Stories of the tsunami

Thirty thousand Sri Lankans were killed in the Boxing Day disaster. Three months on, novelist Louise Doughty asks the island's writers whether they can play a part in the process of recovery

Everyone has their tsunami story. This is the first thing I learn on my visit to Sri Lanka. Everyone has a story to tell, often of near-miraculous escape - but what characterises all these stories is the modesty with which they are related. "I got my feet wet, that's all," says one woman, as she tells me how she and her family fled their holiday home in nightwear after local villagers warned them "the sea is coming". In a country where 30,000 men, women and children were washed away in a matter of minutes, those who were spared play down their own experiences. "In comparison with what happened to others, it was nothing," is a phrase I hear over and over again.

I have a professional interest in stories - as a novelist, I'm always on the look-out for them - but I have come to Sri Lanka not to find material for my own but to encourage others to tell theirs. The British Council, that venerable institution of cross-cultural exchange, has sent me to teach creative writing workshops to young people in the capital, Colombo, and in Kandy, the second city.

Kandy is up in the hill country, but Colombo sprawls along the island's western seaboard. My hotel is minutes from the sea, and on my first evening I take a walk up to Galle Face Green, where Sri Lankan families come out to promenade at twilight, eating from kiosks, flying kites and standing on the sea wall, while their youngsters romp on the beach below. Waves crash on to the sand, breakers glowing white in the mauve-grey light of dusk - it is impossible not to picture that sea rearing huge, like a monster in a fairy tale.

Colombo itself was spared on Boxing Day. The wave came from the east. Racing across the Indian Ocean from Sumatra at 500 miles per hour, it still took two hours to reach this small island, which hangs like a teardrop from the southern tip of India. This gives an added poignancy to Sri Lanka's tragedy. In Indonesia and Thailand there was little time for escape - but no one should have died here, or in southern India. The 30,000 people Sri Lanka lost are a 10th of the estimated total, but a needless 10th.

The tsunami and its aftermath pervade all aspects of my trip. My hotel in Colombo is full of aid workers en route to affected areas, while UN jeeps cruise past in the streets outside. A typical remark in the breakfast room begins: "What I really need in my district is mechanical grouters ... " Overhearing such conversation, it is hard not to feel embarrassed at being in Sri Lanka for any purpose other than the provision of relief. What is the point in encouraging creative writing in a country where one million people are living in temporary shelters and refugee camps? Shouldn't I be heading to the coast with a trowel?

Writers often feel impotent in the face of real human suffering. In the wake of 9/11, Martin Amis declared himself rendered wordless by the enormity of what had happened. September 11 is gradually making its appearance in fictions of various sorts - Jonathan Safran Foer's latest novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, due in June, is about a boy whose father dies in the World Trade Center. But there has yet to be what one might call the definitive novel of what many consider a definitive day in human history. It is too large, too recent, to be encapsulated. And even now, 60 years after the end of the second world war, there is still debate about whether novelists who did not themselves experience the Nazi death camps should write about the Holocaust.

Delon Weerasinghe is with Amis. A playwright and film-maker, he has no intention of writing about the tsunami and has doubts about whether other creative artists should either. Weerasinghe also acts as a "fixer" for western film crews and journalists who come to Sri Lanka, and was guide to Sri-Lankan born BBC correspondent George Alagiah in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Two days on, he visited the Colombo-Matara Express train, which was washed from the tracks as it ran along the coastline. The force of the water floated the train 100 metres. The engine alone weighed 75 tons. Of the 1,700 people on board, only 200 survived.

The sight made a huge impact on Weerasinghe. "No one had moved the bodies," he says quietly. "The stench was overpowering. It was almost impossible to breathe ... " Something else struck him: "Many of the possessions strewn around seemed still in the process of being used. There was food half-eaten, still in its packets, children's toys ready to be played with, bags unopened. It really brought home that every single one of those 1,500 people had their own story, gone in an instant."

This, he says, is why he believes that, for the time being at least, a novel or a play about the tsunami is an impossibility. "The tsunami wasn't a story. It was tens of thousands of stories. No novel or play could possibly do justice to that. No single fiction could represent the multiplicity of experiences which this country alone went through, never mind elsewhere."

Part of the problem is that any novel or play that has wide-scale, real-life tragedy as its subject matter is always taken to signify much more than other novels or plays. The recent film Hotel Rwanda was not just about the heroic true story of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina - it will also be many people's only exposure to the full, dramatic details of the genocide. It represents more than the tales of the individuals involved. In the same way, a novel set during the tsunami could never be just about the fictional characters within its pages - it would be perceived, and read, as being "about" the tsunami as a whole.

