Tamil diaspora
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Having eluded the same ethnic persecution that Sri Lankan Tamils faced, Indian Tamil immigrants to Quebec tend to come from more stable, upper-class backgrounds. More wealthy and well-connected, they are better primed for upward mobility in their new North American context and accordingly pursue English, a language thought/known to offer more gainful returns, over French. Sociopolitically, Indian Tamils also seek to differentiate themselves from the criminal or terroristic associations of the "tamoul" popular in the white Quebecois imagination and deriving from the distortion of Sri Lankan Tamil revolutionary efforts amidst the Sri Lankan Civil War. It seems many Sri Lankan Tamils also share the desire to distance themselves from their Sri Lankan Tamil identity, in part for the same reason of avoiding racist, violent characterization but more likely because of disidentification from a nation that persecuted them. I think of the difference between two members of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in the mainstream: M.I.A. and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. M.I.A. whose father was an LTTE revolutionary and who herself vocally advocates for Sri Lankan Tamil rights, frequently and proudly identifies as Sri Lankan. Born in 1975 and raised in Jaffna, she was old enough to directly experience and remember the civil war, forging a kinship to the nation despite/amidst the persecution. Meanwhile, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, born 2001 in Mississauga, prefers to identify as Tamil Canadian or simply Tamil over Sri Lankan Tamil. Her distance from Sri Lanka is twofold with whatever trauma inherited from her refugee parents translated into putting aside the Sri Lankan identity entirely, likely enforced by the derogatory Western conception as well.