Shehan Karunatilaka and his approach to explore the Sri Lankan conflict of the 1980’s though “The Seven Moons of Maali”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, a Sri lankan writer, won the Booker Prize 2022 which is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world. Shehan Karunarilaka’s work is being appreciated for its approach of presenting a new concept of afterlife journalism. This is his second novel that follows the experiences of a dead war photographer in his afterlife. This is not the first time when he has given us a masterpiece, his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathewis too a notable work which won the Commonwealth Prize, the Gratiaen Prize the DSC Prize and was adjudged as the second greatest cricket book of all time by Wisden. 

As a citizen living in Sri Lanka during the civil war of Sri Lanka in the 1980’s, Shehan Karunatilaka closely saw and examined the political and communal violence around him which was normalised to an extent that it appeared more mundane than terrifying. 

From 1983 to 2009, the island of Sri Lanka witnessed one the most brutal civil wars in human history. According to estimates the dead numbered around one lakh making the whole country overpopulated with spirits. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida takes us to the time and presents us with a dysfunctional system through the experiences of a debauched protagonist. Maali is a son of Sinhalese father and a burgher mother. He loves and trusts his Nikon camera and has a passion for photography. And his journey starts when he wakes up dead! 

At first he thinks he is hallucinating because of some silky pill he took but not much later, he realized that he is actually dead and locked in some kind of underworld. The underworld here is a tax office and everyone there wanted their rebate. He noticed some of the souls who were physically incapable of standing in the line to get their forms filled. The protagonist meets many souls in the underworld including a Tamil university lecturer who was gunned down for criticizing militant separatist group the Tamil Tigers and it was not much surprising that most of them were the victims of violence that tormented Sri Lanka in the 80’s. This was the novel’s approach to depict the victims of the Marxist group, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna or People’s Liberation party, who similarly waged an insurrection against the Sri Lankan government, and killed many working-class civilians who pointed fingers at them. 

Since our protagonist here is a photojournalist, he has witnessed the brutality of the insurrections in Sri Lanka as he worked for newspapers and magazines. He has a record of pictures that can bring the government down or can even stop the nation reckoning riots. Some of such pictures include Burning Tamil homes and slaughter of occupants by the savages of ’83, while a government minister just looks at it., portraits of disappeared journalists and activists, who were bound or dead in custody and many more. And he remembers storing all these pictures underneath his bed in his family home. The challenge here is that Maali only has seven moons to get in contact with someone he can trust to retrieve and circulate these stash of pictures throughout Colombo. 

The pictures will help people understand by exposing the profoundly hateful and violent nature of the nationwide conflict. According to the book every person should get seven moons to wander and recall his/her past lives. Maali here understands the fragility of life through his own death and he believes his photos have the power to affect the nationwide blackout. Maali just has these seven moons to save his work from going to oblivion. And here is where his journalistic mission in the afterlife begins. 

The book has been written in the second person and has satirical humor. Dark scenarios of a real life conflict have been presented with absurdity here. Dead bodies bickering at each other but executed with humor and pathos are some of the elements that ground the reader. Beneath being an intriguing read, this literary masterpiece explores the terrifying yet true reality of the carnage of Sri Lankan civil war. 

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