Ondaatje's Anil Research Articles

The Illusion of Truth in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Michael Ondaatje's Anil’s Ghost, a literary masterpiece, focuses on the distortion of truth. Set against the backdrop of civil unrest in Sri Lanka, the novel follows forensic anthropologist Anil Tissera as she exposes the complexities of revealing truth in a world rife with political and personal turmoil. This research abstract delves into the multifaceted layers of reality distortion portrayed in Ondaatje's work .At its core; the novel questions the notion of objective reality. Ondaatje masterfully employs fragmented narratives, shifting perspectives, and unreliable memories to diminish the lines between truth and fiction. Through Anil's investigation into the skeletal remains of victims of political violence, Ondaatje exposes the subjective nature of memory and the inherent biases that shape our understanding of past events. Moreover, the novel explores the psychological toll of living in a reality distorted by trauma and political oppression. Characters like Anil and Sarath, haunted by their pasts, grapple with the existential question of whether it is possible to reconcile personal truth with the external realities imposed upon them. Ondaatje's lyrical prose evokes a sense of disorientation, mirroring the characters' internal struggles as they confront the elusive nature of reality. Furthermore, the novel examines how power dynamics influence the construction of reality. Ondaatje exposes the ways in which those in positions of authority manipulate narratives to serve their own agendas, perpetuating falsehoods and suppressing marginalized voices in the process. Through Anil's quest for justice, the novel underscores the importance of bearing witness to the silenced truths obscured by those in power. The novel serves as a profound exploration of the distortion of reality in the face of political upheaval and personal trauma.

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

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).

Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature by Roger McNamara

Reviewed by: Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature by Roger McNamara Mahmoud Ababneh (bio) Roger McNamara. Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature. Lexington, 2018. Pp. xxiii, 173. CAD $111.25. Roger McNamara's Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature is situated within the contentious relationships and violent outbursts that occur between different ethnic and religious minorities and the Hindu majority in postcolonial India. McNamara makes the case that a secular perspective, despite its appeal to Western discourse and academic disciplines, is not the only approach for evaluating dissimilar perspectives and ideologies. He argues that because it is an essential component of modernity (a European concept), secularism endorses the values of the upper-class Hindus who successfully established themselves within the colonial system. To recognize and understand the perspectives of minority groups, McNamara explores the writings of Muslims and other minorities in India. He undertakes a keen theoretical and literary analysis in an attempt to present the complex web of cultural and political interactions among these groups. He engages closely with fictional, autobiographical, and historical texts from native writers such as Carl Muller, Michael Ondaatje, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, and Bama. His analysis of these narratives enables him to situate secularism within the historical personages' and characters' lived experiences and empowers him to tease out nuanced variations of secularism. McNamara's book starts by setting up an exhaustive account of historical, theoretical, and political stakes. In the introduction, he deftly historicizes the circumstances that produced secularism in colonial and postcolonial India. As legacies of colonial rule, he explains, both secular time and modernity had "radical ramifications for political and cultural life" (xv). He insists that turning back to an idyllic precolonial stage completely free of European influences is impossible. Rather, critics need to "dislodge" the secular approach from its "pedestal" and "consider it one approach among a number of others" (xviii). McNamara turns to literary analysis in the next five chapters. He focuses on writers and intellectuals from diverse communities: Anglo-Indian, Burgher, Dalit, Muslim, and Parsi. Chapter One focuses on the Burgher minority in Sri Lanka. McNamara closely examines Ondaatje's and Muller's works, which offer fictional explorations of political tensions between the nation's Sinhalese majority and minority groups. McNamara reminds readers that modern historicism legitimizes one group at the expense of another. He argues that Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost rejects historicism and its concomitant [End Page 252] linear narrative as a Eurocentric style that "compels people to take sides in a conflict" (19). It also fails to provide a resolution to the conflict between the Tamil and Sinhalese because it asserts colonial assumptions about these cultures. McNamara proposes the novel relies on allegory and an unverifiable narrative to provide alternative forms of "secular historiography." The novel also explores "non-secular" and "alternative subjectivities" to construct a narrative that proposes a way to peaceful coexistence between the majority and minorities (28). Chapter Two shifts the text's focus to Muslim writers. Through a reading of the historical and political tensions in 1980s India, McNamara judiciously reviews the critical doubts about national secularism and its "endorsements of the cultural values of upper-caste Hindu men" (34). He explores how religious minorities' and lower-castes' demands were considered unfit in the rational and secular ideologies of the nation. He proposes that Manto's and Chughtai's fiction maps out the "possible contours of a secular India" (35), exposing the wide spectrum of tensions between religion, gender, and sexuality that national secularism managed to sidestep. Chapter Three discusses Parsi author Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters. McNamara convincingly situates the novel within the broad rubric of post-secularism as an undefined space between modernity (or postcoloniality) and religion (or lack of it). Post-secularism is represented as another variation of secularism that indicts the secular state and its "abstract citizenship" (74). It also, McNamara argues, "can neither reject modernity … nor simply embrace religion" (74). He rightly explains that while the novel critiques both religious extremism and liberal secular ideals, it "advocates a constant negotiation between faith and reason" (74). Contrary to other critics, he does not read Family...

