Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka

by Adele Marie Barker

A chronicle of life on the resplendent island, combining the immediacy of memoir with the vividness of travelogue and reportage
 
Adele Barker and her son, Noah, settled into the central highlands of Sri Lanka for an eighteen-month sojourn, immersing themselves in the customs, cultures, and landscapes of the island—its elephants, birds, and monkeys; its hot curries and sweet mangoes; the cacophony of its markets; the resonant evening chants from its temples. They hear stories of the island’s colorful past and its twenty-five-year civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil Tigers. When, having returned home to Tucson, 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. Combining the immediacy of memoir and the vividness of travelogue with the insight of the best reportage, Not Quite Paradise chronicles life in a place few have ever visited.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Memoir

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Adele Barker is the author and editor of five books on Russian literature and culture. She has taught at the universities of Arizona and Washington. Most recently, she received a UCross Fellowship for her work and a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant to teach and write in Sri Lanka.

Reviews

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes a certain kind of woman to up and move from Arizona to a war-torn, wet country on the other side of the world. Such a woman is Adele Barker, who, in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, brings – drags? – her fifteen-year-old son Noah to Sri Lanka where she will spend the next year teaching Russian literature.

Barker and her son settle in a house at the edge of the jungle where they quickly realize that they are not alone. Along with many ants, the house is inhabited by rats and geckos, and frequently visited by monkeys, one of which steals the television antenna. Although Barker has been planning on doing the housekeeping herself, and resists anything that smacks of colonialism, she soon finds herself with a maid, a tuk-tuk driver, and a gardener. After all, these people are depending upon her for employment. Over the course of her stay, these people also become her friends.

The author never explains what initially attracted her to Sri Lanka. She spends a lot of time trying to sort out the conflict between the Muslim Tamil Tigers, revolutionaries who have pretty much taken over the north of the island, and the Buddhist Sinhalese. (Barker lives in primarily Buddhist Kandy, where there is a shrine housing the Buddha’s tooth.) She is also curiously remote about her personal life. Although she mentions the break-up of a friend’s marriage, she never writes about her own romantic entanglements. (Don’t expect Eat, Pray, Love in Sri Lanka here.) Also, as an expat mother myself, I was interested in her relationship with her son. How did she convince him to go to Sri Lanka? What was his school life like once he got there? Was he adopted? (She mentions that he is from Paraguay.) Does he have a father? Although she alludes to some problems that Noah is having at school, and to his boredom in a place with no TV or decent soccer pitch, she doesn’t go into great detail. Perhaps this is out of consideration for her son’s privacy, or an innate reserve, but I wanted to know more.

When Barker leaves at the end of the year, she vows to return one day to hear the northerners’ point of view on the civil war, but then something bigger happens – here, where most people had never heard the word “tsunami” before, a 30-foot wave crashes over the coast of Sri Lanka washing away tens of thousands of people. Barker returns to the country, this time without her son, who is now a college student, to check up on friends and survey the damage wrought on “the day when the sea came to the land.” She finds heartbreak and loss at every turn, but also resilience.

At one point, she admires a woman’s gold necklace:

“It was all we had left,” a young woman who looked to be pregnant said. “When the sea came to the land, many of us had our saris on. Do you know how to wrap a sari?” she asked me with laughing eyes.

“Don’t test me on it,” I replied, “but kind of. With help. With pins.”

They all laughed.

The one who was all smiles continued. “We lost our saris in the wave. The sea unwrapped them from us. When we came out of the sea, we were nearly naked. Some of us had slips on. Some of us had nothing. But we had our jewelry.”

Although Barker herself remains something of an enigma, her affection for the people and the country is never in doubt. And as one disaster supplants another in the public imagination, she presents a clear portrait of an island nation persevering in the face of challenges.

[Marc Weitz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another so-so travelogue by another author whose observations are rather standard. Adele Barker is an American who moves to Sri Lanka in 2001 to teach literature. She stays a couple years and then returns after the tsunami in 2004. Now, maybe I am jaded from having read too many travelogues, but her observations of Sri Lanka seem rather standard, and there's nothing special about her perspective. Perhaps, if you haven't read travelogues of Sri Lanka, or like regions, you might find this book more interesting. She spends much of the book trying to decide if she wants to talk about her time in Sri Lanka or be a reporter covering the civil war and later the aftereffects of the tsunami. Her time in Sri Lanka and her teaching are the best parts, and it's interesting to hear how the students react to Virginia Woolf and Dostoyevsky. However, when it comes to the war and the tsunami, it does no good to tell me over and over again that things are destroyed, lives are destroyed, houses are destroyed, and that people are suffering. Thanks, I already can imagine that without you having to tell me.

This book could have been 100 pages shorter. It's filled with complete dialogues between her and the people she meets, which makes me question the authenticity of the dialogue. Is she recording every conversation and transcribing it? Doubtful. Especially, since every character sounds the same and speaks in the same voice as she. The dialogue could easily be cut out and replaced with a few sentences describing the trenchant parts of the conversation. Between this and the repetition, I found myself zoning out through much of the book, and then latching on to a bit here or there that is interesting.

Skip this book. If you're looking for a recent and interesting book on Sri Lanka, try "Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War" by Mark Steven Meadows. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/72...

[Andrew Doran · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up the audio version of this book after returning from our recent holiday in Sri Lanka. I had so many lingering thoughts about the country and I wanted to get another perspective before it all faded out of my memory.

This is very different to Elephant Complex , a book that I started before we departed and had accompanied me on my journey. Not Quite Paradise takes a much more personal approach. The book is narrated by the author who moved from Arizona, USA to Sri Lanka with her 15-year old son soon after 9/11. The first part of the book serves as a pretty straightforward travel diary. I had seen a review on Goodreads which said that the book was “a so-so travelogue by another author whose observations are rather standard” but for me it was lovely to indulge a little bit in hearing someone talk first hand about places that we ourselves had recently visited and and to understand what it had felt like for her. However, as another reviewer notes, she “never explains what initially attracted her to Sri Lanka” and this remains a mystery. It must have been a great upheaval for her teenage son; they eventually decide that he will return home while she stays on for a little longer. Nothing very dramatic happens throughout this part of the book, but the pleasure is in the small details of life and interactions that she has with the people, her house and the landscape.

The second half is quite different. It starts during Christmas 2004 where she hears the awful news of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami which brought devastation and death to the island. She is almost immediately compelled to return there to…I’m not quite sure what. See it first-hand? Report on the damage? Complete the book? She doesn’t give too much away about why she wanted to make the journey, but make it she did, and her writing covers a much broader scope of the island and its recent history as she travels around in this part of the book. Some of the accounts of the tsunami are devastating, even more so as they are weaved together with details and evidence of the long Sri Lankan Civil War. The book was a useful compliment to the topics covered in Elephant Complex and I was grateful to it filling in quite a few gaps in my knowledge and clearing up my misunderstandings from the other, denser, book. The timeline covered stops short of the brutal end of the civil war and felt slightly unfinished because of it.

I don’t think this will ever be held up as one of the greatest travelogues of all time but I did find it a very pleasant read — just what I was looking for after my own Sri Lankan journey.

Originally published at http://andrewdoran.uk/blog/2017/10/12....

[Maxine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read before going to Sri Lanka and really enjoyed it. Got me excited for the trip and learned about the culture.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not Quite Paradise is the memoir of Adele Barker's journeys in Sri Lanka, beginning in 2001, just three weeks after 9/11, and culminating in 2006 with a brief intermission in between the two. She arrives with the intention of teaching literature at the University of Peradeniya, but is caught up in a war and way of life that she desperately tries to understand.

I say this is a memoir of her journeys, but mostly it is a memoir of Sri Lanka. Barker gives many details about the history of the island, particularly the civil war between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil Tigers, a separatist group fighting for an independent Tamil state in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. This war lasted over 20 years and was felt by all: violent election days, scattered land mines, curfews, "normal murders," and poverty. Barker details her adjustment to daily life, but she could never be completely accepted by the native Sri Lankans because of her skin color; to be white was to be in a caste above others, to be seen as either a perpetual tourist, an aid worker, or of no threat to either side divided by civil war. While she tried to break these stereotypes, in one respect by refusing to hire a housekeeper so she would not be seen as "British and colonial," she soon realizes that not providing this job keeps one more Sri Lankan unemployed. She relents, and makes the most of her position.

When Barker returns to the island in 2005, it is to see the damage done by the tsunami of December 26, 2004, which killed 48,000 Sri Lankans in as little as 20 minutes. Her goal was to walk the circumference of the island as much as possible, and it did seem possible, considering there was a cease-fire that appeared to be holding steady. Barker travels through many cities, gathering people's stories of "when the water came to the land." She researches why there was no early warning system and what the government was doing to prevent a catastrophe such as this from every happening again. In her travels, she sees sides of the civil war that aren't publicized, at least not once one leaves the northern Jaffna peninsula: the way not all Tamils are Tigers, how the government was desperately trying to lay siege to the Tigers but in turn was laying siege to its own people, and how the Tigers were not always seen as the enemy by those who lived under their laws.

