I Have Not Painted the War: Art and Abiding in Roma Tearne's Mosquito

Abstract

In recent years, memory studies scholars have begun to question the applicability of verbal testimony for trauma survivors in non-Western contexts. Theorists and therapists have increasingly found that visual art provides a promising alternative to the “talking cure” in narrating and negotiating the memory of extreme experience. In Roma Tearne's Mosquito, characters turn to painting to posit testimony, to foster healing and to help bring Sri Lanka's civil war to international attention. In illustrating this pattern, the novel provokes difficult questions about trauma-related art's reliance on affect, and critics' condemnation of particular strategies for representing the nation.