‘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

Oxford-based artist and writer Roma Tearne was born in Columbo, Sri Lanka in 1954, coming to Britain at the age of ten with her family who were prompted to leave by the growing social unrest in their homeland. She is the author of seven novels including her debut, Mosquito (2007), and her most recent, White City (2017). Brixton Beach, first published in 2009, is her third novel and, like her first two books, explores the impact of civil war in what was then Ceylon and its frequently traumatic impact on Sri Lankan migrants in the diaspora up to the present day. In an interview with Sarah O’Reilly for the Harper Press edition of Brixton Beach, Tearne explained what writing means to her: ‘It gives me back the past, the last years of exile, the memories of place’ (O’Reilly 2010: 4). The novel incorporates some autobiographical experiences of Tearne herself, depicting aspects of her early childhood, which at the time she perceived as idyllic, and the devastating impact of the subsequent civil war in which communal violence irrupted into family and domestic life. Tearne’s parents came from different sides of the ethnic divide: her Sinhalese mother and Tamil father married against their families’ wishes. When Tearne’s mother miscarried a baby, her in-laws told her it was God’s judgement on them. In recasting such experiences in fictional form, Brixton Beach explores the impact of traumatic losses on cultural memory in the context of conflict and displacement, focusing on the subject of maternal loss: at the heart of the story is the death of the heroine’s baby sister from which her mother never recovers. In Writing Diaspora, Yasmin Hussain defines South Asian women writers broadly as those ‘who are either “indigenous” to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and those who are of South Asian descent but reside in diasporas’ (2005: 53). She argues that their fiction both transcends national and cultural barriers and differs from their male counterparts in focusing on the experiences and awakening of female characters. In particular, contemporary works of literature by South Asian women writers ‘assert their own definitions of femininity through the representation of the “New Woman”’, which rejects the traditional ‘Sita Savitri’ stereotype (53). Significantly, Tearne’s text complicates this trope by showing how trauma impedes the emergence of her female characters—Alice and Sita—as just such New Women.

This article examines Brixton Beach in the context of women’s experience of migration in the era of transnational crisis. In particular, it considers Tearne’s representation of the female emigrant in terms of maternal loss, silenced voices, and ungrievable lives (Butler 2006, 2016). When Alice Fonseka’s apparently idyllic childhood in Sri Lanka comes to an abrupt end in the horrific civil war 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 a move from ‘paradise’ to ‘hell’, and Alice’s painful and isolated adolescence in a colourless and largely hostile 1970s and 1980s London. Amidst family breakdown, and her mother’s endless grieving for a stillborn baby, Alice’s only solace is found in art classes at school where, with the encouragement of a teacher, 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 reconstruction as theorized by Judith Lewis Herman (2001) and Sandra L. Bloom (2010) and by recent postcolonial critics such as Irene Visser (2015), whose work emphasizes the therapeutic value of symbolization and narrativization to postcolonial subjects and communities. Despite tragic losses and a pervading tone of diasporic melancholy (Mishra 2007), the novel tentatively affirms the power of art to represent and mitigate human suffering resulting from political conflict and geographical dislocation. In a shocking resolution the novel shows the imbrication of the minority trauma of Sri Lankan migrants and refugees with the wider trauma of global terrorism of the post 9/11 era. Nevertheless, 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, cultural memory and identity within a transnational frame.

War, Trauma and Ungrievable Lives

Brixton Beach begins and ends, not with the Sri Lankan civil war, but with the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005. In the Harper Press interview, Tearne admits losing one of her friends in the London 7/7 bombings: ‘The whole event became shockingly and suddenly personal’ (O’Reilly 2010: 5). It gave her the idea for the novel: ‘At that point I began to see Brixton Beach as a story not just about something that happens to a small community in a distant “exotic” island, the idea that terror was all around, not just in war zones, struck me forcefully’ (O’Reilly 2010: 5). Called ‘Bel Canto’, literally ‘beautiful song’, these sections are focalized largely through the eyes of Simon Swann, an upper middle-class English medic at St Thomas’ Hospital who meets and falls in love with forty-year-old Alice. Simon provides a white western perspective on the situation of both migrant subjects and world events as he witnesses the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings. In this way, Tearne seeks to put postcolonial communal strife in the wider context of global conflict and draw parallels between the losses of Sri Lankan migrants and those who lost loved ones in the London bombings.

