Unburials and Skeletal Reconstructions: Narrative as Forensics in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Abstract

Social scientists know how crucial it is to identify the bodies of the men, women and children who have died at sea or on land, or have been buried in mass burial grounds, and how consequential it is to engage (or not) in some form of ritual, of memorialization. If some scholars have focused on locating and numbering those victims, others have used forensic science to identify the bodies so that the families can get them back, engage in mourning and continue to live. Others, still, interrogate the lost objects of the death-bound migration. This essay will focus on a novel that deals with the exhumation and identification of bones in a civil war context. In Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sri Lankan-born and North American-educated Anil Tissera goes back to Sri Lanka as a forensic anthropologist. She is sent by a human rights group to investigate mass burials during the Civil War and genocide of the Sri Lankan Tamils, thus returning from her diasporic abode after 15 years. In Anil's forensic search for identification, with bones being literally unearthed, what does the literary text perform for those lost or unidentified bodies that could not be accomplished otherwise? What kind of engagement does it offer? Using the angle of forensics and its Latin etymology, this essay will formulate the hypothesis that the literary text enables justice to be delivered in an open court of law (forensis). Moving beyond the stigmatization of the unritual, it will probe the fraught relationship between literature and forensics, investigating the possibility that the narrative, its staging of the unidentified body of the dead, and our relationship to it, could create a public space to be shared by all (forum).