The Venice Biennale 2011. Making work: 1

I am spending a few days in Aldeburgh with a small film crew, making the film we plan to show at this year's Venice Biennale. The budget is small, smaller than the crew itself, but our ambitions are huge and this makes me anxious. For a start, why on earth have we decided to shoot the whole of it on an iPhone? 
‘Stop worrying,’ says Paul Whitty, sonic artist and composer, appearing through the rain with a soggy microphone that is reminiscent of a dead rat. ‘We’ll make a plan, later.’ 
He’s dripping wet and squelching the mud that will soon be all over the carpet of our rented house. We are soaking from head to foot and the hail has frozen our ungloved hands. Still, we stand for a moment, shivering on the causeway with the waves lashing behind us as Paul reports that he has collected some excellent sounds of rain dripping.  What he’d really like to do is drop his hydrophone into the sea and record the sound from underneath the water. Right, I think, off you go then.
‘I’m soaked,’ says Carolyn, our actress. 
As she hasn’t grumbled once all day I take the hint. Time to dry out.  
The rain that began as predicted, on this morning of our second day, is relentless, the sky is a soft charcoal grey, echoing the sea itself. Only the mad whisk of white foam affords a little lightness in an otherwise impossible landscape.


 ‘When I went into the off-licence,’ Paul says cheerily, ‘the guy in there thought my microphone was a dog.’
Whatever, I think.

Overhead a curlew pierces the air with a hesitant, tender cry and then flies in a steady line across the rain-drenched marshes towards the Martello Tower. 
‘And a fishermen came up to me just now,' Paul continues, 'and he said, that’s not fishing you’re doing is it? That's something else.' 
‘We’re going back,’ I say, ignoring him. ‘Before we get pneumonia.’
The light is being strangled by mist and the scene feels straight out of a Tarkovsky film.   
‘Look,’ cries Caroline, ‘it’s snowing!’


It has been an extraordinary few days; all week I have been uncertain as to the direction in which I was going, until suddenly, in a flash, I understood the pattern that had been quietly evolving. It’s called a breakthrough, isn’t it? 

The film we are making is a mockumentary, a fake documentary, based on an idea from my novel The Swimmer, a story about a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee fleeing from the terrors of Jaffna. The Swimmer: The True Story, was what we had decided to call it. 
At dinner the night before, someone I was talking to, remarked she disliked those film-of-the-book, kind of films. But this isn’t that kind of film, I told her. This is a parallel text, another way of seeing, a space between the events that lie within the novel; a different reality, if you like. My companion had looked at me quizzically. Really, did I know what I was talking about?
How do you explain that making work is a tricky business and that although you might have the questions, only rarely do the answers appear. You set out to do one thing, to make that magnificent piece of work, only to have your hopes dashed and for disappointment to descend (really what a sham you are after all, perhaps you should give up and do something more useful). Until, just at that moment of giving up, some magic enters the arena and lifts you like an acrobat, up, above the sawdust, high onto the wire, into the dazzle of the lights. There you balance, not posing as a maker of fine work, but somehow, forgetting all anxiety, immersed in the work itself. It is a moment like no other.

And yesterday it happened again, reminding us that this is why we do what we do, for so little money, in wind and biting rain. For it is the thing that makes us happy.
That moment came when the Tamil dancer who had offered to come up from Ipswich, threw off her coat and boots and ran into the wind on Aldeburgh beach to dance on the shore of the North Sea in front of my camera. I was so excited my hands shook, but our dancer, triumphant and free as a kite, cold but not diminished, was unaware of how we held our breath. 
Here, then, was the essence of what I was making. Here, on the wet shingles, in the slash of a crimson sari and with a shake of ankle bells against the surf, was the thing I had been groping blindly for. 
The whole beach stood still, and the fisherman watched, and the children playing ball stood with open mouths and the men walking their dogs paused before throwing their sticks into the waves, and the sea kept turning and turning as the Tamil girl danced. On and on she went, speaking of  connections and integrations, of belonging and longing and a whole myriad of other things. Wordlessly.
And time stood still. And Paul let fall his hydrophone. And even the cold went away, such was the magic on the beach. 
For in that moment of pure unaffected theatre I saw with sharp clarity what had been missing in this delicate Suffolk landscape. It was present in the flash of colour, appearing and disappearing and appearing again; insistent and lasting. That which governments denied and  communities misunderstood. A mixing of a wider palette. East, meeting West. 