The second part, ‘Paradiso’, which both invokes and subverts Dante’s Divine Comedy (circa 1308-21: 2008) to suggest a situation that appears idyllic but which contains darker intimations, takes the reader back to 1973 when Alice Fonseka, on the cusp of her ninth birthday, is on her way to stay with her beloved grandparents in their house on the coast in Mount Lavinia. Seen largely through Alice's eyes, the novel’s mixed heritage female postcolonial protagonist, the reader learns piecemeal about the political situation in Sri Lanka in which Tamils are discriminated against by the Sinhalese majority and their protests for rights are ruthlessly quashed. Soon afterwards, her parents suffer a tragic loss when their second child, a baby girl, dies stillborn owing to the negligence of a prejudiced Sinhalese doctor for whom Tamil babies are ‘worth nothing’ (Tearne 2010: 53). As a disadvantaged Tamil, Stanley, Alice’s father, can’t afford to pay for a private confinement, which leaves Sita vulnerable to poor treatment by a Singhalese doctor at the public hospital. The family swiftly learns that by virtue of ethnicity, their lives are deemed what Judith Butler has termed ‘ungrievable’. Butler writes: ‘An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all’ (2016: 38). This concept carries particular poignancy in relation to Sita’s stillborn baby, who has literally never lived. In the immediate aftermath of the baby’s death, while the rest of the family attends a small funeral for the baby, Sita is left at home to recover and never sees the baby’s body. While the family performs the proper death rites, Sita herself is excluded. Her mother, Kamila, believes this to be a mistake as it means Sita is unable to mourn properly. Alice's grandfather Bee agrees, later telling Alice, ‘What you don’t see stays in your mind longer. It haunts you. D’you understand?’ (Tearne 2010: 74). While Sita’s physical scars from the traumatic birth eventually heal, the psychic ones, which represent ‘a different kind of pain’ (58) do not. Following the family’s migration to England, Sita’s loss becomes even more ‘unframeable’ and thus unspeakable.

In Frames of War: When is Life Grievable (2016), Butler focuses on ‘cultural modes of regulating affective and ethical dispositions through a selective and differential framing of violence’ (1). Global power relations mean that the lives of those in the Global South are not seen in the same way as those in the North in relation to the impact of violent conflict. This asymmetry is underscored in the novel where the events of 9/11 and 7/7 are viewed by powerful Western nations as examples of terrorism with global implications whereas the events on a small island in the Indian Ocean are almost unknown and unremarked in the West despite their colonial legacies. By bringing them together, indeed, by framing the Sri Lankan communal conflict within the wider context of international terrorism, Tearne draws attention to the similarities and differences among the two sets of victims who, it transpires, fatefully overlap. Thus, the novel helps us think about ‘global responsibility in times of war’ (Butler 2016: 37).

