Tragedy, trauma and the healing touch: A French visual artist’s poetic tribute to child survivors of 2004 tsunami

In her first intentful switch from prose to poetry, French visual artist and author Veronik Menanteau channels her experience, both as witness to the nightmare scenario of the tsunami of 2004, and as volunteer in the extensive relief and rehabilitation effort in Nagapattinam, into a collection of verse.

‘Tsunami Poems’ (Red River 2026), with its frontal blurb setting out the literary leitmotif of a dedication to the memories of the 2004 Indian earthquake and tsunami and its aftermath presents a “a poignant, and inspiring, tribute to the memory of the 27,000 men, women and children, who were the victims of the Tsunami in Tamil Nadu”.

The collection of verse, illustrated with the art works of the child survivors, is as much a tribute to their amazing spirit of resilience.

At a recent book launch hosted by The Brown Critique and People for Pondicherry’s Heritage, Gayatri Majumdar, poet, asked the author the obvious first question. Why a tribute two decades since the tragedy?

“Whenever I looked at the paintings by the children all these years I was amazed by their capacity to tap deep into the core of their emotional suffering and express themselves. I knew that very deeply that something would come out… when the moment was right”, she responded.

“I needed to go to the quintessence of the experience and transcend it to formulate an artistic proposition.”

As she has also penned in the preface, Ms. Menanteau said: “It took me all this time to open my notebooks and extract the very essence of my feelings that I had written at the time. In writing these short little poems, I wanted to honour the extraordinary strength, courage and dignity of the children that survived the tsunami.”

In 2000, the artist founded an NGO, “Art As First Aid Energy”, in response to the global call launched by UNICEF to take initiatives in favour of Children’s Rights, following the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted at the United Nations in 1989.

Her specifically designed palliative creative education programmes, a form of channelling art for therapeutic end, to develop the socialising function and the imagination of children in great distress, in an extremely safe setting would touch the lives of children severely traumatised by war (Vietnam), genocide (Cambodia) and the tsunami (India).

“Our method was designed to respond in emergency situations. That is why we were able to join the Indian Tsunami Relief Project set up in Nagapattinam in 2005”, she recalled.

Working with child victims, some of whose entire families were snatched, and others orphaned at a fragile age, the priority was to give them a safe space. Many children with post-traumatic stress disorder were showing signs of emotional dysfunction; some had lost the ability to speak.

In the secure space that was created, the children became the absolute masters of their creation while expressing the essence of individual dignity and identity. Over time, they adapted to the use of different colours of the paint tubes and discover the effect of mixing hues as they evolved a powerful visual and graphic language.

The process effectively offered an opportunity for the children to transform the abstract, sensory, affective content of trauma into something observable and identifiable. It also offered rehabilitation personnel a mode to “hear the children’s emotions, to all their multiple and varied ways of communicating”.

The Nagapattinam experience was also a learning curve for the artist-author.

“I certainly learned and deepened my knowledge that concerns the development of the child victims of post-trauma and the advantages and benefits of child care and a recognition of emotions that have the power to regenerate”, said Ms. Menanteau.