Take my milk for Gall(e)

By Vihanga Perera

Masturbation is a psyhco-sexual phenomenon. It, at one level, is a means of releasing tension. Once it is done, the masturbator is often left with a sense of momentary satisfaction; but, also a sense of ‘lack’. As much as it is a vehicle of ecstasy we often make a mental note that we would perform ‘better’ the next time. These are fairly common features in the masturbatory art; and these are also the elements that it shares with the Galle Literary Festival (GLF). Now running in to its fourth season, the said ‘festival’ will hit the old fort town soon after the elections are done. The GLF website is on and kicking. Promo posters adorn Barefoot-like places, prompting the potential participant to ‘buy and read’ the stuff of those ‘writers’ who would make Galle a memorable masturbation.
The cultured reader may, by now, feel a bit annoyed at my choice metaphor: ‘masturbation’. But, what I see in the GLF is the need of a few to retreat into the ‘exotic’ coastline for a week in order to release a bit of tension, promote themselves and the ‘chosen ones’, feel a bit ‘good’ about their being ‘writers’ and the like. More than a ‘literary festival’ that has a national application, GLF is a corporate venture of a limited number of ‘Colombo-centric book people’, their chosen likeminded and an assortment of hoteliers-marketers. By having a ‘festival’ down south, they have managed to make themselves and the world believe that Sri Lanka has the kind of literary space that is rich, flourishing, potent and has enough stuff for them to have an annual forum of a week’s length. They have, for their sake, spun a make-belief tale that our writer-reader-publisher discourse is so wide as for them to infuse a local-international mix into it, to have a worthy ‘discourse’ under lights.

Average, mediocre

But, what often happens is that the average (for we are basically that) get together with an internationally second rate band of ‘writers’ to try and wash off some of their ‘unimportency’ / impotency at the Galle seaside. The GLF has still failed to expand their ‘party’ beyond the fashionistas and the ‘wannabe’ circle of Colombo. They have failed to go out and muster the Sinhala and Tamil creative discourses of the island. Though one shouldn’t be surprised at their not being kept, the GLF has made promises to ‘perform better’ in the past. On paper, the GLF brings together ‘Sri Lankan creativity’. It is fairly well understood that it’s ‘creativity’, English. But, their website denotes the bankruptcy of their enterprise. Unless the GLF organizers are using some queer kind of ‘rotation’ equation, I see very little of the 2009 participants in the 2010 schedule. Quite extra-ordinary, still - the 2010 list is more pronounced for its ‘absentees’, than the obscurity presented in it.
The GLF website promotes the profiles of its participants in http://www.galleliteraryfestival.com/part2. Here, out of 48 participants / groups, 19 are Sri Lankan (inclusive of Shyam Selvadurai). Out of these 19, Channa Daswatte and Ashley De Vos are architects; there are three groups that specialize in dance and music; Hasini Haputhanthri is introduced as a blogger; Thilini Ranasinghe is presented as the translator of a children’s story and Irangani Serasinghe presented as an actress and a conservationist. Out of the ones in the programme line up there are not even ten published writers from Sri Lanka. How more frail could the stimulus get? To hide the ugly nudity of this exotic tamasha the organizers of the GLF have tried to make it a cross-genre enterprise, touching on architecture, conservation, woodcraft and jazz. But, underneath the clothing, the bareness of the ‘literary representation’ is pronounced, and more in the 2010 line up than it was before.

Dearth of poets

With the exception of Sybil Wettasinghe, Ashok Ferry and Shehan Karunathilake none of the past three years’ shortlisted Gratiaen candidates are there. The dearth of poets is marked. The likes of Malinda Seneviratne and Vivimarie Vaderpoorten are left out or (as I hope it is) have opted out. Names such as Carl Muller, Jean Arasanayagam, Punyakante Wijenaike, Sumathy from the previous years’ lists have been weeded (or they have consciously opted out). Kandy does not exist for the organizers of the event. In fact, the only places that exist for them appears to be Colombo 3,4,5,7 and some mediocre overseas districts. An overall look at the list of ‘writers’, therefore, doesn’t indicate any improvements from last year.
An item to await, however, is the release of Shehan Karunathilake’s maiden The Chinaman, which, it is said, would happen in the process of the mardi gras. Well, this novel for which Shehan won the Gratiaen Prize for 2008 [awarded in 2009] should be something to look forward to since its been over an year since the prize was awarded and he’s taken all the time in the wide world with the “further editing” of his hit. I would have liked to see The Chinaman as it was when its manuscript won the Gratiaen; and at that time I had a hunch that Shehan had done something big with his submission. Ashok Ferry is in, and his Serendipity may receive a good audience with the suddhas [it sure is written with an orientalist’s pen and celebrates the exotic aspect of the island]. David Blacker, Lal Medawattegedara and Richard Boyle make up the rest of the ‘feature items’ that are rounded up with Ruwanthi De Chickera, Sybil Wettasinghe and Cyril Wijesundara.
Not only will the GLF do no good to enhance the output of Sri Lankan creativity as a whole, it will only sustain the egos of a largely class-conscious, narrow literary circuit in English literary consumption. For sure - the lights, the laughter and the cheers would flow. Those who go there would essentially go. But, as T.S. Eliot says it, it would be little more than “[i]n the room the women come and go / talking of Michaelangelo”.

Editor's note:

While writer Perera is stating his point of view, on which the reader can be the judge -- for sake of accuracy it is worth stating that Vivimarie Vander Poorten read her poetry last year and was at the festival, almost too conspicuously. For our part, we have to state it's bad enough suffering some of those Sri Lankan writers whose names are mentioned in the article, for one year, leave alone two or three.
It's also puzzling why the writer says there are no poets and local language writers in this year’s list when he omits the name of Lakbimanews staffer Thava Sajitharan who is both a poet ... and a Tamil language poet...
A reference to Rajpal Abeynayake was omitted since it appeared the writer was uncertain about his creative publications. Rajpal Abeynayake is a published novelist, as his novel, was , in parts, published -- in print -- in this newspaper. It was called Done Things. Incidentally, that's more than what could be said for some Gratien award nominees including some of those whose names are mentioned, whose thin volume of ‘work’ is still in manuscript form, and has essentially not been published anywhere.
But in any case, Abeynayake is in the festival as a critic, perhaps saying some of the same things, though not all, that the writer has mentioned in the article...