ABSTRACT
In the fiction of Sri Lankan British writer and visual artist Roma Tearne the journey of migration undertaken by several characters from war-torn Sri Lanka to Britain, in the hope of finding sanctuary, mirrors the author’s own migratory trajectory and experience of displacement. Born to a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father, as a small child in the early 1960s Tearne left her native island “with all its tropical beauty” (2009, 83), as unrest originating in the conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority intensified and escalated into full-blown civil war. As Minoli Salgado has pointed out, the literature produced by either resident or diasporic Sri Lankan writers in English has been shaped by the fraught history of postindependence Sri Lanka. Since the 1950s the country has seen “the dramatic decline of Ceylonese or multiethnic Sri Lankan nationalism in favour of Sinhala linguistic nationalism along with the sharpening of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism” (Salgado 2007, 9), leading to complex ethnic divisions and an armed conflict between the Sinhalas and the Tamils, which was officially ended only in 2009.
