Novels should say something.
Under the best circumstances, they should say something wise about the world, or they should say something beautiful about human nature, or they should say something controversial, or something funny, but at the very least, they need to say something.
Most people in most social situations, when pressed to state publicly their opinions about something will, smartly, walk back their most radical positions into something that everyone can agree upon. When you’re standing around the water cooler with your co-workers and someone says, “Hey did you catch President Biden’s speech last night?” you shake your head and go, “Yeah, politics sure are crazy, huh?” You’re out on a date and you’ve just watched the worst movie of your life, but the attractive person sitting next to you asks what you thought about the film, so you go, “The music was good!” Your spouse asks you what you think of the new table they just bought, and you say, “Yeah, I like it! Let’s put it in the corner!” These are normal reactions that normal people have to avoid getting into a non-normal and long discussion that may potentially get heated.
But novels are not social interactions. You’re not putting 100,000 words onto paper to be polite. Your novel needs to say something. It needs to exist for a reason. On the day that I’m riding in an elevator and someone turns to me and says, “Wow, crazy weather we’re having. Oh, by the way, what are your thoughts on the Sri Lankan Civil War that lasted over thirty years?” I might say, “Well, there was some violence on both sides. Violence is wrong, you know? Anyway, here’s my floor.”
But if you ask me to write almost 400 pages about this conflict and the best that I come up with is: “Terrorism is bad and people shouldn’t kill people“ you are definitely free to accuse me of being an idiot who has nothing to say.
So anyway, Shehan Karunatilaka, the author of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is an idiot and he has nothing to say.
“Ok, but what’s the book about, Kevin?” Nothing. It’s about nothing. The main character is a gay Sri Lankan photographer who was killed in 1990 and he has one week to exist as a ghost before he makes peace with his death and “moves on” in the afterlife. I won’t be getting into the literary quality of the book (it is 400 pages long and doesn’t go anywhere) or the conclusions that I think Karunatilaka is making about gay men (which are not positive in the slightest) but instead I just want to focus on the politics.
To do this, I want to make a very, very, very reductive explanation of the Sri Lankan Civil War. I’m going to make this short, because I don’t have 400 pages worth of information about this topic, and you don’t have 400 pages worth of patience to read about it.
The Sri Lankan Civil War began as a result of a Singhalese-controlled government in the Singhalese-majority country of Sri Lanka systemically and repeatedly attempted to ethnically cleanse the Sri Lankan Tamil minority and Indian Tamil minority, usually done through government sanctioned mob violence in Tamil communities. The Tamils eventually react violently to this repression and systemic ethnic cleansing. According to one source, The Tamil Centre for Human Rights, over 53,000 Tamil civilians were killed and over 25,000 presumed dead from 1960 to 2004 at the hands of mob violence incited by the Sinhalese. The International Truth and Justice Project while quoting the United Nations claims over 17,000 Tamil civilians killed in 2009 alone. Deaths of soldiers on both sides seem to have been over 26,000 each, but numbers of Sinhalese civilian deaths are far fewer than the Tamil. All parties involved agree that millions of civilians in the Tamil-majority Northeast have been displaced since the roots of the conflict began in the 1950s. This violence was preceded by years of mob violence either willfully ignored or condoned by the government in attempts to ethnically cleanse the Tamil minority. One of the inciting incidents for the violence was the declaration that the official language of Sri Lanka would only be Sinhalese, in a blatant attempt to force the Tamil-speaking minority out of government positions. And of course, it goes without saying that Tamil civilians experienced high rates of sexual violence being done to them by the Sinhalese government forces. This is all important context that Karunatilka does not provide to the reader.
Now, you may be thinking that I’m presenting a bit of a one-sided view of the conflict, and you would be correct. To balance, I think we need to discuss the LTTE, the militant wing of the Tamil minority. They were the originators of the suicide vest, and popularized suicide bombing as a method of fighting. I have to say that resorting to tactics such as these, as much as it’s demonized in western media, is more the symptoms of a desperate, outnumbered, and outgunned population fighting back in whatever way they can. There were thousands of Sri Lankan (Sinhalese and Muslim) civilians killed by the LTTE, but it needs to be pointed out, that number is far less than the number of Tamil civilians They have been credibly accused of using child soldiers, which I think is indefensible. They cannot be said to be the “good guys” because I don’t believe that there can be “good guys” in a situation like this, but I would argue that they were victims, and they did as much as they could to try to change their country to allow people like them to be able to survive. Many of us would do the same if put in their position.
