Renarrativizing the Sri Lankan Tsunami: Ecodisaster, Geotrauma, and Healing in Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave: A Memoir

This chapter brings to the forefront how the Sri Lankan writer Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave: A Memoir studies the untimely demise of her husband, two sons, parents, and best friend in the devastating waves of the record-setting tsunami in 2004 that raced across the Indian Ocean at up to 800 km per hour and slammed into coastline cartographies. As her therapist’s advice to navigate her emotional turmoil through words in the darkest phases of her life, Deraniyagala, the economist, emerged as Deraniyagala, the memoirist, to touch upon how the disruption of the climate reshaped her personal life in a matter of minutes, as well as her guilt over surviving. This chapter clusters together how the disorderly assemblage of post-disaster circumstances testifies to the fatality within this female author in her return to the site of occurrence. This chapter recounts how the writer-observer undergoes a sense of liminality, caught between the eco-destructive shifting that has already ravaged her family and her traumatized future. Extending on Rachel Pain’s idea of “geotrauma,” this chapter delves into how the multiscalar intersections between acute trauma and place trigger the existential anxiety of Deraniyagala. Through the microcosmic embodiment of her struggles after the ecodisaster in her country, this chapter is concerned with Deraniyagala’s toilsome journey from personal anguish to healing.