I went into this story thinking I was going to be experiencing a personal story of one person's journeys through a land that differs greatly from our own, and in a way that assumption was correct. However, this is much more a story about Sri Lanka; we do not get a very good look at Adele Barker. We know where she is from, that she has a son, and that she is a professor. But that is about all we are told, and I believe the reason behind this is that we do not need to know the details of the person writing the story. The story is about the people of Sri Lanka, their lives in a nation continuously torn apart, and how such a nation can come together, albeit briefly, when disaster strikes, and then just as quickly return to war.

Barker narrowly avoided disasters on a consistent basis. There were many bombings, murders, mine explosions, and threats that could have kept her from ever finishing her book. Thankfully, she was spared them all. Her experiences made the story real, and were a reminder that tragedy is always close at hand in Sri Lanka, but it is also taken in stride. This is a world I will never see for myself, but I was given a glimpse into its complexities and its beauty. Barker seamlessly ties together everyday life against the backdrop of a war-torn nation, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at something only those brave enough to experience it can really comprehend.

4 out of 5 stars. Barker's writing, while not poetic, is honest, thoughtful, and emotional. I found myself rooting for her and the friends she made in Sri Lanka, as well as those who helped to guide her through her journeys. I am thankful this book came to me because it is all too easy to sit in a country of freedoms and be ungrateful, while half a world away people struggle to survive.

This book was given to me by Beacon Press in association with Library Thing's Early Reviewers program. No incentives were used to produce a positive review of this book.

[Christina (Reading Extensively) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adele Barker and her teenage son Noah spent a year in Sri Lanka where Adele taught literature at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy. In Not Quite Paradise, Adele discusses everything from the food and customs to the people she meets, and the civil war. After the tsunami, Adele returns once again to Sri Lanka and describes the horrible devastation. She also travels north to war-torn Jaffna where she experiences the danger first hand. Not Quite Paradise combines interesting details about daily life, historical fact, and current events in a country ravaged by war for over twenty years.

Sri Lanka is a tiny island nation populated by two distinct ethnic groups: the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. It was once a colony of Britain but after the British pulled out, tensions escalated culminating in the civil war between the LTTE, a faction of Tamil terrorists, and the Sinhalese government that began in 1983. Adele makes the country’s history come alive and she talks about the conflict from an unbiased point of view. Her own personal experiences as an American adjusting to life in Sri Lanka add touches of humor to the narrative.

Not Quite Paradise was an intensely personal reading experience for me. My parents are originally from Sri Lanka. They immigrated in the mid 70s before I was born. If not for that choice, my sister and I would have grown up there in the middle of the war. The descriptions of war violence were very hard to read about. Although the war ended last year it will take a long time to rebuild and heal. People in Sri Lanka have suffered a lot but even among the sorrow they have hope. There is a lot of beauty and rich culture on the island. Adele is particularly interested in elephants and local birds and I enjoyed reading about the animals that she saw. She also met and made a lot of new friends both Sinhalese and Tamil and she shares their stories with us. I admired Adele’s bravery in coming to a country so different to her and I like how open she was to new cultures and ways of belief. Her conversational writing style is mostly accessible and flows well. If you enjoy reading narrative nonfiction and learning about other cultures, you might enjoy Not Quite Paradise.

[Carole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since I know so little about Sri Lanka, which I will be visiting next month, the book was useful in providing the impressions of an American in this land of conflicts. Barker worked in Sri Lanka as a Russian literature instructor (!) for several months shortly after September 11. She never explained why she did this, although you got the feeling it was an escape from something she didn't want to deal with. She stayed exclusively in the south and central mountain areas, primarily Buddhist, and developed kinships with her hosts, students and servants. Careful to avoid any likeness to British colonialists, she tried to absorb the culture and traditions. Meantime, her adopted teenage son seemed to be quite miserable in the new surroundings, and she let him go home to the care of friends while she finished her assignment. In the second part of the book, she returned four years later, after the tsunami (a word unknown in Sri Lanka at the time) wreaked havoc on the island, killing over 30,000 unwarned people. I wasn't quite sure why she returned, as it seemed to be mostly in the capacity of voyeur and interviewer. What did her presence add to the devastated island? She did reassure herself of the welfare of her former hosts and benefactors. Meanwhile, her son was back in the states struggling with his first year of college, without his mother, and not seeming to fit in well. While the son's struggles were only alluded to in an offhand manner, I kept feeling she was needed by him and should have spent her time there, rather that looking at flood wreckage a year later. You had the feeling she needed the extra material to round out her book. She did manage, at some personal risk, to make it to the Tamil controlled north and went into some of the political and personal turmoil caused by 30 years of civil war. This aspect was missing from the first part of the book. The book was useful for an incomplete introduction to the daily lives and experiences of the people of this mysterious island. But the book seemed self-serving and superficial. There is a picture of the author posing with an elephant on the back cover.

