FIONA SHAW

2022 HUBERT BUTLER ESSAY PRIZE AWARD CEREMONY

I am aware as I stand here that I have none of the erudition of my predecessors and indeed the presence of the prize’s patron, Mr Banville, is enough to inhibit any other views about the value of the written essay.

There are, however, two aspects to witnessing huge events, the visceral and the analytic. This prize wisely celebrates the latter through this essay’s pithy ability to add meaning and understanding to political upheavals by connecting them through historic parallels.

I should like tonight to concentrate on the visceral, the disorder and confusion that occurs before there are words to order the experience. One reason I want to do this is that seismic events produce chaos and it takes time to understand them. In his essay Mr Sullivan says we are too preoccupied with the present but in part it is because it is the seed of the future history and for that we are ‘just waiting’.

Like many, I am normally someone who learns about significant events through the medium of a calm essay, I found myself, however, in Sri Lanka for the past two months at possibly the most momentous time in its history since its freedom in 1947. I had the gruesome privilege of seeing a country change in that short time and descend into poverty and depression.

I choose this example as Sri Lanka is the same size as Ireland and the similarities help me understand as I translate the scale of their problems into our own. Two islands 'both alike in dignity’, ‘small enough to visit your grandmother and get home in a day’. Sri Lanka’s population is four times that of Ireland but its climate makes the accommodation of so many people easier and in general they seem, like the Irish, quite easily contented.

I met a trishaw driver who has an acre of land in Jaffna and he hoped to retire there to live off this scrap. ‘Is that enough?,’ I asked. ‘More than,’ he replied. A diet of fresh fish and beautifully cut vegetables rice and curry is all anyone needs.

This summer all that changed for him and for many others. Due to long-term government corruption and theft, the country’s coffers emptied out into a debt crisis. In April the imported petrol and diesel and gas dried up. The country was broke largely due to mismanagement and theft by the ruling class. Huge loans from China and Europe had been squandered and the Sri Lankan rupee tumbled as the dollar reserves ran dry. The country’s debt so high it began to default on its loans.

Tantalisingly, we could see huge oil tankers in the beautiful port of the city’s Galle Face waiting for payment and then sailing away. Sri Lanka has long survived on subsidised petrol and subsided fertiliser and last year decided to stop the latter so in the rupture of one year the rice crop failed, and rice sky-rocketed in price, causing huge hardship. Queues formed for fuel; women lined up for paraffin, some watching over the hundreds of fuel containers chained together as mothers reverted to cooking on open fires with wood, at least those who were lucky enough to have outdoor spaces in the vicinity. Those in flats were not able to do this.

The army of trishaw drivers who make a living for their families waited for gas in queues sometimes miles long and began a wait for fuel of up to five days and nights. Initially they did so with good hearted patience and a kind of resignation – playing chess, talking in groups and sometimes playing music on their phones. But by the time I left 16 people had died in queues from dehydration or worry or shock.

All over the country this was the phenomenon in towns and villages as trickles of fuel sent from Sri Lanka’s neighbour India were shared at petrol stations. I saw young girls doing their homework in the back of tuktuks until schools were closed. Then they stopped being seen in their white uniforms. After lockdown, the situation played further havoc with their futures.

Young people began to leave the country in droves for the Middle East, Australia, anywhere. I doubt many will return. A young massage artist doing well, taking weekends to discover this paradise of a country, travelling to the national parks to see elephants, leopards and bears, found herself struggling to buy string hoppers for her brothers whom she supported. ‘Last week they were four for 120 rupees; now the cost is 800 rupees’. As the weeks went by all events were cancelled, and tourism shrank to the zero it once was, The hotel staff, so reliant on tips, now stopped working, their livery unused, and waiters found it hard to come and work in city restaurants - those few that could still stay open, since most customers stopped coming too.

Meanwhile the country has eight million Facebook users, so the swell of discontent was being organised in part by the student “Aragalaya” movement on that platform and 9 July was named as the day the whole nation could at last protest. There was so much excitement. The demoralisation vanished as the people shouted against the President - ‘Gota, go home’ - and some people processed miles from the outskirts wearing flip flops. Some hung on to the sides of farm lorries and some commandeered the trains from Kandy, sitting on the roof. By 11am on that day with the beautiful blue sea on one side, the Galle Face was full of people, maybe as many as two million, none of them armed. They united in race and religion for this one purpose: to exercise their demand for a democracy that might allow them to live.

The President did resign later that week and sadly the man who replaced him immediately began to round up the students who had kept the vigil of protest over previous months. A young man who had stolen a mug as a souvenir during the storming of the President’s palace was arrested for theft, while billions had been robbed from ‘the people’. Tear gas unleashed by soldiers who are often brothers of the protesters led to some interesting confusion. One protester I saw had his eyes washed out with bottled water by the same soldier who had tear-gassed him moments before.

Who knows how it will end. We need the essay to make sense of this kind of event, to hold it, mark the moment like a flag, a piece of sculpture, a testament to what has happened. We need the essay to connect it to other events unique to their own circumstances and yet similar. History gets carved out of the present and past through words that weave patterns and point us to resolution. That is why we need sense after chaos.

The Sinhalese greet each other as follows: ‘Kohomada?’ (‘How are you?’), to which the reply is ‘Ohe innawa’ (‘Just waiting’), We are all ‘just waiting’. I congratulate Mr Sullivan. Please write more essays.

Fiona Shaw, Kilkenny 9 August 2022