“Chasing Queers with Cameras”: Objects, a “Prosthetic Man,” and the Impotent Witnessing of War in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Abstract

This paper approaches Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as a tongue-in-cheek queer reimagining of Sri Lanka’s bloody 1980s when the government battled Tamil militant groups as well as an armed insurgency in the south. This queer revision is filtered through dysfunctional things. Dead and amnesiac, the protagonist recalls the chain of events as it is reconstituted by broken cameras, blurry photographs, accessories with slippery meanings, and repurposed sports and military equipment. Positing that dysfunctional objects are related to queer positionality and mediate the retelling, I explore their role in producing a satirical queer fictional war history. I argue that objects, in terms of how they symbolize witnessing war, enact impotent witnessing, a conceit discursively premised on the Sinhala queerphobic/transphobic insult ponnaya, which signifies male queerness and/or impotence, including political impotence. Objects make a virtue of impotence when producing a satirical war record, probing whether a queer war photographer has the prerogative to bear witness to human rights violations and atrocities from his subaltern position. The paper finds that objects’ impotent witnessing metaphorically depicts some silenced and non-hegemonic voices from the 1980s war history, reflecting a politics of foregrounding delegitimized and non-normative accounts of that time.