Searching for the Revolution in Every Incarnation

Sri Lankan novelist Vajra Chandrasekera grew up reading the stories of Western literature as if they were science fiction. “I had to figure out the rules, the terrain, and how things work,” he told Tricycle. “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.”

Now, as a science fiction 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 book, 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 how he grapples with the violence of Sri Lankan Buddhism, how rituals anchor and retell history, and what we can learn from letting go of fixed notions of genre.

You’ve described Rakesfall as “genre dysphoric.” What do you mean by that? One of the ways in which I wanted to talk about reincarnation was the idea that selfhood is a lot more permeable than is generally considered acceptable in fiction, where you’re expected to have a single main character who you can follow, or a single set of main characters. In this story, things are a little messier than that. One of the ways I wanted to reflect that in the book’s structure was to have these transformations in each incarnation of the register and the style and the genre of the text itself: In each chapter, it’s not just that the characters are recurring in a different world or different universe or different setting; it’s also a different style of story. So you can move from, for example, a murder mystery to a play. One of the things that I actively wanted to fight against was this idea of a fixed set of genre boundaries in any particular area. I wanted to be able to move freely between different forms, to have a fluidity of genre.

The words “genre” and “gender” are etymologically related, so I feel like the same kind of fluidity applies in both cases. I think that a lot of genre readers are trained to start cataloging and indexing in their head, figure out what the rules are, and then be able to predict what happens next based on your understanding of those rules: This is this kind of story; therefore, the next step will be something like that. That is exactly the kind of expectation I wanted to flout, which does make things difficult for a reader who doesn’t let go of the need to have control over their reading experience. But I do think it will be rewarding for people who are OK with letting go a little bit.

In the novel’s exploration of reincarnation, one question that recurs is whether characters should be held responsible for their actions in previous lives. So how do you think about this question? Is there sort of a generational guilt, then? This is a problem that the book poses that it doesn’t actively try to answer. At one level it’s a meaningless question, because we don’t have access to the kind of technology that the book presents, which is the ability to know things in an absolute sense using this mystical or technological way of seeing what has happened. Without that certainty, we can never actually know. But generational guilt, I think, is real because we make it real. That is not so much a question of guilt for me as a question of recurrence. We reproduce the sins of our ancestors because we are partly calling back to our ancestors.

Sinhala Buddhism is a great example of this: The racism of Sinhala Buddhism in the 19th century was partly driven by feudal and medieval understandings, which were filtered through the colonial era and became racialized. At some level, people were attempting to mimic what they thought their ancestors had done, because they were trying to honor this culture that they did not understand—and that they could not understand. We don’t understand it either, because that kind of pure understanding is what history destroys. But in attempting to honor that history, nevertheless, you make yourself part of it. You entangle yourself with it.

For example, there is genocide denial in the Mahavamsa, which is a Sinhala epic text written in the 5th century. It tells many stories, including the story of a king who essentially committed a genocide of a great many people. According to this chronicle, or its modern translations, some Buddhist monks then come and tell the king that all the people he killed didn’t count because there were only two Buddhists who died, and they were the only ones who count.

I have no idea what to make of it, but this story is a key part of 20th-century Sri Lankan politics, and it is still something that is referenced in modern electoral campaigns today. King Dutthagamani, the king in question who committed all these murders, is a great Sinhala heroic figure, and he is revered as a great Buddhist leader because he built many of the great ancient temples that you can still see to this day in the old cities of Pandharpur, for example, so the violence, the racialization, the us-and-them thinking, this clearly has been around for a long time. When presidential candidates in the 20th or 21st centuries reference the story of Dutthagamani today, they are calling upon that history. I don’t know if generational guilt is the word for this, but there is definitely generational something. There is an inheritance of violence here, specifically Buddhistic or Buddhistically framed violence, which is being recalled and reinforced and reenacted. And it is in doing those things that generational guilt comes into play, because if you live your life by these rules, then those rules are going to apply back to you.

Throughout the novel, you also experiment with ritual. In one section, characters study in the Department of Ritual History, and one has completed a master’s degree in the sacred poetry of pre-Kaliyuga civilizations, with an emphasis on “the poetics/politics of deep time, the ritual song cycles that retell and anchor history, compose causal chains, and sing narrative into being.” Could you say more about how rituals retell and anchor history? I think a lot of traditional ritual is about attempting to nail down some part of this very changeable and frightening world and say, “OK, this part we understand, and we’re going to make it keep happening just like this for as long as humanly possible.” Ritual tends to shape a culture’s understanding of the world. For example, traditional Sri Lankan folk magic relies heavily on exorcism as a medical intervention. There are eighteen devils of disease, and there are formal ritual structures of dance, music, and ritual possession in which the priests have a dialogue with the possessing devil and alternately beseech and bully it into leaving, thereby curing the disease.

These kinds of things were actually very common in the premodern era. They were not all that uncommon even when I was a kid. Now they’re relatively more quaint. But I find this deeply fascinating because it’s so clearly an attempt to marry medicine and science and a natural philosophy of the world to an overarching worldview, the origin story of a people, and the mythic terrain of wherever it is that you live. For example, you will have your local gods. If you have a forest, then there’s probably a god to whom that forest is sacred; if you have a mountain, there’s probably a devil up there that the villagers tell you to avoid.

These are the kinds of things that anchor both space and time for people, and we replace them in modernity with their modern equivalents, but structurally speaking, they don’t really change all that much. While modern science and medicine obviously operate in a very different way, most people do not have the formal training to comprehend modern medical science either, so to the extent that you’re taking whatever authority your society tells you is authoritative and carrying out whatever you are told will cure what it is that ails you, we are still very much inhabiting the same kind of world.

It’s not that it’s irrational or rational. In many ways, it’s a very rational way to deal with a large and confusing world: You have to be able to trust someone, and you make these decisions as a society about what you consider reliable, authoritative, and trustworthy.

I wanted Rakesfall to reflect a society that was very similar to ours in the sense that it clearly has an academy that we would recognize. It has universities and degrees, dissertations, advisors, and so on. But at the same time, the model of the world is very different from ours. That’s partly because a certain event happens that changes the nature of physics in that world, and they are now dealing with what they call a regime of poetics that is different from ours; that is, the songs that they sing about their world are different from the stories that we tell about ours, but they are real to those characters in the same way that ours are real to us. We should not say they are irrational because their world actually has been changed to make those things real.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.