And so when I’m having dinner with my wife’s family one evening and someone leans over to me and says, “You know, suicide bombing is really bad,” I would go, “Yeah. Yeah you’re right. It is a bad thing.” But if I was put in a position where I could write out some information and context about the Sri Lankan Civil War, I would do it the way that I just did: “The LTTE resorted to devious tactics when faced with the knowledge that tens of thousands – if not over one hundred thousand – of their civilians were killed, many of them sexually assaulted, and millions displaced. I can’t condone those methods, but I certainly can understand why they did them.”
Shehan Karunatilaka, coward that he is, tries to “both sides” this conflict throughout his novel.
Ok, wait, it’s not fair to call him a coward. I take that back. Shehan Karunatilaka was born in Sri Lanka, close to Colombo, and across the island from the predominantly Tamil North and Northeast coasts. I presume he is Sinhalese. I’m not sure if he grew up in Sri Lanka, or saw much of the conflict, or was affected by it directly, but honestly, I don’t think it matters. I understand him a little bit. As someone who came of age in the aftermath of 9/11 and someone whose first impression of Afghans and Iraqis were that they were “terrorists”, I get what that does to your mind. I get what it’s like to be afraid, rightly or wrongly, that at any moment, someone nearby might blow themselves up. I get what it’s like to be constantly fed a stream of rhetoric that one particular group hates us, and that group is dangerous. I get what it’s like to be surrounded by people who feel this way, and thus you have no other opinion or frame of reference to understand what’s happening outside of your bubble. I get you, Shehan.
So whether Karunatilaka grew up in New Zealand, or he was living in Jaffna for a while, or someone he knew got killed in a suicide bomb, or if he just read about it in the news, it doesn’t really matter. Growing up in such a political environment messes with your head a bit, and you maybe stop realizing that the terrorist might be a freedom fighter. And perhaps at the end of the day, your strongest, kindest impulse is the ability to say, “Ok, we both did bad things.”
It’s also not fair to call him a coward, because I wonder if there even was anything he was too scared to say. For a lot of people, this novel is their first introduction to the conflict in Sri Lanka that lasted decades and killed tens of thousands of people. I am, in fact, the weird little freak that studies this type of thing for a living, and even I hadn’t thought about Sri Lanka in a long time. There are many, I assume, who were completely unaware of the situation at all, and bringing those people from having zero knowledge about a subject to having a little bit is a small success, and I think we should commend Karunatilaka for this. Maybe his goal was to tell a different story, and just added in elements of Sri Lankan history as flavor.
I want to believe that’s true, but I just don’t think it is.
The book is long, tedious, and repetitive, so I can’t really get into the specifics of the plot, but the climax of the book goes like this:
Our protagonist Maali Almeida, as a ghost, has been trying to get his friends to publish photographs that seem to implicate the Sri Lankan government in the killing of Tamil civilians in 1983. I looked into this a little bit, and the photos are either meant to include an actual photo taken of a Tamil man about to be killed by a group of Sinhalese, or a made-up version of something similar. It is noteworthy, I think, that the events of the novel take place in 1990, but this photograph was taken seven years earlier. Apparently Maali decided it wasn’t really important to publish these photographs as the violence was actually occurring. I found myself imagining a different protagonist who would have been working towards publishing these photos in a newspaper to show the Sinhalese residents of Colombo that their government was not to be trusted and that the Tamils deserved respect and protection, or just trying to get the newspapers to talk about this violence in the hopes that it might be stopped. Those ideas never really enter into the novel’s themes. Instead, several years after the incident takes place, presumably after many others were hurt by the resulting conflict where the photograph was taken, our protagonist displays the photographs, context-less, in a small art studio. In the world that the novel takes place in, not much changes.
While the protagonist has set up these photographs, a Tamil suicide bomber has, despite being a lowly driver, been able to get in close proximity to high-ranking government officials, who seem to have had some involvement in killing civilians (although the government’s role in discriminating against and sanctioning violence against the Tamils is never mentioned.) Our photographer protagonist is arguing against using the suicide vest to kill these government officials. There are other people in the building who will be killed.