Some writers have chosen other, more indirect ways to comment. On March 3, World Book Day, Bloomsbury published New Beginnings, a collection of first chapters from novels-in-progress by world-famous writers such as Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Stephen King. None of these first chapters is about the tsunami - the authors were asked for them on January 10 - but they have been donated free, as has the time of the publishers, distributors and all involved in the book's production. Nearly all of the £5 cover price will go to tsunami-survivor projects. A hundred thousand copies have been sold already and Bloomsbury hopes to raise between £.5m and £1m towards long-term regeneration in south Asia.

Not all writers agree that a feeling of impotence is an appropriate or laudable response to human suffering. Romesh Gunesekera is the most well-known Sri Lankan writer based in the UK. "I never really understood why some writers said they couldn't continue writing after 9/11. Was everything so trivial before?" As a Sri Lankan, he is used to the idea that real-life tragedy is happening outside the window while the novelist writes. He was working on his first book when Sri Lanka erupted into civil conflict between the Tamils and Sinhalese in 1983, a conflict which led to 60,000 deaths. "Most writers are dealing with the world they live in ... a world in which terrible things have happened and are still happening. Writing is not a matter of duty, it is more a kind of negotiation with different realities. We each do it in our own way and perhaps don't have much choice in how or what we end up writing."

I found his thoughts echoed by many writers I met in Sri Lanka itself. A country that has seen two decades of ethnic strife is equipped - psychologically at least - to absorb tragedy. "The war", as it is referred to, saw the country divided between the south, where the Sinhalese majority live, and the north and east regions occupied by the Tamil minority - approximately a fifth of Sri Lanka's population. By the time peace was brokered in 2002, much of the northern city of Jaffna had been reduced to rubble and almost every region of the country had been affected. Bombs in Colombo had killed 300 - and even peaceful Kandy saw a truck bomb explode outside the Temple of the Tooth, one of Buddhism's holiest shrines. During that period, the very act of writing in a particular language could be interpreted as political. To write in English, for instance, the language of the old colonialists, was considered by some as an affront to Sinhalese nationalism.

The issue of language is less controversial now and English is commonly used as a lingua franca in a professional or business context. Shop and road signs are often in English, and the tourist industry has ensured that many Sri Lankans speak a little. Literacy rates are high for a developing country, 92 percent, but with a total population of 18 million, many of them living in poverty, the market for writing, particularly fiction, is obviously limited. Virtually no writers make a living in Sri Lanka. The system of author advances that we have in this country is unknown and it is common for writers to pay for their own publication or seek sponsorship.

At a reading I give from my own work in Colombo, I meet Ashok Ferrey, who has just published his first collection of short stories, Colpetty People. In 2003, it was short-listed for the Gratiaen award, a literary prize endowed by Michael Ondaatje with the money he received from the 1992 Booker prize for The English Patient. Getting published at all is so difficult in Sri Lanka that manuscripts are admissable for the Gratiaen - Ferrey's book is being printed, two years after being short-listed, by a new publishing house, Perera Hussein Publishing. Ferrey had to drop one story. "Cost is everything. Paper has to be imported from India, for instance. Including the additional story would have taken the price of the book over 500 rupees, way beyond most people." (Five hundred rupees is about £2.50.) Colpetty People retails at 450 rupees. Ferrey receives 32 rupees, about 15p, for each copy sold. The print run is 1,000 copies, which Ferrey and his wife have distributed to bookshops themselves. "I'll be happy if I sell seven or eight hundred."

The income is so tiny that it is irrelevant when it comes to supporting his family. He earns a living as a builder. "My wife and I decided that whatever royalties I get, we're going to put towards building a small house for a tsunami family."

The Gratiaen award has given a huge fillip to English-language publishing in Sri Lanka, but there is also a market for writing in the language most Sri Lankans regard as their mother tongue, Sinhala. A "bestseller" or lifestyle book in Sinhala can sell up to 20,000 copies. But much of the literary end of the market is given over to traditional tales in high-flown Sinhala of interest mainly to academics. Some books in Tamil used to be published in Jaffna, but during the 20-year conflict between government forces and the LTTE, or Tamil Tigers, the industry seized up and the gap has been filled by books from the much larger Indian Tamil market.

