Galle Festival - How Relevant?

Of course, there's no immediate way that fiction or poetry can be of constructive use in a bloody conflict whose human cost remains concealed. But the fact that most of us can't read the Sinhalese novelists does point to one very relevant literary exercise. A key failing of the otherwise world-class Sri Lankan education system is that while many islanders read at least some English, very few Sinhalese can read Tamil, and vice versa. This will be a major obstacle to any peaceful integration of the island for all sorts of reasons, and allowing Sinhalese and Tamil literature to promote understanding across the ethnic divide is perhaps the least important of them. But putting effort into translation projects would be a small but tangible step in the right direction ...

Lindesay Irvine on The Guardian blog writes about authors celebrating freedom of expression at the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka, and notes the great need for translation of locally written fiction to transcend ethnic boundaries.

Ajith P. Perera [found via The Literary Saloon] refers to the event as :

Colombo elite’s annual intellectual masturbation

and rather cynically asks what objectives the festival actually serves :

A section of Colombo elite might take a long holiday, eat continental breakfasts, drink lots of expensive wines, exchange yarns about their kids, buy few ornamentals, gain few pounds, may even boost the condom sales of nearby pharmacies and disperse. So much for the literature.

The tragedy is large section of creative writers never benefit from either of these festivals. They become untouchables at state festival because they do not appease Talibans. State shows the rebels the door. ... They have no place even at Galle because they do not write in English.

He says he sees the best creative writing - particularly poetry - on the blogs. But bloggers were not a group represented at the festival.

Maura O'Connor of The Sunday Times of Sri Lanka [also found via!] says that:.

.. despite all the fun to be had at the festival, there was a strong sense that the event had yet to seriously deal with the reputation and criticism it garnered in previous years for rather unabashed elitism.

While the programme touted intimate gourmet dinners in Galle Fort mansions and the opportunity to rub shoulders with literary hotshots, there was little in the way of events that allowed for the discussion of topics such as the current ethnic conflict, politics, education, media responsibility, or development. This is strange because one of the festival’s espoused objectives is to “encourage debate on topical issues.”

These are the challenges that the organisers of any literary festival in this part of the world (or indeed in any part of the developing world) have to face up to. The Ubud Festival I think is managing to keep on right side of the line.

Debut Asian Fiction on NPR

Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain is reviewed alongside Mosquito by Roma Tearne, a novel set in Sri Lanka are reviewed on America's National Public Radio (NPR). You can listen to the broadcast here.

(More about Roma Tearne here.)

Elmo's Story

I'm just a very ordinary man who wrote a book and they called me a novelist after that.

said award-winning Sri Lankan author Elmo Jayawardena very modestly at the MPH Breakfast club last Saturday.

I finished Elmo's first novel, Sam's Story a couple of day's back and very much enjoyed it. The story is narrated by a young man called Sam, who is mentally slow and illiterate, and who finds employ as a domestic servant with a family at "the river house". Alternating chapters unravel the story of Sam's growing up in a village in the rural Kalutera district where the poverty is absolute, and the only jobs to be had are tapping rubber or digging sand ... and for the young men, joining the Sri Lankan army to fight the on-going civil war.

The novel is largely based on real life. There actually is a Sam and he still works for Elmo (who "drives areobblanes" for a living) and his family, and many of the incidents described in the book with such humour and affection really did happen. (Elmo took out his family photos to show me Sam and the house by the river before the event began.)

The background about Sam's family and childhood which real Sam was unable to tell him, he filled in from his own experiences of growing up dirt poor, often going without food, and from his charity work with the poor.

There is reality in the real sense of it ... when a person is poor they don't have hope.

In the book, Sam's voice is convincingly realised and his quirky way of seeing the world acquires it's own logic. (Why have a statue in the garden of a boy pissing into the fish pond when he can do it just as well? Why pack away the Christmas tree when it will only need to be brought out again next year? Why isn't the dog his when he loves it most?)

