STK: Shaun Kadlec's Fulbright Journal
Journal: January 25th, 2003
Hey, y'all,
Time flies. The Christmas and New Year's holidays swept through like a vehement western wind; and with it I have been sweeping around the island. Not vehemently; and not too westerly, I hope. Right after I wrote December's journal entry, it became clear that I needed a holiday. A proper holiday on a southern beach. It turned out that a group of wonderful twentysomethings from all around Europe (whom I'd met the week before, here on work exchanges in business, management, computer fields) were heading to Unawatuna for a weekend. So I hopped on a southbound bus with them and spent much of the 4 hour ride in an informal Sinhala lesson with Lucy, a peach from England who wanted an introduction to the language. I'm sure the passengers around us found it amusing: WhiteBoy with American drawl loudly over enunciating simple sentences like "THE BUS GOES" and "I EAT" while enthusiastic Britisher (as they sometimes say) wrestles with uncooperative (though not dangerous) vowels until exhausted-and both fall asleep.
Being at the beach was more fun and relaxing than I could have hoped. The water in Unawatuna is remarkably warm and clear. When the sun is shining, it's almost like those photoshopped travel brochure pictures advertising Mediterranean dream vacations. The town itself is unabashedly touristy and the beach is almost completely developed, which is a pity. It's built up mostly by smaller restaurants and guest houses-but they're literally built on the sand a few paces from high tide's edge. It's charming, of course, to sip an arrack and soda with the sun set blazing a light trail over the water and right up to your table. But then lots of environmentally unsound practices are charming.
And of course despite the commercial and environmentally disruptive. aspects, being near the ocean was good for the soul. Nothing like letting the edges of The Great Chaotic Deep play your feet while you think Melodramatic Thoughts and dream up the beginnings of Ballades of Infinite Longing. And it was fun to hang out with some "westerners" for a while, though the more time I spent with them the funnier it became to know that for all intents and purposes, we're all considered to be in the same cultural group by many locals. Europe, the U.S., Canada, South America, Australia-it's all The West. And I suppose we're often guilty of similarly grand lumping. The design aesthetic was very Asian, don't you think? Right. Anyway, after a day of beach leisure we went to a dance club of sorts at the Kingfisher Inn. It was more like a small stage that opened to the ocean (the audience? I'm not sure it was interested), built on the sand like everything else. The DJ was pretty skillful, and the crowd, about two thirds tourists and one third locals, was ready to surrender to The Groove. There was clearly some drug and sex trade going on-or proposals for trade, at least. Depressing, yes, and a good reminder to be careful all of the time.
After Unawatuna, I made my way to a more secluded and far less developed beach town called Tangalle. The tides there are dangerous, so swimming is prohibited. The town is situated after the end of the coastal train line, so not many tourists make it that far. Wide, pleasant, sandy beach for miles and miles with the minimum number of guest houses and restaurants required to keep you from forgetting that you are in fact a tourist. A beautiful place.
I spent Christmas morning baking in the tiny electric oven I discovered rusting on the top of my kitchen cabinets. It was a nice way to feel connected with home, making some of our traditional American foods: apple crisp, peanut butter cookies, banana bread. The evening was whiled away with the Headmaster of the Colombo International school and several teachers from the UK. We went to the Mahaweli Reach, a fancy hotel just outside of Kandy, and had a mediocre buffet dinner, but a fantastic game of charades after dessert. And Antony the headmaster didn't once slap my wrist with a ruler or demand that I finish my porridge.
It may be hard to believe, but New Year's Eve was even more memorable. I climbed Adam's Peak with a small group of people I've met while singing with my advisor's wife's choir. Several pictures are in the snapshots section. There is an imprint on the tip-top of Adam's Peak that looks like the footprint of a very large person. (The estimate I've heard is that you'd have to be about 27 feet tall to have feet the size of the footprint). Unfortunately, the footprint is locked out of view in a shrine room, but the old stories say, depending on your faith, that it belongs to Adam, the Buddha, Siva or Mohammed. I suppose that if you're cool enough to be hopscotching over mountaintops, you can transform your body to any size you want. Pilgrims have been climbing the mountain for AGES. Steps were installed at some point and have been recently resurfaced. The muscular experience of making the climb is more like being on a Stairmaster or doing stadiums than climbing a mountain. You're supposed to make the climb at night (the path is well-lighted) and be at the top for daybreak. A beautiful tradition. The gang and I (we named ourselves The Blushing Pilgrims) celebrated the arrival of the new year itself on a landing somewhere half-way up the mountain with shouting and a sweaty group hug. Then it was back to climbing. There are little tea stalls at intervals all the way up the hill, and the prices become higher and higher the closer you get to the top. An elegant lesson in basic economics. All supplies are carried up on the heads of laborers, including the propane tanks and cases of sodas and stacks of lumber. No alternative routes. No helicopters. We stopped for tea several times.