             

The Galle Literary Festival: A Cultural boycott?

I wasn’t going to say anything. The news from the place where I was born is old news. What I feel about the civil war in Sri Lanka is an old story, too. And anyway, here, in Britain we have enough problems of our own to bother about some pretty island in the Indian Ocean. But then, I read a sentimental little piece about the Galle Literary Festival written by a Sri Lankan writer and it became impossible to stay silent. The writer is Tamil, not born in Sri Lanka but living in the US and her inability to think either clearly or analytically is disturbing. Her article, written with ‘swimming eyes’, in gushing prose, and her reasons for attending the Galle literary festival, are as thin as rice paper.
http://www.themillions.com/2011/02/in-the-room-against-a-cultural-boycott-of-the-galle-literary-festival.html
  
Sri Lanka is a country with an appalling human rights record. For those who do not know this already, it is a country that has been at war with itself for decades. As far back as the late 1950s Tamils were being persecuted, set fire to and denied jobs. I know, for as a four year old I watched a Tamil man being burnt to death. The civil war that followed was made even more difficult to understand because of the  formation of the Tamil terrorists. The world lost patience and the human shield of ordinary Tamil civilians was forgotten in the mayhem that followed. Stuff happened; the public library in Jaffna was burnt down, not once but twice by Sri Lankan soldiers but the then government couldn’t care less. Precious manuscripts were lost and the morale of Jaffna Tamils sunk further. Eventually a dynastic and powerful new government did away with the Tamil Tiger forever and the war was declared finally over. A hundred thousand ordinary Tamils were either dead or in appalling conditions in refugee camps, the north was littered with land mines and there was only rhetoric left to deal with the problems. As the new government cannot tolerate any criticism, those who speak out or write in the newspapers are either shot or continue to disappear, taken away in white unmarked vans. This is going on now, not in some grim past. 


Into this situation, with a rising tourist industry (the New York Times described Sri Lanka as the number one holiday destination) comes a new generation of Sri Lankans. People born or living abroad, who understandably want closure to a shameful chapter of Sri Lankan history. But in their haste they confuse the need to forget with the need, first, to remember. The latter has always to preclude the former. South Africa and Ireland are good examples. So that by failing to recognise or understand this basic human requirement, necessary for moving healthily forward, they cause more harm than good.
  
One of the objectives of the government of Sri Lanka is to staunch criticism in order to give an appearance of normality within the country. The Galle Literary Festival is a perfect opportunity for doing this. It has risen in prominence and become a safe option for writers from abroad who dream of wide tropical beaches against a palm-fringed backdrop of boutique hotels. But these scenes are located far from the terrible mess in the north and north-east of the island. Here, unseen by western eyes, are illiterate Tamil children still living in psychological and physical deprivation. Here you will find the women who have learnt to lament their loss in silence and here, too, are the men who cannot bear the colours of yellow, green and brown; all colours of the land but also that of army uniforms. These people cannot access Sri Lanka’s glamorous literary festival. Nor would the organisers wish to move their event to them.


