As a diasporic writing about his homeland with an awareness of how his work might have a material effect on that country, Ondaatje deals directly with the issue of how a postcolonial country is represented abroad. In an age of globalization, the manner in which countries like Sri Lanka are represented internationally becomes very important to them. The fragile economies of these countries are inevitably dependent on industries such as export and tourism, along with financial aid and loans from donor countries—usually from the West—and institutions like the World Bank. International opinion matters, and unfavorable images of such countries can lead to material loss by means of sanctions and/or withdrawal of aid. This is why, in Anil’s Ghost, President Katugala 14 is prevailed upon to permit Anil’s investigation. By agreeing to such an investigation, Katugala is at least playing the part of a responsible leader in order to appease the international community. As Anil begins to realize, “Our purpose here seems to be the result of a gesture” (44). It is a gesture, however, that the Sri Lankan government knows it cannot avoid making.
In the novel, Ondaatje emphasizes that the type of representation given to a country like Sri Lanka can be problematic. Those who are in a position to represent Sri Lanka to the outside world—foreign journalists, representatives of international organizations—often have no real understanding of the situation in the country. They fly into the country for a limited time, according to the novel, and believe that they can report on the country from within a comfortable and convenient cocoon, without actually experiencing or being aware of what Sarath refers to as the “character and nuance and mood” (259) of what goes on. Their reports on the country are based on false assumptions. Anil, for example, assumes that there is a single and permanent truth and that it is desirable to find this truth at whatever cost. Thus, she is absolutely committed to her specific mandate, which is to investigate the truth concerning the government’s human rights abuses. She is challenged by her various local interlocutors to realize that there are different sides to the situation in Sri Lanka that should not be ignored. Sarath, for instance, reminds Anil that the Tamil militants in the north and the east and the Sinhalese insurgents in the south have also committed many atrocities and therefore Anil’s investigation, with its complete focus on the government’s wrongdoing, is slanted from the start. Sarath reminds her that each element within the Sri Lankan conflict is guilty, repeatedly arguing that “every side”—the government, Sinhalese insurgents, and Tamil separatists—have been guilty of human rights violations. Most provocatively, he suggests that the murders and disappearances that characterize the conflict also implicate the West itself: because the Sri Lankan conflict is an “unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers”—hence the fact that the war is fought by “secret gangs and squads” (17-18).
Gamini reiterates this idea, emphasizing that in Sri Lanka, often those “setting off the bombs are who the Western press call freedom fighters. … And you want to investigate the government?” (133). Palipana, on the other hand, questions Anil’s methods of arriving at what she believes is the truth. His fall from grace was caused by his attempts to reach the truth by making an imaginative leap, just as Anil is attempting to find it by making connections through scientific methods. Palipana does not admit the possibility of a difference between his seeing “as truth things that could only be guessed at” (83) in deciphering inscriptions on stone and hers in examining bones to arrive at the truth. When Anil quotes the central sacred text of Western culture, the Bible, saying, “‘The truth shall set you free.’ I believe that,” Palipana replies that frequently “truth is just opinion” in “our world” (102).
The two brothers and Palipana attempt to make Anil realize that truth can be relative and that it can be manipulated by the powerful to suit their purposes. What is perceived as truth can also be dangerous and destructive. Sarath’s metaphors for the truth in the context of Sri Lanka’s war are ominous—he describes Anil’s approximations of the truth as “a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol” and recalls that in the past truth has been “broken into suitable pieces” in the Western media, resulting only in a “flippant gesture towards Asia” that contributed to the ongoing cycle of violence (156-57). Paradoxically, Anil’s “truth” could thus contribute to new crimes of the sort she is trying to uncover. Sarath, therefore, disagrees with Anil’s view that it is always desirable to bring “truth” to light, whatever the consequences of such a revelation might be. As someone who has lived for years in a volatile situation, Sarath does not see any virtue or necessity in making explosive revelations—igniting the “sleeping lake of petrol”—that would lead to only negative repercussions. After all, if the government is exposed as violating human rights, Sarath is aware that its secret forces might try to make even more people “disappear” in order to punish those who are responsible for the exposé, and to deter others from participating in such investigations in future. 15 Another possibility would be that the results of Anil’s investigation about the situation in Sri Lanka might be distorted by the foreign press so that much-needed aid would be denied to the country, which might possibly affect all Sri Lankans negatively, not just a brutal and corrupt government. In such a situation, Sarath believes, the truth is of no use to anyone.
Ondaatje suggests through the novel that diasporics do have a responsibility when it comes to representing the homeland. 16 This responsibility does not hinge on diasporics censoring themselves and their impressions of the country or viewing the homeland as a sacred space, but on attempting to show a less superficial view of the country than what is presented by complete outsiders. Sarath constantly challenges Anil to be more responsible in the way she is conducting her investigation, comparing her to a visiting Western journalist (27), which, in a sense, she is since she is in Sri Lanka only for seven weeks. Sarath and Gamini also privilege lived experience and active participation over observation and analysis, which are part of Anil’s modus operandi. Understanding, they insist, cannot come simply from reading reports—witnessing and involvement are also necessary. Sarath emphasizes that Anil’s absence from Sri Lanka during the formative phases of the conflict means that she cannot appreciate the “real chaos” and lawlessness that had produced a battle between insurgents, separatists, and paramilitary forces that left people of goodwill like Sarath and Gamini “caught in the middle” (154-55).
