The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: a Failed Novel about a Failed People

By Dhanuka Bandara

Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Matthew won immediate critical and public acclaim upon its publication in 2010. The manuscript of the novel had already won the Gratiaen Prize and there was some buzz about it in the Sri Lankan critical circles even before the novel’s publication. It certainly did not disappoint, in fact it over-delivered. I remember many who thought that it was the “Great Sri Lankan Novel” and maybe it is. Chinaman went on to gain international recognition, including the Commonwealth Book Prize (2012). Unlike Karunatilaka’s first novel, his second, the Booker Prize winning, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, was first acclaimed in the West. Before it won the Booker Prize hardly anyone had read it in Sri Lanka and the book was known in a different, earlier version, Chats with the Dead.

I first heard about Karunatilaka’s great triumph on BBC. It is the first time a Sri Lankan had won the Booker Prize, excluding Michael Ondaatje whose Sri Lankan connection is pretty tenuous. From the get go I had an uneasy feeling about this novel. I heard that it was about the murder of a Sri Lankan, queer, war photographer in the 80s. It seemed to me that Karunatilaka was trying to hit all the right tropes to write the kind of postcolonial novel that the West found agreeable to their woke tastes. Karunatilaka received his precious prize from the Queen Consort, Camilla Parker who, to the best of my knowledge, has never really shown any real interest in literary endeavors, at a glitzy event whose “celebrity guest” was Dua Lipa, whose connection with the literary world is also not clear. Couple of weeks later I bought a copy of the book and started reading it, expecting it to be average at best, and found it to be an unmitigated failure as a novel in every imaginable respect; stylistically, ideologically and otherwise.

I know that there are many in Sri Lanka who have similar sentiments about the book and most of them are not willing to share them in public lest they are called, right-wing nationalists, Sinhala Buddhist chauvinists, jingoists, homophobes or worse. There is this pervasive pressure to claim that one likes the book, especially given that it comes with the approval of the supposedly erudite western critics, who know what they are doing, and the novel also seemingly espouses a political ideology that is deemed desirable in “polite” liberal circles in Colombo, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Nevertheless, needless to say, that it is important that we have an honest, and measured critical discussion about our first Booker Prize winning novel. Whether you like it or not, its historical significance is indubitable.

How did then a novel, that in my view, is a complete failure win the prestigious Booker Prize that the absolute greats of twentieth century writing had won in the past? Karunatilaka’s book confirms everything that the West has learnt about Sri Lanka in the last couple of decades; that we are a stupid, racist, sexist, homophobic people who have entirely f—ed up. Ironically enough, this is not altogether untrue. Hence the title of this piece. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a failed novel about a failed people. The failure of the book reflects our own failure. However, I found that it is repugnant to exploit the misery—self-inflicted or otherwise—of one’s own people to win accolades from the West, who in no small measure is also responsible for the mess that Sri Lanka (and the “Third World” in general) is today.

The novel opens with the dead protagonist waking up in what appears to be purgatory, or perhaps it could be better understood as “gandhabba avadiya”—an in between space where he is given “seven moons” to find out who killed him and a stash of hidden photographs of great consequence. The opening is tangibly Dantesque and Maali Almeida meets Dr. Ranee Sridharan—no doubt a fictional rendition of Rajani Thiranagama—who sort of plays Virgil to Almeida’s Dante. She appears to be some kind of gate-keeper in the afterworld. The fictionalization of Rajani Thirangama in this way seems rather distasteful, a questionable narrative choice, and rather platitudinous at that; an attempt at appealing to the NGO crowd that romanticize and venerate Rajani Thiranagama and her legacy, albeit without an iota of her courage and conviction.

This is not to diminish Rajani Thiranagama’s significance as an activist, and her death which has accorded her the status of martyrdom; rather it is Karunatilaka’s frivolous and unskilled treatment of her that I find, well, almost disrespectful. For example, look at the following section where Dr. Ranee tells the protagonist about her husband and family: “He supported me though he didn’t agree with me. He stopped all politics after I died. He’s Down There. Looking after my girls. He’s a lovely father. And I visit him in dreams and tell him whenever I can.” This kind of writing is corny, to say the least.

Karunatilaka glibly oversimplifies the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict and the youth insurrection in the 80s. The overall point appears to be as Sri Lankans we just like to murder each other. For example look at the following descriptions of abbreviations which are clearly included in the novel to make life easier for the western readership:

LTTE – The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

· Want a separate Tamil state

· Prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this.

