Hello again, my Sepia friends! I’m delighted to say our mutinous overlords invited me back as a part-timer here at the bunker, and I promise not to abuse the privilege. (But did you feel that shudder? Those were standards being dropped.)
So as I cast about for something to write about besides boys and terrorist envoys, I found this item in the news tab (thanks Gujulicious): Sri Lanka hosted a literary festival this weekend in Galle, a beautiful city on the Southern coast with a uniquely Dutch heritage.
Attended by non other than the freshly minted Booker winner, Kiran Desai, The Galle Literary Festival billed itself as “Sri Lanka’s first literary festival” and announced noble goals:
Our objectives are to raise the awareness of the increasing depth and diversity of Sri Lankan writings in English, to give Sri Lankan writers an equal platform to their international colleagues, to encourage the use of English among young people and to attract visitors from overseas to visit Galle and the Southern Province.link
But Sri Lanka already has a National Literary Festival, as bureaucratic and stodgy as it may be. And the founder of this Galle festival appears to be an Anglo-Australian hotelier, Geoffrey Dobbs, who has a vested interested in drawing affluent tourists to his Galle hotels and resorts. And this same Geoffrey Dobbs also founded a a tsunami relief organization, 
The Asia Sentinel has a lacerating article on this matter:
Is it appropriate for a registered charity dedicated to Sri LankaÂ’s December 2004 tsunami relief to sponsor a foreign literary festival in the middle of what to all intents and purposes is an ethnic and civil war? Of course, says Geoffrey Dobbs, a colorful Anglo-Australian hotelier who founded both the upcoming Galle Literary Festival and the charity Adopt Sri Lanka. He says he sees no conflict whatsoever.
Others, such as some who responded to DobbsÂ’ original plea for tsunami aid, arenÂ’t so sure. They are asking for a full accounting and wondering why their money is being used to support a lit-fest rather than the still-suffering victims for whom it was originally intended.link
Dobbs was interviewed by NPR and The Washington Post, among others, when he began his charity organization, and his own description of his accounting practices leaves much to be desired:
The reason why we are quite effective is because there’s not a lot of red tape,” Dobbs said. “We can make instant decisions. It’s our own money, so we don’t have to account for it.”
Still, the band of businesspeople – which includes a Sri Lankan antiques dealer, a German organic farmer and a Belgian owner of a tire manufacturing company – lack the transport and professional expertise available to the government or established aid groups.
Dobbs said their strengths lie in local knowledge and contacts with village headmen. They have set up a Web site to promote their cause and attract funding, and they telephone each other daily to exchange experiences and suggest solutions.
“If a certain area needs something, and a certain area has got it, we then trade our sources of supply,” Dobbs said in an interview on the verandah of one of his colonial-era hotels, the Sun House.link
I can’t help adding my two cents to this matter based on an extended visit to Sri Lanka last summer. I’m sure many aid organizations did the best they could, but my eyes latched on to the screwups: the farmers who were given boats. Boats that were the wrong kind for the type of fishing in the area. Farmers who were not allowed to sell the damn boats they couldn’t use because that would be “profiting” from charity. Boats used as surreal begonia planters. The village headmen who seemed quite flush. Entire villages still living in tents. I find it difficult to believe philanthropist/businessman Dobbs when he says AdoptSriLanka can “move on.”
It is quite possible that all accounting irregularities are minor glitches and this festival is an act of good faith. But that leads us to the question of whether a festival featuring mostly foreign writers, few honest to god literary authors (some are chefs “working on a cookbook”) and just one panel that even comes close to addressing the conflict (“What makes Sri Lankans one?”) has any place in Sri Lanka. I smell self-interest, and it smells quite lucrative.
But if we rotate the prism and look at this situation again, isn’t this sort of press a relief for a country tired of being permanently affixed with a “war-torn” prefix? Despite the motives or sketchy funding, landing Desai and Mehta is quite a coup, and some talented but less known Sri Lankan authors get to share a spotlight, gain some exposure. And maybe, this weekend, some young writers felt validated and hopeful about their calling.
I don’t know anymore which perspective is the more idealistic. I returned from Sri Lanka more convinced than ever that this war is self-perpetuating, and that people without a vested interest in its continuation long for normalcy and find it wherever they can. The photos in the post are quick snaps from within the Galle Fort. I cede the floor to you, so please weigh in. Did anyone attend the festival?
Awesome! Yay!
I mean, you blogging, that is. Not, um, such painful literary angst.
It’s really frustrating when people take charity and make it so confusing. This is one reason why I’m such a fan of transparency.
