Book Review: Island Witch by Amanda Jayatissa

Rising up because the daughter and apprentice of a demon-priest, or Capuwa, was by no means going to make Amara the most well-liked lady in her village. However with the British consolidating their energy on Nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, her household’s place grows ever extra tenuous within the face of the virtually militant Christianity the British have introduced of their wake. 

Amara’s Thaththa does his greatest to are likely to the wants of his individuals, even once they abandon their Buddhist methods in a way anathema to his personal beliefs. He additionally defers to the British and their favored Christian villagers every time potential, urging these latter to depend on the powers and privileges afforded them by the ruling regime. However not all issues may be solved by the colonizers:

[Thaththa] didn’t have the center to refuse Clifford when he visited our dwelling for the second time two days later, on the very daybreak, hair matted and eyes bloodshot, trembling like a leaf. His daughter, Lalitha, had began talking in a distinct tongue, he sobbed. What little they may perceive was all profanity. Curse phrases that the lady had by no means as soon as uttered in her life–phrases that she had not even heard earlier than, he claimed. She would lie on her mat, her physique bending and contorting whereas she hissed and spit and snarled. She had tried to chunk the Christian priest who got here to bless her. She’d been possessed by a yaka, Clifford cried.

 

His face grim, my father merely nodded and began to make preparations. This was no job for a overseas god. We now have to take care of our demons the standard manner.

And for essentially the most half, the village does its greatest to stability their traditions with the brand new cultural calls for of the invading British. Amara herself was raised to comply with in her father’s footsteps regardless of the apparent disapproval of her mom, who turned her again on her personal privileged household to marry a Capuwa. So when Amara begins having unusual desires and visions, she assumes it has one thing to do with the road of labor that she’s nonetheless studying. It’s a shock to her, then, when Thaththa not solely begins to keep away from her, but additionally decides in opposition to persevering with to tutor her as his inheritor. 

Amara’s emotions of isolation and disorientation are additional aggravated when persons are brutally attacked within the jungle surrounding their village. Aloysius Peiris, assistant to the village headman and one in all her father’s staunchest enemies, is for certain that the assaults are a results of what he phrases demon worship, if not outright perpetrated by the Capuwa himself. As tensions rise within the village, Amara’s already tenuous psychological well being begins to crumble. With family and friends turning their backs on her, the one factor left to present her function is to search out out who actually carried out the assaults, so she will clear her father’s title and, maybe, discover peace as soon as extra. 

However misogyny and energy are far higher forces than even one headstrong teenager can face alone. Will surprising allies assist her overcome the formidable obstacles in her path, or will they doom her to heartbreak as soon as the horrifying reality of what’s been accomplished to her is lastly revealed?

Amanda Jayatissa’s writing is fiercely feminist, with this historic thriller impressed by the folklore of her homeland making one other sturdy entry in her all the time considerate, constantly entertaining oeuvre. Amara is a heroine who is simple to root for, as she questions the patriarchal beliefs – conventional or Western – that search to maintain her stifled and damaged:

I’ve all the time hated the opinion that ladies are overly emotional. We noticed it in all our tales–girls beating their chests and crying to the heavens whereas the lads remained stoic and subdued. Males like Aloysius claiming that we had been topic to flights of fancy and wild imaginations. Neha had informed me that it was as a result of girls are extra tenderhearted. That this was a great factor. That softness wasn’t weak spot. However I didn’t wish to be tender or delicate. I needed to be sturdy and in management. That’s why Thaththa shunning me damage as a lot because it did. That’s why it was getting more and more troublesome for me to disregard the desires and the voices. Who may I inform with out being forged into the identical lot as all melodramatic girls?

Whereas wealthy within the tradition and ambiance of Sri Lanka, Island Witch isn’t a blanket excoriation of colonization. It’s, as an alternative, a nuanced examination of the fixed battle between ethics and rationalization, between compassion and oppression. Amara isn’t the right heroine, which solely provides to the realism of her battle to make life higher for herself and her household, even within the face of overwhelming and at occasions supernatural odds.

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