Writing In-between Life and Death: Contemplation as Death Ritual in Michael Ondaatje's "Death at Kataragama"

Abstract

Michael Ondaatje's collection of poetry, Handwriting, uses writing as a metaphor for Sri Lanka's pre-alphabetic, multi-modal forms of writing, thought, and culture that have disintegrated during Sri Lanka's long and ongoing history of colonial contact. One prose poem in the collection, Death at presents a speaker pondering life lived between two cultures as well as death and the removal from human form. Kataragama, being both a god and city, both a metaphysical space and a physical place, defines a struggle between a self located in multiple cultural identities, but also within the space of physical/metaphysical conflict. In the poem, the conflict of the physical and metaphysical forces the speaker to contemplate a cultural identity that is between cultures. Thus, the contemplation of and writing about cultural longing and belonging are complicit in spirituality and preparation for death, suggesting that the subject's reflection on multiple cultural identities and the subject's concomitant alienation and conflict can add meaning to life, rather than simply alienate one from essential matters. In Death at the contemplation of death, direct commentary on the passing from the physical to the metaphysical, allows the speaker to use personal examination of multiple cultural identities as the central concern in finding the meaning of one's life, and to use this contemplation on identity and the writing of it into poetic form as a ritual in preparation of death.