Book Review: Island Witch by Amanda Jayatissa

Growing up as the daughter and apprentice of a demon-priest, or Capuwa, was never going to make Amara the most popular girl in her village. But with the British consolidating their power on 19th-century Sri Lanka, her family’s position grows ever more tenuous in the face of the almost militant Christianity the British have brought in their wake. 

Amara’s Thaththa does his best to tend to the needs of his people, even when they abandon their Buddhist ways in a manner anathema to his own beliefs. He also defers to the British and their favored Christian villagers whenever possible, urging those latter to rely on the powers and privileges afforded them by the ruling regime. But not all problems can be solved by the colonizers:

[Thaththa] didn’t have the heart to refuse Clifford when he visited our home for the second time two days later, at the very crack of dawn, hair disheveled and eyes bloodshot, trembling like a leaf. His daughter, Lalitha, had started speaking in a different tongue, he sobbed. What little they could understand was all profanity. Curse words that the girl had never once uttered in her life–words that she had not even heard before, he claimed. She would lie on her mat, her body bending and contorting while she hissed and spit and snarled. She had tried to bite the Christian priest who came to bless her. She’d been possessed by a yaka, Clifford cried.

 

His face grim, my father simply nodded and started to make preparations. This was no job for a foreign god. We have to deal with our demons the traditional way.

And for the most part, the village does its best to balance their traditions with the new cultural demands of the invading British. Amara herself was raised to follow in her father’s footsteps despite the obvious disapproval of her mother, who turned her back on her own privileged family to marry a Capuwa. So when Amara starts having strange dreams and visions, she assumes it has something to do with the line of work that she’s still learning. It’s a shock to her, then, when Thaththa not only begins to avoid her, but also decides against continuing to tutor her as his heir. 

Amara’s feelings of isolation and disorientation are further aggravated when people are brutally attacked in the jungle surrounding their village. Aloysius Peiris, assistant to the village headman and one of her father’s staunchest enemies, is certain that the attacks are a result of what he terms demon worship, if not outright perpetrated by the Capuwa himself. As tensions rise in the village, Amara’s already tenuous mental health begins to crumble. With friends and family turning their backs on her, the only thing left to give her purpose is to find out who really carried out the attacks, so she can clear her father’s name and, perhaps, find peace once more. 

But misogyny and power are far greater forces than even one headstrong teenager can face alone. Will unexpected allies help her overcome the formidable obstacles in her path, or will they doom her to heartbreak once the horrifying truth of what’s been done to her is finally revealed?

Amanda Jayatissa’s writing is fiercely feminist, with this historical thriller inspired by the folklore of her homeland making another strong entry in her always thoughtful, consistently entertaining oeuvre. Amara is a heroine who is easy to root for, as she questions the patriarchal beliefs – traditional or Western – that seek to keep her stifled and broken:

I’ve always hated the opinion that women are overly emotional. We saw it in all our stories–women beating their chests and crying to the heavens while the men remained stoic and subdued. Men like Aloysius claiming that we were subject to flights of fancy and wild imaginations. Neha had told me that it was because women are more tenderhearted. That this was a good thing. That softness wasn’t weakness. But I didn’t want to be soft or delicate. I wanted to be strong and in control. That’s why Thaththa shunning me hurt as much as it did. That’s why it was getting increasingly difficult for me to ignore the dreams and the voices. Who could I tell without being cast into the same lot as all melodramatic women?

While rich in the culture and atmosphere of Sri Lanka, Island Witch isn’t a blanket excoriation of colonization. It is, instead, a nuanced examination of the constant struggle between ethics and rationalization, between compassion and oppression. Amara isn’t the perfect heroine, which only adds to the realism of her struggle to make life better for herself and her family, even in the face of overwhelming and at times supernatural odds.