In the fiction of Sri Lankan English 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 Tamil father, as a small child in the early 1960s Tearne left her native island "with all its tropical beauty" (Tearne 2009:83), as unrest originating in the conflict between the Sinhalese majority and 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 post independence Sri Lanka, that since the 1950s 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 Sinhalas and Tamils which was officially ended only in 2009. The flight from Sri Lanka is often evoked in Tearne's fiction as a traumatic moment of rupture, generating a deeply distressing quest for home and belonging in her characters who, as they struggle to forge their new, mobile identities and settle in Britain, constantly question the eligibility of their host country to offer them refuge and provide them with a new home. Bibliography
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