Earlier this year Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, amongst others, called for a boycott of this festival and as a result, some writers found their conscience pricking. But others, including the writer of the blog I have just read, went. What is interesting is the reasons given for the trip. Talk of woolly matters, of art, of literature, of creativity, is high on the agenda and predictably comes the claim, that to deny a literary event is to deny freedom of speech. 
But I would like to ask these writers, who are the people who will actually benefit from this particular festival? Well, for a start the government of Sri Lanka will be pleased at an excellent whitewashing programme. We know that for sure! As for the organisers, a prestigious international event can only improve their visibility and profile. Next we have the audience, made up of the middle class, English reading public, (with possibly the token orphanage, or Tamil child thrown in, especially those who suffered in the tsunami as this gets Western sympathy) and the foreigners on holiday, of which there are many. But let’s not forget the writers; fêted, well fed and watered and given, as one of them recently told me, ‘frankly a smashing little holiday in the middle of economic winter gloom.’ 


I am often asked why I do not go to this festival even though I have been invited. Why I chose to attend the Jaipur literary festival but not Galle. Let me make this clear. I long to go. I long to see my home once more. But the terrible injustice that was done to Sri Lanka’s ordinary people on both sides of the ethnic divide needs to be highlighted. Because the dead have no voice, because their memory is still not honoured or talked about. Because those who speak out are still being silenced. Because I am not so misguided as to imagine any real or serious discourse in the manicured atmosphere of Galle is possible under the current government. Of what will these writers actually speak? Thus far no writer going to Sri Lanka has said anything that addresses the real problem.

And even if I have got it completely wrong, even if all those visitors who come to Galle to sit in hallowed silence under ceiling fans, to hear the UK-returned writers speak, are right and the conversations taking place are about life and literature, what good will this do? What has the internationally ‘acclaimed’ Sri Lankan writer got to offer the poor and the displaced, the bereft and the victims of Sri Lanka’s war? Will their discourse give the lost generation of children a different life? Will the government suddenly become transparent and admit to the killing sprees they went on in order to gain power? Will the broken woman who came this year to Galle, in search of her journalist husband, (disappeared on January 28th) have him returned to her? Let us not be so naïve as to believe so. Nothing will change other than perhaps the level of our suntan.

 But, still I believe, far, far in the distant future, long after this foolish generation of celebrity seeking writers is forgotten, there will come a rising cluster of different novelists. One has seen this often in the past, coming out of some terrible hurt.   Russia is a good example. Writing perhaps in Tamil, or in Singhalese they will bring us a true discourse penetrating all parts of the island. For as W. G. Sebald movingly wrote, individual and collective amnesia needs to fall away in an ‘archaeological excavations of the slag-heaps of our collective existence’ before we can move on. When that moment arrives, when the national consciousness within the country is at last awakened and is truly allowed to speak out, then Sri Lanka will heal itself. Until that time comes it will be better to stop pretending the Galle literary festival is anything more than a damn good holiday.   

The Return Of The Crocodile

What d’you think is causing it? Is it climate change, global warming, or the presence of too many foreigners that's created this new trend? Certainly the crying game has got more challenging, as they say in contemporary parlance. A recent study shows that, apparently, tears have always been available amongst the British but it was WW2 that stopped the flow.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12447950

‘A time of war is no time for weeping’ claims Dr Thomas Dixon, who has done a study on the subject.
Hmm, I thought that a war was precisely the time for weeping. For when your loved ones' lives are threatened, when the children born to you might have no future, when all that is personal and precious (never mind the beauty of your homeland that will be scarred forever) stands on the brink of destruction, isn’t that when you cry?
Hasn’t real grief always been a private thing? Perhaps the mistake I’m making is confusing grief with tears. It doesn’t matter, just good to know on authority that everyone in Britain is crying again. Even if it is only on TV Talent shows.
 Meanwhile those of us who have no interest in crocodiles or statistics will continue to lament, albeit in private, ‘man’s inhumanity to man'.

Incidentally, I’ve just read that the best way to fight off a crocodile is to poke its eyes out.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12448009

Bigger and Bigger...

