Women: a cultural review

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‘All My Life is Built on Memories’: Trauma,

Diasporic Mourning and Maternal Loss in Roma
Tearne’s Brixton Beach

Sonya Andermahr

To cite this article: Sonya Andermahr (2023) ‘All My Life is Built on Memories’: Trauma,
Diasporic Mourning and Maternal Loss in Roma Tearne’s Brixton Beach, Women: a cultural
review, 34:1-2, 50-63, DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2023.2184615

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2184615

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 w S O N Y A A N D E R M A H R
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‘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

............................................................................................................................................................................
Women: a cultural review, Vol. 34, Nos. 1–2
ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &
Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article
has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
http://www.tandfonline.com https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2184615
 ALL MY LIFE IS BUILT ON MEMORIES · 51
............................................................................................
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

O xford-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 inter-
view 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 Sinha-
lese 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 judge-
ment 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 “indi-
genous” 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
52 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
............................................................................................

South Asian women writers ‘assert their own definitions of femininity

through the representation of the “New Woman”’, which rejects the tra-
ditional ‘Sita Savitri’ stereotype (53). Significantly, Tearne’s text compli-
cates 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 experi-
ence of migration in the era of transnational crisis. In particular, it con-
siders 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 theo-
rized by Judith Lewis Herman (2001) and Sandra L. Bloom (2010) and by
recent postcolonial critics such as Irene Visser (2015), whose work empha-
sizes the therapeutic value of symbolization and narrativization to postco-
lonial 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 pol-
itical 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 margin-
alized 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 inter-
view, Tearne admits losing one of her friends in the London 7/7 bombings:
 ALL MY LIFE IS BUILT ON MEMORIES · 53
............................................................................................

‘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 heri-
tage 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
54 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
............................................................................................

ones, which represent ‘a different kind of pain’ (58) do not. Following the
family’s migration to England, Sita’s loss becomes even more ‘unframe-
able’ and thus unspeakable.
In Frames of War: When is Life Grievable (2016), Butler focuses on ‘cul-
tural 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, com-
munal 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
 ALL MY LIFE IS BUILT ON MEMORIES · 55
............................................................................................

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 disorientat-
ing 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
56 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
............................................................................................

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 imagin-
ary 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 melancho-
lia’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 gen-
eration, that is as long as the memory of the initial trauma can be remem-
bered 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 mar-
ginalized and withdrawn. Despite her love for Bee she cannot bring herself
to write honestly to her grandfather, censoring her grief in short unemo-
tional 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.

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.
ALL MY LIFE IS BUILT ON MEMORIES · 57
............................................................................................
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 effec-
tively 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 cho-
colate 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 preoccupa-
tions between the folds of the baby clothes so painstakingly embroidered
in her other life. […] Knowing there was no longer any point in resurrect-
ing 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 over-
come 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 mar-
ginalized woman.
58 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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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 differ-
ence is that whereas Sita’s box only serves to act out her trauma, Alice’s rep-
resents 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 con-
structions 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 incor-
porating 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
 ALL MY LIFE IS BUILT ON MEMORIES · 59
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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 home-
sickness 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 out-
wardly successful, is unfulfilled. The events of 9/11 have changed every-
thing 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 passion-
less marriage and solitude, Alice is suddenly overwhelmed by Simon’s
60 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
............................................................................................

romantic attention. Music and art, their respective passions, become the
catalyst for their relationship. Alice is gaining a reputation for her sculp-
tures and for the first time finds success in her professional life. Alice’s exhi-
bition, ‘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 rep-
resent in her art: ‘the experience of the “disappeared” and the bridging
of the spaces between one person’s experience and another’s’ (362). More-
over, 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). Increas-
ingly, 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 conso-
lations 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 vulner-
ability, 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.
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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 home-
land. The novel ends with a grief-stricken Simon, knowing that he must
return to Brixton Beach, the house where Alice has recreated—and memor-
ialized—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 vio-
lence 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
62 · WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW
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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 gener-
ation 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 charac-
ters, 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 defi-
nitions 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 melan-
cholic longing of displaced subjects. The novel’s achievement lies in its
representation—in art—of cultural memory as a form of diasporic mourn-
ing. 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 inter-
generational 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 transna-
tional crises and their impact on women in a uniquely powerful way.

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

ORCID
Sonya Andermahr http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4713-6912
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