The Ghosts of War

The Ghosts of War M. C. Armstrong (bio) This Thing Called the World by Debjani Ganguly. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. 312, 5 illustrations. $94.95 cloth, $26.95 paper What distinguishes Debjani Ganguly's This Thing Called the World from much of the discourse on world literature is her relentless focus on the Global War on Terror. In a field often overwhelmed and diffused by its subject, Ganguly has chosen to make this phantom phenomenon the coordinate on her map through which she triangulates a study of "World," "War," and "Witness," or, in other words, the global networked novel and its ability to engage this hypermediated war and its attendant humanitarian crises. Ganguly begins her study with a quote from Ian McEwan's Saturday, and she returns to this novel throughout her book. In McEwan's protagonist, Henry Perowne, Ganguly locates a British neurosurgeon who, in 2003, during the lead-up to the Iraq War, seems to be suffering "the condition of the time, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to a generality, to a community of anxiety" (1). Perowne cannot decide whether to watch the news, and in his struggle to make a choice about checking in on the war, he may be the perfect stand-in for the reader of This Thing Called the World, for there is certainly an understandable tendency to turn away from the "transnational forms of violence that occur at the interface of conventional warfare between sovereign states, organized crime, and state-sponsored [End Page 285] violations of human rights through population displacement and genocide" (9). Fortunately, for such a reader, Ganguly's work offers the relief of a lyncean lens, a keen comparative frame of vision that analyzes the growth of the rhetoric of terror and the global novel in the context of eighteenth-century literature, the era in which, Ganguly argues, we find the seeds for our current "sentimental," "humanitarian," "panoptic," and "spectacular" imaginary (35). This Thing Called the World does not suffer from the planetary proclivity to discount detail. Franco Moretti, elaborating on his theory of "distant reading," a world literature scholarship enabled by big data and hypermediated networks of image and information, wrote, "if the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, less is more."1 The text does not disappear in Moretti's own writing, as Ganguly generously acknowledges, and it does not disappear in Ganguly's care. Although Ganguly disregards some of the more innovative critical voices in this field of discourse, such as Rebecca Walkowitz and Christian Moraru, she does not neglect the global novels she treats. She structures her work, as mentioned earlier, around three parts (World, War, and Witness) and nine chapters, each supported by close readings of a wide range of theory and primary texts. Her nuanced treatment of McEwan, David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, Don DeLillo's Falling Man, and Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers and Maus constantly grounds the ghostly phenomenon of global terror in characters who embody "the fear-saturated worlds of ordinary people" whose lives have become more than just entwined with the "brutal ravages of history" (226). In this entwining with the global war(s), the characters Ganguly chooses to highlight have become witnesses. The "witness," like the "death-world," is a term Ganguly develops into a world all its own. This Thing Called the World engages "the world" and in so doing creates worlds, the macro's character scarring, marking, and quite often illuminating the micro. In a global war in which witnesses are often excepted, erased, and rendered bare (think Guantanamo Bay), Ganguly's text offers a compelling counternarrative in which the witness emerges from such underworlds and the rhetoric of exceptionality with a politics, an ethics, a phenomenology, a melancholy, a music, and a voice. Ultimately, it is through this evolved concept of witness that Ganguly is able to map her genealogy of the novel and engage what she calls the "Postliberal Imaginary" that "has lost faith...

