The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and Postmemories of Sri Lanka’s Era of Terror

Abstract

This article argues that Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida articulates a “postmemorial” supplement to Sri Lanka’s Era of Terror of the 1980s—a period that is largely underrepresented in the Sri Lankan anglophone novel and has been serially subjected to official amnesiac politics. By deploying the gaze of a dead queer photographer who seeks to constitute a non-existing archive of violence using a broken camera, the novel presents an alternative historiography that subverts the grand patriarchal narrative of the “righteous” administration of President J.R. Jayawardena. Extending and adapting Marianne Hirsch’s framework of “postmemory,” the article illustrates how Karunatilaka’s novel uses limited photographic and historical material as “testimonial objects” to forge a transgenerational connection between the present-day Sri Lankans and the victims, witnesses, and survivors of the Era of Terror. Karunatilaka insists that the postgeneration should reckon with the Era of Terror to better engage with the crises of memory, democracy, justice, and accountability facing Sri Lanka today. The novel thus calls for a transgenerational “addressable other”—in line with Dori Laub’s framing—for the historical trauma of the Era of Terror.