Creating a solid foundation for peace: Writing of the lost life in Michael Ondaatje’s Handwriting

Abstract

While it invites deep and sustained attention, Michael Ondaatje’s Handwriting has seldom been studied, since its publication in 1998, for the author’s concern with peace, even though this collection of poems highlights peace and war. I will argue that in Handwriting, Ondaatje proposes ways to achieve internal and external peace that are not only relevant to the Sri Lankan civil war but also to the wider contemporary world. In Handwriting, Ondaatje presents a narrator who returns to Sri Lanka because of a sense of dislocation, and who writes to understand the cause of ethnic violence and reconstruct the Sri Lankan past that was lost during the civil war. In doing this, Ondaatje shows a possibility of peace for Sri Lanka and his readers. People in conflict can be united when they are less obsessed with their different identities, recognize their shared desire for peace, respect one another’s differences, and work together to create a shared memory that does not homogenize and is open to new elements from other cultures. As the narrator investigates this situation by writing creatively about Sri Lankan people, his example also demonstrates a way to achieve mutual understanding by artistically constructing a shared memory. Alain Badiou’s views about events constitute the major theoretical framework of the present study.