Spectres of Colonialism: Comparing The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) by Karunatilaka to Anticolonial Texts
Part II of II.
“It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.”
~ Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind (20).
“The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, ‘My God. What are these people doing to themselves? They’re killing each other. They’re killing themselves, while we watch them die.’”
~ Aaron Huey, Honor the Treaties (min. 7:30)
“I dream of a country where children are not afraid to dream.”’
~ Évelyne Trouillot, in “The Haiti that Still Dreams” by Edwidge Danticat
“Us” by Ruby Ibarra feat. Klassy, Faith Santilla, and Rocky Rivera
In Part II of “Backstory to Sri Lanka’s Postcolonial Moment,” I want to compare and contrast The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) by Shehan Karunatilaka with two unequivocally anticolonial “texts,” Decolonising the Mind (1986) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and the short film Honor the Treaties (2012) by Eric Becker. Like these texts, Seven Moons elucidates the colonial history that brings Sri Lanka to the postcolonial moment of the book – 1989, when the country was embroiled in a horrific and genocidal internecine war. Like these texts, Seven Moons engages in a kind of agitprop – after all, as Orwell wrote, all art is propaganda – and names the colonial and neocolonial powers that continue to plague the country. Unlike these texts, Seven Moons directs this agitprop internally instead of externally, and it does not call for a militant struggle against cultural imperialism in all its forms or wage a purity campaign against the vestiges of European and other exogenous influences.
Honor the Treaties (2012) is a short film by Eric Becker chronicling photojournalist Aaron Huey’s time on the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Lakota tribe and one of the poorest and most violent places in the United States. Huey came to Pine Ridge to document the community. In the video, he asserts that his goal is not simply to make ruin porn – to “take pretty pictures of ugly things,” but rather to tell the story of the Lakota people.
“The people that let me in,” states Huey, “they just happened to be in a dark world. And so I used that as an opportunity to talk about genocide, and to talk about what it means to grow up in a prisoner of war camp where one day the guards went away. […] That was the moment it stopped being just about journalism, when I actually chose a side. And I chose their side, and I chose to say what they wanted me to say. Whether it was realistic or journalistic no longer mattered.”
Genocide is what white settlers did and are doing to Native Americans. At the behest of the U.S. government, white settlers engaged in successive military and civilian campaigns that massacred indigenous communities, stole their land, cheated them, broke treaties and promises, exterminated the buffalo to starve them, created the Bureau of Indian Affairs to facilitate continuous waves of land dispossession and to punish native economic and social relations (collective land ownership and food storage), violently imposed the white economy on them when they faced starvation, and forced their children to attend residential schools that stripped them of their language, religion, and culture. Native peoples are subject peoples and prisoners of war.
I wanted to show the image of the mountain of bison skulls that demonstrates the systematic and deliberate extermination of the bison in order to decimate Native populations. It can be found at this link: https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-bison-skulls-documents-animals-on-the-brink-of-extinction-148780.
I haven’t yet read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) by Dee Brown, but I did recently read The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and An American Inheritance (2023) by Rebecca Clarren, which recounts all of the colonial violence that led to this moment in Native American history – the same history that Aaron Huey invokes in Honor the Treaties, and it was eye-opening. When one learns the history properly, one feels compelled to support Huey’s propsal:
A long time ago, a series of events was set in motion by a people who looked like me, eager to take the land and the water and the gold in the hills. Those events led to a domino effect that has yet to end. As removed as we, the dominant society, may feel – from a massacre in 1890 or a series of broken treaties 150 years ago, I still have to ask you the question: how should you feel about the statistics of today? Is any of this your responsibility, today? I’ve been told that there must be something that we can do, there must be some call to action. Because for so long I’ve been standing on the sidelines, content to be a witness, just taking photographs. The suffering of indigenous peoples is not a simple issue to fix. So, where does that leave us? Shrugging our shoulders in the dark? The call to action I offer today is this: honor the treaties. Give back the Black Hills. It’s not your business what they do with them.
What do we learn from Aaron Huey’s experience by comparison with Almeida’s? Aaron Huey is a real photojournalist, trying to use his work responsibly to right wrongs and make a positive change in the world. Almeida is a fictional photojournalist whose ultimate goal is to end the Sri Lankan war; he also wants to effect change through his work. Huey is an outsider to the Lakota community and their struggle to repossess the Black Hills; Almeida is an insider. The Lakota are still subjugated by colonial rule and ongoing dispossession, while Sri Lankans have thrown off the yoke of formal colonialism. These cases of agitprop photojournalism have distinct contexts, which helps explain the differences in anticolonial vs postcolonial approaches.