He's aware of the ironies too. The family dog gets the best medical treatment and a stream of visitors when he gets food poisoning. Sam's mother has to walk miles and wait hours for medical treatment, and is prescribed medicine and an improved diet which they can't afford. His master's family have two children who are educated overseas and who barely think about the civil war. Sam's brothers are conscripted, and one killed while the other becomes a deserter.

The war enters the household in the form of conversations between the master and his friends over drinks - everyone expounds on what should be done, but no-one really has answers. Meanwhile in the kitchen, there is enmity between Sam and the two servants Janet and Leandro. Sam doesn't know what the war is about but he knows that the Tamils are supposed to be the enemy of the Sinhalese.

But as the Masters wife (hey, this is my friend Dil!) says, sadly shaking her head each soldier in the conflict is some mother's son and really it is as simple as that.

As Elmo said at MPH :

We hate because we do not know them, and we will not know them because we hate.

I find it really interesting that Elmo the author is so easily able to slip inside another skin, and see himself too through that person's eyes. (He isn't always complimentary about Elmo the character!) The ending of the novel, thank goodness, is fiction.

The real Sam is unable to comprehend that he has become the hero of a book and that a lot of people travel to meet him, but in the pages of this book he becomes the perfect vehicle to explore the effects of poverty and war on the the ordinary Sri Lankan citizen.

Elmo - The Everyday Hero

Yes, a writer, who started off by writing between flights. Watch the simplicity again. "An apple (the fruit not the brand), a laptop, a do not disturb sign," was all it took to get him going. He'd write anywhere in the world. Unlike many other writers, he wasn't bound by the constraints of the study or the desk. Work was done wherever his flight took him, and where he has been, recognition has followed him. The former Singapore Airlines Captain, current pilot trainer for Sri Lankan Airlines-cum-award-winning writer - and as he reminds me, a grandfather too as well - has been pronounced an 'Everyday Hero', for when he wasn't writing or flying, he was steering the Association for Lighting a Candle (AFLAC) in Sri Lanka, a charity that has drawn the attention, funds and time of people from all over the world.

Deepika Shetty catches up with Capt. Elmo Jayawardena who will be appearing at MPH's Breakfast Club in Bangsar Village 1 at 11a.m. tomorrow and at Seksan's in the afternoon.

Do Malaysians Really Get Satire?

Satire ... [1] is a literary genre, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to bring about improvement. [2] It is used in graphic arts and performing arts as well. ... Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, the purpose of satire is not primarily humour but criticism of an event, an individual or a group in a clever manner.

from Wikipedia.

Does satire flourish in Asia?

One of the most entertaining panel discussions of the Ubud Writer's and Readers' festival debated the question. Besides our own Kam Raslan, we met Sri Lankan author Manuka Wijesinghe who writes beautifully about the absurd in her novel Monsoons and Potholes, and Indonesian Isman Hidayat Suryaman who talked about how he hides his criticism of authority in humour since he cannot do it openly. He added a nice detail for us, Indonesia doesn't have a "censorship board" it has an "enlightenment board!" which does the same job! The session was moderated by Nury (who gets everywhere!).

Kam talked about how satire has become increasingly popular in Malaysia, and he read from Amir Muhammad's book to illustrate the fact that in Malaysia actually satirists are not needed because politicians do the job beautifully for them!:

Our job is to mock authority and our politicians make it too easy ...

he said, talking about how the politicians provide most of the material for KL's Instant Cafe Theatre for which Kam also writes skits.

When it came to question time I asked the panelists if they felt that their audiences really get their satire? As Instant Cafe founder Jo Kukathas (who was in the audience*) pointed out, of course Malaysian audiences understand satire ... otherwise why would their own company have been so successful?

I was actually thinking about satire on the page, particularly when it doesn't have a box around it saying "This is meant to be funny". And I was thinking specifically about this post on Amir Muhammad's blog on a spoof column he wrote as Ambi Mohan for the New Straits Times - the reactions from angry readers who didn't understand that their leg was being pulled actually makes funnier reading than the articles themselves!

