Backstory to Sri Lanka’s Postcolonial Moment: The Seven Moons of of Maali Almeida (2022) by Shehan Karunatilaka. Part I of II.

Warning: Contains Spoilers.

“Who do you blame for this mess?  Was it the colonials who screwed us for centuries?  Or the superpowers that are screwing us now?”

            There is a terrible scream from down below and the roof spits out black shadows which the Dead Priest sucks up through what looks like a large straw.

            “Who screwed us?”

            “The Portuguese assumed the missionary position.  The Dutch took us from behind.  By the time the Brits came along, we were already on our knees, with our hands behind our backs and our mouths open.”

            “I’m glad we were colonised by the British,” you say.

            “Better than being slaughtered by the French,” says the Priest.

            “Or enslaved by the Belgians.”

            “Or gassed by the Germans.”

            “Or raped by the Spaniards.”

            “Sometimes, when I think of the mess that this country is in, I think it might be better to let the Chinese or the Japanese buy us over, let the Yanks and the Soviets own our thoughts or let the Indians take care of our Tamil problem, like we let the Dutch take care of our Portuguese problem.”

            The Dead Priest sits across from you and whispers into the dark.  “This island has always been connected.  We traded spices, gems and slaves with Rome and Persia long before history books were invented.  Our people too have always been tradable.  Look at today.  The rich send their kids to London, the poor send their wives to Saudi.  European paedophiles sun on our beaches, Canadian refugees fund our terror, Israeli tanks kill our young and Japanese salt poisons our food.”

            […] “The British sell us guns and the Americans train our torturers.  What chance do any of us have?”

            The Priest has grown muscular and crawls towards you as she speaks.  Her voice doubles, trebles, and then multiplies.  You recognise this walk and this growl.  You pull away from the shadow and it blocks your exit.

“The Brits left us with an unpolished pearl and we have spent forty years filling this oyster with shit.”

            It now has its face against yours and you are no longer sure if it is a he or a she.  You feel the cold and the empty roaring through you.  His eyes are made from a thousand other eyes and her voice is a thousand other voices.  That hum at the edge of our hearing is not a she, or a him, or an it, or a they.  It is a cacophony.

            “Here’s the stinking truth, take a good whiff.  We have fucked it up all by ourselves.”

            The Mahakali’s arms are around you and someone else’s arms are around you and everyone’s arms are around you.

            “Say it once more.  Louder and slower.”

            Its teeth are as black as its eyes, and when its mouth grows wider you see its black tongue and the eyes peering from its throat.

            “We have fucked it up.  All by ourselves.”

~ The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, pp. 262-264

“You Want It Darker” by Leonard Cohen

The postcolonial novel

This revelatory passage, like the turn in a poem, though not the climax of the narrative’s action, reveals The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) by Shehan Karunatilaka as a postcolonial, rather than anti-colonial, novel.  Sometimes I find that classifying art within existing taxonomies of meaning aids my understanding.  In Part I, I want to make my thinking visible and share what moved me about the text, and in Part II, I want to compare Seven Moons with two unequivocally anti-colonial “texts,” Decolonising the Mind (1986) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and the short film Honor the Treaties (2012) by Eric Becker.

            While anti-colonial cultural production seeks to hold former colonial masters singularly responsible for the postcolony’s current ills, postcolonial texts acknowledge the postcolony’s history of imperialism but reject the anti-colonial tendency to blame all current horrors on their historical colonizers.   Rather than calling for revolution, reparations, or indigenous economic sovereignty / neocolonial withdrawal, as anti-colonial texts do, postcolonial texts demand nothing of the colonial powers.  (These are my crude definitions.)  Although Seven Moons illuminates British support of the genocidal Sinhalese government through arms dealing, it neither interrogates neocolonial economic relations persisting in Sri Lanka (dependencies, status as a vassal ‘client state’ or puppet state), nor does it call for a change of foreign policy pertaining to the neocolonial superpowers. 

            In his Booker Prize acceptance speech, Shehan Karunatalika makes clear that his goal for Seven Moons, like the above passage, is aimed straight at Sri Lanka herself:

Let me just say this: my hope for Seven Moons is this, that in the not-too-distant future, ten years or as long as it takes, that it is read in a Sri Lanka that has understood that these ideas of corruption, race-baiting, and cronyism have not worked and will never work, and that it is read in a Sri Lanka – well, I hope it’s in print in ten years, but if it is – I hope it’s read in a Sri Lanka that learns from its stories, and that Seven Moons will be in the fantasy section of the bookshop […], next to the dragons and unicorns, and will not be mistaken for realism or political satire. 

