The 2016 Fairway Galle Literary Festival drew to a close in Jaffna last weekend. Having unfortunately missed the main event in Galle, I was determined to catch at least the end of the festival, and thus found myself on an eight-hour bus ride through the night from Colombo to Jaffna.
Although I had worried about language barriers, on arriving in Jaffna, I quickly discovered that its residents could not only converse in English, their Sinhala was so impressive that it put my attempts at Tamil to shame.
The festival included nine panel discussions and talks that took place in Jaffna’s beautifully restored Public Library. I had not planned on sitting in on the entire programme but was immediately drawn in by the thoughtful and intimate atmosphere of the first session I attended –a discussion with Canadian author and playwright Padma Viswanathan on her novel ‘The Toss of a Lemon’.
Roughly based on stories her grandmother told her, Viswanathan’s novel delves into a Brahmin widow’s life and what she called the psychological intricacies of oppression.
“I wanted to put readers in an uncomfortable moral position,” said Viswanathan whose characters are as empathetic as they are sometimes perplexing in their devotion to the system.
Singaporean author Ovidia Yu had us laughing from the start in the next session where we were introduced to a most delectable cook and amateur sleuth, “Aunty Lee”. “She is not a busybody,” insisted Yu, “it’s just that everything that happens on the island is her business.”
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