The civil war eventually comes to the ‘paradise’ at the Sea House: the train journey on route to Alice’s grandparents before her departure to England provides intimations of the violence to come with a reference to a bomb going off and a Tamil man pursued along the tracks by the police and killed at a level crossing, another casualty of the ethnic conflict. The bomb which then blows up a bus in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo prefigures the bomb blast in a London street many years later. In this way, Tearne highlights the multidirectional connections between different types and sites of trauma (Rothberg 2009). One night, Alice wakes up to discover that Bee is sheltering a Tamil man, Kunal, who has been shot in the leg and is on the run from the police. On one of her visits, Kunal tells Alice that she will be better off in England: ‘There are too many dead here to haunt us’ (132). Significantly, it is Sita who responds most to Kunal’s suffering. She becomes his nurse and tends him before and after his gangrenous leg is amputated. Her personal tragedy is seen to intersect with a collective, communal trauma and gives her an outlet for her own suffering: ‘But after all what does my own suffering amount to? thought Sita. Given the thousands of Tamils who are suffering daily’ (143). For the first time since the baby’s death Sita is able to gain some perspective on her own traumatic loss. Kunal’s near delirium as he lies in the annexe of the Sea House gives Sita permission to unburden herself and she finds herself telling him about her own suffering: ‘Then slowly, haltingly, hardly aware of doing so, she told him how it was for her, with the love for her dead child trapped within her, inescapably’ (145). Through her relationship with Kunal, Sita feels a ‘momentous change’ take place in her (155). In light of Butler’s (2016) theory of bodily vulnerability and openness to the other, it can be seen that this mutual connection to the other’s pain helps Sita identify her own traumatic experiences and thus begin the healing process.

On the eve of the departure to England, neither Alice nor Sita wants to go: Alice wants to stay with Bee and her friend Janake at the Sea House and Sita wants to stay with Kunal with whom she has now fallen in love. Their last night together is full of ghosts and the whole family feels an unbearable sense of loss. Sitting grief-stricken in his garden after their departure, Bee contemplates his and his country’s losses: ‘What became of a country that sent its people to the four corners of the world, indifferent to their fate, uncaring of the history they carried within them? Bee could not imagine. […] It was beyond his understanding’ (Tearne 2010: 217). Thus, Bee’s sense of cultural and historical trauma is inextricably bound up with his personal and familial loss. Meanwhile the country’s civil war gathers pace like ‘a monster that destroyed anything in its path’ (254). Tearne vividly describes the toll taken on the characters of years of civil war, which Bee says has ‘cursed us’ (286). In a horrific turn of events, police-sponsored thugs finally come for Bee himself who is seen as a pro-Tamil ally and an enemy of the state; he is cut down with a machete and his wife Kamala who witnesses the massacre is shot dead. Tearne emphasizes the contrast between the natural beauty of the island and the horror of the political conflict that destroys lives. When news of their deaths eventually reaches Sita and Alice, ‘distance would both protect and abandon in equal parts, so that their wound would congeal instead of healing’ (288). Sita’s sister May also becomes traumatized by the murder of her parents and at witnessing so much suffering and injustice. Thus, the cycle of violence and trauma engulfs the whole family both in Sri Lanka and in England.

Diasporic Melancholy

The third section of the novel, which charts Sita and Alice’s disorientating migrant experiences in England, is aptly called ‘Inferno’ in a reversal of the order of Dante’s Divine Comedy, thus subverting the typical western narrative trajectory. As they near the dock, Sita imagines them as in a ‘ghost ship bringing its cargo of life to its shores’ (223) in what appears to be a reference to the Middle Passage. In a gesture repeated in several postcolonial texts (Rhys 2000, Selvon 2006, Emecheta 2021, Levy 2004), the characters experience a significant disillusion on their arrival in the colonial metropolis, which had always been represented to them as a place of truth and beauty. England seems ‘huddled in darkness’ and Sita is perpetually cold. As they begin their new life in the dismal flat Stanley has found in South London, Alice recalls Bee’s words that ‘in order to survive’ she would have to search for a ‘different’ kind of beauty in England (222). In The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007), Vijay Mishra defines the diasporic imaginary as ‘any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself as a group that lives in displacement’ (14). He utilizes the concept of ‘impossible mourning’ suggested by Freud’s ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) as a way of reading diasporic writing which ‘often recalls a moment of trauma in the homeland’ (12). Arguing that ‘the diasporic imaginary is a condition … of an impossible mourning that transforms mourning into melancholia’¹, Mishra eschews the celebratory, postmodern model of migrancy for a much more sombre assessment of the diasporic subject (9). According to Paranjape (2009): ‘The diasporic imaginary is marked in Mishra's view by the never-healing wound, which is passed from generation to generation, that is as long as the memory of the initial trauma can be remembered or recuperated’ (online). To an extent, Tearne’s novel adopts a similar melancholic affect as each of the characters in their different ways is locked into melancholia.

