ensure the security of their successors—a sacrifice whose extent has become increasingly apparent to me as I venture into adulthood and financial independence myself.
My parents didn’t come here to live a life of luxury. They came to a place where they could walk through the streets without worrying if they were going to have a gun pulled on them, where they could go on public transport without wondering if they were sitting next to a bomb, where they could grow up and have children and send them to school without having to think about whether they were going to come home or whether they had even made it to school in the first place. With British citizenship came a level of guarantee that permitted them to live without fear, but anxiety and PTSD continued to plague their minds.
As a nationalistic native population characterises them as lazy and unwilling to assimilate, they struggle with the lack of understanding of their psychological trauma, with the overwhelming culture shock leaving them mentally unwell. The shift from working on the relaxed, sunny tropical island to the monotone concrete-scape associated with the 9-5 capitalist grind only furthered their depressive symptoms as their own minds and bodies were working against them, which in turn was met with hostility.
The truth of the matter is that, despite their best efforts to adapt, Amma and Appa and so many other first-generation Tamil immigrants face persecution for something that they are rather than something they have done, further alienating them from the unknown environment that they have been forced to call home. What has to be understood is that they are not asking for charity; they are asking for empathy. And this is why it is so important to me that my parents trusted me to tell their story.
As a child of refugees, I will never stop advocating for their social freedom.
Dedicated to A. Maheetharan and Nanthini - thank you for everything. I hope I can begin to repay you with my privilege.
Comments