This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly

Reviewed by: This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly Claire Chambers Debjani Ganguly. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. xii + 300 pp. I write this review in November 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected US president twenty-seven years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of This Thing Called the World's most valuable contributions is the attention it accords to "the historically significant threshold of 1989" in shaping our current Manichean political climate (1). Notwithstanding recent scholarly emphasis on the World Trade Center attacks and their aftermath, I agree with Debjani Ganguly's thesis that 1989—a year significant for, but not reducible to, the collapse of communism—marked the most profound shift in geopolitics and literary aesthetics since the revolutionary movements of 1968. However, from my perspective as a researcher of British Muslim writing and given that Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown is one of the key texts discussed in this monograph, it is surprising that Ganguly devotes little space to exploring the Rushdie affair in her nuanced analysis of 1989 as a new "temporal horizon for the emergence of a new kind of novel" (6). Ganguly, who is Director of the University of Virginia's Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, argues that post-Cold War world novels are notable for their engagement with modern kinds of unending war and insurgency, the digital environment, and human rights discourse. She launches this ambitious and perceptive line of enquiry by bringing contemporary world novels into dialogue with the late-eighteenth-century protonovel. The eighteenth-century comparative framework is illuminating, but it seldom filters into the individual case studies about contemporary novels. For instance, especially since the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the infamous fatwa against him in 1989, Rushdie has been eager to position himself as heir apparent to Enlightenment philosophes such as Voltaire. This promising research avenue is not pursued in Ganguly's chapter on Rushdie's 2005 novel. Ganguly's disentangling of the terms "postcolonial," "global," and "world" in the introduction is much needed and persuasive. She hints at the recent emergence of global literature as a category, linked as it is with the ongoing issues of colonialism and globalization. But it is puzzling to see that this well-read study does not interact with work on global fiction by such scholars as Sanjay Krishnan, Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley, Diana Brydon, and Richard J. Lane. With her eighteenth-century expertise, Ganguly is more immersed [End Page 177] in longstanding debates about world literature from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Edward Said and Immanuel Wallerstein. Drawing on Romantic sources, she expounds on the lovely, instructive phrase "the melancholic realism of the world novel" (19). She also reflects on the increasingly pervasive sense in academia that there are problems with the term "postcoloniality," particularly in light of transnational brands of terror and war without end. Ganguly paints a grisly picture of what she terms, with a nod to Achille Mbembe, "deathworlds" around the globe (9), as well as to resistance movements that deflagrate in response. The chapter entitled "Forensic Witnessing," for example, is an elegy for the Sri Lanka killed during its protracted civil war as portrayed in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. Strangely, though, the 2003 Iraq War is first encountered via Ian McEwan's Saturday. In this novel, a rather objectionable middle-class man, Henry Perowne, expresses views of the war and Muslim migrants in Britain that are hardly offset by even the echo of a contestatory subaltern voice. Similarly, Martin Amis's "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" provides readers' first window on 9/11 in this volume. Ganguly praises "Amis's deft strokes" (49) in the short story and absorbs his phrase "the thing which is called the World" (43) into her title. It is a missed opportunity that she does not challenge Amis's preoccupation with the figure of the terrorist, his simplistic view of Atta as a man with a death wish, and the hateful nature of some of his public pronouncements on Muslims and Islam. Ganguly makes...

“Inhospitable Nation”: Violence, Maternal Desire, and Healing in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

“Inhospitable Nation”: Violence, Maternal Desire, and Healing in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Archaeology and Teleology in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Critics have observed that Anil Tissera, the forensic pathologist in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, adopts an aerial view of the war in Sri Lanka, but they have noted less frequently the novel's emphasis on excavation, and together the motifs make for a dialectical logic that opens up possibilities for healing both the nation and the self. Her Western ways are not necessarily repudiated by the text, especially since they reflect a devotion to individual freedom as much as they do to scientific objectivity.

