Unveiling the Cultural Ambiguity: A Cultural Interpretation of Roma Tearne’s Brixton Beach

Abstract

Roma Tearne the writer of the novel Brixton Beach, analyzes the quandary of Sri Lankan migrants living in a Western society and how some of the female characters triumph their feelings of estrangement and alienation to surface as individuals with their own logic of escalation. Being an expatriate, she elicits the story of Sri Lankan immigrants who flee from the civil war and try to acclimatize to life in the United Kingdom. The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka depicts the realization of the unsettled situation in particular postcolonial societies after decolonization. Tearne’s novel endows narrative representations of silence surrounding the married life of Sita and Stanley, who come from different ethnic backgrounds. The experience of a new and completely different place heartens the migrants to keep their language, traditions and culture to articulate their sense of otherness. The characters retain their traditions even though they are living in a foreign land. In Brixton Beach, Alice, Sita’s daughter, experiences being alienated in her new environment in England and by her parents’ separation. She is depicted as tussling for self-expression, which she later describes through her interest in art, rather than verbally. She is seen as trying to preserve her cultural identity in her confrontation with her English-born son. The novelist also brings to surface the traditions of the Tamils and the Sinhalese and how their existence in United Kingdom gives them a hope for a better future.