In exile in England, the little family lacks communal bonds that would enable them to mourn (Visser 2015). On hearing the terrible news that Kunal was killed by a bomb planted for him, Sita is too upset to collect Alice from school. The shock is amplified by Alice nearly getting run over by a car walking home alone. Thereafter, Sita regresses and begins the repetitive behaviours of packing and unpacking her dead baby’s clothes that characterized the early months of her post-partum trauma. Alice becomes the witness to her parents’ unhappiness, listening outside rooms, feeling responsible for her mother’s grief and her father’s anger. Socially isolated and neglected, Alice sits alone in her small bedroom drawing. At school, where she fails to make friends, she is increasingly marginalized and withdrawn. Despite her love for Bee she cannot bring herself to write honestly to her grandfather, censoring her grief in short unemotional letters home as a way of protecting both him and herself. Although Sita gets a job mending clothes for a dry-cleaning company, she spends her days sewing at home and rarely goes out. Stanley has affairs and stays out for longer periods until eventually the marriage breaks down and he leaves; meanwhile ‘Sita was busy with the voices living in her head’ (267). Having been silent about their respective grief for so long, when they hear the awful news of Bee and Kamala’s murders, Alice and Sita have no way of speaking about this new trauma and they each retreat further into themselves.

For psychoanalytic critics Abraham and Torok (1994), the concepts of mourning and melancholia correspond to the processes of introjection and incorporation of the lost object whereby ‘incorporation is the refusal to introject loss’, one which ‘if recognised as such would effectively transform us’ (127).¹ This refusal to mourn commits the sufferer to a pattern of repetitive behaviours, ‘psychic concealment’ and enjoins a poetics of hiding. For example, the trauma sufferer may conceal their trauma through the construction of secret ‘crypts’ and ‘intrapsychic tombs’. Such motifs abound in Brixton Beach in a postcolonial context: Tearne utilizes a number of receptacles to represent the characters’ sense of loss and grief including cupboards, drawers, trunks, and boxes of various kinds; Bee, for example, ‘keeps his memories in a rusty old chocolate tin’ (Tearne 2010: 283). In a particularly poignant passage, Tearne depicts Sita’s sense of loss and internalization of trauma using one such example of metonymy: Sita’s heart had become ‘hard as a rambutan stone; shrunken and dark and unbreakable. It happened so stealthily that very few people noticed. […] Sita started wrapping her preoccupations between the folds of the baby clothes so painstakingly embroidered in her other life. […] Knowing there was no longer any point in resurrecting her hopes, she packed her soft-cotton sorrows carefully inside the large empty trunk that seemed to have invaded her mind’. Then, quietly, she climbed into it and shut the lid (Tearne 2010: 88). Thus, Sita’s grief is figured as an internal crypt, which perpetuates pain by locking away trauma and transforms ordinary mourning into a long-term form of diasporic melancholy.

With the onset of early dementia, Sita’s condition only deteriorates: she buys a doll from the market and dresses it in the clothes made for her dead baby all those years ago. Unable to work through her grief, she acts it out repeatedly through the ritual of dressing and undressing the doll. Over time, the doll collection grows; Sita constructs little coffin-like beds for them all lined in white silk, which Alice discovers one day on a visit. Resigned to her mother’s coping mechanism, Alice reassures her that she won’t take them away from her. Yet, as Abraham and Torok comment: ‘The fantasy of incorporation is deluded in regards to its effectiveness’ (1994: 132) and thus it fails to ward off trauma: ‘the ghost of the crypt comes back to haunt’ (130) the subject through her repetition compulsions. Thus, while Sita’s construction of the coffin beds shows labour and artistic skills, it does not help her overcome her trauma in the way that Alice’s art eventually does for her; rather, the acting out merely reinforces her alienation from ordinary life and relationships made worse by her situation as a minoritized and marginalized woman.