We reached the top at about 2:30. I'm still not sure who did the calculations to decide when we should begin the climb, but we made it to the peak with a good four hours in which to shiver and huddle for warmth, among other activities. Nikolai, the 17 year old Russian, and Palitha, the twentysomething Sri Lankan had an engaging and Dostoyevskian conversation about the pros and cons of various forms of suicide; Sihntay, our Korean friend, sang us many upbeat Korean pop songs; Aparna (who's a Sri Lankan grad student in Toronto in Postcolonial literature) and I talked about all sorts of textual and cultural issues. She is certifiably fabulous, and I'm sad for my selfish self that she's already gone back to Toronto. And so the gale-force blasts sent wind-chills, I swear, to almost below freezing (I know. All of you having real winters are rolling your eyes; I think my tolerance for spicy foods and humidity have increased in exactly the same measure as my tolerance for cold has decreased). And the complete darkness in full-circle pan-o-vision made the mountain top feel at the same time intimate and (indulge with me) "like an island in infinity," (thanks, Lorca).
Sunrise arrived gradually. A band of clouds lay just above the horizon, so we didn't see the dramatic entrance of the first ray of sun, but the evolving reds and blues and oranges were a spectacular blessing of their own. (Didn't come out on film, unfortunately). I felt renewed. Until we began the climb back down the mountain with our already-tired legsies that were trembling by the time we reached the van. We saw the scenery for the fist time on the way back; saw spectacular cliffs and waterfalls where the night before we had only heard falling water.
When we got back to Kandy, I went into super-academic mode to finish researching and writing a paper to present at the Sri Lankan Association of Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies biennial conference. I had been reading and working on Shyam Selvadurai's two novels, Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens, focusing on sexuality issues (they're two of the only Sri Lankan artistic works to portray gay characters). As I worked on the paper, however, I realized that there was so much background work to do, given the unexplored-ness of the subject in the Sri Lankan context, that I had exceeded the paper's length limit before even getting to the novels. So it ended up being a postcolonial sexuality theory paper-elementary, of course-looking at what it means in Sri Lanka, culturally and textually, to openly identify oneself as non-heterosexual. It was extremely well-received, and a lively and positive discussion followed. I gave a short poetry reading at one of the sessions for creative writers. A very positive experience as well. Some of the poems I read are posted in the poetry section; I also plan to post the essay, but I want to look at it again (needed some time away from it after the conference) before I do.
And speaking of poetry, I met a lot of fascinating and skilled writers at the conference, very inspiring, so I've decided to go ahead and pursue the anthology project, but in a slightly different form. It's going to be a monthly online journal that features a lot of work by just a few writers at a time and includes some biography, interviews, etc. I found a lot of support for the project at the conference, and in subsequent meetings found a local web-based, non-profit, social action organization willing to design and host the site. It's all very tentative right now, so we'll have to wait and see how content and site development goes. It's still slow-going when it comes to wrestling writers into working with me.
My own writing is going quite well. I have a modest bundle of poems that I'm going to send out to journals this week. I'm doing a lot of revising and refining these days as well as generating rough drafts. I've managed to keep my daily writing schedule, with some small lapses, despite the traveling to the beach and to Colombo and Adam's Peak and back to Colombo. In the new drafts I'm generating, I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate political, historical and social justice issues into verse without sounding like a propagandist or a journalist. I'm going to the Mid-Year Fulbright Conference in Puri, India, next month (all expenses paid by the Indian Fulbright commission. Life is hard) and am scheduled to give a short reading. I'm working on a political piece for two reading voices that I hope to debut there.
Don't tell anybody, but I'll admit that I was a bit homesick during the holidays. I noticed a shift in the way I was appreciating things. Instead of being instantly delighted by and engaged with things that are new and different, which had been the case, more or less, during my first months here, I found myself stirred when things were similar to home. Simple things. Like passing through a stand of pine trees on a windy day (wind is very rare here, but this is its season), or having a good cup of coffee or hearing an REM song on the radio or getting emails from y'all. I'm feeling much more balanced now, however, and only rarely wistful about home. It's a challenge to figure out how much to hold on to your own cultural practices in your daily life and how much to try different things. I suppose we can discuss that next time. This update is reaching the limits of polite size. The next one will come after a shorter interval than the interval between this update and the last. Won't feel the need to cover so much material at once. I promise an update on the peace process here, which is problematic but still progressing.
And I wish you peace, urgently, in The States as well.
Shaun