Into a Haunted World

Sri Lankan novelist Vajra Chandrasekera grew up reading the stories of Western literature as if they were science fiction.

Now, as a writer, Chandrasekera views speculative fiction as an opportunity to depict different types of worlds than we typically inhabit—as well as different kinds of personhood. His latest novel, Rakesfall, explores the permeability of the self, following two characters as they’re reincarnated across histories and worlds, from the mythic past to modern Sri Lanka to the far future Earth. Through endless lifetimes together, the characters find themselves trapped in cycles of violence and betrayal, haunted by their past lives.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Chandrasekera to discuss the weaponization of religious myths in Sri Lankan Buddhism, the role of haunting and possession in his work, and what it means to be living in a postapocalyptic world.

While Rakesfall spans a number of genres and includes parables, fables, creation myths, descriptions of a TV show, a play, and even instructions for a game, you chose to publish it as science fiction. So how do you view the possibilities of science fiction as a genre? What I like about speculative fiction broadly in any of its subgenres, science fiction included, is that it allows you to be free of constraints in what you want to depict: We can choose to depict not only times and places other than the ones we inhabit but also different kinds of personhood or selfhood. A great deal more play is acceptable, I think, in speculative fiction, and there’s less expectation of availability, or the way that a text becomes available to the reader.

My take on this is perhaps a little different because I grew up reading a lot of fiction set in, for example, the US or England. For me, all of that was a bit science fictional anyway: Here is this fantasy land, where the rules are very different, and everything that people experience is very different. I used to read Western literary fiction as if it were a kind of fantasy novel because I had to figure out the rules, the terrain, and how things work. These are things that are implicit to readers in the West, but readers from outside the West have to figure them out on the fly.

That’s also why I like to write speculative fiction in a way that incorporates a fairly conventional Sri Lanka. There are sections of Rakesfall that are very straightforwardly set in Sri Lanka, which a lot of speculative fiction readers respond to as if they were reading a fantasy world. I think that shows that the line between the kinds of reading you do is less of a solid line than you might think depending on where your reader comes from. For me, speculative fiction is the form that gives you the most freedom in the sense that your reader is at least a little primed to not take anything for granted.

Rakesfall also includes retellings of myths like the Ramayana and the Jataka tales, and you’ve talked about the ways that religious myths have been used as ideological weapons and can even determine the outcome of elections. Can you say more about the weaponization of myths? How are religious myths used to manipulate political narratives? In Sri Lanka, the demographically dominant religion is Buddhism, which is often framed in Sri Lanka as Sinhala Buddhism. Sinhala Buddhism came out of late-19th-century anticolonial movements in British Ceylon, and it was formulated in a very racialized way: While it was about resisting the British Empire, it was also about the supremacy of the Sinhala ethnic group, the demographically dominant racial group on the island, at the expense of the island’s minorities, the Tamil people and Muslim people. Being Muslim in Sri Lanka is seen as a racial category, which dates back to the mid- to late 19th century, when British colonial censuses categorized various groups as racial groups regardless of their origin or their preceding self-definitions. They then allocated parliamentary power based on those demographically determined racial categorizations.

Since before independence, Sri Lanka had these connections between racial grouping, religious grouping, and political power. Upon independence, Sinhala Buddhism became a unifying force for the Sinhala people and a way to exert political power over the minorities on the island, which led to a considerable amount of violence. There were pogroms, as well as legally enforced discrimination at multiple levels, including language rights and the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of people who were then deported over the next twenty years to India. This culminated in the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009), which ended in genocide.

All of this was undergirded by a very strong Sinhala Buddhist ideological camp, which was represented by Buddhist monks of the various Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhist nikayas, or sects. Any Sinhala politician who wanted to win an election had to make these claims to the protection of Buddhism. The protection of Buddhism, quote unquote, was inserted into our first republican constitution in the 1970s, after independence, and it remains there to this day. It has become something of a political flash point from every angle. During the war, for example, it was very common for Buddhist monks to be extremely militant, aggressive, and jingoistic in support of the war and in support of the violence.

For me, Buddhism has always been inflected by racism, xenophobia, and violence. The way I write about Buddhism can’t help but be inflected by this because this is not just the Buddhism of my lifetime but also the Sri Lankan Buddhism of the last century and more. It’s very much a concern in the present day: Sinhala politics remain exactly where they have been since the 1880s and 1890s, which is to say extremely racialized and tightly entangled with power.

This violence is a key feature of the novel, and the world of Rakesfall is a haunted world, replete with curses, exorcisms, and demon possession—the dead work, go to law school, have hobbies, and even go on dating apps. Can you say more about the role of haunting in your work? I’ve always liked haunting as a literary concept because it allows you to have figures haunting your text without necessarily taking it over. This is how I treat it in Rakesfall. Many of the ghosts in Rakesfall are the ghosts of the war dead, and that war mirrors the Sri Lankan war. I feel like a great deal of everyday life in Sri Lanka is haunted by the ghosts of the dead, because that’s what happens when a nation-state commits genocide in the name of one people, whether those people care to remember it or not. I think many people would prefer not to remember. But you never stop being haunted by these things that happened and by the people who were lost in that way.

Haunting is a way to speak of not just the dead but also the killed, the murdered, the people who had something taken away from them, who were treated unjustly and who have not received justice. That is, for me, a very primal and very archetypal image of haunting, and I think Sri Lanka in particular—and the world in general—is extremely haunted by all the crimes that are and were committed in the names of various people who may or may not endorse those crimes but nevertheless are bound up in them.