In Decolonising the Mind (1986), revolutionary Marxist Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o engages in the anticolonial project of reclaiming his native language and culture. Lamenting the destruction of his native Gikuyu language, he announces that he will no longer write in English; his works have been translated into English, but from my understanding, he only writes in his native tongue. The text documents his and his Kenyan community’s attempts to reclaim their language, culture, and art – especially theater and community storytelling – for revolutionary and anticolonial purposes. He explicates his approach thus:
Imperialism, led by the USA, presents the struggle peoples of the earth and all those calling for peace, democracy and socialism with the ultimatum: accept theft or death. The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against the collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish. Amidst this wasteland which it has created, imperialism presents itself as the cure and demands that the dependent sing hymns of praise with the constant refrain: ‘Theft is holy.’ Indeed, this refrain sums up the new creed of the neo-colonial bourgeoisie in many ‘independent’ African states (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind, 3).
What Thiong’o does in this piece, that postcolonial art sometimes fails to do, is identify the social conditions that perpetuate a violent and oppressive status quo. Anticolonial texts force us to consider a reality that there are exploiter states and exploited ones, and until the exploited states transform their conditions of exploitation and create a strong subsistence ‘economy,’ they may never universal peace, freedom, and prosperity. As I’ve said, I see the need for both postcolonial and anticolonial art. Maybe in the end, the distinctions don’t matter quite so much, as long as the art imagines a viable future and takes flight, as long as it finds a way out, an escape from the unbearable present. While I’m no state socialist (anymore) and am cynical and wary of state interventionism, I think Thiong’o’s socialism makes sense; he’s trying to recover ancestral lifeways of collective subsistence, and the modern way that he expresses that is through socialism. By contrast, I (who the hell am I? I know, but I’m entering the conversation, so here goes) take up with the libertarian left communards and post-Marxist autonomists and think that “back to the land” collective subsistence gift economies, marked by mutual aid and voluntary sharing, are the way to go. Eschew all forms of domination, from the state to the market, with their monopolies on violence and privation. Restore the commons.
I couldn’t think my way out of this one, but then I read this article from The New Yorker by Edwidge Danticat from yesterday: “The Haiti that Still Dreams.” Haiti is in a similar position to Sri Lanka and is beset by the same structural genocide and horror. Interestingly, Danticat proposes two practical solutions to Haiti’s horrific present: 1) a return to Haiti’s rural, agrarian subsistence culture; and 2) a national revitalization of all kinds of artistic production. On moving away from Port-au-Prince’s sick postindustrial culture of imposed scarcity and attendant violence and recovering an independent and healthy rural subsistence economy, Danticat writes,
As more and more of the capital’s residents are forced to return to homesteads and ancestral villages, the moun andeyò [rural people, labeled ‘outside people’] have much to teach other Haitians. “Historically, the moun andeyò have always been the preserver of Haiti’s cultural and traditional ethos,” Vivaldi Jean-Marie, a professor of African American and African-diaspora studies at Columbia University, told me. Rural Haitians, who have lived for generations without the support of the state, have had no choice but to rely on one another in close and extended family structures called lakou.
For Haiti, going back to the land means escaping the ‘open air prison’ of the concrete ghetto that produces monsters and structural genocide. Urbanization is just another name for dispossession, which breeds economic enslavement and dependency, volatility, and vulnerability to premature death. Colonial capitalism will always have boom-and-bust cycles and produce death worlds and sacrifice zones. Danticat’s other proposed solution is widespread artistic creation, following the mantra that “art is joy”:
“If there are gangs, we’d be better off with art gangs,” [musician] Zikiki said. “Gangs that paint, make music, recite poetry. Art is how we bring our best face to the world. Art is how we dream.”
If it sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly the two-pronged solution that Thiong’o exhorted postcolonies to adopt 38 years ago, the year I was born, and it also aligns with the goals of international human rights organization La Via Campesina. I agree with it wholeheartedly.
When thrown into relief against these anticolonial texts, I confess that I ultimately find them more politically satisfying than Seven Moons. I tend to read art didactically; I can’t help it. Seven Moons richly explains Sri Lanka’s colonial history, but it doesn’t dream a new reality or create a blueprint for achieving collective liberation. And we may say that practical solutions are not the responsibility of the artist and that to require them is imposing something more restrictive and dogmatic on the art than simply letting it speak. I agree with this. Not all art has to contain the same anticolonial polemic. As a cop-out, I’m going to make the answer a ‘both-and’ one. Without both – both the postcolonial and the anticolonial in art and literature, both the purely aesthetic and the didactively instructive and ‘political,’ how can Sri Lanka secure a better future? Does the future imagined have to be a utopian one? No, and as I’ve written, I don’t believe in top-down systems of governance and control. I neither believe in planned economies nor in heteronomy (rule by a formal establishment). Maybe I’m a Bookchinian, I don’t know. But in order to escape the present and its cyclical violence, one or many possible futures must be prefigured and imagined.