Yes I do see your confusion Jon Snow. On the…ehhem…Big Society subject, I mean. 
http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/member-big-society/14699
My question is this. Why go for a Big Society when we can have a Bigger Society? Or if everyone thinks we should use a different word, how about a Majority Society, seeing as there are so many of us? 
My view is that our PM should sack every one in central and local government (including himself) and give the jobs to volunteers. Then there’d be plenty of money to spare, which would take care of the question, ‘where’s the money coming from?’
Next, of course you don’t want to run the Police, Jon, but my neighbour does, and is happy to give it a go. Likewise the hospitals, the schools, etc. I’m prepared to run a library or two, filling it with copies of my latest book. I could give 27 of them away to refugees who can’t read in English and create an event called My World Night Of Twenty Seven Books.

As for regulating these little ventures, come, come; don’t worry about that. The banks have managed perfectly well in the past, and so shall we. 
Meanwhile David Cameron can have a bit of time off to do what he’s best at. Talking rubbish. 


Oh and by the way, my scheme took me only twenty seconds longer than the PM to think up.
Shall we vote on it?

Living like Ghosts: Britain's Untouchables

In early February, in the midst of the mayhem that was beginning in Egypt and the natural disasters elsewhere, a study conducted by Oxfam and the Centre for Migration Policy Research at Swansea University was quietly published. It painted a depressing picture of daily life amongst asylum seekers in Britain. 
http://bit.ly/hOSR46
Described by Kate Wareing, Director for Oxfam, as the lives of ghosts, the limbo, in which those fleeing persecution live is horrific. The system of applying and waiting, of re-applying and hoping against hope for asylum is designed, Oxfam claimed, ‘to make people feel as low as possible’, sending out ‘a message that those who are refused asylum are not even worthy of our compassion’. It would seem from this description that Britain has created a class of sub-humans, a society of outcasts, an order of Untouchables. 
How has this happened? At what point did a country that prided itself in its desire to do good with its strong sense of secular responsibility and its model of liberal but traditional stability, lose its decency?
I was not born in the British Isles. I came here as a child from one of the far flung corners of what was then the British Empire. In the place where I was born, amongst the ordinary people scraping a living, the idea of Britishness was synonymous with reason and justice. In contrast to the chaos from which we sought to escape England appeared to us as a country where order prevailed. Where I came from, the accident of birth determined your position on the social ladder. In Britain, we imagined, things were different. Rightly or wrongly, in a tradition that dates back into the 19th century the wretched and the persecuted continued to flock to this country in the hope of asylum. In many places, perhaps because of a faint residue of Empire, a connection between Britishness and decency remains to this day. While it is perfectly clear that the British government cannot solve the world’s ills, and while many will argue that enough is enough (how many more immigrants can this small island hold?), surely there remains an argument for treating those that beg asylum with compassion, before their application is possibly and finally rejected.
According to the Oxfam report:  ‘these people… have made heartbreaking decisions to leave their families and flee their homes. They end up living like ghosts on the streets of Britain because of government policy and decision-making that strips them of their rights and dignity.’
In the sub-continent of India Indians find the degradation in their inner city slums so great that often, the only thing possible is to ignore the problem.

Foreigners notice, and are shocked. Now in Britain, in the community of asylum seekers clinging to the twilight edges of our relatively affluent society, we seem to have a new class of Untouchable. Unable to communicate properly in English, often with no access to legal advice, destitute and living a hand to mouth existence, they depend on the kindness of others like themselves. Meanwhile the Government, embarrassed by the scale of the problem, does nothing. For as we know, highlighting the plight of these ghosts does not win votes.  
In Suffolk, where I am Patron to ISCRE (Ipswich and Suffolk Council for Racial Equality) I was told appalling stories of unimaginative decision-making by the UK Border Agency which has neither the resources nor the training to process asylum applications in a humane way. And so these people, outcasts of our Big Society, wait, sometimes for years, to discover their fate. Recently, listening, often through an interpreter, to these men and women speak, I was confronted again and again by such lives wasted through negligence. There were children separated from parents, husbands from their wives, speaking quietly. The stories were unbearable. 
By suppressing any discourse, by denying these new untouchables the right to a dignified wait for the rejection when it comes, by refusing them one single, decent moment’s respite before their fate engulfs them again, we as a nation, debase both them and ourselves.

