‘All My Life is Built on Memories’: Trauma, Diasporic Mourning and Maternal Loss in Roma Tearne’s Brixton Beach

Abstract

This article examines the representation of women’s experience of migration in the era of transnational crisis in Roma Tearne’s Brixton Beach (2010) in terms of maternal loss, silenced voices and ungrievable lives (Butler 2016. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London, New York: Verso). Beginning and ending dramatically with the 7/7 terrorist bombings in London, the novel depicts the life of Alice Fonseka whose apparently idyllic childhood in Sri Lanka comes to an abrupt end in the horrific civil war whereupon she, her Sinhalese mother and Tamil father are forced to flee to England. Tearne depicts the traumatic cleavage this represents, figured in the novel as move from ‘paradise’ to ‘hell’, and Alice’s painful and isolated adolescence in 1970s and 1980s London. Amidst family breakdown, and her mother’s endless grieving for a stillborn baby, Alice’s only outlet is found in art classes at school where she finally learns to express herself. As an adult, Alice becomes an artist whose work memorializes her family trauma and, in the process, enables her to reconstruct the silenced and fragmented cultural memories of her divided country. By making this process central to her novel, Tearne foregrounds the restitutive possibilities of narrative: despite tragic losses, the novel ultimately affirms the power of art to represent and mitigate human suffering in times of war. Drawing on the insights of a range of contemporary theorists working in the fields of diaspora theory, vulnerability studies, postcolonialism and/or trauma studies, including Vijay Mishra, Yasmin Hussain, Irene Visser, Sandra Bloom and Judith Butler, the article argues that the novel gives voice to women as minoritized and marginalized subjects, and thus provides a valuable gendered perspective on issues of collective and individual trauma, memory and identity within a transnational frame.

Keywords:

• trauma
• diaspora
• maternal loss
• women migrants
• vulnerability
• cultural memory
• transnational crisis

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Freud’s (1917) essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ distinguishes between ‘normal mourning, in which a person works through their grief for a lost person or object and eventually relinquishes it, and ‘pathological’ melancholia in which the sufferer incorporates the lost object and is unable to detach from it or find a consoling substitute. However, in his later ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), Freud moves beyond this model to articulate a more ambivalent model of endless mourning in which mourning includes a persistence of melancholic attachment. Dominick La Capra’s (2000) concept of acting out and working through trauma similarly captures the ambivalence of Freud’s later model.