Art and Love as a Way Out of Trauma

The one mitigating factor in the Fonseka family’s history of loss and grief is the presence of art in the lives of Bee and Alice. Bee is an artist who transmits his passion for art to his granddaughter and nurtures her talent. Before her departure, Bee gives Alice a watercolour painting of the Sea House to remember him by. Walking on the beach before her departure to England, Alice collects driftwood, which she makes into a small box and which will later inspire her work as a mature artist: ‘It was a smallish box that could not be opened. Three nails kept it closed, but through a gap in the construction of it you could see a seashell inside. You could see it but not quite reach it’ (Tearne 2010: 169). Like Sita’s shoe box of baby clothes, the box represents a crypt with her trauma buried inside. The difference is that whereas Sita’s box only serves to act out her trauma, Alice’s represents the beginnings of an artistic working through of hers. Giving it to her friend Janake at the point of leave-taking, Alice knew ‘he would understand that it was not a box to open. It was a box of sealed-up memories. Hers. His’ (188).

After her migration to England, art becomes a solace for Alice firstly at school and then by becoming an artist herself. Alice starts making constructions in art class including a cupboard made of reclaimed wood with a boat inside, which represents in Alice’s words ‘a kind of house that keeps secrets’ (280). She ages it with cardamom powder brought from Sri Lanka and papers the inside walls with Sinhalese newspapers that lined the inside of their travel trunk, thus gesturing towards and incorporating her diasporic identity. The cupboard represents both a repository for her cultural memories as well as a means of coping with her sense of loss, longing and loneliness. The piece wins an art prize: a journalist comes to interview her for the local newspaper and the article quotes her words: ‘There are lots of stories in the wood … from years and years ago’ (280), which reference the way materials can be repositories of memory. As Bloom (2010) argues, art has the potential to ‘bridge the black hole of trauma,’ and artistic practice ‘has been connected to healing of self and community’ (198). Alice’s artwork is informed by her memories of both the paradisiacal and hellish aspects of her homeland and represents a means of working through her traumatic experiences in a way that her mother’s crafting activities could not.

In the penultimate section of the novel, ‘Purgatorio’, we see Alice’s attempts to forge a new life as a young adult. She enrols at art college and soon afterwards meets and marries Timothy, a young Englishman. They move to a new house which Alice christens ‘Brixton Beach’ in honour of the coastal Sea House back home. She fills the house with island colours and decorates it to create ‘a tropical feel’ (Tearne 2010: 374): the kitchen cupboards are made of driftwood, reminiscent of the beach in Sri Lanka, ‘bleached and blanched with sun and salt-water’ (374). A rich repository of cultural memory, it is the first time she begins to feel at home. Soon afterwards, in creative synergy, she discovers she is pregnant: ‘The shock seemed to energise the voices inside her head. They swam like great shoals of fish around her. The past, returning out of banishment, was paying her a long overdue visit’ (326). Eventually she takes up painting again, setting up a studio in the spare bedroom and over time art provides genuine consolation from her grief. When her son is born, whom she names Ravi after her mother’s long forgotten dream-child, Alice’s homesickness and longing for the sea return full force ‘with the momentous event of motherhood’ (331) and she determines to take him to Sri Lanka one day. Meanwhile, in an unconscious gesture of acting out, just before Alice’s baby is born, Sita buries the coffins in the garden. The doctor believes it signifies the release of an old grief, triggered by the impending birth of her grandchild. Not long afterwards, Sita dies worn out with grief.

