Health and South Asia

humanitarian space, only allowing government media to the battle theater and rejecting all pleas for help from civilians trapped as terrorist propaganda, the GOSL managed to crush the LTTE and tens of thousands of civilians in a few gruesome months of warfare.

Two years after the climax of the conflict I decided that I wanted to tell about this episode in history. I wanted to find a way to inform an audience unfamiliar with Sri Lanka about the situation and tell the story of people that were forced to live through the war and the aftermath.

Visiting a Sri Lankan friend who had become a refugee in Chennai, India, in 2011, we celebrated, with a modest lunch, the successful arrival of her husband in Zurich. He had spent US$20,000 and four months with agents traveling from Chennai to Nairobi, Istanbul, Kiev, and finally to Zurich. The story was incredible and I realized how people were affected by conflict long after the bombs stopped falling. So I began to look at telling the story from this perspective—from the asylum seeker, reflecting back on his life.

I struggled with the medium of telling this complex story, but I wanted it to resonate with non-academics and engage a general readership. I had been a fan of graphic novels on conflict, such as Palestine by Joe Sacco, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and of course, Maus by Art Spiegelman, and found them to be a compelling way to engage with these complex topics. I enjoy the medium of the comic book, and seeing the faces, expressions, and the geography of where a story is set. Presenting the story as sequential art takes the reader into a different space with the narrative, where we have to both read and see the page.

The exceptional artist Lindsay Pollock, with whom I’m fortunate to be collaborating, and I began to interview Tamil asylum seekers across London and record their testimonies of surviving the conflict, their journeys to the UK, and their lives as asylum seekers. The methodology of creating the narrative has proven to be an emotional but fascinating experience. We interview a number of people for each chapter and build the fictionalized and anonymous composite narrative from all those interviews. We then storyboard the chapter and pencil the rough draft of the chapter. The fascinating process is taking that penciled chapter back to the respondents and encouraging them to edit the chapter to represent the most factual account. We then ink the pages for the finished comic strip. The final stage is to source (from my own database and the Internet) reference material of images, film clips, reports, and web links and embed them behind appropriate panels of the illustrations on the The Vanni website (www.thevanni.co.uk).

The online reference material is central to the project as it tackles global issues of conflict, migration, and asylum, and features Sri Lanka as its case study to build the narrative; but the themes are global and not unique to Sri Lanka. Therefore, by embedding websites, academic journals, and multimedia behind the illustrations we create an innovative space where students and general readers can learn about these topics through the interactive medium.

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