Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka

Since the early fourteenth century, travelers have journeyed to the resplendent island of Sri Lanka—once known as Ceylon—believing it to be just short of paradise. In 2001, centuries after the arrivals and departures of Dutch admirals, Portuguese soldiers, Arab traders, and British tea planters, Adele Barker and her son Noah came from Tucson, Arizona, to the island. Settling into its verdant central highlands, they would spend the next year immersing themselves in the customs, cultures, and landscapes of Sri Lanka—its elephants, birds, and monkeys; its hot curries and sweet mangoes; the cacophony of its markets; the resonant evening chants from its temples. They would also encounter there a world infused with the religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and missionary Christianity—and with the troubled history of sectarian violence that had culminated in a twenty-five-year civil war. Combining the immediacy of memoir and the vividness of travelogue with the insight of the best reportage, Not Quite Paradise chronicles life on the island in all its complexity. Barker conveys the quality of everyday experience—at once lyrical and profoundly discordant. A professor at the University of Peradeniya, she daily crosses a campus lush with greenery and reverberating with birdsong, discovering that only decades before, its swollen rivers had carried the bodies of students killed in the insurrections. Her narrative moves deftly from personal details—people she befriends, the cohabiting insects, the marauding monkeys that steal her TV antenna, the elephants lumbering through traffic —to eyewitness accounts of the devastation wrought by the war between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil Tigers. When, having returned to Tucson after her sojourn in Sri Lanka, Barker awakes on December 26, 2004, to see televised images of the island’s southern shore disappearing into the ocean, she decides she must go back. Traveling from the southernmost coasts to the farthest outposts of the Tamil north, she witnesses the ravages of the tsunami that killed forty-eight thousand Sri Lankans in the space of twenty minutes, and reports from the ground on the triumphs and failures of relief efforts. Barker speaks with survivors in temporary camps and seeks out people she had known years before, only to discover that some of them were lost forever on ''the day the sea came to the land.'' Missing neither the nuances of the peaceful Buddhist pace of life nor the explosive violence of civil war, Barker offers an eye-opening account of the ''pearl'' of the Indian Ocean, inviting American readers to experience firsthand the vivid beauty and turmoil of a place few have ever visited.