Maybe this direct indictment of the postcolony, the radical here and now, rather than of vestiges of hauntological structural forces, is something the postcolonial novel is willing to do that the anti-colonial novel usually isn’t.  I believe that both anti-colonial and postcolonial texts are necessary and important, and the choice to employ one over the other is context- and situation-dependent.  Would Sri Lanka be aided more by an anti-colonial or postcolonial approach?  Seven Moons expresses the latter.  Like Karunatilaka’s speech, the postcolonial aspects of Seven Moons challenge the anti-colonial novel’s sometimes facile determinism concerning the ongoing consequences of colonialism, which obviates the putatively independent postcolonial polity of responsibility.

            As an aside, it was quite uncomfortable watching him get interrupted like that.  Let the author speak.

            Maali Almeida is a lovable, fallible ghost – a self-proclaimed “Photographer. Gambler. Slut” (3) – whose posthumous experience among the living and the dead and unfolding murder mystery are narrated in the second person: “You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone asks.  The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse” (3).  I loved the rare narrative style and thought it worked marvelously.  One of the effects was to make me identify with Almeida (the text was speaking to me!), but who is the narrator? 

Almeida is a gay war photojournalist in 1989 Sri Lanka, a country besieged by a horrific civil war where the “democratic” ethnic-majority Sinhalese government commits massacres against Tamils and, in the fashion of their CIA / School of the Americas trainers, runs violent counter-insurgency operations against minority factions and so-called Marxist rebel groups.  While Almeida’s constant cheating on and deceit against his boyfriend DD are frustrating, one senses that Almeida uses the addictive pleasure of meaningless sexual encounters to distract himself from his constant proximity to death and horror.

Sex is but one of Almeida’s vices; an inveterate gambler and a “numbers guy” who counts cards, he plays the odds, lives according to (sometimes self-deluding, fantasy versions of) the laws of probability, and regards the universe as governed by mere chance: “[A]s every gambler knows, the biggest killer in this godless universe is the random roll of the dice.  Plain stinking jungle variety bad luck.  The thing that gets us all” (38).  Especially fond of his best friend Jaki’s “happy pills,” he also drugs and drinks socially.

Which side are you on?

Almeida’s turpitude thus established, he presents himself as a photojournalistic mercenary, albeit one with a conscience, who has no allegiances and picks no sides other than personal profit. In life, Maali serves many masters (105) and sells to the highest bidder, working for the LTTE, Tamil-front group CNTR, the Associated Press, the British Consulate, and the Sri Lankan army. When short on cash, he doesn’t worry who signs his cheques (190).  Early in the story, Almeida declares his only allegiance: ending the war.  “‘I take photos. I bear witness to crimes that no one else sees.  […] These are not holiday snaps.  These are photos that will bring down governments.  Photos that could stop wars’” (8).

Unlike the anti-colonial novel, sides are protean, duplicitous tricksters in the postcolonial novel – neither what they appear to be, nor worthy of our blind allegiance.  While our sense of moral outrage and didacticism lives firmly in the absolute modern, our social reality dwells in the turbid postmodern.  As we will see, Almeida has his reasons for being cagey about choosing sides, and he is right not to choose.

First, Almeida is multi-ethnic – part Burgher, part Tamil, and part Sinhalese.  No ethnic faction for him. When Elsa from CNTR approaches Almeida and introduces herself to him in a casino, she opens thusly:

“Have you heard of Simon Wiesenthal? […]  He survived Auschwitz and spent three decades hunting Nazis with only photos to go by.” […]

“I know who Simon Wiesenthal is and I don’t know who you are and I’m here to watch this band.” […]

“You’re here because three casinos have banned you and you have a crush on that rich kid over there.  He’s not a homo, by the way.  Even you know that. […] My employers will pay your debts at Bally’s, Pegasus and Stardust, if you sell us your photos. […]  We understand you have reels of photos from the pogroms of ’83.”

“Is that what they’re calling them?”

“I prefer that word to riots.  And people get testy when you say ‘genocide,’ especially Sinhalese.”

“I stopped calling myself Sinhalese after 1983,” you said, though it wasn’t like you called yourself this before.  You got more from Colombo’s hippies in the ’70s than just bad acid.  You believed that we are all Sri Lankans, children of Kuveni, bastards of Vijaya.  Kumbaya kumbaya” (107-108).

While Almeida flirts with the JVP (Marxist guerrilla group) by going to a few rallies, he’s more of a champagne socialist (as a former socialist, I get it).  In his memo on Sri Lanka’s warring factions, Almeida highlights the ideological incoherence and hypocritical brutality of all actors involved, exposing the absurdity of ethnic and ideological sectarianism.  In that vein, he introduces the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) thus: “want a separate Tamil state.  Prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this” (24) and the JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna) similarly: “want to overthrow the capitalist state.  Are willing to murder the working class while they liberate them” (24). 

