KAMALIKA PIERIS

The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.

The Booker Prize is a high-profile literary award, it is greeted with much fanfare.  It is considered   a great honor  for authors to be nominated for the long list and selected for the  short list. The nomination   greatly helps the sale of the book as well.

 Shehan Karunatilaka won  the Booker Prize in 2022 with Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.   The  story is  set in Colombo, in 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler,  closeted gay was  murdered. He now ‘wakes up’, in the afterworld   and observes what happens in the living world to those connected to him.

Maali Almeida was killed for taking photos of the 1983 anti- Tamil riots. The  main action, a hunt for a  few negatives of the 1983 riots is, in my view, too flimsy  for such a lengthy story, but Booker judges have thought otherwise.

The book was described as a whodunit, a  thriller, a metaphysical thriller  and also as a  South Asian epic. The judges said what set the book apart was the ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques.”  It was a serious romp that takes the reader to the murderous horrors of civil war in Sri Lanka,  they said

Was it important for you that such a violent story should also be funny  interviewers asked. I don’t know if that was intentional, replied Shehan, speaking  after the Booker win. There’s a Sri Lankan gallows humor. Even today, despite the uncertainty there’s a lot of people cracking jokes. Personally, I  enjoy and gravitate towards literature that has a bawdy sense of humor,  he said .

Critics noted the political orientation of the book. One critic said the book was razor sharp indictment of  Sri Lanka politics and society , morbidly funny. Another said Shehan Karunatilaka’s epic novel is a powerful evocation of Sri Lanka’s dark and brutal past.’

Shehan wanted to write a novel which had a political orientation. I wanted to write about 2009 and the end of the war, what if the dead could speak. But I was reluctant to engage there. 1989 seemed like a safe” period. It was far back and .most of the protagonists and antagonists from that time were dead,  said Shehan.

 Maali Almeida was a  war photographer, who  it appears, accepted commissions from all sides, from the government, the Tamils, the  NGOs. Maali had photographed scenes from the war zone.He had photographed the war in both north and  east. There are shots from Vavuniya, Batticaloa and Trincomalee, he recalled.

The novel  is full of references to the Sinhala-Tamil clashes starting from 1977. Maali Almeida  was killed for taking photos of the 1983 anti-Tamil riots and as a ghost he had plenty to say about these riots. 1983 was an atrocity. 8000 homes, 5000 shops ,150,000 homeless, said Maali Almeida. Who will speak for the many victims of 1983,  of men who burned Tamil homes in 1983, of the  Tamil lawyer killed by Sinhala mob in 1983, he asked.

Maali had taken black and white prints of  the 1983 attack. He had photographed rioters setting  people on fire, Sinhala men in sarong dancing outside burning shops, cops watching Tamil women dragged out of buses. He had photographed a  naked Tamil kicked to death, and another naked Tamil man being taunted by boys with sticks. He had also photographed  a boy and his mother beaten with sticks,  a toddler with broken arm, and man with cleaver hacking an old man.

The novel then  drops 1983 and moves to  the Eelam wars in the north and east. The book has many references to the Eelam war. Eelam war ended  12 years ago but books like this will help to keep the   war  fresh in the minds of  gullible ,  ignorant  western readers.

Maali  was there when the army shelled in Mullaitivu. He photographed a bunker stuffed with terrified parents and screaming children.  Maali focuses on  the plight of  civilians caught in the war. The photographs showed how people are dying in the war zone, explained Maali.  Tigers and army were killing civilians.  77 Tamil civilians were killed in the Omanthai massacre, he said.

His  emphasis was on family and children, on  burned homes, dead children. Maali recalled  four bodies baking in the Jaffna dust, a dog, man, mother and child. Maali  was there when the army shelled in Mullaitivu. He photographed a bunker stuffed with terrified parents and screaming children.

Maali recalls other photographs of a similar nature,  of mother and daughter buried under bricks in Kilinochchi, of family fleeing the shelling in Vavuniya  of smoldering remains of an infant in Akkaraipattu,  of dead children displayed on mats, women tied to poles , children in bunkers, tiny heads tucked under tiny   elbows ,eyes wide and empty,  of children bleeding in front of me.”

The novel  fleetingly takes up  an   anti-Eelam   position.  Only Lankans will have beauty pageants and cricket matches while the country burns, said the ghosts. Partying after beauty contests while our soldiers die,  they said.

 Then the novel  changes focus. It speaks ofInnocent Tamils” ,  Vanni refugee camp   and the plight  air raid survivors trapped in  camps. It speaks of Minister Cyril Wijeratne later referred to a Minister Cyril  and to Major Raja Udugampola.There are negative references to the army. They say STF are dumping bodies left and right in Labugama forest reserve, said a ghost.  The ghost Sena” stationed his  ghostly army with a precision  our military never had, observed Maali.

There are oblique  references to the Sinhala Buddhist culture. The ledger used in the afterworld had a  Bo leaf design on the cover,  there was a low caste  yaka called Narada and   blow jobs were available in Anuradhapura. One ghost had studied at Sri Bodhi College, another  had perched cross legged beside a stone Buddha.  The  novel speaks of the  ‘Sinhala script which the country claims is their only language. ( continued)