FLEFF
News
Local Author's Insight Into Effects Of The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Will Be Part Of Ithaca College's Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
Dave Maley, 4/2/2008
ITHACA, NY—“A Topography of Banda Aceh: Notes from a Journey”—local author Sorayya Khan’s reading and slide show account of the effects of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—will take place on Friday, April 4, as part of Ithaca College’s 11th annual Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF). Free and open to the public, the event will begin at 10:30 a.m. in the Handwerker Gallery.
On Dec. 26, 2004, an earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale occurred 60 miles off the coast of Sumatra, causing the tsunami that ravaged the coasts of most landmasses bordering the Indian Ocean. One of the hardest hit areas was the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh: Of the approximately 89 villages that made up Banda Aceh, 41 were destroyed, and 61,605 people out of a general population of 264,618 lost their lives.
In May 2007, local author Sorayya Khan traveled to Banda Aceh to interview tsunami survivors and, a few weeks later, returned to Ithaca with a sharpened perception of what “environment” suggests.
“Five miles from the sea, in the western suburbs of the city, sits a ship as large as four stories tall and one football field wide,” Khan wrote. “It looks like it has fallen from the sky to the ground, but the ship was carried inland to a residential neighborhood by the force of tsunami waves 40 feet high. Swirling uncontrollably as the water receded, it obliterated everything until finally coming to rest upon four houses. . . . The neighborhood has accepted the ship as its own, bending a road around it and rebuilding next to it.”
At the end of her stay in Banda Aceh, Khan discovered the counterpoint to the narrative of the ship’s destruction in a conversation with a resident, who told her that during the tsunami 700 people clamored on the ship to escape drowning.
“The stories of survivors have an enviable natural shape that builds, peaks, and resolves and, sometimes, as a way of maintaining composure in agonizing interviews, I concentrate on that reality rather than the sadness being revealed, the excruciating loss of five children in the blink of an eye, the inability to hang on to an ailing mother, the failure to reach a drowning sister.”
Author of the novels “Noor” and the forthcoming “Five Queen’s Road,” Khan has published in such literary journals as “The Kenyon Review,” “North American Review” and “Asian American Pacific Journal.” Her work has been anthologized in several collections, including Bapsi Sidhwa’s recent “City of Sin and Splendor: Writings on Lahore.” Khan is currently completing her third novel.
FLEFF 2008 will run Monday–Sunday, March 31–April 6. A complete list of events, along with a day-by-day calendar, is available at www.ithaca.edu/fleff.
Launched in 1997 as an outreach project sponsored by Ithaca College, Cornell University’s Center for the Environment and Eunadi Center for International Studies and others, FLEFF has become a major regional event in upstate New York and enjoys an international reputation as a cutting-edge, multi-arts program.
For more information and to schedule interviews, contact Patricia Zimmermann at (607) 274-3431 or patty@ithaca.edu, or Tom Shevory at (607) 274-1347 or shevory@ithaca.edu.
Originally published in News Releases: Local Author's Insight Into Effects Of The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Will Be Part Of Ithaca College's Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.