Gamini, working twenty-four-hour shifts in emergency rooms during the conflict, has little sympathy for those who offer criticism from a safe distance; for him, they are “armchair rebels” who might have their perspective changed should they “visit me in my surgery” (132).
Ondaatje himself makes an effort to provide a relatively multi-faceted view of Sri Lanka in his novel. He highlights Sri Lanka’s ancient civilization and its achievements through his descriptions of numerous archaeological sites. Gamini reminds Anil of Sri Lanka’s ancient civilizations, saying, “We had ‘halls for the sick’ four centuries before Christ” (191-92). While Ondaatje emphasizes that the country was not always a war zone, he points out that even now, in the midst of violence and conflict, life does go on: “The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed” (11). Unlike Gunesekera in Reef, Ondaatje shows that exile—even for those with the resources for mobility—is not the natural and obvious choice for people living in a war-torn country by emphasizing Sarath’s and Gamini’s patriotism and refusal to leave their country. Through his fragmented novel, Ondaatje also shows that no one story is more important than another. His strategy of using many voices within the narrative means that the diasporic perspective is not given more prominence than the perspective of those living in Sri Lanka. So, though we start with Anil’s story, we go on to hear those of Sarath, Gamini, Palipana, and Ananda, and learn about the suffering caused by violence. Subalterns like Sirissa, Ananda’s young wife who becomes one of the thousands of people who simply “disappeared,” or Lakma, Palipana’s niece who retreats first in
to silence and ultimately into the jungle following the murders of her parents and the subsequent death of her uncle, make their absence present and their silence/silencing felt.
Through the local characters, Ondaatje consistently advocates contextualization. History, politics, and culture, these characters stress, need to be considered in order to make comprehension possible about what is going on in a country like Sri Lanka. When Anil accuses Sarath of urging her to engage in self-censorship, he argues that she needs to comprehend the “archaeological surround of a fact,” avoiding the “false empathy and blame” that too often appears in the accounts of Western journalists (44). The responsibility of a diasporic, according to Ondaatje, is to avoid generalizations and take into consideration the historical, political, social, and cultural contexts in which events happen—“the archaeological surround of a fact.” Ondaatje has, by this point in the novel, already described the manner in which dedicated archaeologists like Palipana and Sarath immerse themselves in the field, getting to know the sites upon which they focus. The prelapsarian Palipana is an indefatigable researcher, immersed in “the context of the ancient cultures” (79). So what Sarath is asking Anil to do is not just to study the phenomenon of Sailor’s murder and the government’s possible wrongdoing, but to attempt to comprehend all the factors that contributed to such a phenomenon. Sarath repeatedly emphasizes that Sri Lanka is “not like Central America” (17) and again, “this is not Brussels or America” (161). Anil cannot rely on her experiences with conflicts in other countries, she has to have an understanding of the particularities of this one.
One of the most surprising aspects of Anil’s Ghost, therefore, is that Ondaatje himself provides little information or contextualization about the sources of the conflict, despite the fact that he stresses the importance of just such contextualization, particularly through the character of Sarath. While the suffering and destruction caused by violence is delineated frequently, very little is said about the factors that have led to the turmoil in Sri Lanka on which the novel is focused. Ondaatje identifies terrorism in the north, insurgency in the south, and government-sponsored paramilitaries as sources of Sri Lanka’s violence, but he avoids even the hint of speculation about the motives behind the violence enacted by the northern separatists, the southern insurgents, and the government, choosing rather to catalogue the means by which the perpetrators disposed of bodies (42-43).
On the other hand, and unlike Gunesekera, Ondaatje emphasizes First World complicity in the conflict in Sri Lanka; the conflict, the narrator suggests, was “a Hundred Years’ War with modern weaponry, and backers on the sidelines in safe countries. … ‘ The reason for war was war’” (43). Even here, the impression is that universally, war is begun and carried on for the sake of profit. This is true, of course, to a certain extent. However, it cannot be said that young Tamil men and women who joined the separatist cause or Sinhalese men and women who participated in insurrections did so only for the sake of profit. Members of each group had a specific and pressing cause, and they considered this cause important enough to willingly sacrifice their lives for it, if necessary.
In her article about how Anil’s Ghost critiques human rights discourse, Teresa Derrickson makes a convincing argument that through the character of Anil, Ondaatje is emphasizing the Eurocentricism implicit in human rights discourse and the Western bias of international organizations like the United Nations. Derrickson is less convincing when she posits that Ondaatje refrains from speculating on the causes behind the violence in Sri Lanka because he is attempting to avoid the generalizations made by the West on the strife in postcolonial countries: “Deliberately skirting issues such as cause and accountability (which appear to cater to a Western need for an unambiguous, univocal reading of truth), he succeeds in avoiding the narration of yet another Western historical account filled with ‘false empathy and blame’” (148). This seems to be an essentializing argument predicated on seeing Ondaatje himself only as someone of the West and denying him the ability to also see as a diasporic—just as Ondaatje himself denies Anil the ability to have a double consciousness.
