When I was a child, there was nothing much to do in my house in Colombo but write. Reading was desired, of course, but books were hard to come by, and that meant several things: my two older brothers and I read with great appetite, we fought over books, we memorized what we saw in black and white, and we dreamed of caravans, midnight feasts, puddings, and snow, things we had never experienced in our own lives. We begged for books from our friends at school, from neighbors our own age and much older. Books were passed around and packed away quickly into school bags as though they might be confiscated. They were brought out and read with deep pleasure. They were traded for favors of all kinds. The brother closest in age to me and I often exacted payment in pages of a book. “The book you borrowed has only 253 pages”, one of us might say, “so you can only read 253 pages of the book I borrowed”. And so we had to also turn into book thieves, risking fisticuffs in order to get at the final pages of the others’ book.

But writing. That was different. That could be done without servility, or becoming emotionally indentured to ones siblings. What I couldn’t memorize in its entirety, I wrote down in notebooks. “Hooloovoo, a hyper-intelligent shade of the color blue”, I took from Douglas Adams, as a child.

But why take all this quite so badly? I would not, had I world and time To wait for reason, rhythm, rhyme, To reassert themselves, but sadly, The time is not remote when I Will not be here to wait. That’s why.

We dreamed of caravans, midnight feasts, puddings, and snow, things we had never experienced in our own lives

I kept the back page of a notebook for gems like the one above, from Vikram Seth, which I wrote out in elaborate longhand. This habit of being able to recognize the unique voice of writers I had no idea I would ever meet in person was one I could not shake. I recall noting – even as I speed-read the passages and questions on my ACT in Literature – the particular sentence that described our human fear of insects. I don’t remember the precise words, but the line noted that insects were the embodiment of our deepest human fears: the insides on the out, all spikes and gesturing, and the power of a determined collective. I left enough time at the end of the examination to jot down the two sentences on the back of a bus ticket in handwriting that mimicked, due to the constraints of space, the footprints of ants.

Much later, applying to colleges, when asked to write about a book that transformed my life, I reach back in time to another set of quotes that had made it into my notebook. They did not come from the great Russians I had by now read, nor from the English poetry and literature I had studied in my A level classes, nor from the Greeks whom I’d also read, but from William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. The two quotes, about good and evil, and about hope, defined a world view for me, one that continues to resonate in the way I live my life now. I wrote then, as a nineteen-year-old, about the place of things in a universe that had its own wisdom and reason. More than that, I wrote, quoting Blatty, that sobriety was vital in times of despair as well as in times of hope. I used his words without ever having seen the revenge exacted by a Fall on a Spring, or the Spring on Fall. It was the poetry and musicality of the words that gripped me. Those words made sense.

Ru Freeman, on the far left, buying pickled olives from a roadside stand on the way to a rugby game, with her brother and cousin. Photograph: Courtesy of Ru Freeman

There’s a particularity to the way language is acquired by a non native-speaker such as myself, and how it is manipulated. My English texts in Sri Lanka were full of the rudiments of basic English which were required for the entire school population, but at home I was immersed in a version so elevated from that kind of ordinary usage that there was little to do but learn how to become conversant in it. My parents spoke that way, as did my brothers, and therefore so did I. There was no value placed on knowing the latest information on pop stars, though a working knowledge of politics was expected within the family. We did not own a functional pair of scissors; band-aids (sticking plasters) were bought one at a time and only when required, and shopping in general was undertaken for only the most necessary items, but there was a dictionary in the house to which my brothers and I were directed. We cursed and swore (in our elegant tongues), but we reached for it anyway.



The two Exorcist quotes, about good and evil, and about hope, defined a world view for me

This was our underlying message: what we needed to know could be found in books, and if we failed to find our answers there, we would at least have acquired the language with which to ask for help from smart adults. And since this acquisition was so varied, our sense of its usage was correspondingly without limits; there was an internal rhythm to our understanding of the English language that did not seek to obey any single aesthetic, but instead let our intuitive sense of the world unfold on the page however we wished.

During those years, Sri Lanka had no tradition of public readings of work in English, though those who wrote in Sinhala and Tamil had their own, multitudinous audiences. As such, we, along with our peers, performed for private audiences in full length theater productions, or during examinations where we declaimed the words of others rather than our own. Pulsing beneath what was taking place among those like me who wrote in English, was an entirely different scene: one where Sri Lankan writers saw their own work performed on stage. For those who wrote in English, publication translated into collections of poetry rather than prose, though there were always exceptions, and that work was assigned for study in university. It was, in other words, a more cerebral activity, rather than one that included the out-loud utterance.



It has been fascinating to discover, then, the more recent establishment of festivals of literature in Sri Lanka and, more importantly, readings of new work, as well as the local publication of fiction in English. The Galle Literary Festival is known beyond Sri Lanka’s shores and has had its share of critics for its lack of inclusion of literature in translation, but it is a festival that has brought international writers to Sri Lanka. Beyond that, though, are the smaller local festivals that have taken on the matter of engaging with literature in a way that continues a cultural tradition of respect for language and books. Of these, Annasi & Kadala Gotu (which translates into pineapple and hand-held cones of roasted nuts), is perhaps the most interesting. It spanned just one day, but included panels of people discussing literature and the creative process in three languages, Sinhala, Tamil, and English. Its very name is an acknowledgement of a particularly local love for nutritious, delicious, and completely addictive street food, and an attempt to demystify literature and the literary culture.

Ru Freeman and her brothers, standing before the Aukana Buddha Statue. “I had this photograph propped up before me as I wrote On Sal Mal Lane . It inspired me, somehow, and I think some of the texture of that moment is in the book,” she says of it on her website. Photograph: Courtesy of Ru Freeman

There’s a particularity to the way language is acquired by a non native-speaker like myself, and how it is manipulated

It stood to reason, then, that the organizers of that festival were intrigued to hear of an endeavor that I have been pursuing along with my brother, Malinda Seneviratne (also a writer, journalist, poet, and winner of both the Gratiaen Prize for Literature in Translation in 2013, and the Gratiaen Prize for Poetry in 2015, established by Michael Ondaatje), the establishment of an international festival of literature in translation, which we called IF/LIT.

Earlier this year, in the wee hours of a morning, I skyped in from the US on an afternoon gathering in Colombo. Assembled there was my brother, two young men who were active in the local literary scene, Rick Simonson from Elliott Bay Book Company who was in Sri Lanka after speaking at the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF), and a group of Sri Lankans, all women, who had been brought together by a former schoolfriend of mine.

The most interesting thing about this group was that none of the Sri Lankans (other than my brother) were writers, but they were all extremely well-read, continuing into this present day our tendency to place great value on the worth of books. Further, all of the women were in positions of power, most of them heads of private corporations from hotels and tourism to exports and finance, and all of them active patrons of the arts. Even more importantly, they were committed to sharing their love of learning of the world through its literature with as wide an audience as possible, and willing to volunteer their time to make it happen. I don’t know if that drive to invest so personally in literature is unique to Sri Lanka, but I can say unequivocally that it is rare in the US, where I live now.