«Mosquito» is a love story of the writer Theo, who came to his homeland, Sri Lanka, to take a break from Europe, and his 17-year-old neighbor Nulani, a talented nugget artist. The growing civil war is tearing the heroes apart. The author of the novel, Roma Tiern, a fragile woman with a soft smile, came to represent Mosquito in Russia and answered questions from Psychologies.
Writer, artist, and once also a ballerina, Roma Tiern was born in Sri Lanka. A ten-year-old girl, in 1964 she moved with her parents to London. Two years ago, Roma made a successful debut with the novel Mosquito. This is a love story of the writer Theo, who came to his homeland, Sri Lanka, to take a break from Europe, and his 17-year-old neighbor Nulani, a talented nugget artist. The growing civil war is tearing the heroes apart. Roma, a fragile woman with a soft smile, came to represent Mosquito in Russia and answered questions from Psychologies.
Psychologies: You opened up Sri Lanka to the Western world. What does Sri Lanka mean to you personally?
Roma Tirn: The image of Sri Lanka in the minds of the majority is a fabulous island with golden beaches, palm trees, a warm ocean, magical sunsets — a real paradise. This is how Sri Lanka still looks in travel brochures. But for me, this is heaven lost. A paradise that was destroyed by an endless civil war. Mosquitoes carry malaria in Sri Lanka. These are not European small mosquitoes, Sri Lankan mosquitoes are long and very beautiful, such bizarre winged angels. They are beautiful, but they are infected with death. For me, this is the symbol of Sri Lanka.
In the novel, there are many amazingly beautiful landscapes, as if resisting the devastation around. Do you agree with Dostoevsky who said that beauty will save the world?
For me, beauty is combined with creativity. Art is beauty, and I believe that art can heal a person. In London, I worked with refugees from Sri Lanka. These people saw a lot of terrible things and were unable to talk about what they experienced. And then I asked them to just draw something, and they drew with joy, and almost all the works were very beautiful, they captured the best that people saw in life — flowering trees, children, the ocean. This makes it much easier for people to survive.