Building Bridges through Literature:A workshop organized by Thothanna
Building Bridges through Literature:A workshop organized by Thothanna
1st, 2nd August 2009 at Subhodi Training Center, Piliyandala
In the serene atmosphere of Subhodi Piliyandala a group of writers from different corners of Sri Lanka got together to spend one and half days. There were participants from Puttlam, Anuradhapura, Trincomalee and Colombo. Some had been writing for over 40 years and some were just beginning. Men and women from Sinhala, Muslim and Tamil communities shared their experiences, honed their writing skills and reflected on the role of literature in peace-building.
In a program that combined free-writing exercises, brainstorming, collective group exercises, reflective learning sessions, case studies and lectures, they explored the importance of dealing with everyday social realities as well as the collective memory of the country’s past. How do we tell stories about the recent past we have been through? How do we tell stories that can heal people and bring them together, instead of setting them on a course of misunderstanding and alienation? How do we avoid making the mistakes that some of writers and literati from the post-independence period have committed unknowingly? How do we write about ‘the other’ within us, as well as ‘the other’ who is different from us, in a way that makes the reader empathize? And who is the reader we are writing to – the one who is a global citizen who has multiple choices to for his or her free time. These were some of the questions they reflected upon and discussed.
The overall outcome of the event is to create a platform for writers to come together to discuss conflicts in order to create a literature with a social consciousness. Some of the agreements reached at the end of the workshop were to create a virtual space for their voices in the web and publish some of their work inspired by the workshop in a collective volume.
Dr Sunil Wijesiriwardene, Dr Tudor Weerasinghe and Hasini Haputhanthri were resource persons for the workshop.
For more details, take a look at the workshop report:
