Galle Literary Festival and Sri Lankan literature

This week's column is devoted to examine briefly, the Galle Literary Festival (GLF) and Sri Lankan literature. The GLF- 2011 will be held from January 26 to 30 in and around the UNESCO declared world heritage site of Galle Fort. As the GLF marks its 5th anniversary, it is important to look back on the festival's contribution to the promotion and propagation of Sri Lankan literature in an international context.

As announced in its official website, the festival will feature 'award winning writers, historians poets and biographers from Nigeria, the Ukraine, Malaysia, Australia, India, Pakistan, Canada, England, the United States, South Africa, Turkey and Sri Lanka' together with host of events.

The writers who will be featuring at the festival include Orhan Pamuk, Kiran Desai, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Jung Chang, Andrey Kurkov, Damon Galgut, William Fiennes, Charles Allen, Pankaj Mishra, Tash Aw, Jill Dawson, Pauline Melville and Sri Lankan local and diasporic writers including Karen Roberts, Randy Boyagoda, Liyanage Amarakeerthi, Prashani Rambukwella, Roshi Fernando and Ranjini Obeyesekere. The school of poets include Daljit Nagra, Roger McGough, Omar Musa, Vivimarie VanderPoorten and Tishani Doshi. This year's focus of the Festival is Malaysian writers and literature.

Why Amarkeerthi instead of Amarasekara?

Previous years, I have pointed out that featuring of Sri Lankan writers should be an essential part of the Festival as the venue is Galle. In addition to appointing a curator to the Festival (Sri Lankan -Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai is the curator of the Festival), the Festival organisers have decided to feature a couple of Sri Lankan writers.

Strangely, their choice for Sinhalese medium writer is US trained Liyanage Amarakeerthi who has been described in the official website, among other things, as the author of Atawaka Putthu, which in my view, is a dubious piece of work with a lot grammatical errors. Prashani Rambukwella and Vivimarie VanderPoorten will be featured as Sri Lankan writers in English and the exclusion of Professor Yasmine Goonaratne is questionable.

In 2010, I mentioned the singular contribution that Sri Lanka's foremost writer, poet Gunadasa Amerasekara has made. I said: "It is pertinent here to examine, albeit, in brief, the singular contribution that Gunadasa Amarasekara has made to the enrichment of Sinhala literature. Prof. Wimal Dissanayake, internationally acclaimed US academic, in his monograph 'Enabling Traditions, Four Sinhala Cultural Intellectuals' writes: "Gunadasa Amarasekara (1929) is arguably the leading Sinhala Cultural Intellectual. As with most public intellectuals, his writings are controversial and generate intense public debate. He writes about literature, criticism, culture, modernization, consumerism, globalisation and so on with intense passion ... Gunadasa Amarasekara is a novelist, short story writer, poet of distinction who has shaped the imagination of many generations of Sinhala readers and widening their social awareness ..." The sad issue is since its inception the GLF organisers have failed to allocate even a single session to discuss Amarasekara's work (and wonder they are capable of evaluating his work in Sinhala!).

For Amarasekara, poetry represents the essence of a nation's mirror. He observes that "poetry constitutes the language of the national heart. It is also the conscience of the nation. The fact that nearly half a century elapsed since attaining our independence, and we have not been able to reach the language of the heart ('hada basa') has generated anxiety and foreboding in me for a long time. Does this indicate the death of our heart? We know that a dead heart cannot speak to us or possess a language. If so, does it prefigure that we are facing a spiritual death that precedes physical death? " Here in his vibrant prose, Amarasekara sees the ignorance of tradition as a key determinant to an intellectual and emotional sterility.

It is Amarasekara's deeply held belief that one way of ascertaining whether a given tradition is dead or alive is by examining the response of modern readers to the poetry created within the matrix of that tradition. "Are we able to respond to the forms, styles and techniques contained in those poems readily? If we are able to do so, it is his contention that the past carries with it presentness, they are alive, pulsating and relevant."

Given the inclusion of Liyanage Amarakeerthi as a Sri Lankan writer who is a Lilliput compared to literary giant Gunadasa Amerasekara and Poet Rantha Sri Wijesinghe who lives in Galle Fort is questionable and raise questions about the motives of the organisers of the Festival. Another notable omission is young Thisuri Wanniarachchi who won the State Literary Award for the best novel in English for her novel, "Colombo Street".

It is highly doubtful whether these so-called writers such as Vivimarie VanderPoorten and Liyanage Amarakeerthi are entitled by virtue of their associations to represent Sri Lankan literature in English and Sinhalese. What is certain is that they may represent the present crisis in Sri Lankan literature in general, and Sinhala novel in particular.

If any kind of prose printed as a book would make a novel, and if any prose broke down into lines would make poetry, then those self-proclaimed writers and poets would be real writers and poets.

Where do the British Council funds go?

Finally, it should be mentioned that the exclusion of writers of the calibre of Gunadasa Amarasekara or excluding the seminal cannon of works by prominent Sinhala and Tamil literati, the organisers of the GLF have raised doubts in our mind whether there is a neo -colonial cultural invasion taking place in our backyard, perhaps using the British Council funds meant for meaningful cultural programs of Sri Lanka. We will raise this question further.