When, towards the end of the novel, peace finally comes to Sri Lanka, for Alice the island only holds ‘painful memories’ (360). Ravi, her son, now a young man, has grown away from her and has repudiated his mother’s painful past in a similar way to her father’s rejection of Sita’s grief: ‘You and your bloody memories are nothing to do with me’ (362). It is as if women, and mothers specifically, carry the burden of cultural memory, which is subsequently disavowed by the younger generation (Hussain 2005). Like many second-generation immigrants, Ravi, a mixed-race man in a Britain shaped by racism and colonialism, is caught between cultures and ‘feels neither one thing nor the other’ (Tearne 2010: 370). Eventually, too, Timothy leaves Alice, echoing Stanley’s words about Sita that ‘she’s not normal’ (343) and that he’s ‘tired of hearing about all her dead relations’ (344). In dismissing her grief and othering Alice, Timothy adopts a characteristic western and racist attitude, deeming her losses ‘ungrievable’ in the manner described by Butler. Thus, family breakdown, maternal loss and intergenerational transmission of trauma are shown to persist throughout the novel (Luckhurst 2008).

In the final part of Brixton Beach, the story moves forward in time to 2004 and the reader re-encounters Dr Simon Swann. His life, though outwardly successful, is unfulfilled. The events of 9/11 have changed everything for white Western subjects: ‘Terror had returned to Britain and it was here to stay’ (Tearne 2010: 351). A chance encounter brings Simon and Alice together and he soon falls in love with her. After years of passionless marriage and solitude, Alice is suddenly overwhelmed by Simon’s romantic attention. Music and art, their respective passions, become the catalyst for their relationship. Alice is gaining a reputation for her sculptures and for the first time finds success in her professional life. Alice’s exhibition, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, echoes Proust’s meditation on memory and the passage of time. We see the exhibition through Simon’s curious but uncomprehending eyes. Confronting her sculptures for the first time, he encounters a glass-fronted cupboard covered in plaster with men's shirts apparently ‘struggling to get out’ (366). Another sculpture looks like a hybrid of a table and a cupboard, ‘taking on a strange life of its own’. The surface is covered in fine hair and it exudes an ‘air of menace’ (367). A journalist captures in words what Alice has tried to represent in her art: ‘the experience of the “disappeared” and the bridging of the spaces between one person’s experience and another’s’ (362). Moreover, Alice sees her work as ‘righting a terrible injustice’ (376), which as Visser (2015) argues, may be part of a community’s working through of trauma.

Trauma sufferers are ‘ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told’ (Lewis Herman 2001: 1). Finally, after years of silence, just as her mother had attempted decades before with Kunal, Alice haltingly tells another person about her trauma, describing to Simon her mother’s ordeal, her grandfather’s murder, the years of loneliness: ‘they were the things that history had remained silent about’ (Tearne 2010: 376). Increasingly, too, Alice hears her grandfather’s voice in her head, advising and guiding her. While the critic Vijay Mishra would no doubt read this as an aspect of the diasporic imaginary, a melancholic retrospective yearning, for Alice Bee’s voice acts as a catalyst for healing and working through her trauma. In signifying the importance of communal and intergenerational bonds, it is reminiscent of the process of therapeutic restitution identified in postcolonial texts and contexts (Visser 2015). In addition to the consolations of her art, Simon’s love has a rejuvenating and liberating effect on Alice, setting her free from her grief. After they first make love, Alice tells Simon that she wants to ‘take you back to my stretch of beach’, a place that she hasn’t visited for thirty two years, and thereby reconnect with the long-buried memories she has begun to communicate to a beloved other (Tearne 2010: 390). Tearne underlines the moment’s significance: ‘In Sri Lanka they would call it a re-birth’ (390). By embracing bodily vulnerability, in Butler’s (2016) terms, and creating a ‘we’ instead of an ‘I’ through the union of each other’s bodies, their relationship facilitates the process of healing from trauma. Life is suddenly full of promise: ‘Now that they have started, memories are flooding out of her like love’ (Tearne 2010: 398) as Simon’s love enables Alice to reconnect personal and cultural memories through art and human relationship.

Sadly, for Alice this process of restitution has only just got underway when violence once more enters her world. The final chapter, called simply ‘5 July 2007’, clearly signals to the reader the specific event with which the novel opens. Alice is on her way to the gallery in the Edgware Road that has sold a sculpture of hers for a large sum. A sense of fatefulness and tension, which has accompanied Alice’s family narrative since the start of civil strife and the death of Sita’s baby in Sri Lanka, hangs in the London air. Even rational medic Simon feels that ‘everything hinges on chance [and] anything can happen at any time’ (397). The reader is held in suspense as Alice waits for a packed tube train to leave the station and boards the next one, which contains the suicide bomber. The novel intimates that Alice sees him, a young man with a backpack who ironically looks like her son Ravi. We then witness Alice waking up on the pavement outside the tube station, a man saying ‘hold on, luv’ (403). Poignantly, the narrator tells us in free indirect style: ‘She has been holding on … ’ (404). All Alice’s final thoughts coalesce around Simon and her memories of her Sri Lankan homeland. The novel ends with a grief-stricken Simon, knowing that he must return to Brixton Beach, the house where Alice has recreated—and memorialized—the Sea House, her childhood home: ‘For it is clear that he, Simon Swann, needs this beach; it is … irreversibly part of his internal landscape now’ (408). Thus, Simon shares in the abiding sense of life’s precarity and bodily vulnerability even as he seeks to make a connection with Alice’s estranged son Ravi in order to preserve Alice’s legacy.

Conclusion

It is the central dramatic irony of the novel that just as Alice finds romantic love, professional success and some measure of restitution, horrific violence intervenes once again to wrest it from her. Thus, while Alice manages to work through her traumatic losses via art in a way that her mother Sita did not, her own life mirrors the violent and tragic end of her grandfather. Amarasekera and Pillai (2015) are therefore correct to read the novel as essentially ambivalent; one which posits Sri Lanka as a site for reconciliation but at the same time acknowledges the persistence of trauma, not least through its cataclysmic ending. While Alice is well on the way to making a recovery, Tearne as creator cannot finally envision a concordant ending for her central character. Throughout the novel Alice as postcolonial female protagonist is characterized in terms of diasporic subjectivity and her literal and metaphorical journeys emphasized for the reader: ‘She had travelled the ocean and tried to understand this alien place, but she was still struggling, she thought in pain, astonished by the years of effort. And she thought again of all the messages she had thrown overboard, day after day’ (345). In this respect, the novel would seem to confirm Mishra’s highly ambivalent model of diasporic mourning as something which persists as an open wound from generation to generation and which cannot be easily if at all mitigated by a change in fortune or an act of will. While for Alice, making art, becoming a mother and finding a lover help keep the sadness at bay; for other characters, such as Sita, mourning turns into a pathological form of melancholia which leads to a permanent disengagement with life. To invoke the trope of the ‘new woman’ of South Asian diasporic literature posited by Yasmin Hussain (2005), in Tearne’s text she cannot yet be born as local, and global conflicts conspire to prevent her transcending traditional, colonial definitions of the female subaltern as victim—not (just) of patriarchy but of communal violence and international terror.

Both character and author utilize art to reconstruct in aesthetic terms what Mishra calls the diasporic imaginary, that persistent sense of melancholic longing of displaced subjects. The novel’s achievement lies in its representation—in art—of cultural memory as a form of diasporic mourning. While all Tearne’s characters contribute to this act of mourning in their different ways, it is the artist characters, Alice and Bee, who express it most poignantly and seek to memorialize it through their art. Yet, it is the women, both mothers, who overwhelmingly carry the burden of intergenerational diasporic mourning. As Alice tells Simon: ‘All my life is built on memories […] the effort it takes to be a person who does not belong is unimaginable, you know. I am one of those people, living that life’ (Tearne 2010: 376). If Butler poses the question of who ‘we’ are in times of war and asks ‘whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned[?]’ (2016: 38), Tearne’s text provides an emphatic response: the lives of ‘foreigners’ and, especially, minoritized and marginalized women are also valuable and grievable. While arguably not effecting a paradigm shift in the genre as a whole, the novel demonstrates that contemporary British postcolonial women’s writing is capable of representing transnational crises and their impact on women in a uniquely powerful way.

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.