![]() I love the idea that meen magals make these sounds, especially as this would challenge the cis-hetero male sexualisation of mermaids and their dulcet voices. On “true voice”: the sounds that emerge from the Kallady lagoon are intriguing, but not necessarily pleasant to the human ear. Secondly, I made this duology during a time of intense exigency in my personal life, which included but was not limited to bereavement and the overarching role of the pandemic itself. Heeding the mermaid’s call let me go back to that home, and forge a relationship with it that is entirely mine. The primary question, instead, was about what the meen magal meant to this place. As a Tamil from Batticaloa who had never been there until I was 27 years old, but who had been raised in that culture and by people who longed for their homeland, having a question other than “Can I belong to the place that we lost?” be at the forefront of my mind on my visits there was a bulwark. First, pursuing the mystery of why the symbol is everywhere in Mattakalappu / Batticaloa except in the lore allowed me to perform a journey that can be very emotionally dangerous for diasporics and exiles from traumatised populations. The mermaid symbol has now come to mean two things to me personally. My long pre-existing adoration of the sea and the moon both melded beautifully into this new fascination. From that point on, I understood that mermaids were intrinsic to the place and the people I come from in ways that I instinctively understood but could not immediately explain. I certainly think that the very first time I saw the mermaid arch in Uranee (which appears in both books in the Ila duology) was a catalyst for this love. Like many children, I liked mermaids as a child, but my full-fledged love for them emerged only in adulthood. Listen.” Is this the motivation? To get people to listen to the many facets of the mermaid to see the turmoil in the beauty (or vice versa)? What do you mean by “true voice?” What is it about the mermaid that draws you? I think about the last lines of your book as I ask this question: “My true voice – it is always here, has always been here. You said in an interview with The Hindustan Times: “I reveal myself in all my writing, a way of being that comes with its wonders and its snares.” In many of your works, the mermaid is a recurring image or motif. ![]() It was against this backdrop that some of the conversation was conducted. In February, owners Amazon suddenly announced the shutdown of the publisher of Incantations, Westland Books. We began our conversation in early January, 2022, a little less than a week after Incantations was published. ![]() In this interview, conducted over email, she discusses her motivations for writing the book, switching to the digital art medium, and her everlasting love and fascination for mermaids. Mermaids, Manivannan found, were represented in all public facades of the city. #Sea of solitude mermaid full#On full moon nights, in the Kallady lagoon, in certain places in the water, if one lowers the wooden paddle and holds the dry end to one’s ear, one can hear certain sounds. When she returned to Mattakalappu, the place her mother had grown up in, she realised that the stories about mermaids she had grown up hearing were not a Disney fantasy created by her parents. Her name comes from the Tamil word for Sri Lanka, Ilankai, and she tells her readers the fantastical stories and myths about mermaids across time.īorn in India in 1985, Manivannan grew up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Ila is the narrator of Sharanya Manivannan’s debut graphic novel Incantations Over Water. And life – even my life, so long and so equivocal – is just sea spray in the breeze.” “The heart is as inexorable as a tidal wave, as thorny as an anchovy, as moon-girdled as a shell (and as punctured with eyelets). ‘Do Different: The Untold Dhoni’: How MSD, in whites, weathered the Shoaib Akhtar challenge. ![]()
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