But yay! Cicatrix back in the house!
Hey Saheli! Thanks!
I hoped to sneak this in when the site was less-frequented so I could fix it up a bit…shoulda known better 😉
i’m glad to see you’re back too, cicatrix.
transparency ROCKS! that’s why i’m such an advocate of blogging all the BS perpetrated in the world today…
cicatrix, any scenic location can promote ecotourism despite political conflict — just advertise using pictures not showing WMDs and fighting guerillas.
if you’re interested, there’s a book coming out in spring ’07 by naomi klein called disaster capitalism. she discusses a lot of the problems with fungibility of funds and how donations don’t translate to objects people can use effectively, but i think she is looking at the effects of katrina.
Cica! Dude I’m so happy to see your name on here again that I haven’t actually bothered to read anything you’ve written. I’m sure that’s the effect you were going for.
Hooray for cicatrix! And yeah yeah I’ll read it later and stuff.
the return of cicatrix! with a post about
war-tornliterature-torn sri lanka! 2007 is seeming better than 2006 already.agree with PP, 2007 is definitely better :), welcome back cicatrix!
That’s what I’d say.
Remember the whole Miss Sarajevo thing. Beauty in the midst of madness. It’s especially needed there, in Sri Lanka. I’m not sure the human spirit can afford to wait for the conflict to end before getting back to the business of being human. And that’s what literature is about: the business of being human.
And as you say, who knows what fire might get lit in some young, talented heart?
cicatrix, the website for this particular literary festival is here:
http://www.galleliteraryfestival.com/sponsors.htm
and the list of sponsors:
http://www.galleliteraryfestival.com/sponsors.htm
I’m not sure about it all, but the sponsors seem to be biggies, including SriLankan Airlines, The British Council, USAID, Emirates, The Australian High Commission etc
Woohoo! Welcome back to the land above the comments, Cicatrix!
Great to see you back Cicatrix ! Now if you’d make those photos a little larger ( in the img tag change the width field to “width=400” or something perhaps ?) my straining eyes would be very grateful. And more pictures are always welcome.
About the content of the post: I don’t have that much of a problem with a literary festival in a war-torn country but there’s no excuse for using aid-money to fund it, or even of not having a complete accounting of where the aid-money went.
Btw: profit-making off of natural disasters is not new. For example (according to P.Sainath) the stock markets of 5 out of the 7 affected countries (including Sri Lanka) hit historic or near-historic highs in the week following the Tsunami. Apparently that is the way free markets are supposed to work.
Correction: Sainath actually said this:
I was in Galle Fort two weeks ago and saw the publicity for this event. I remember wishing I could attend. At the time, I didn’t know that charity money was being used to fund the event, but from what I could recall Tsunami relief was not part of the publicity brochure…
“Rotating the prism”, Galle Fort is amazing. And I am quite sure the two large hotels there (Galle Fort Hotel and Amangalla) will benefit from the event as will the shops and other businesses inside the fort. Maybe lifting the economy will help in some way?
aww, thanks for such a nice welcome. I promise to keep my nose clean, my typoes in check, and my tongue firmly in cheek. At least for a little while.
Thanks for the head’s up on the Naomi Klein book, namitabh bachchan. I just looked it up on Amazon. It’s called Blank is Beautiful and analyzes both Katrina and Sri Lanka :
This sounds an awful lot like the sort of conclusions drawn by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in Imperial Life in the Emerald City. While Iraqis struggle to get by without water or electricity or the basic guarantees of safety, U.S. administrators spent millions of dollars and thousands of man-power hours creating a flat tax.
Klein can be a bit glib and her arguments are sometimes a little slippery, but she does have a finger very much on the zeitgeist. I look forward to reading it.
Romeo must die, I linked to the festival website in the post. The Asian Sentinel article claims that some of those sponsors are bogus.
Ashvin, I’ll try to make the pictures bigger. I agree with every comment above about the Aid organizations lack of transparency and accounting being a problem.
