In the "Introduction" to her collection, children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections (2013), poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar describes her project as an elegy for the victims of the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182 who, in the thirty years since the disaster, have been in constant danger of being forgotten. Saklikar describes her project as "a sequence of elegies. […] / This is a dirge for the world. […]/ This is saga, for a nation" (9). Blending fact with fiction, official evidentiary exhibits with imagined recreation, Saklikar uses an experimental style of post-traumatic representation to both depict a violent unforeseen event, as well as reproduce the caesuras in the public's knowledge about the bombing. It is here that Saklikar gets to the heart of what it means for a transnational trauma to be represented and endured by victims who are fundamentally caught between the dynamics of creating a "saga, for a nation" and a "dirge for the world"; As a collection, children of air india simultaneously contends with Canada's evolving political framing of the tragedy while attempting to mobilize this transnational disaster multidirectionally, linking marginalized communities across national and cultural borders. Saklikar's use of "saga" emphasizes that Canada's official narrative of Air India is, as with many state histories, part fact, part fiction, while her use of "dirge," a song of mourning, acts as an "un/official archive of voices and names, […an] interruptive document to the official story of Air India Flight 182" that links this event to other international tragedies and instances of state-sponsored violence that have been elided by official national narratives (MacDonald 97). This presentation will focus on the evolution of Air India literature and activism as they initially advocated for state recognition of the tragedy and its victims who, at the time, were not seen as "Canadian citizens," to later literary works and testimonies that move beyond the politics of recognition to create transnational links with other instances of statist violence through a practice similar to what Audre Simpson defines as a "politics of refusal," aligning Indo-Canadians with marginalized subjects at home and abroad. By examining Air India literature and activism through indigenous epistemologies, it becomes clear that both the erasure and the inclusion of these victims within the state saga comes at too high a cost, and instead, they must move within and beyond the overlapping sovereignties that converge to manage a transnational tragedy to create new multidirectional affiliations that protest the untenable conditions of official state redress.
