Sri Lankan “Gates of Fire”: Michael Ondaatje’s Transnational Literature, from Running in the Family to Anil’s Ghost

Abstract

This article examines the implications of reading Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) — a fictional treatment of the aftermath of civil war in Sri Lanka, from the point of view of a reluctant returnee to the island — in the context of Stephen Clingman’s assertions about “transnational fiction” as a “new way to understand the complexities of identity and location”.The article analyses the author’s adoption and adaptation of religious and mythical motifs in the novel, rereads the text’s recuperative religious/secular conclusion and considers the travel-inflected foundations of Anil’s Ghost in a text concerned with Ondaatje’s own return to the island, his Sri Lankan “travel memoir” Running in the Family (1982). The article presents Ondaatje’s work as a challenge to received political and cultural ideas about Sri Lanka.