A little bit of us is everyone who ever wrote something that we read or everyone who wrote a song that we loved.

The question of haunting is fundamentally tied to the question of identity and selfhood, as characters navigate experiences of possession. One character “hears her own voice and it is strange and full of strangers, rough and multiple, more teeth than she has in her mouth”; others have multiplicities within them, their hauntings but also their past lives. How do you think about the slipperiness of the self in the novel? One of the ways that reincarnation or rebirth is formulated or imagined in everyday, commonplace life is as a kind of gamified system of moving through levels: You die and then you’re reborn somewhere else, and then you die and you’re reborn somewhere else. You accumulate points or lose points based on your actions. If you get more points, you go upward to heaven; if you lose points, you go down to hell or to animal incarnations. This is a common folk understanding of reincarnation, and this is partly because of the last couple of hundred years of colonial influence—it actually has been called Protestant Buddhism by various scholars.

This obviously contradicts some fairly basic Buddhist actual principles, like anatta, or not-self. The way that I like to reconcile those things is to imagine reincarnation as something that is not tied to any person, because there is really no such thing as a person except in this constellation of biological and psychological elements that we are made of. When we die, those things go away. They decompose and are reformulated materially into other things and other people, so reincarnation is literally true in a very basic way of conservation of mass and energy. But I think culturally we also have something that you could call reincarnation, which is the way we transmit ideas and thoughts and art and everything that we are as people across time through writing. In a way, all the various forms of time-binding technology that we have invented are about reincarnation because you’re making resonant connections with future people.

There’s a James Baldwin quote where he says, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” That is a big part of what I think of as reincarnation in the sense that while time, history, and culture change dramatically, I think we are all a lot more alike than the cult of individuality would like us to admit. We find these deep resonances between people through art and through social contact, and we find ourselves mirrored in other people. We infect other people with ourselves. If you make a deep connection with someone, they take away a part of you. Some part of them is now what used to be you, and vice versa, and you can transmit this across history through art and culture. And that is, in fact, how we are made. A little bit of us is everyone who ever wrote something that we read or everyone who wrote a song that we loved.

I wanted to write a story that could be read as the more literal kind of reincarnation, where people are transmitting themselves across time. At the same time, I wanted the story to be able to read as entirely different people in different eras finding themselves deeply connected through their understanding of history, the way they approach the world, what they think is vital, and the particular relationships that they build with other people that mirror other historical relationships that have existed in time.

You also explore the relationship between history and memory. One character notes that memory is a kind of possession, and others discuss the dangers of sentimentality and holding on to very selective visions of history. how is memory functioning in the novel, and how is memory a kind of possession? It’s similar to how we leave traces of ourselves in other people and vice versa. You know how you remember things from your own childhood, and for a moment, you are literally that child again? It’s just for a minute, but it’s there. Or maybe you remember something incredibly embarrassing that you did, and you very much feel the same cringe response in your body. To me, that is possession in the sense of the malleability and permeability of the self that I’m talking about. If there is no fixed self, if there is no ineradicable hard object somewhere inside our selfhood that you can point to and say, “OK, that’s me, that’s the core of me,” if what you are is instead a flow, a set of processes, then being overtaken by a recurring process from your own past is to be possessed by yourself, a different version of yourself. You can actually see this response when you start to get older just by looking at your body and realizing that it’s getting older, and you have that shock: “Oh God, when did I get these wrinkles? When did my hands get so veiny? Why do my knees hurt?” That voice is the ghost of a younger self.

Rakesfall might be described as an apocalyptic novel, but it’s an apocalypse that keeps on happening—the world keeps ending, and people keep finding ways to survive and resist, whether through living in the city of the dead or regreening a desiccated earth. how do you think about notions of apocalypse? Apocalypse is such a huge part of speculative fiction. It’s practically a genre in its own right, and it’s been done by many great authors. I like to think of apocalypse as something that happened a long time ago, and we are all living in a postapocalyptic world. We can think of apocalypse as something that happened in the centuries of global carnage and pillage that we now genteelly refer to as the colonial era. For me, that was the world’s great apocalypse, and we are all living in its aftermath and picking up the pieces.

The really important thing is that we have to keep picking up the pieces, and we have to keep picking up each other in this postapocalyptic world. That may be all that we can do. In many situations, you do not have the power to make change at the level that you might wish to—and you should try, obviously, because at some point, somebody will be able to, and maybe it’ll be you. But even if you cannot make change at the level that you most deeply desire to, I think it’s the effort of doing it anyway that matters. 

There’s a sense of loss and defeat that apocalypse suggests, and while I do think that is an appropriate response to history and the world, I don’t think it precludes searching for the revolution in every incarnation that we have.

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“The Golden City”

Everybody is happy in the golden city, for a long, long time. Everybody is sad. We have time to be everything in that unspeakable place, before that end at the end of time itself when sacrifice will be called for one last time, when all the worlds collapse into each other’s arms, when we will hold ourselves so tight, timeless and alive—our last breath in our lungs, our hands held in the dark, our lips kept warm in the cold—when we find out what lies beyond worlds and time, what crimes are left to commit, what thrones remain to be overthrown.

But we’re not there yet. In the golden city, the long, blessed future stretches out ahead. Most of our worlds were yet to come. It was fine. It was life. We don’t have to talk about it.

♦

From Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera © 2024. Reprinted in arrangement with Tor Publishing Group.

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