And I’m really glad Mr. Kobayashi brought up the Sarajevo beauty pageants. I was always too literal-mided to be able to see how “beauty in the midst of madness” could be worthwhile. Thought recources should be allocated to problems according to seriousness and importance. But after this trip, I think I finally understand. When life is so harsh and hope is scarce, a little diversion suddenly becomes a wonderful thing.
yeah, i was in sri lanka this past summer to do some volunteer work, and i was surprised at how many of these relief organizations in sri lanka are actually run by white “foreigners” who live in sri lanka and run luxury spas/resorts. even many of the volunteers seemed to be wealthy white folk. not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but one has to wonder whether there is a really a proper understanding of people’s needs. are there relief orgs/non profits in sri lanka that are run by non-expat sri lankans without a political agenda?
and also speaking of misappropriating tsunami aid…did anyone else hear how certain sl buddhist viharas in the nj/nyc area never even sent over the money they raised “for tsunami aid”? very disapointed to hear that, but also not that surprised–i donated to oxfam.
ashvin (#11) – what did the record stock market indices have to do with the tsunami? The tsunami was a disaster for many no doubt, but I don’t see a capitalist conspiracy in that the stock market was rising to record levels. At least in India’s case, the damage was limited to a few areas and thus had no significant impact on the economy. The site you linked to looks like it has a political agenda, I would think twice before forming opinions based on selected quotes.
I can attest firsthand to the fact that people did not hesitate to try and profit from the tsunami; right here in DC, several party promoters latched onto the idea of “tsunami fundraisers” and some of them claimed to be partnering with reputable organizations (Red Cross, AIF, etc) to lend their events credence. Few, if any, ever accounted for the funds raised; it was taken on good faith that at least some of the money went to charity.
The idea of going out for a night of drinking as a way to donate to a worthy cause is either pure genius, or totally fucked up, depending on which way you hold that particular prism, huh?
Anyway, great to see you back around these parts, Cicatrix! Good post, too. 🙂
I don’t see a capitalist conspiracy either. It’s no secret that disasters for some can mean profits for others; isn’t that just how markets work ?
I agree that, as far as I can tell, the booming stock market was not necessarily driven by the ’04 Tsunami but it apparently wasn’t slowed down by it either (this other article suggests that since most of the brunt of the Tsunami was borne by the uninsured — fisherman who live along the coasts etc., the market wasn’t affected adversely). If I were to guess what stocks were driven up by the Tsunami, I’d guess perhaps construction companies that were expecting aid dollars to flow in ? But I haven’t investigated and haven’t read anything that suggested that either.
But we know that failing harvests in one part of the world (eg. oranges in CA this winter) mean that the price of oranges go up and translate to profits for people who bet on fewer oranges, or that wildfires in CA a few years ago meant more profits for Enron, or the War in Iraq means more money for companies contracted to perform the “reconstruction” or that the Chernobyl disaster meant that traders in Chicago got rich (there was another more current example whose link I can’t find at the moment). So while I concede that the particular allegation that the Tsunami drove the stock market highs is unsubstantiated, the larger point that disasters for some can mean profits for others is not controversial.
I was in Sri Lanka for the Literary Festival,and did grapple with a few of the questions posted here. Is the ultimate motive profit to draw attention to the Hotels?( why not? Trickel down theory=Everyone profits at their own leval) Does it help the locals (Yes) More tourists = Work and wages for the villagers/Hotel workers/stores and town) . I did not know that the funds’ for the Festival’s cost and implementaion were drawn from a charitable fund.Curious to know if anyone else reading this website, could confirm veracity and offer more information.Does the money made, from selling the tickets to the lectures, lunch seminars and dinners, get funnled back into the ‘Charitable fund?
I did go for the festival. It was amazing. True there were glitches but to be expected for a first I suppose. I am Sri Lankan and there was a lot of flack regarding this festival. Most of which I could not understand. In typically Sri Lankan fashion sour grapes, bitching and backstabbing went on and on and on. I thought the Sri lankan participants could learn a lot from the International participants. They may be good writers but they need to kinda perform to wow the audience. I am sure in the coming years we will see some fab talent emerge at these festivals – both writers and performers. As a festival it was fun and an experience I wouldnt have missed. About funding allegations. Why would they want a tsunami organisation to fund them when they had enough bigwig organisations supporting them. So I wouldnt worry too much about the allegation, it must be in usual Sri Lankan style that someone has a bone to pick! I hope the festival will be an annual thing and it would be lovely if our neighbours from the big country came for it as well.
Hi, I literally flew from the Hajj to the Lit.Fest. Being a daughter of the Fort, I was proud I was home, Well done, Fabulous event Those others, check your envy: it does not a touch a soul who was part of the event
I believe the ‘comma’ is the best punctuationin print, The Festival will go on,
Suha Cassim
Hi, I literally flew from the Hajj to the Lit.Fest. Being a daughter of the Fort, I was proud I was home, Well done, Fabulous event Those others, check your envy: it does not a touch a soul who was part of the event
I believe the ‘comma’ is the best punctuation in print, The Festival will go on,
Suha Cassim