Impressions of the Galle Literary Festival

Tissa Jayatilaka

FEAST: The Galle Literary Festival may well have been the “invention of an eccentric imagination” but, it was, a very desirable and successful invention. The organisers of the festival deserve both our congratulations and thanks.

Also our best wishes and support to make it an even better endeavour next year and in the years ahead. There were participants from Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia, India and Sri Lanka who spent almost a week together enjoying this literary feast.

That a good thing can be made better is an indisputable fact. I, for one, would like to see younger Sri Lankan participants in greater numbers at future festivals. To make the gathering more inclusive, and add greater literary variety to it, we should perhaps invite translators also to participate in addition to writers, critics, the cognoscente and the aficionados.

By doing so, we could strive to encourage greater interaction amongst the English, Sinhala and Tamil writers besides those of certain other regional and international languages. To keep the costs of participation even lower than this time around, we could look at some less pricey venues like, say, halls and classrooms in some of the schools in Galle.

Prior commitments, regrettably, precluded me from taking in the first several days of the festival. Going by the response of and feedback from those of my friends (both writers and others interested in the written and spoken literary word) who were there from start to finish, it appears that all events on offer were enjoyable, some, of course, more so than others. As to be expected, most observers felt given the richness of the menu, that more enjoyable events could have been longer than the time allocated for them.

On Sunday January 14, the final day of the festival, there were two events. I had the pleasure of ‘moderating’ one and participating in the other. “What Makes Sri Lankans One?” was the theme of the discussion in which I was down to play the role of moderator and those originally invited to be on the panel of discussants were Neela Marikkar, President of “Sri Lanka First,” a group of business leaders that advocate a negotiated settlement to end the conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Thamil Eelam (LTTE); Namini Wijedasa, journalist and winner of the 2005 Natali Prize for Human Rights; Kumudini Samuels, who is known for her work in the area of women and peace; fiction writer David Blacker; actor and media personality Rohan Ponniah and surgeon, philanthropist and author Hilali Noordeen.

In the event, only Blacker and Samuels of this group made it to the discussion. Marikkar went down with a dreadful viral fever that has afflicted many a Sri Lankan lately.

Wijedasa had to make a choice between two competing priorities and so gave the festival a miss and Ponniah withdrew for personal reasons. Samuels’ participation was in doubt as her infant son, too, appeared to have contracted the dreaded viral fever! Luckily it was a false alarm and she was able to make it at the eleventh hour.

Libby Southwell, Ameena Hussein and I spent a few anxious days trying to make alternative arrangements. In historian Silan Kadirgamar, formerly of Jaffna College, Universities of Colombo and Jaffna and Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, and Rohan Edrisinha, Lecturer in Constitutional Law, University of Colombo and Director and Head, Legal Unit, the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, we found two splendid substitutes.

His familiarity with the politics of the North and the East of Sri Lanka, and his scholarly awareness of the valued contribution of the Jaffna Youth Congress to both the pre-and post-independent national politics of Ceylon/Sri Lanka enabled Kadirgamar to make the case for the enlightened Tamil nationalist argument in relation to the Sri Lanka versus LTTE conflict at the discussion.

I detected a note of sadness and nostalgia for the lost Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in Kadirgamar’s contribution. He was, as ever, passionately steadfast in his assertion of the rights of the Tamil citizens of Sri Lanka while underscoring the oneness of all Sri Lankans. Blacker’s stance was opposite to that of Kadirgamar’s.

He was of the view that Sri Lankans are not one and he wondered if indeed they need(ed) to be one and whether they shared anything in common at all! Although admittedly diverse culturally and socially, all Sri Lankans share a common humanity and we are, in that sense if in no other, one was my personal response. Blacker chose not to elaborate and so one was left wondering what precisely his considered opinion on the subject is.

