The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: From Elizabethan Despair to Ecocritical Hope

Abstract

Sri Lankan literature in English occupies an important place in postcolonial literature but can also position itself in the arc of ecocriticism. The aim of this paper is to explore Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker Prize winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by tracing a transition from despair to hope. Thematising the civil war in Sri Lanka, the novel depicts the Afterlife from the perspective of a recently dead photographer called Maali, who tries to solve the mystery of his death and retrieve some of his photographs. In the plot, despair and hope are of paramount importance and take on interesting traits. While the portrayal of despair strongly resembles its Elizabethan conception and can pave the way for intertextual interactions with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, hope takes on ecocritical traits through a positive form of fragmentation, which bridges human/nonhuman boundaries, and a decolonial reading of the Sri Lankan landscape. By analysing specific excerpts from the novel, this paper will underline the ecocritical themes in the novel and highlight compelling connections with Spenser’s text. Thus, Sri Lankan ecocritical literature will be explored and interesting aspects of Karunatilaka’s novel, such as the transition from despair to hope, will be brought to the foreground.