Professional Intimacies: Human Rights and Specialized Bodies in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

The United Nations, and the liberal institutionalism it instantiates, has faced a perpetual legitimacy crisis throughout its relatively brief history. The project of achieving a legal universalism capable of guaranteeing human rights on a global scale has appeared alternately as naïve fantasy and as neoimperialist ruse. This legitimacy crisis was evoked perfectly by President George W. Bush in February of 2003, when he warned that the UN would become an “ineffective, irrelevant debating society” if the Security Council did not approve the United States’ call for the invasion of Iraq.¹ This transparently partisan espousal of political realism was calculated to persuade the public of a paradox: that the only force capable of effecting universal legal protections is the will to wield an absolute violence, free of any a priori legal constraints.² This paradox, in turn, rhetorically traps the UN between these two undesirable narratives: to refuse would be to relinquish its grip on reality in favor of the cloistered “debating society,” divorced from hard realities on the ground, but to acquiesce would be to allow human rights discourse to become the tool of U.S. imperialism. Whichever response it chooses, it is particularized, and its ability to uphold a genuinely universal legal order based on liberal humanist principles undermined.

With the universal thus debased by partisan rhetoric, many of the UN’s defenders found it sufficient to defend the UN on the basis of the particular. Many were quick to point out the plethora of humanitarian, environmental, social, and peacekeeping programs that ensure the UN’s “relevance” to large populations all over the world, in myriad concrete ways that go far beyond the tactical decisions of the Security Council.³ In essence, many who came to the UN’s defense did so not primarily on the basis of its juridical force, but of its professional efficacy. One critic, William Clarance, even locates the UN’s future raison d’être in replacing the goal of a single, globalized legal order with an ideal of locally tailored professional pragmatism. Far from providing “one-size-fits-all” solutions for diverse local conflicts, the UN provides “a professional method in which the bottom-up Weld process of closely observing and analyzing population-displacement dynamics in a war zone is an indispensable prerequisite to determining the appropriate response mechanism for a specific ground situation” (8). Indeed, in some cases the UN is truly effective only when the “commitment and skilled pragmatism of professional fieldworkers” wins out over “pressures from an unfavourably disposed bureaucracy in Geneva” (11–12).

It is this promise of professionalism—the promise of reconciling universal legal norms with a disciplined, “bottom-up” pragmatism—that Ondaatje examines with a mixture of admiration and skepticism in his 2000 novel, Anil’s Ghost.⁴ Transposing the detective genre into the realm of international law, the novel reflects upon the viability of a supranational gaze that can survey and regulate the actions of “rogue” governments, not through military interventionism but through a form of due process. Anil, a forensic anthropologist, enters Sri Lanka under the auspices of the UN Centre for Human Rights, charged with finding evidence of human rights abuses committed by the government. In order to gain access to the country, however, she must agree to be partnered with Sarath Diyasena, a government-appointed archaeologist associated with a group of nationalist scholars. In contrast to Anil’s forensic method, his methodology is informed by a commitment to the distinctiveness of local context and the close interpretation of detail. Under his observation and selective guidance, she discovers an anonymous skeleton, which they dub “Sailor,” and which she believes represents an anonymous victim of kidnapping, torture, murder, and finally disappearance at the hands of the government. In order to trace Sailor’s identity and prove the government’s guilt, they must not only negotiate their own disciplinary conflicts, but collaborate with several other local professionals, each of whom has his or her own form of truth at the nexus of disciplinary methodologies and historico-ethical commitments. These include an epigraphist, a medical doctor...