Haven’t there been enough historical events where photographs have chronicled the horrific essence of conflicts and wars? Haven’t we all shed a tear for photojournalists who gave up their lives attempting to capture every second of brutality and injustice through the lens of their camera?
In 2022, if there’s one book that really touched my conscience, it was Shehan Karunatilaka’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Previously published as Chats with the Dead in 2020, it is a tribute to all those who wield the camera with an honest agenda and the hope that “photos... could stop wars.” It is true that words can be rewritten and pages of history can be torn out, but no one can tamper with pictures, not when they bear witness to history.
The book is a dark satire about a fictional war photographer, Maali Almeida, who wakes up dead amidst the terrifying and very real historical setting of the Sri Lankan civil war in the 1980s. Almeida documented countless atrocities through his prized Nikon camera. From shooting “the government minister who looked on while the savages of ’83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants”, to taking “portraits of disappeared journalists and vanished activists, bound and gagged and dead in custody”, Almeida has seen and photographed it all.
But now that he is dead, there isn’t much he can do. He is granted seven moons a week to retrieve his stash of photographs “that will bring down governments”.
{{/usCountry}}But now that he is dead, there isn’t much he can do. He is granted seven moons a week to retrieve his stash of photographs “that will bring down governments”.
{{/usCountry}}The modesty of Karunatilaka’s prose is layered with the occurrence of violent insurrections taking place on the island at the time. Wars are neither easy to interpret nor justify, but the author’s cool and somewhat debauched hero — a queer atheist who gambles — makes the solemn climate of this dreadful period of Sri Lanka’s history extremely reader-friendly.
This is a fine addition to the great body of literature emerging from Sri Lanka.
Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram.