UA News

Adele Barker will sign copies of her book, "Not Quite Paradise" at the UA BookStore on Tuesday.

In a journey that began in 2001, University of Arizona Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies Adele Barker shifted her focus to a nonfiction project that has resulted in a new book on life in Sri Lanka.

"Not Quite Paradise" is Barker's account of the year-and-a-half she spent living and teaching in Sri Lanka, along with narratives about her subsequent return visits.

The book contains the daily personal details of Sri Lankan life and culture, reports on the civil war between the government and the Tamil Tigers and accounts of the devastating 2004 tsunami and its impact, during which 48,000 Sri Lankans died in the space of 20 minutes.

On Tuesday at 4:30 p.m., Barker will be signing copies of her book at the UA BookStore, located at the Student Union Memorial Center, 1303 E. University Blvd. 

"I am blessed because I had the opportunity to teach and live in such a beautiful and utterly complex society, a society that we in the U.S. rarely hear reports on," Barker said.  

She also said the society is one fused with the religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. But it also is a society with the troubled history of sectarian violence that had culminated in a 25-year civil war.

Barker's book has gained the attention of the Huffington Post, which asked the author to write blogs on a return visit to Sri Lanka in 2009. Her latest visit coincided with the end of the civil war and the publication wanted to have firsthand accounts of life there in the 5th anniversary of the tsunami.

"Not Quite Paradise," published by Beacon Press, offers an eye-opening account of the "pearl of the Indian Ocean, including Barker's life as a professor at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Barker traveled to Sri Lanka in 2001 as Fullbright Foreign Scholar with her son, Noah.

While living in Sri Lanka, Barker taught humanities classes in a pre-tsunami society at a lush, green campus, and discovered that only decades before, its rivers had carried the bodies of students killed in insurrections against the government.

"Many of the students I taught at that time were returning students who had been held in camps for their insurrection activities, but thanks to the university president, many had been allowed to return to school to finish their studies," she said.

Barker finished her book in 2004, but the tsunami brought her back to the county and she expanded the book to add details of life after the devastation.

Her book also details discussions she had with survivors in temporary camps as she sought out people she had known years before, only to discover that some of them were lost on "the day the sea came to the land."

Barker has published several books and many articles on Russian culture and literature, including: "A History of Russian Women's Writing"; "Consuming Russian: Popular Culture, Sex and Society Since Gorbachev"; "Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges Between (Ex) Soviet and American Women"; and "The Mother Syndrome in the Russian Folk Imagination."

Barker earned her doctorate in comparative literature from New York University. She came to the UA in 1979. Most recently she has served as graduate advisor for the graduate program in comparative cultural literature studies.