Jo actually took me to task about the question I'd asked a couple of nights later, at the party at Blanco's house, and gave me plenty of examples of her own to support her argument. Somehow (might have been on my part the wine) we managed to entangle the question of "Do Malaysians get satire?" with "Do Malaysians get irony?" (which is a somewhat separate one, but nevertheless worth considering ... and I would say much of Kam's humour is gently ironic.)

On satire, with censorship so tight, and self-censorship added to it, there really is little tradition of making fun of authority figures here by means of the written word ... although happily the blogosphere is becoming increasingly good at using satire, much to the discomfort of politicians.

(It's worth noting too is that Kam's deliciously satirical sense of humour was shaped by TV programmes like Monty Python, as he grew up in the UK.)

My question then, is there a tradition of satire here, particularly on the printed page?

The issue is still knocking round in my own head. Would love your views.

(Incidentally, Isman has a very amusing blog calld The Fool Has Landed and wrote this session up very well himself. And Deepika writes a lovely piece on Manuka.)

*Now can you guess who the obnoxious politician was?

From Fragment to Novel

I am so excited to hear about Michael Ondaatje's new novel since it's been quite a while since the moving and beautiful Anil's Ghost.

In an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald he talks about how writing a novel is a process of evolution for him. He reveals that he began his new novel, Divisadero with a fragment of story someone told him in passing:

It was something about a horse that got loose in a barn and knocked down its owner. He wrote it down: a stormy night, an animal losing its mind, the girl in a heap on the floor. Gradually, the beginnings of a novel collected around those two pages; one girl turned into two, followed by a young man.

"It was a keyhole that allowed me to discover the rest of the book," he says now. "It was the opening." A landscape rose up to meet the horses, humming with insects and shimmering with grasses and, over five years' writing, the three people in the barn gradually revealed themselves to him. "I wasn't quite sure what any of them was like; they were all mysteries to me," he says. He didn't yet know that they had grown up together, that one limped, that one became a gambler.

"Some writers know exactly what their books are about when they begin," he says. "That seems incredibly boring to me. I am much more interested in how the writer evolves in the writing, so that the novel evolves as well." It was the same, he says, when he wrote his most famous novel, The English Patient. "I didn't know who the patient was: he was just the patient. He was a mystery to me. But then, as a book progresses, there is a kind of archaeology the writer performs on the characters; you work backwards.

So if you need a starting point for a story carry a notebook around with you and jot down those interesting snippets that you overhear, the stories that people tell you. You might just find the starting point you're looking for.

Author Pate

Margaret Atwood once said something along the lines of - "Wanting to meet an author because you like his book is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate." Strange analogy!

Thanks Reezal for the photo.

B-Reef Reading

There's a special magic about hearing an author read his own words and it was a real treat to listen to Romesh Gunasekera read from Reef both at Silverfish and at the British Council reception Friday night.

It's a book of "memory and imagination ... how you work out who you are and why you're there ..." (Romesh's words) and the characters have taken up residence in my head.

The story is a long flashback, narrated by a Sri Lankan restauranteur living in London after a late night encounter with a compatriot at a petrol station. Triton recalls his life as a houseboy in the employ of Mr. Salgado, an aristocratic dilettante, and how he gradually takes over the running of the household. Triton observes and puzzles over Salgado's relationship with the unconventional Nili, and does his best to lubricate the friendship with wonderous offerings of food (the love cake with extra eggs and freshest butter, the beautiful parrot fish, and of course the Christmas turkey).

It's a novel of great charm and beauty.

Another book of Romesh's that I've greatly enjoyed is Monkfish Moon, his collection of short fiction set between Britain and Sri Lanka. My favourite story is Batik, about a Sri Lankan couple living in London in an apartment they have carefully and lovingly renovated together. But now the news of atrocities committed at home threatens to tear their relationship apart. As in Reef, there's a sense of safety lost, a paradise despoiled.

Truth is held in the smallest of details - the gory dissection of the chicken for dinner, the bruise coloured door, the shards of a shattered cup.

