Galle Literary Festival: The enjoyment was there, but topical dialogue was missing

At the start of the third annual Galle Literary Festival, founder and organizer Geoffrey Dobbs was asked what his measure of success was for the events that would take place over the next four days.

Dobbs spoke of the festival’s ability to play a role in exposing young Sri Lankans to English literature, in particular the outreach undertaken by organizers to students of schools in the Central Province by way of setting up English-language activity rooms and offering them subsidized ticket prices. But his main yardstick for success was “how much the festival goers enjoy the sessions.”

Geoffrey Dobbs addressing the gathering at the festival’s formal opening ceremony at the Martin Wickremasinghe Museum

By these standards, the festival was undoubtedly successful. Throughout the panel discussions, such as the one featuring travel writer Pico Iyer and author Colin Thubron’s on the modern day spirit of exploration (Iyer: “Going to Tibet is like walking into the rooftop of your consciousness”), festival goers appeared to be thoroughly entertained.

At many, the venue was full to overflowing and when authors left the stage of the main hall, it was often to join festival-goers next door in drinking tea and lounging outdoors under the trees.

There certainly wasn’t a shortage of events offered at this year’s festival: Roughly 59 were held from Wednesday through Sunday including intimate literary dinners, poetry readings, workshops, concerts, book launches and guided tours around various parts of Galle.

Some of the best events (the public ones available to journalists at least) included the much-lauded author Patrick French’s discussion of what it was like to write a biography of V.S. Naipaul–a process that took five years and two-dozen interviews with the notoriously difficult author–and young newcomer V.V. Ganeshananthan’s talk on writing about the Sri Lankan experience as a Tamil who grew up in America.
Though French’s realm is non-fiction and Ganeshananthan’s fiction, and though each is at very different stages of their respective careers, both offered articulate glimpses into the writer’s experience and the careful logic that informs the process of creating a book.

But 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.”

Even the festival’s attempt to include gender on the agenda with Germaine Greer’s talk entitled “Who Put the ‘Post’ into ‘Post-Feminism’?” seemed surprisingly misguided. The vast majority of Sri Lankan women did not experience the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, let alone feminism in all its subsequent variations.

While no event in Sri Lanka–literary or otherwise–should be limited to dreary subjects such as politics or war, neither does it seem smart to exclude them entirely if the organizers hope the festival will be relevant in the future.

One of the more provocative events of the four day festival was in fact not listed as part of the festival programme, but rather as a “fringe” event held at the Y.W.C.A. on Saturday. Organized by a group of independent journalists, the roundtable discussion on the state of the media in Sri Lanka was moderated by Amal Jayasinghe of AFP and featured newspaper editor Rajpal Abeynayake and columnist and Director, Policy Research and Information of the Presidential Secretariat spokesperson Lucien Rajakarunanaya. Both participants were allowed 60 seconds to answer questions put forth by Jayasinghe or the audience such as whether media institutions should be owned by the state in Sri Lanka or how to expose the human element of a conflict that is mostly off-limits to reporters.

The debates between audience members and the panelists, or between the panelists themselves, was spirited and substantial, and offered the sort of vigorous dialogue that the Galle Literary Festival left one wanting more of.