oa Music and Memorialization: Narrative of Return in SVPD’s Made in Jaffna (2021)

Although BIPOC artists have been dominating global popular music charts in recent years, certain artists’ music centre on narratives shaped by socio-political turmoil. The Sri Lankan civil war (1983 – 2009) resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Tamil peoples as well as one of the largest refugee crises in the twentieth century. This ethnoreligious divide between the Sinhala Buddhist majority and the Tamil Hindu minority continues to this day through the erasure of Tamil heritage and identity in the state via the destruction of Tamil memorial sites in Tamil Eelam (North Sri Lanka). There is a burgeoning music scene in Canada from the diasporic Tamil Eelam community in which themes of displacement, dispossession and exile are at the forefront. These artists pay homage to their homeland while also forging a sense of communal belonging by performing their diasporic identity through their music. In this paper, I focus on Shan Vincent de Paul’s (SVPD) album Made in Jaffna (2021) to explore how home is re-created and reimagined through the soundscape. This music album acts as a site for the lost home to be housed and preserved; a heritage object to uncover how the remembered past affects the present. I argue that SVPD returns home through his music and that the album is an archive or domicile of home- making and un-making. I employ Marianne Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’ (1996) to illustrate intergenerational narratives of rupture. I demonstrate where memorial sites are threatened or erased, we can look for alternative routes of memorialization through sonic reconstructions of home.