A tiny gem but totally satisfying.

Postscript:

Leon wrote about the Friday night reception at British Council director's place. Since we don't have photos, we have blog memories, Leon.

Have Pen - Will Subvert

My article in Starmag today:

Romesh Gunasekera doesn’t believe in pigeon-holing, nor does he write to an agenda.

IDENTITY is never a one dimensional thing,” says author Romesh Gunasekera, neatly sidestepping my question about whether he sees himself as a British or a Sri Lankan writer. His novels and short stories are set in both places and he clearly relishes the ability to move between worlds without being pigeonholed himself.

(British Council Malaysia brought the writer to Malaysia recently; he gave a reading from a selection of his works at the Silverfish bookshop in Kuala Lumpur.)

His second novel, Reef, a lyrical story about memory and imagination, put Gunasekera firmly on the international literary map. The novel was nominated for the 1994 Booker prize, and while he says it was wonderful that it was shortlisted, he claims that it was “kind of ideal not to have won because the one or two first time writers who did win with the first book tended not to have written after that.”

At fewer than 200 pages, Reef is an unusually short novel in an age where fiction writers seem obliged to turn out complex and lengthy tomes. Says Gunasekera with characteristic humility, “I didn’t think I had the right to demand someone read a long novel by a writer they didn’t know.”

It is impossible of course to write about Sri Lanka without reference to the atrocities that have been part of its recent troubled history. I ask him whether he felt he had a duty as a writer to make sense of the violence.

“I’m not writing to an agenda, but writing stories that interest me,” he says. “But I also have to write to understand the world I live in and the fact that the world is getting more violent.”

In his earlier works, that violence tends to occur outside of the frame of the story, but its effect and reverberations are felt by the characters in the foreground. It’s his third novel, Heaven’s Edge, set in a dystopian fictional country, which deals with the subject more directly. It “explores the whole idea of violence, how it comes into our lives and how man has to come to terms with it”.

Gunasekera says ideas for the next novel are germinating even as he writes the current one. “I already know the books I intend to write if I live long enough,” he says. But he finds it hard to talk about the process that he goes through when writing fiction because it’s been different for each book.

“One thing I’ve learned is I don’t know how to do it. I do know roughly how long it’ll take me, which is longer than I think. I have a rough idea of how much of my life will go into it. Otherwise, when you start any book you are always a novice.

“If you write the kind of books I tend to write, which don’t conform to a genre, you start with nothing and you have to invent the way to do it each time. People always talk about giving birth to novels, and I think that there is a similarity. Afterwards you tend to forget what’s involved, how difficult, frustrating and painful it is.”

It’s vitally important for him that the book feels alive to his readers and totally engages them. The key to making this happen is a great deal of revision.

“Unless you are making a Jackson Pollock (the American abstract artist famous for his ‘drip and splash style’), which is fine in terms of self-expression, creating different worlds does involve rewriting. I’d happily continue rewriting for many more years except that some time it must come to an end.”

Gunasekera’s first book, Monkfish Moon, established his credentials as a writer of short fiction at a time when it was relatively rare for writers to bring out a collection as a first book, and although he says that he would love to bring out another, it not be commercially viable.

Indeed, the short story has been declared so seriously endangered in Britain that a campaign to save it from extinction has been instigated. But Gunasekera sees the tide beginning to turn with the awarding of an annual short story prize, and with the growth of e-zines (online magazines) and the increasing popularity of the short-short story. He firmly believes the short story is still the best form for the novice writer to tackle.

I tell him that I read that he’d once warned that fiction can be dangerous because it “opens up things that probably shouldn’t be opened up” and ask him what he meant by that. It’s a theme he warms to.

“Literature should be subversive. When you read a book, you become the story. You can imagine it exactly how you like and no one can tell you you’re right or wrong. External authority has no place – and this is why in a repressive regime fiction is banned and fiction writers are persecuted.”

And that is probably the most powerful argument for our need to read good books!