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

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. By deploying the gaze of a dead queer photographer who seeks to constitute a non-existent archive of violence using a broken camera, the novel presents an alternative historiography that subverts the grand patriarchal narrative of the state's supposedly righteous administration. By adapting, extending, and localizing Marianne Hirsch's framework of "postmemory," the article illustrates how Karunatilaka's novel uses limited photographic and historical material as "testimonial objects" (Hirsch 178) to forge a transgenerational connection between present-day Sri Lankans and the victims, witnesses, and survivors of the Era of Terror. The article also argues that Karunatilaka uses Buddhism in two ways: to invoke an Indigenous cultural register with which to stage the unprocessed trauma of political violence and to satirize the state's agenda. In this fashion, the novel calls for a transgenerational "addressable other"—in line with Dori Laub's framing—for the historical trauma of the 1980s. Karunatilaka insists that the present-day generation should reckon with the Era of Terror to better engage with the crises of memory, justice, and accountability that Sri Lanka faces today.