JOIN USArt that heals
On May 19 this year the president of Sri Lanka officially declared the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, apparently bringing to an end 26 years of civil conflict. The duration, as well as the complex ethnic divisions, caused the Sri Lankan civil war to go unreported for long periods of time. As Roma Tearne observes: “the war had become a worn-out habit on the island... the brutality of which was hardly noticed in the west. Other wars, more important ones in larger, richer countries, hit the headlines.”
Tearne came to England at the age of 10, when her Tamil father and Sinhalese mother settled in south London in 1964. Since then she has pursued a dual career as a visual artist who has exhibited at the Royal Academy, and a novelist whose recurrent themes are the devastating impact of the war on domestic lives and the redemptive power of art.
Her debut novel, Mosquito, featured an exiled Sri Lankan writer returning to the country and falling in love with a 17-year-old artist. Of all Tearne’s work, this was the book that most directly engaged with the violence of the civil war, particularly the Tamil Tigers’ deployment of female suicide bombers, who descended from the north like mosquitoes “but, unlike the mosquitoes, were full of a new kind of despair and frightening rage.”
Bone China, which followed, was an expansive, semi-autobiographical family saga spanning the 1960s in which a Sri Lankan girl finds her feet in Swinging London and discovers a rare talent as a composer. Once again, the central character of Brixton Beach, Alice Fonseka, is an artist — a sculptor who works with found objects — though this time Tearne brings the story shockingly up to date, as the novel begins with a vividly realised account of the aftermath of the 7 July bombings of 2005.
The opening scene plunges straight into the horror and confusion of a British doctor, Simon Swann, as he runs towards the carnage on the Edgware Road. Tearne establishes a potent sense of the atrocity through sharp, sensory fragments, incorporating flashes of ‘acid green jackets’, ‘a bracelet on a blackened arm’ and the all-pervasive smell of ‘sweat and rubber and explosives’.
It is clear, as Dr Swann performs his duty, that he is frantically worried about the whereabouts of a woman who lives in a house known as Brixton Beach. To discover who this woman is, and how Brixton mysteriously came to possess a shoreline, Tearne winds the narrative back 30 years to an idyllic Sri Lankan beach, where the young Alice is receiving her first cycling lesson from her beloved grandfather Bee, a renowned artist and printmaker.
At first, the war seems safely remote from Alice’s blissful childhood. But intimations of the conflict begin to infiltrate; first when Alice is discriminated against at school for having a Tamil father; then when her mother loses her baby due to the wilful negligence of a Sinhalese doctor. The family head for Britain, where the Fonsekas’ marriage crumbles as Alice’s father joins a radical sect which supports the Tigers, and her mother slips into dementia, crafting cardboard coffins and dressing a collection of dolls in her dead baby’s clothes.
As with the heroines of Tearne’s previous two novels, the therapeutic power of art enables Alice to survive. She names her house Brixton Beach and is mentored by a young art teacher who encourages her to develop the driftwood creations which provide a symbolic link to her lost home.
As a visual artist, Tearne instinctively thinks in terms of texture and colour. Yet more often than not her metaphors have a musical value. She writes of tension on the island “stretched like a cello string,” or of Alice’s footprints “marking the sand like musical notation.” The conflict itself sets a discordant tone: “The war began drumming again. After months of silence it marched in two-four time; a two-conductor orchestra without direction.”
Above all her prose is illuminated by a painterly sensitivity to light. Alice inherits her talent from Bee, who is slaughtered in reprisal for harbouring Tamil refugees. “Words were not his thing; explanations were best done with brushes. The colour of a place, the angle of the light, a tree, these spoke volumes.”
In Bone China, Tearne observed that “a mantle of despair was settling like fine dust on the island, clogging the air, blotting out its brilliance and choking its people.” It remains to be seen if the pall of civil war has finally lifted, or whether Sri Lanka is experiencing another of its many false dawns. Whatever happens, Tearne has preserved the emotional impact of this sad historical chapter in three remarkable novels dedicated to what has become “the invisible story of the British empire.”
BriXton beach
Roma Tearne
Harper Press,
2009, pp 409