There were other things I meant to say, comparing Sri Lanka’s internecine ethnic conflict with the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda, which all bear the stamp of colonial race-baiting and racialized class differentiation, another act of structural violence. I also meant to say that a danger of anticolonial writing is not only its dogmatism but also its determinism, which makes postcolonial writing appear more existentialist in promoting free will, radical individual freedom, and radical individual responsibility. There’s also a passage in Seven Moons that I transcribed. It seems to metaphysicalize and mythologize Sri Lanka’s colonial oppression, making it seem both transhistorical (which it is) and inevitable and immutable (which it is not). This is why the Marxists and revolutionaries instruct us to historicize everything, so that the violent foundations of social phenomena are not fetishized and abstracted into immutable physical laws of the cosmos. I’ll leave it here to let the reader decide how to interpret it.
In Seven Moons, Sri Lanka’s origin myth conveys that its history is founded upon colonial oppression and dispossession:
‘This land is cursed.’
‘I’ve heard that before. How so?’
‘You took all those photos and you still have to ask me that?’
‘Fair point.’
‘Ceylon was a beautiful island before it filled up with savages.’
‘True. Some countries import their savages. We breed ours.’
‘You know there were people here long before the Sinhalese?’
‘Kuveni’s people?’
‘They weren’t considered people. We call them devils and snakes.’
‘Were yakas and nagas before or after Ravana?’
‘No one cares.’
‘So, who were the indigenous Lankans?’
‘Not Vijaya and his sea pirates. That’s for sure.’
If the Mahavamsa is to be believed, the Sinhalese race was founded on kidnapping, rape, parricide, and incest. This is not a fairy tale, but the story of our birth as given by the island’s oldest chronicle, a chronicle used to codify laws crafted to suppress all that is not Sinhalese and Buddhist and male and wealthy.
Once upon a time in north India, a princess meets a lion. Lion kidnaps and forces self on princess. Princess gives birth to girl and boy. Boy grows up, kills lion-father, becomes king, marries sister. She gives birth to boy, who becomes troublemaker, who is banished with seven hundred flunkies, who arrive in ships on the shores of Ceylon.
Prince Vijaya and his band of bald thugs kick-start our history by slaughtering the native Naga people and seducing their queen, though perhaps not in that order. If the origin story is true, the mess we are in should be no surprise. Betrayed and ruined by the callous prince, Queen Kuveni of the Naga tribe curses the land before she kills herself and abandons her children to the forest. The curse sticks for a few millennia and, in 1990, shows no signs of lifting.”
‘Our ancestors have literally been demonized,’ says the creature. ‘I have heard that the Mahakali is a descendant of Kuveni. Some say she is Kuveni herself’ (138-139).
This post is very well timed for me. I just finished Ned Blackhawk's National Book Award winning scholarly non-fiction,, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History which I highly recommend. It presents an unadorned account of the facts and, although specific to the American situation, can easily be seen in universal terms in the countless examples of colonialization worldwide regardless as the who were the colonizers. The intergenerational trauma inflicted on the subjugated peoples creates unexpected outcomes when the influence of the colonizers recedes and, as stated, the jailers leave the prisons unattended. Attempts to recreate a cultural past are invariably found to be difficult if not impossible. Even in situations like Haiti where the colonial powers were expelled by the native population there was no effective plan to recover. This black revolt against the white colonizers terrified the US which feared the same on their soil. Repeated efforts at recovery have failed and to wish for a groundswell of consensus to return to an agrarian economy seems optimistic at best in the face of changing realities in global economies. There are few place in the world that have not been negatively impacted by colonialism and there is a desperate need for a call to action. I have no idea what that action should be and it's heartbreaking. It remains , however, beneficial for art and fiction in particular to keep the issues in broad daylight for all to see so action is at least possible. This can and should be expressed in both anti-colonial and sympathetic post-colonial terms.
The Pine Ridge video was heartbreaking and the revolutionary rap, US, thought-provoking. The self-actualization of individuals required to move from the utterly demoralized, violent, and beaten community of the Lakota to a position of strength and self-determination of revolt, at the other end of the spectrum, is monumental.
I’m totally overwhelmed and beyond that I don’t know where to begin. Perhaps for now I’ll just say I’m honored and fortunate that you call me friend. You have an amazing intellect and I’m honored that you allow me to benefit from that intellect.