[Sarah Fisher · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book started off rather well. I liked the blend of history and travelogue as it traced her experiences in a new country and you also learned new information as she was told by the locals. However, a few chapters in and you realize that this book has no real direction. In fact the author's main motivation for sharing her life, as she mentions many times, is that she had planned to write a book while in Sri Lanka and now, dammit, she'll write that book!

So in the end, this blend of travel writing, memoir, history and investigative journalism just doesn't work as she doesn't delve deeply enough into any of these to form a concrete picture of the situation. In the memoir like sections, for example, she was just too vague and relied to heavily on compare and contrast. "This is how America is and this is how Sri Lanka is and it's really really different." She skirted over her more personal views of the culture or even how it affected her home life. I mean, she has a teenage son! And it seems like the first time she's there, he hangs around and watches tv. And the second time she goes to Sri Lanka she just leaves him with friends and doesn't really mention him again.

And one more short note on her visit after the tsunami. I just didn't get this. She felt the need to go back because of the disaster. But her response was just to visit lots of places hit by the tsunami to take a look around. I don't see how this helped the situation at all or brought to light any surprising things about foreign aid.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Suzanne has covered the book fairly well in recent review. I'm just going to add my own feeling that Barker's initial background on the Tamil - Sinhalese conflict, presented in a hybrid non-fiction historical account, along with interviews, came across as rather dry for me (and I'm a big non-fiction reader); so much so that I flirted with giving up. Things improve after she gets settled, establishes relationships with Lankans, and begins a routine as a college instructor. Second half of the book concerns her return visit after the 2004 tsunami, much of which concerns a trip to Jaffna in the far north, through areas that had been long out-of-bounds under the Tamil Tigers.
As a reader, I'm tempted to say that her style got a bit "dense" at times. I suspect that came from mixing travel narrative, memoir, and (amateur) journalism. Her approach seemed to be to use her direct experience as jumping-off points for discussions about the island's situation, which detracted from the flow of the book.
My recommendation would be to stick with the book until the author is settled in, and has begun teaching. If you're having trouble getting into it at that point, you won't enjoy the rest of the story.

[Lusine Mkrtchyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was like watching a documentary about a country and a conflict far away from my daily conversations or reading horison. What I like the most that the author did her best to not demonize neither of the sides, she gave voices to both sides to raise details about the devastating civil war from each perspective. Thats what is missing in most discusions about any conflict in our times. All is black and white, so easily labeled good and bad, victim and heroe.

Some reviewers are unhappy of a white american woman writing about third world country problems. So whats the problem. Only Sri Lankans have right to write about Sri Lanka? She shared her experience of living in Sri Lanka and taking her child to share a culture half a globe far from their homeland. Of course she will have outsider vision and even if she does her best to live like locals live, of course she still has privilliges that others dont have. She does not pretend to become at anytime a part of Sri Lanka but it is still appreciable the amount of efforts and research put in this book to present a country hit by cilvil war and natural catastrophe.

[Muneer Uddin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the usual fish out of water travel story from Western Europeans and Americans: American goes to foreign country, expresses wonderment at the local customs, experiences massive amounts of white guilt, and engages in tons of navel gazing.

So much potential, but ultimately a disappointment.

[Melisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating look at Sri Lanka from and American perspective, both before and after the tsunami.

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

woman I met here in Arizona; went over to teach in Sri Lanka; civil war in Sri Lanka

[Ravindu Perera · Rating 5 out of 5]

great book enjoyed it from start to end

[Alexi Parizeau · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up to get some insights into the damage the civil war and tsunami caused in Sri Lanka.. and got a little preview of the culture.