The postsecular imagination: postcolonialism, religion, and literature

Preface: The Literary and The Postsecular. Introduction: Situating Postsecularism 1. Postsecularism and Nation: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient 2. Minority's Christianity: Allan Sealy's The Everest Hotel 3. Postsecularism and Violence: Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost 4. If Truth Were A Sikh Woman: Shauna Singh Baldwin's What The Body Remembers 5. Postsecularism and Prophecy: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses 6. Art After the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, Shalimar The Clown, and The Enchantress of Florence 7. The Known and The Unknowable: Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Mahasweta Devi's Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha Coda Notes References Index

Vanishing points/visible fictions: the textual politics of terror

My paper explores Agamben's formulation of ‘vanishing points’ – that is, spaces of exception and exclusion where a human being can be killed with impunity – and considers this in relation to the representation of the human body in literary texts on terror. I focus on the way in which gaps and elisions in discourses on terror are registered, marked and filled by literary texts that focus on the precarious vulnerability of those designated as homo sacer. I explore how writers presence the being rendered ‘sacred’ who is placed beyond the protection of the law and in danger of being silenced and disappeared, and examine the ways in which biopolitical discourse helps illuminate our analysis of literary texts such as Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Chris Abani's Song for Night and Salman Rushdie's Shame. I show how the formal differences between these texts are underscored by a shared concern with an ethical re-evaluation of how best to bear witness to politically sanctioned violence, and reveal how a literary and discursive approach to biopolitics can help identify the ways in which the relationship between the subject body and sovereign power comes to be constructed.

A Poetic Encounter with Otherness: The Ethics of Affect in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

A Poetic Encounter with Otherness: The Ethics of Affect in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Victoria Cook, in Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje's Anil's addresses issues of identity raised in the narrative of Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost. Cook's paper is a close analysis of Ondaatje's novel, paying particular attention to the way in which Ondaatje examines identity as both a construct and a process. The approach used is one that draws on postcolonial theory and takes a perspective. Cook argues that Ondaatje's text moves beyond the concept of a postcolonial literature of resistance into an area that requires a theory of process rather than product. Transnationalism is shown here to be just such a theory, in that it captures something of this fluidity: the analysis is underpinned, therefore, by the application of transnational theory, as put forward by critics such as Paul Giles. Names and naming are the main themes addressed in the course of this argument, with regard to the way in which they impact on issues of identification. Finally, Cook explores in her paper issues of identity in Anil's Ghost, identity that traverses cultural and national boundaries and encompasses both central and marginal positions. Victoria Cook, Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje's Anil’s Ghost page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.3 (2004):

Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Sandeep Sanghera, in her paper Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost discusses questions which make Ondaatje's novel a text about postmodern identity: who is this woman Anil who lives mostly in the West, travels on a British passport, works for an international organization, and no longer has any real ties to her first home? In the paper, these questions are examined via the languages Anil adopts and abandons in the novel. Sanghera elaborates on the question of foreign-ness represented by the protagonist of the novel; however, this foreign-ness is examined in the particular context concerning the substance of family and kinship as well as language and nation. Sanghera's analysis represents the questions and thoughts of readers who are themselves migrants between languages and homes. Sandeep Sanghera, Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost page 2 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.3 (2004):

Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Marlene Goldman suggests in her paper "Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" that at first glance Ondaatje appears to promote the idea of a Sri Lankan Buddhist faith as transcending history. Ondaatje introduces the subject of Buddhism early on in the novel, emphasizing initially the devastation wrought by imperial and colonial forces. Goldman, however, argues that subsequent references to Buddhism undermine the initial portrayal of a religion besieged by external imperialist forces. For example, at one point, the character Palipana refers to the assassination of his brother, Narada, a Buddhist monk. Narada was possibly the victim of a "political killing" and rumours suggest he was killed by a novice and thus his death recalls the historical connection between the JVP (termed "the antigovernment insurgents" in the novel) and young Buddhist monks. Goldman argues that rather than offering a sanitized account that ignores Buddhism's enmeshment in politics, Ondaatje's novel addresses the complex relationship between religion, politics, and violence in Sri Lanka.