Samuels began on a personal note by sharing with us that she is of “mixed” parentage, i.e., of a ‘Sinhala’ mother and a non-Sinhala father. She bemoaned the ‘polarisation of the communities’ which prevents the Sinhala and Tamil Sri Lankans from recognising their commonalities or from celebrating their differences and hybridity.

Samuels ended with the rhetorical question, ‘who determines a Sri Lankan identity, the Sinhalese?’ Edrisinha, like Blacker before him, opined that Sri Lankans are not one. But, unlike Blacker, he told us why they are not! In the ‘Majoritarian and unitary’ sense, we do not have a ‘oneness’, he observed.

He, as did Samuels, wanted Sri Lankans to recognise the manifold virtues of their pluralism and diversity and strive to become a ‘Rainbow nation’ a la South Africa. As he has done for years now, he urged Sri Lankans to come to terms with the need for shared rule and self rule and invited one and all to embrace ‘the federal idea’.

In the limited time available for Q & A, a few ideas were exchanged but insufficient time (those due to participate in the next event featuring stars such as Sir Arthur Clarke, Mark Tully and William Dalrymple were almost knocking the doors down!) prevented a proper exchange.

One of the Sri Lankans in the audience, Malinda Seneviratne, in a conversation afterwards noted, for the record, that while those like Silan Kadirgamar and Rohan Edrisinha are considered liberals when they advocate federalism for Sri Lanka, others like him who oppose federalism and insist that the unitary state be not abandoned in the process of resolving the conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE are labeled ‘chauvinists’ and hardliners.

A more diverse panel that included someone with Seneviratne’s viewpoint might have generated more heat, and also, some light. Something to think about in 2008 and beyond when putting together panels for events that are likely to have themes on which a clear consensus does not exist.

In bringing our discussion to a close I implied that I supported the views of Kadirgamar, Samuels and Edrisinha as I believe, like the late John Lennon, in a world free of labels — whether these be based on ethnicity, religion or nationalisms.

While accepting the reality that there are those Sinhalese, Tamils and others who wish to assert their respective nationalisms, I pointed out the crucial need to distinguish between emancipatory and oppressive nationalism.

The nationalism of the LTTE is as oppressive as that of the Sinhala supremacist or of their American, British, German, French, Russian, Israeli and other counterparts. Not until we significantly reduce Man’s humanity to Man will we ever be able to come up with enduring solutions to our conflicts exacerbated by religious or nationalist zeal.

Nury Vittachi and his panel made up of Sir Arthur Clarke, Mark Tully and William Dalrymple brought the proceedings of the first ever Galle Literary Festival to a memorable close with a lively and entertaining give and take on their respective experience of being “An Englishman Abroad”.

Over lunch that followed when not distracted by the care, and attention lavished on Sir Arthur Clarke, I was able to have a chat with Romesh Gunesekera who sat next to me. To my left was a librarian from New York. Gunesekera and I talked about the mixed Sri Lankan literary critical response to his novels which he said he could live with.

We talked of the possibility of discussing with an invited audience the latter issue and his more recent and projected writings on his next visit to Sri Lanka. Over a post-lunch cup of tea, I also met a Zanzibar-born, Tanzania and Pakistan-raised, Canadian poet Nuzhat Abbas who has studied and worked in the U.S., U.K. Spain and Turkey.

Her interest in and conversation about issues concerning Islam in North America, gender, sexuality and the ‘War on Terror’ fascinated me. This is the kind of interaction, among other wholesome things, that activities like the Galle Literary Festival make possible. Chairman Mao was right to seek to let a thousand flowers bloom even though he set about crushing some of the blossoms that that laudable exercise engendered.

As I left The Lighthouse Hotel to cope with the Sunday afternoon traffic on the Galle - Colombo road on my way back home, some of the many words written by former Rhodes scholar and the late U.S. Senator, J. William Fulbright, began to ring in my years and these are -

The rapprochement of peoples is only possible when differences of culture and outlook are respected and appreciated rather than feared and condemned, when the common bond of human dignity is recognised as the essential bond for a peaceful world.