This article was written by Joe Kovacs
When I joined the Peace Corps and went to Sri Lanka in 1997, I took a leave of absence from a graduate program in English literature at Fordham University. I was unhappy with academia as an aspiring creative writer; I wanted to make literature, not analyze it. I had no idea how international development work in Asia could help, but at least it would provide a long-overdue vacation from education. I'd never left the United States before, and after an exhausting trip west from New York through San Francisco, Tokyo and Bangkok, the third flight of my trans-global journey arrived in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo at two in the morning. I spent the rest of those benighted, pre-dawn hours in a retreat center in the jungle, trying to sleep. But the dense heat drenched me in sweat, even as I lay still in bed, the uncompromising mattress made my back sore and a swooping blue mosquito net left me entombed. Had I just made a mistake? From the jungle outside came a sudden high-pitched screech, convincing me that I'd come to a land of monsters.
Fortunately, I was not eaten alive my first night in Sri Lanka. The morning after I arrived, I learned that the strange screeching had been rogue monkeys, not a familiar noise in the Bronx, where I'd been living before that. But Sri Lankare named in 1972, the Sinhalese phrase means the resplendent island really was a land of monsters: monsters of the human kind. I came to a country suffering through the fifteenth year of a civil war between the Sinhalese government and an extremist Tamil organization seeking a separate homeland for Tamils on the island. Suicide bombers, terrorist strikes and vicious military campaigns have left 63,000 people dead to date and drained the nations economic resources, leaving thousands more in poverty.
Norway is currently brokering a peace agreement which may resolve the dispute. But in 1997, when I arrived, the fighting was so intense that scarcely a year later, the Peace Corps closed the program and the volunteers returned to the United States.
As I would soon discover, I wasn't the first young man ever to leave the trappings of Western civilization and intellectualism for Sri Lanka. I would soon learn about other writers who were either from or had passed through Ceylon/Sri Lanka locals Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, Carl Muller and Romesh Gunesekara, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Englishman D.H. Lawrence and Americans Mark Twain and Arthur C. Clarke. But it was Leonard Woolf, whose life as an intellectual had been shaped by his experience in Ceylon, who drew my greatest interest.
In 1904, Englishman Leonard Woolf - later the husband of literary giantess Virginia - completed his education at Trinity College in Cambridge and enlisted with the British Civil Service. The teardrop-shaped island that rises 18 miles off the coast of southern India is unimpressive in size (roughly the size of West Virginia, it hardly warrants a blip on the world map), but has a lucrative history of ancient cultural kingdoms and imperial rulers. The Portuguese first controlled the coasts in the early 16th century until it passed to Dutch hands in the 18th century, and finally to the newly rising power of England in 1796, when it was named Ceylon. The British dominated as no previous power had for it managed to seize Kandy, the seat of power of the Sinhalese king in the central hill country. Ceylon became a lucrative British colony over the next century. Profitable trade in cinnamon, coconuts, rubber and coffee,and later tea, brought wealth to the coffers of English businessmen.
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