Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka on writing a good sex scene – By Benjamin Law
Source : theage
Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Shehan Karunatilaka. The Sri Lankan author, 47, won the Commonwealth Book Prize, DSC Prize and Gratiaen Prize for his 2010 debut novel, Chinaman. His second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, won last year’s Booker Prize.
POLITICS
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is set in 1989, during the 1987-89 JVP insurrection, a period of Marxist armed revolt against the Sri Lankan government. You were almost a teenager at that time. What are your memories of the era? We lived with this idea of perpetual war. As a kid, you just absorb the fact that there’s war happening somewhere in your country. Bombs go off, schools close, there are curfews, checkpoints. This is the backdrop against which I grew up. I was a middle-class kid in Colombo who saw bodies on the road sometimes. This was nothing compared to my friends who lived in Jaffna [in the north] and in the war zones in the east who had harrowing experiences. The newspaper would have the cricket score on the back and the death count on the front.
Last year, a stunned world watched the anti-government protests, fuelled by the country’s economic crisis, right across Sri Lanka. What was it like to be there? What a year it was – definitely one for the memoirs. I wasn’t quite on the ground: I was in Iowa at a writers’ workshop between April and June. When I got home, Colombo was waking up to mass protests. Yes, there was water in the taps and food in the shops, but I was certainly fearful because we didn’t know how it was going to turn out. The military is heavily armed; the politicians who ended up resigning were feared. You associate protests with radicals and students, but this was so widespread. To see grandmas and working-class people involved was moving. And then there was the comedy of it: people belly-flopping into the president’s pool and watching the cricket on his couch. The questions aren’t resolved, but Sri Lanka’s like that: a volatile, wonderful, absurd, hilarious place.
SEX
You’re a married father of two children. Maali, the central character of Seven Moons, is a closeted gay man. What kind of research did you do when it came to shaping him? Maali is based on a famous Sri Lankan activist called Richard de Zoysa, who was murdered in 1990. He wasn’t a war photographer or gambler [like Maali]: he was more of an activist, journalist and theatre actor – and a closeted gay man. I spoke to gay men who lived in the ’80s and the younger Grindr generation. In Sri Lanka, LGBTQ rights have a long way to go, but at least there’s a lot more awareness. One text I particularly drew on was a play called The One Who Loves You So by Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke. The play is about guys who hook up on Grindr – quite explicit sex scenes happen in front of you – [but] it’s a very moving love story. So I kind of leaned into that.
What’s the secret to writing a good sex scene? I tend to favour the Bollywood technique where the couple come together … then you pan away to a train going through a tunnel [laughs]. When you try to do blow-by-blow choreography, it’s like watching porn versus watching an erotic scene. It’s the same with a ghost story. When you see the ghost, that’s kind of the lamest part of the movie, right? Depending on the special-effects budget, most of the action should take place off-screen.
RELIGION
In Seven Moons, Maali thinks of himself as an apolitical atheist who is racially indifferent. What about you? I was brought up a Sinhalese Buddhist, so I’m the majority. But “Sinhalese Buddhist” is a political invention. There’s no such thing; there’s Buddhism and there’s the Sinhalese language. I also went to an Anglican school. These days, I have an app that helps me to meditate and, on a good day, I do some yoga. So I suppose I can put myself in the camp of being Buddhist. But I don’t do the rituals or go to temple. It’s not a secret: I share a lot of Maali’s beliefs, such as, “How can there be justice when we’ve seen all of this stuff happen?” Maybe I’m not as idealistic as him: he believes there’s hope and that the actions of one person can change things, whereas I’m more a Generation X slacker. I’m not quite Maali, but I’m not a million moons away from him, either.
What do you believe happens after we die? Well, I wrote a book [The Seven Moons] about the afterlife! I read the religious texts, the philosophers, the near-death experiences, the neurologists. The fact is, no one knows. That’s what we know: no one knows. And that’s the thing I hold onto. My wife’s Christian; my family and hers, we have our religious beliefs and our kids are exposed to those. But I also talk to them about the “no one knows” philosophy. What happens after we die? I’d like to be surprised, but I don’t think I will be.
Do you have any rituals or superstitions when it comes to sitting down to write? I’m not sure they’re rituals. I light a candle, adjust the lighting, select the music, set the mood. That’s how I waste the first hour. The most important ritual is starting early: everything happens in the first two hours. After that, kids wake up, Facebook wakes up, the phone starts pinging. But having this place where no one’s going to talk to you … Sometimes I scribble, sometimes I type, sometimes I make notes, sometimes I read. But I turn up, every day.
Shehan Karunatilaka will appear at the Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney writers’ festivals in May.
