Living as adults, reading as children at Galle Literary Fest

Sunila Galappatti, author of A Long Watch.

The historic Dutch fort in Galle last week hosted acclaimed writers, artistes and thinkers at one of the most-anticipated literary festivals in the region.

The Galle Literary Festival 2017, held this year from January 11 to 15, has since its launch in 2007 drawn a wide range of personalities to the country’s southern shores.

“We live as adults, but read as children,” observed Sunila Galappatti, author of

A Long Watch , the memoir of Commodore Ajith Boyagoda, the highest-ranking military officer held captive by the LTTE. “We want exact positions as we read… and we aren’t ready to allow for the human spectrum that we encounter in our real lives,” she said, on her attempt to bring out her protagonist’s voice with its ambiguities intact.

Ms. Galappatti, after grappling with the complexity of the narrative, decided to be a storyteller and not a chronicler of the conflict. “I realised that I was a subjective re-teller of a subjective story,” she said. She made a conscious effort to retain the Commodore’s “understated” voice that she heard in his account over the six years she worked on the book.

Earlier, a screening of short films by young Sri Lankans explored the symbolism of the armed forces in Sinhala society, the search for the disappeared in the North, religious intolerance and deprivation.

From the final years of the island’s long war to the aspirations for healing after it ended in 2009, the festival has seen a lot.

“There has been a change for me after the government changed [in 2015], in the way I programme,” said Shyam Selvadurai, acclaimed author and festival curator.

Under the previous regime, he “felt hell-bent and also conscience-driven” to include sessions on the civil war, trauma and reconciliation, he says. “I would actually go out and create these sessions, soliciting participants. Now I no longer feel the active need to do so.”

He compared it to being a writer who is gay. When Mr. Selvadurai began his own writing, he felt the need to raise it in his books and be “out” in his sexual identity.

But now, given the “huge changes” in acceptance, he feels less inclined to do so in quite the same way.

For the moment, he sees no great shift in literature since the war ended. “This is because books and ideas take a long time to gestate. The writer needs the distance of time to metaphor-ise an experience. Eight years isn’t a lot; and a lot has also happened in the eight years [since the war ended].”