“Most Lankans are Silent Seethers”: Haunting as Resistance, Spectral Temporality, and “the Dark Heart of Lanka” in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Shreyaa Gajraj; Nagendra Kumar

Authors

Shreyaa Gajraj Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee
Nagendra Kumar Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee

Keywords:

haunting, absent presences, temporality, Sri Lanka, mnemonic trigger

Abstract

This paper foregrounds Shehan Karunatilaka’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’s function as a reflection on the concept of haunting as resistance against forgetting, focusing on the notion of spectral temporality within the context of Sri Lanka itself as a spectral space informed by cultural amnesia. Leveraging Avery Gordon’s framework of ‘haunting’ through her work Ghostly Mattersas a component of social life, and Jacques Derrida’s specterintroduced in his work Specters of Marx, the paper follows traces of absent presences by interrogating the ways in which Sri Lanka’s ghosts demand reclamation of silenced events and delayed justice. This paper argues that The Seven Moons deploys haunting as a mode of political resistance through certain interconnected mechanisms rooted in Sri Lanka’s post-war context: enforced disappearance as state practice, photography as counter archive against institutional erasure, and the figure of Mahakali as expression of collective rage – all grounded in specific “sites of death”. It looks at enforced disappearance as a tool of state terror strategically employed by the Sri Lankan state, alongside laying bare distinctive triggers that actively participate in resisting institutionalized erasure. Finally, it evokes the haunting quality of certain sites of death suggesting their temporal discontinuity.

Author Biographies

Shreyaa Gajraj, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee

Shreyaa Gajraj is a research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India. Her research focuses on the Sri Lankan civil war, exploring themes of trauma and memory.
Nagendra Kumar, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee

Nagendra Kumar is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. He is an expert in English Language, Literature, and Communication Studies. In addition to authoring the critically acclaimed book The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee: A Cultural Perspective (Atlantic, 2001), his work has appeared in esteemed journals such as South Asian Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Asiatic, Rupkatha: Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Caesura: Journal of Philological and Humanistic Studies, IUP Journal of English Studies, and Literary Voice, among others.

References

Brockmeier, Jens. “Remembering and Forgetting: Narrative as Cultural Memory.” Culture & Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1, Mar. 2002, pp. 15–43, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067x0281002.

Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag.” Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, Verso, 2016, pp. 76–105.

Buthpitiya, Vindhya. “Absence in Technicolour: Protesting Enforced Disappearances in Northern Sri Lanka.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 28, no. S1, Apr. 2022, pp. 118–34, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13758.

Cronin-Furman, Kate, and Roxani Krystalli. “The Things They Carry: Victims’ Documentation of Forced Disappearance in Colombia and Sri Lanka.” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 27, no. 1, Aug. 2020, pp. 79-101, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120946479.

De Brigard, Felipe. “The Nature of Memory Traces.” Philosophy Compass, vol. 9, no., June 2014, pp. 402–14, https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12133.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Routledge Classics, 2006.

De Alwis, Malathi. ‘“Disappearance’ and ‘Displacement’ in Sri Lanka”. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 378–91, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fep024.

Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, Sept. 2012, pp.–24, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.

Freud, Sigmund. "The uncanny." Romantic Writings. Routledge, 2017, pp. 318-325.

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Gatti, Gabriel, and Jaume Peris Blanes. “The Deviated Mourning of the Disappeared: Reimagining Disappearance and Transcending Its Tropes.” Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 40, no. 1, Wiley, Sept. 2020, pp. 54–68, https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.13138.

Gwin, Minrose. “Introduction: Reading History, Memory, and Forgetting.” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 40, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–10, www.jstor.org/stable/20077901 .

Holloway, Julian, and James Kneale. “Locating Haunting: A Ghost-Hunter’s Guide.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 15, no. 3, July 2008, pp. 297–312, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474008091329.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “Notes and Sketches.” Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Stanford University Press, 2002.

Hoag, Trevor L. “Ghosts of Memory: Mournful Performance and the Rhetorical Event of Haunting (Or: Specters of Occupy)”. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, vol. 10, no. 3/4, 2014, pp. 1-22, https://liminalities.net/10-3/ghosts.pdf.

internationales literaturfestival berlin. “Shehan Karunatilaka: Die Sieben Monde Des Maali Almeida // the Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (EN).” YouTube, 12 Sept. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6SwiejRmGw.

Jayasuriya, Maryse. “Terror, Trauma, Transitions: Representing Violence in Sri Lankan Literature.” Indialogs, vol. 3, no. Violences, Apr. 2016, p. 195, http://dx.doi.org/10.5565/rev/indialogs.48.

Karunatilaka, Shehan. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Penguin Random House India, 2022.

Kirss, Tiina. "Seeing Ghosts: Theorizing Haunting in Literary Texts". Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma, edited by Philipp Schweighauser et al., University of Toronto Press, 2013, pp. 21-44, https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442664197-002.

Lincoln, Martha, and Bruce Lincoln. “Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 57, no. 1, Jan. 2015, pp. 191–220, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417514000644.

Lee, C. “Haunting Effects of Spectral Spaces in Postcolonial Literature.” Research Scholar: An International Refereed Journal of Literary Explorations, vol. 4, no. 3, 2016, pp. 20–32. https://hdl.handle.net/1887/46837.

Łukaszyk, E. A. “Ghosts, Eco-Queer, Sri Lankan History: Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, vol. 23, no. 1, Aug. 2024, pp. 156-78, https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.23.1.2024.4067.

Lim, Yiru. “Fictive Realities: Witnessing and the Imagination in the Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.” Reading Violence and Trauma in Asia and the World, edited by Yiru Lim and Kit Ying Lye, Routledge, 2024, pp. 38–49.

Mathew, Raisun. “The Mayhem of In Between Existence: Decoding Transitional Liminality in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”. Journal of Arts, vol. 13, no. 2, April 2024, pp. 78-92, IIS University, https://shorturl.at/GZfdx

Saha, Ashmita, and Mallika Ghosh Sarbadhikary. “Myth, Mystery, and Murder: Trauma and Resistance in the Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.” Critical South Asian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, Aug. 2024, pp. 5–13, https://doi.org/10.33182/csas.v2i1.3255.

Sharma, Navin, and Priyanka Tripathi. “Human Rights and Literature: A Study of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”. Southeast Asian Review of English, vol. 60, no. 1, 516 July 2023, pp. 171-191, https://doi.org/10.22452/sare.vol60no1.10.

Trigg, Dylan. “The Place of Trauma: Memory, Hauntings, and the Temporality of Ruins.” Memory Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, Jan. 2009, pp. 87–101, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698008097397.

Thiranagama, Sharika. In My Mother’s House Civil War in Sri Lanka. University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Valančiūnas, Deimantas. “Haunting Memories: Sri Lankan Civil War, Trauma and Diaspora in Literature and Film.” South Asian Diaspora, vol. 13, no. 1, May 2020, pp. 37-49, https://doi.org/10.1080/19438192.2020.1767959.

Van Wagenen, Aimee. “An Epistemology of Haunting: A Review Essay.” Critical Sociology, vol. 30, no. 2, Mar. 2004, pp. 287–98, https://doi.org/10.1163/156916304323072116.

Wijewardene, Shermal. 2024. “‘Chasing Queers with Cameras’: Objects, a ‘Prosthetic Man,’ and the Impotent Witnessing of War in the Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.” South Asian Review, September, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2024.2380182.

Zarook, Gnei Soraya. 2023. ‘“The Missing Are Considered Dead”: Reflections on a Declaration.” Journal of Genocide Research 26 (4): 495-505. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2023.2212514.