        

World Book Night

Here we go again. Another insane publicity stunt, this time we’re going to give books of our favourite authors away by the lorry load. Wouldn’t it be easier to keep the libraries due for closure going, instead, allow those who have forgotten how, to re-learn the wonderful art of personal choice? The whole idea of reading is to develop our own taste, form our own opinions, lose that famous sheep mentality. How on earth can we do that if someone is spoon-feeding us all the time? 
According to Jamie Byng from Canongate, as quoted in The Guardian: ‘Having 20,000 passionate readers giving out between a million books they love in one night is going to create word of mouth for books on an unprecedented scale’ http://bit.ly/eyWlpW
No it isn’t. This is just another form of chaos that will end up in the Mind shop. I often find books at charity shops, their pristine state declaring they haven’t even been opened. Books bought on a two-for-three deal, perhaps and then dumped. 
For not all books suit everyone’s mood or taste and a book that is 'discovered' by yourself has an excitement attached to its discovery that is something else entirely. 
The reading public isn’t stupid whatever the global market might say to the contrary. Of course it suits the commercial world to create uniformity and rebrand this uniformity as word-of-mouth but how many times have you heard someone say, ‘I tried to read that but found it boring? What's all the fuss about?’ This Book Night isn't for lovers of books, it isn't for writers or readers. It won't make those who don't love books suddenly see the light. It isn’t as if The Great Night is setting out to educate anyone by providing a reading list, (as for example on a university course), followed by discussion. There will be no real analytical conversations afterwards, no comparisons with other writers, no discourse on plot and language; just a few platitudes that include the word ‘acclaimed!’ And as for the ridiculous idea that only a small minority object to being treated as sheep, I wouldn’t be too sure about that. 

Empty Shelves

Have you noticed? The concept of ‘the library’ is beginning to be eroded. Oh it’s a slow process all right. Lose a library or have some other more important service cut, is what they are telling us. But lose a library and along the way we will lose something much more important than a building with some books in it.  

When as a child I came to live in Britain with my parents the first thing I discovered was the public library. Until then all my father could afford to buy me were four books a year. Two for Christmas and two more for my birthday in June. After I had finished reading each book I simply went back to the beginning and read them all over again. By the end of each year I knew the four books by heart and I had drawn up my wish list for the following year. My lists of course were hopeless because they always had more than four books on them.

But then, after a dramatic sea voyage of twenty-one days, chased by monsoons over inky black seas, I landed in this extraordinary place where the unlimited exchange of books was possible. It was the 1960s.

‘See,’ my father said, after I had joined the public library and received my blue library tickets, ‘the English love books and they want everyone to love them too.’

I was ten years old; thrilled to be in the country that had given us Shakespeare.

              For the next eight years until I left London to go to university, the public library, off the Brixton Road, was a large and important part of my world. After the struggle and the poverty of Colombo I had finally found my paradise.

It was here, in this place that I met Ratty and Toad and Gerald Durrell’s family and many other animal. There were the Brontës, Charles and Mary Lamb and, Oh a wonderful book called ‘The Little White Horse’, which afterwards, I thought I had only dreamt of, as I could never find it again.

Years went by in this way as I stretched out in the back garden in the summer holidays, or curled up on my bed in winter. With a book and my cat.

