SPECTRAL MEMORIES AND HISTORICAL VIOLENCE: A HAUNTOLOGICAL READING OF POSTCOLONIAL TRAUMA IN THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA

Abstract

Through the theoretical framework of Jacques Derrida's hauntology, this article analyzes Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022), placing the book within the discourse of spectral politics, postcolonial trauma, and collective memory. It contends that the novel uses the ghost as an ethical and political intervention that opposes state-sanctioned forgetfulness about Sri Lanka's civil war, the JVP uprising, and systematic extrajudicial violence, in addition to using it as a narrative device. Derrida's idea of the specter as an absence that demands justice beyond the bounds of law and historiography is highlighted by Maali Almeida's disembodied narration, which permits the articulation of suppressed truths inaccessible within bodily existence and juridico-political institutions. The study shows how the non-linear narrative structure of Karunatilaka creates a hauntological temporality where past, present, and future collapse into a "time out of joint," allowing suppressed histories to resurface and disturb national reconciliation narratives. The article argues that the novel depicts the traumatic return of the repressed, revealing unresolved grief, institutional silence, and the moral failure of post-war reconciliation mechanisms, drawing on Derrida, Gordon, Luckhurst, and Peeren. The text politicizes the afterlife, making the ghost a symbol of resistance who bears witness to unresolved historical debts and unacknowledged violence. In the end, by extending hauntological theory beyond its Euro-American contexts and proving its crucial relevance to South Asian post-conflict societies, this study advances postcolonial trauma studies. In the face of historical erasure, it presents The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as a hauntological archive that demands collective remembering as a moral and political necessity.