By refusing to indicate the reasons for the conflict in Sri Lanka in his novel, Ondaatje risks making it seem as if the violence in Sri Lanka is the same as the violence in the former Yugoslavia or Guatemala or any other war-torn country. The novel actually begins with a scene in Guatemala where Anil has been working on an investigation. Ondaatje represents Sri Lanka as part of a continuum of global violence. In fact, he said in an interview that what was happening in Sri Lanka was no different from conflicts elsewhere in the world: “It’s more a state we’re all living in now, in Africa, in Yugoslavia, in South America. It’s a very contemporary situation that goes on everywhere around us” (Kanner n.p.). While Ondaatje’s attempt to universalize the problem in Sri Lanka enables non-Sri Lankan readers to relate what they might be familiar with to what is happening in a different country, it can also make it seem as if the conflict in Sri Lanka is somehow both inevitable and incomprehensible. It downplays the possibility that there are specific reasons for a conflict that occurs in a specific place, and that there are in fact specific ways in which such a conflict can be resolved.
Even though Sarath is tortured and killed in the latter section of Anil’s Ghost, the novel itself ends on a somewhat optimistic note. Ananda, the eye-painter turned alcoholic miner, reconstructs an ancient Buddha statue that has been blown up by thieves in search of treasure, and paints the eyes of a new statue of the Buddha. This ending suggests the healing power of the arts as well as the possibility that the violence and destruction in Sri Lanka can be repaired. On the other hand, the emphasis on the Buddha statues and rituals and the Sinhalese eye-painter—along with the predominantly Sinhalese cast of characters, the mention of only Sinhalese place names on the map of Sri Lanka, and the inclusion of only Sinhalese names on the “disappeared” list—seem to suggest a type of chauvinism and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism that were factors which led to the ethnic conflict in the first place.
Responding to criticism that Ondaatje has valorized Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, Marlene Goldman has argued that the opposite is the case. Goldman posits that Ondaatje shows the interconnectedness between Buddhism and nationalism and the way in which Buddhism is implicated in the ethnic conflict: “Far from advocating the restoration of ‘a pure Buddhism,’… the narrative calls into question the long-standing ties between Buddhism and Sinhala nationalism” (n.p.). She points out that Ondaatje is drawing parallels between Palipana and the real-life Sri Lankan archaeologist Senerat Paranavitana, who deliberately misread inscriptions from the past in favor of the Sinhalese majority rule of the present:
By drawing such close connections between Palipana and the real-life figure of Paranavitana, Ondaatje underscores how myths of racial superiority and national unity and purity developed in Europe in the nineteenth century, along with other “gifts” of the colonizers, influenced readings of Buddhist sacred chronicles and became intertwined with notions of religious and political identity in Sri Lanka. (n.p.)
However, unlike Sivanandan, who in When Memory Dies states explicitly how myths of origin and historical documents have been used by both sides to show their respective claims to the island, Ondaatje has only made subtle allusions towards how the past has influenced the present conflict. The very fact that Goldman has to take it upon herself to provide the “archaeological surround” means that Ondaatje has not given his readers the contextualization that is necessary for them to grasp the point he is trying to make in the text.
As impressive an accomplishment as Anil’s Ghost is, it is hard not to wish that Ondaatje, in crafting his novel, had acted more consistently on his own advice about the necessity of providing “archaeological surround.” Nonetheless, Ondaatje’s great achievement in Anil’s Ghost is to prompt his readers (Sri Lankan and otherwise) to direct a critical eye toward their own assumptions and presuppositions. There is a sense of humility that underlies this novel that offers
hope that the various Sri Lankan and international parties to the conflict can move beyond mere clichés to something more nuanced and constructive.
Purveyors of Prejudice? Distant Warriors
While Gunesekera and Ondaatje focus on Sri Lanka as a setting for their respective novels discussed above, two other diasporic writers—Channa Wickremesekera and V.V. Ganeshananthan—concentrate on how the Sri Lankan conflict is maintained and continued in the international arena. While the former is Sinhalese and the latter is Tamil by ethnicity, each tries to present and represent the two sides of the conflict. Camilla Orjuela has observed that due to rapid developments in transportation and communication technology, there is much closer contact between diasporics and the homeland than in the past. Orjuela acknowledges that diasporics have played a major role in sustaining conflicts in the homeland (by directly supporting warring parties, canvassing international support, and influencing ideas in the homeland), but in addition she suggests that they have a too often overlooked role to play in the pursuit of peace (437-39). Looking carefully at the work of Wickremesekera and Ganeshananthan can help to rectify this conventional oversight by showing how these writers open up opportunities for self-reflection within their respective ethnic groups and for dialogue with the other (opposing) ethnic group.
Terror and Reconciliation Page 20