Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje's Writing

Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

27 Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost Marlene Goldman Critical response to Michael Ondaatje’s depictions of war-torn Sri Lanka have been polarized and politically charged. Early on, Arun Mukherjee condemned Ondaatje in the strongest terms for his supposed preoccupation with aesthetics at the expense of more pressing issues such as history and politics. Ondaatje, she contends, “does not get drawn into the act of living, which involves the need to deal with the burning issues of his time, such as poverty, injustice, exploitation, racism, sexism, etc., and he does not write about other human beings unless they happen to be artists—or members of his own family” (34). Similarly, Suwanda H. J. Sugunasiri in an essay entitled “‘Sri Lankan’ Canadian Poets: The Bourgeoisie that Fled the Revolution” categorizes Ondaatje as an Eurasian or bourgeois and claims that he has adopted a mode of artistic expression that allows him to be creative “without being committed to history, legend, culture or ideology ” (64). In the end, Sugunasiri argues that the designation “Sri Lankan” is “inapplicable ” not simply because writers such as Ondaatje “were a bourgeoisie that fled the revolution,” but also because “they are ignorant of history, culture and the myth of the land and its people, and seem unable to relate to such sensibility” (75). Other critics, responding for the most part to Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, have been more sympathetic to Ondaatje’s treatment of Sri Lanka, particularly in light of the author’s complex position as a bourgeois. “Probing one’s identity is problematic in the best of situations,” Chelva Kanaganayakam writes, “let alone in the case of one who is seen as both the agent and victim of colonial hegemony” (35). Analysing the fate of the middleand upper-class society after Sri Lanka’s independence in 1947, Ernest MacIntyre explains that, unlike the Tamils and Sinhalese who found themselves engaged in “a tryst with destiny,” the bourgeoisie, “the local descendants of the previous Dutch Empire... were to enjoy an entire mortality of heightened unreality, a surreality, because they wouldn’t be provided with even a humbug of ‘a tryst with destiny’ at midnight in 1947” (315). As Kanaganayakam asserts: “To be refused a role in history is to be denied the very basis of identity”; in his eyes, this explains Ondaatje’s “need to establish a niche for himself in Sri Lanaka, which appears time and again with obsessive insistence in his work” (34). However, Kanaganayakam still finds fault with the author for refusing “to be drawn into issues that surface in any serious discussion of the country,” an apolitical stance that makes it impossible, regardless of “the author’s angle of vision or aesthetic sensibility” for Kanaganayakam, to refute Mukherjee’s observations (Kanaganayakam 36). As the critical responses indicate, a fundamental question about Ondaatje’s fiction sparks continuous debate, namely, what kind of engagement with Sri Lanka is forged within his texts? Far from receding, this question has loomed even larger with the publication of Anil’s Ghost. Some critics continue to insist that the portrayals of Sri 28 Marlene Goldman Lanka in Anil’s Ghost remain apolitical and ahistorical. Kanishka Goonewardena argues , for instance, that history “is much less evident in Anil’s Ghost, which (just like Running in the Family) can be and has been appreciated without any awareness of the political upheavals in Sri Lanka (1). In his eyes, the attenuation of history and politics here is more striking than it is in Running in the Family, if only because Anil’s Ghost is full of characters “obsessed with history and telling the truth, along with human rights and wrongs” (1). Goonewardena, in the end, condemns the novel on the grounds that Ondaatje “only deals with the symptoms of the Sri Lankan crisis, as he paints a picture of the everyday life there in a time of terror” (2). “To caricature crudely,” Goonewardena writes, “Anil’s Ghost reads like a story about people dragging a constant flow of dead bodies out of a river that has no hint of what’s happening upstream. Who is throwing the bodies in? Why? Is that not worth knowing?” (2). Responding to the same supposed dearth of historical and political detail, Qadri Ismail argues pointedly that this oversight supports the cause of Buddhist Sinhala nationalism : “nowhere in the entire novel,” says Ismail, “do we find any engagement with the Tamil claim to being oppressed, or with the liberal/human rights/leftist...