JVP – The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna

· Want to overthrow the capitalist state

· Are willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.

UNP – The United National Party

· Known as the Uncle Nephew Party

· In power since the late ’70s and embroiled in the above two wars.

My point is not that there isn’t any truth in these claims, rather they oversimplify and particularly so for a western readership, the civil unrest in the 80s. And these oversimplifications and generalizations help establish the larger point of the novel, which is that we are a dumb and animalistic people: “If we have an animal as a national symbol, why not a pangolin, something original that we can own.

Like many Sri Lankans, pangolins have big tongues, thick hides and small brains. They pick on ants, rats and anything smaller than them. They hide in terror when faced with bullies and get up to mischief when the lights are out. They are hundreds of thousands of years old and are plodding towards extinction.” The number of “orientalist” clichés that Karunatilaka has packed into these lines is quite impressive. We (the Sri Lankans) are primarily animals. We look like animals and act like animals. We are cowardly bullies and we are headed towards extinction. We occupy a lower rung of the evolutionary hierarchy. No doubt the discerning judges of the Booker Prize paid due attention to passages such as this and it had a determining impact on their final decision.

There are many Sri Lankan novels about the political unrest since independence: When Memory Dies (A. Sivanandan), Anil’s Ghost (Michael Ondaatje) Funny Boy (Shyam Selvadurai), Reef (Romesh Gunesekera), Moonsoons and Potholes (Manuka Wijesinghe) among others. However, it is Karunatilaka who has truly managed to cash in on the misery of his own people by coming up with the right formula. All the novels mentioned above are more or less better written, better structured and have a better reading of the civil unrest that gripped the country in the 70s and 80s, and at any rate are more compelling as novels. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies has a particularly nuanced reading of Sri Lankan politics since independence. Yet none of them met with the critical success of Maali Almeida.

Perhaps the timing was just right for Karunatilaka’s book, or perhaps it won the acclaim that it did, because its author turns the orientalist nonsense up to twelve. While on the one hand, as I have argued above, the novel oversimplifies the causes behind the violence in the 80s, and shows us as no better than animals, it endlessly indulges in exoticization. One of the novel’s striking aspects is its superficial use of Sri Lankan mythology. Terms such as preta, bodhisattva, varam and kanatte keep coming up over and over again and sometimes for no reason at all.

Consider for a moment the following sentence: “Forgotten smiles and bewildered eyes flutter in the air as the lorry turns into the kanatte” (224). Karunatilaka here appears to deliberately try to make the novel exotic and esoteric. What else could it be? After all there is a perfectly good English word for kanatte which we all know and use. Here is another example: “The man changes his shirt and walks to the bus stop. He jokes with the boy at the cigarette kade and takes the number 134 bus into Colombo.” What on earth is a “cigarette kade”? As an occasional smoker myself I know for a fact that there are no cigarette kades. There are petti kades that sell cigarettes though. If Karunatilaka’s attempt here is to add a “local flavor” to his writing—fatuous as it is—he should at least get his lingo right.

In a novel that trashes Sri Lankans for being Sri Lankan, the only characters who are portrayed in a positive light, with an ethical consciousness and as free agents are those who belong to Colombo’s liberal, English speaking upper middle-class: the protagonist himself, his lover, Dilan Dharmendran (DD) and his friend Jaki. None of these narrative choices are accidental, if anything they are clichés. The only good people in this country, and possibly elsewhere, who are not racist, sexist or homophobic are the westernized liberal middle-class. By now, I’m old enough to know that this is the sort of nonsense that gets you to places. The question then is how are we to come to terms with Maali Almeida? Our first bona fide Booker Prize winning novel.

I have been careful to point out above that, in the final analysis, what Karunatilaka is saying about Sri Lankans is not even altogether untrue. It is true that racism, sexism and our utter collective stupidity have wrecked this country. We are today a defeated, humiliated, and impotent people and many of us are struggling to leave the country altogether. Therefore, I suggest that we understand the failure of Maali Almeida as our own failure. The failure of Maali Almeida, and the failure of Shehan Karunatilaka, reflects the failure of Sri Lanka as a nation, and as a people. I think it is with the acceptance of this reality that we would be able to redeem ourselves as a people, and hopefully someday produce a decent novel or two. After all, the beginning of wisdom is the realization that one is one’s own problem.