In the end, the suicide vest detonates, and the government officials are killed along with a couple dozen government workers working in the building at the time. At this moment, ghosts of dead LTTE members are watching and celebrating, which I find to be a particularly ghoulish characterization of a group of people trying to avenge the murder of their family members. Now, I think analyzing the ethics of a suicide bomb is especially difficult and thorny, but the book insists that I do, so here I go.
The novel insists that such an action is evil behavior, but does not offer an alternative. And if it does, I find it to be unsatisfactory. The violence of 1983 is long past in the events of the novel, yet those who have perpetrated it have gone unpunished. In ways that are impossible to ever accurately know, tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were murdered, and the novel would like for us to equate them with the two dozen office workers killed in the suicide bomb. Our alternative to this violence is displaying some photographs in a small, private art gallery, which will do…something? In both the novel and real world events, the conflict continued long after 1990, going all the way up to 2009. Karunatilaka seems to be suggesting that nothing can be done about these killings. Releasing information about the killings does nothing, and violence does nothing.
The thing is though, the suicide vest seems to have had a bigger impact, didn’t it? At least those responsible for murder ended up killed. There’s a much bigger discussion to be had about the officer workers as well. While I don’t advocate for killing someone that works in the office of the government that kills civilians, I also don’t really believe that this person might be completely innocent either. Are they not at least partially complicit by helping a government like that? The novel wants to lead me to the conclusion that the suicide bombers are just as bad as roving gangs of murderers trying to ethnically cleanse an ethnic minority from their country, and sorry, but I am not convinced that is true.
And again, I do not understand Karunatilaka’s motivations in writing this novel. I tend to be cynical, and so my assumption is that he would like to share the enlightened centrist message that “every kind of violence is bad,” and like, yeah, ok, nobody was questioning that to begin with. He may have wanted to educate, but I don’t feel like I learned more about the conflict after reading this novel. In fact, in many cases, I feel as though he was working against presenting Tamils in a humanizing way, or trying to explain the circumstances that led to the civil war to begin with. Here are a few of the examples that I can remember:
One of the side characters is a homophobic, ultra-rich and powerful Tamil member of the government, despite lack of government representation being a core issue of the conflict. This character goes on a long tirade about all the racist prejudices he has.
Another side character that features prominently is the ghost of someone murdered by the LTTE. She is a matronly figure and we are meant to like her and sympathize with her.
There are no characters in the novel that are the ghosts of people killed by Sinhalese. We spend a lot of time with suicide victims, but never any meaningful discussions about the violence done to Tamils.
There are no discussions of the recent history of Sri Lanka, or how the conflict got started. In the world of the novel, it is because of political factionalism that people get killed and not any material reason.
Two Tamil characters are presented as being devious, and implied incestuous, despite being managers of an NGO trying to share information about the killing of Tamils. I cannot stress enough that Karunatilaka had the opportunity to share information about and the opinions of Tamils killed in the violence initiated by the government, but instead just to make them crafty little liars that sleep with their siblings.
The ghosts of dead Tamils and communists are working with literal demons. The demons in the novel are presented as literal, straight-up monsters with no ambiguity to them. The ghosts are fully aware of the evil of the demons, and happily make deals with them.
Another Tamil character is a drug addict. She probably comes off the best out of all of the non-Sinhalese characters, although this comes at the expense of very rarely (if ever) mentioning that she is Tamil. (I actually forgot about this until I remembered that she’s the niece of the racist, homophobic Tamil guy I mentioned earlier.)
Towards the beginning, in the first 25 pages, the LTTE is described as “slaughter[ing] Tamil civilians and moderates]” to achieve their goal of a separatist state. No other information is given about why they want a separatist state.
If this book was the only piece of information that I had about the Sri Lankan Civil War, I don’t think I would understand anything about the Sri Lankan Civil War. I would think that the government started killing people for no reason, and that some civilians were crazy and bloodthirsty, so they started blowing themselves up for no reason. I would assume that Tamils were horrible, bigoted, mafia-esque bad guys. This novel says nothing at best.
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