I grew older and began to move on to fresh pastures with many untapped classics. By the time I was seventeen I found myself dreaming of Anna Karenina and Natasha, while having nightmares over Raskolnikov in ‘Crime and Punishment’. No one told me what I should read, there was no nanny state in those days, no best-sellers lists, no recommended reading; no abridged versions of Dickens or George Eliot. So that now and again, in between the books I found ‘boring’ came the unexpected discoveries that were to mark me for ever and mould me into a writer. James Baldwin’s, ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’, was one such example, ‘Matilda’s England’, by William Trevor was another, while Jean Rhys’s ‘Quartet’ made me simply long to have an adventure in Paris. These books were my own discoveries and I loved them all the more because of it. And the beauty of the library was, I could make mistakes, take out a book that I ended up disliking only to return it, without losing any money. It was in this way, with a growing spirit of adventure, that I began to develop my own taste in literature. It was a personal thing, one that remains with me today.

Independent reading, that was what that library gave me.To take away even one such institution is to take away the possibility for the individual child to make such magical discoveries. It is as shocking as shutting a museum and putting all the exhibits on line. It just isn’t the thing to do.

A Sense of Home: India and the Jaipur Literary Festival.

Dawn breaks over Delhi as our train snakes across the outskirts of the city. All over these dust scarred suburbs there are small fires around which groups of figures crouch. Like shadow puppets in waiting. The train gathers speed and I catch a glimpse of a man stretched out on a makeshift bed beside a flickering bonfire. Somewhere in my head a memory is triggered. The lights blink through the trees, sharper than the neon, stronger than the hesitant dawn. Like the fireflies Ruskin saw in Italy, ‘moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves.’ These are the street people, my Indian friend tells me later, who have nothing but bits of wood to keep them warm against the chill January air. My eyes are gritty with tiredness. I cannot keep my camera steady for the long exposure it needs in this uncertain light. So I simply have to look. And remember.

The sky lightens and lightens but a milky mist floats over the ground. It shrouds the laurel and the ‘boom’ trees, knee deep, now, in mile after mile of yellow mustard fields. The land appears as a watercolour painting, softened and remote. And utterly beautiful. For the second time I am reminded of Italy and the countryside of the Bassa, the lower Po plain. A land also laden with dreams and myths; a landscape marked by man and his temporary existence.

It is forty-seven years since I have witnessed an Eastern sunrise but it seems I have not forgotten the sense of it. Perhaps that is why I have always felt at home in Italy.

Jaipur plunges us into a more direct kind of colour. Kingfisher blues and crumbling pinks, marigold-yellow holy trees and crimson pomegranate seeds against a sun-stained hand. For a painter to rediscover colour in this way is enormously thrilling. Years ago, as a child, as the boat carrying me to England headed for Southampton’s docks, I decided to turn my back on colour. I have no idea why. But for now just being in the midst of it all is enough. Ideas flit and swim around and then are lost in an overlay of other thoughts. How many will remain intact when I go back to England, remains to be seen. My sketchbooks bulges with half-finished drawings, labels of a particular searing green, small exquisite matchbox lids and scraps of hand dyed cotton. I am returning home.

At the festival people approach me. Some have flown from Colombo for this largest of literary events in the calendar. I scan their faces, foolishly looking for the place where I was born, knowing I shall not visit it again. Not until the politics within the country changes; until the wrong that was done is redressed. That is another story, too painful to contemplate at this moment. For here in Jaipur all is warmth and friendliness. I meet two wonderful Marathi writers secure in the language in which they write, secure in the place where they were born and have always lived.

On the last night of the festival, on the way back in the taxi, one of them begins to sing a morning raga. Quickly we take out our mobile phones, wanting to capture the moment, telling our singer laughingly, that his voice is that of a much younger man.
‘I know,’ he says, unperturbed, a mischievous glint in his eye.
In the now deserted street an elephant and its keeper returning from a wedding wait patiently for our car to pass before lumbering on, bells tinkling delicately into the night. In the darkness the image is a fleeting one.

Back in Delhi, before I begin the long flight to Heathrow, my new friend says,

‘Come back, Roma, and I will take you to the south where you will feel even closer to the land.’