Next comes the bombshell revelation, which Almeida learns later but shares at the beginning of his story: “You have photos of the government Minister who looked on while the savages of ’83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants.  You have portraits of disappeared journalists and vanished activists, bound and gagged and dead in custody.  You have grainy yet identifiable snaps of an army major, a Tiger colonel, and a British arms dealer at the same table, sharing a jug of king coconut” (14, emphasis added) (see 196). 

I missed it the first time around, but I’m so glad I spent time preparing this essay.  Outrageous!  The two major Sri Lankan civil war rivals, the army and the Tigers, are conspiring with a British arms dealer to keep the war going in perpetuity. It’s all a game to the leaders.  They don’t care about the Sri Lankan people.  They’re selling them out.  Like the Great Game and the 1884 Scramble for Africa at the Berlin Conference, which carved up the African continent for European powers, the postcolonial context finds indigenous leaders just as rapacious, bloodthirsty, and ruthless.  Instead of trafficking in territories, they’re trafficking in lives.  They’re all meretricious merchants of death.  In the immortal words of Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket!  Cui bono from the carnage?  Cui bono?

Nobody else knows what Almeida knows, that they’re all corrupt bastards.  Remember, the key crimes are cronyism, corruption, and race-baiting.  Karunatilaka told us.  Other Sri Lankans feel morally obligated to pick a side and join the struggle.  Before Almeida knows anything, he feels compelled to take photographs and document the violence.  The only thing he knows for certain is that he wants the war to end.  He spends his life figuring out how to respond to the question, which side are you on?  During her first interaction with Almeida, Elsa continues,

“Mr. Almeida.  Do you have the photos from the ’83 massacre of Tamils?”

“Do you work for the people who buy third-rate weapons from God’s chosen people [the Israelis]?”

“We are not LTTE.  Though our goals are not incompatible.”

“You already sound like a politician.”

“1983 was an atrocity.  Eight thousand homes, five thousand shops, a hundred and fifty thousand homeless, no official body count.  The Sri Lankan government has neither acknowledged nor apologised for it.  Your photos will help change that.  Tell me, kolla.  Which side are you on?” (109).

Which side are you on?

I’m a pacifist who thinks the revolution is in growing organic food and making “love, not war,” ha, so I also wanted to add this one. 

Makes me cry every time.  Love me some Natalie Merchant.  I also recommend the films Harlan County, USA; Bread and Roses; Pride; and yes, Norma Rae (don’t judge).  Once upon a time, I was an underground union organizer, otherwise known as a “salt.”  I left that work because the union for which I salted used high-control manipulation and cult tactics to induce obedience and conformity.  Again, no judgment, please.

Which side is Almeida on?  In this context, what an unfair and stupid question that turns out to be, and by the end of the novel, we understand just how facile and ridiculous it is.  In exposing the question as a travesty and farce for Almeida’s Sri Lanka, Seven Moons critiques the anti-colonial novel that categorically forces people to choose sides.  In Seven Moons, we learn that the reality is more complicated, that all sides are corrupt, and that it’s precisely the problem of choosing sides that perpetuates this senseless war.

The redeemed antihero

We know Almeida’s flawed.  He cheats, parties, and lies.  He makes bad choices.  Still, I became so endeared to him, and I was devastated that, after escaping the Palace and political assassination as a spy or triple agent, his murderer was of the more prosaic and personal variety – his boyfriend DD’s political stooge of a father, who doesn’t want Almeida to “contaminate” his son and ruin his chances for a conventional bourgeois life.  Though Almeida played with fire and serpentined landmines, repeatedly cheating death while embedded with combatants, he was still a closeted gay man in the 1980s.  Not invincible or bulletproof.  His indiscretions made him vulnerable, and anti-gay violence finally felled him.  What a tragic end for what was ultimately a sensitive soul committed to bearing witness to tragedy and sharing the horrors with the world in order to change it.

I loved the gallows humor, both because it was funny in a danse macabre way (there’s that phrase again) and because it reveals the pain and rage behind the humor without being stuck in either.  I loved the character development chronicled in the text, that Almeida transforms – from self-serving sybarite into someone who will move mountains to save the people he loves (thinking of how he saved Jaki), from cynic to idealist, as demonstrated in the following passage:

You saw DD’s face and how different it was from his father’s and you saw him on a plane landing somewhere sunny and you pictured him purifying poisoned wells and you daydreamed of him smiling.  You imagined him lending his life to some pointless cause just like you had and it made you happy.  We must all find pointless causes to live for, or why bother with breath?

Because, on reflection, once you have seen your own face and recognised the colour of your eyes, tasted the air and smelled the soil, drunk from the purest fountains and the dirtiest wells, that is the kindest thing you can say about life.  It’s not nothing (365).

That’s the end of Part I.  In Part II, I’ll discuss anti-colonial texts and see if I can compare/contrast and wrap up why I think Seven Moons took a postcolonial approach.