The complexity of the Sri Lankan literary scene is exemplified by Jean Arasanayagam, a writer who has published 25 novels, numerous poems and short stories - and written in all three languages. Meeting her is a disconcerting experience: brown-skinned and wearing a sari, she seems like many other dignified ladies of a certain age and Asian descent. She is in fact a Dutch burgher. The small but significant burgher community are the descendents of Dutch colonialists who intermarried with the native Sinhalese. (Ondaatje comes from the same community.) Arasanayagam may look Asian but she was raised and schooled in English. "Whenever I read my work in India they say to me, why don't you write in your mother tongue? English is my mother tongue." To complicate matters, she married a Tamil, and has written about the ethnic conflict in detail from a Tamil perspective. "I know my life would be a lot easier if I stayed off controversial subjects but I feel it's my duty to speak out. We have been through two decades of war. We can't avoid that." And the tsunami? "Of course writers should write about it. Writers should always tackle the big topics."

I meet Arasanayagam in Kandy, the spiritual heartland of Sinhalese Buddhist culture and centuries-old home of the ancient Kandyan kings. Kandy resisted two and a half centuries of attacks by marauding Dutch and Portuguese and eventually fell to the British in 1815, due to internal divisions. It is here that I present my final workshop, to students of English literature at the nearby university.

All of my workshops have been presented in English, so I have been meeting the cultural elite of the country - but what has struck me throughout has been the sheer range of my students and their astonishing enthusiasm for creative writing. The young people I have met have been Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamil, of Dutch burgher, Japanese, Arab and Spanish origin. (The Sinhalese and Tamil populations mix widely and the war has been deplored by the vast majority of Sri Lankans on either side.) In Colombo, two Muslim girls attend one of my workshops in full burkhas, eyes just visible beneath swathes of black cloth. "Believe me," their teacher says quietly, "underneath all that, those girls are typical teenagers." All perform the exercises I set them with gusto and are full of questions at the end. One young man has come all the way from Jaffna. Until the peace deal, Jaffna was a war zone, and is still controlled by the Tamil Tigers. When a student has driven for 14 hours and crossed eight military checkpoints to attend a workshop, you begin to understand the importance of creative writing to a population of young people who are only just beginning to discover it.

Many of the young people I meet are contributors to a new Sri Lankan website,, set up by the British Council to promote Sri Lankan writing in English. Two hundred writers have contributed to the site so far and the variety of work posted is impressive: everything from poems and short stories, through political tracts to comic sketches.

There is a separate section devoted to the tsunami, where I discover a poem entitled "for Orlantha". Written from the point of view of a Sri Lankan contemplating a tourist death, it is a poignant inversion of the western perspective on the tragedy. "I pray that you / savoured your complimentary cocktail / revelled in the hotel beach towels and bath robes / were not facing the wave as it hit". Its author is Marissa Johnpillai, who attends one of my workshops in Colombo. She wrote "for Orlantha", she tells me, out of a sense of personal loss for a friend but thinks the consequences of the tsunami run from top to bottom of the society. "Every living Sri Lankan is a tsunami survivor ... the tsunami will always be part of our national psyche. I don't see how that won't flow through to the arts ... in fact, in my opinion, it would be unhealthy if it didn't."

With its distillation of thought and feeling, poetry has an obvious relevance when it comes to a creative response to tragedy, particularly in the highly charged atmosphere of the immediate aftermath. But a novel with a wide range of characters and fully realised narrative could surely introduce many more readers to the reality for individuals of an event such as the tsunami. Ferrey believes such a novel can and should be written. "The only reason I haven't started one is that I am not sure my writing ability is up to it. But I hope someone does. The attention of the world will move on but the consequences of the tsunami will be with us for years. It is still important for the world to realise what we went through on a human level, not so that we receive aid, like victims, but so that we understand each other as human beings."

Ferrey's response is typically modest and shared by many of Sri Lanka's established writers. But the young people in my workshops, unpublished, enthusiastic and brimming with ideas, have no such reservations. "I don't see the point in being a writer unless you're going to write about the big stuff," says one. "I have always written about the war and what is going on in our society." If there is a great novel of the tsunami to be written, it could well come from one of the ambitious young people I was privileged to meet. Sri Lanka faces many challenges in the coming years, both economic and political, but if the teenagers and students I came across are any indication, the future is hopeful.

· Louise Doughty's most recent novel is Fires in the Dark (Simon & Schuster)