War Doctors: Toward a Postnational Ethics of Hospitality in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Confessing to a boyhood fixation with doctors, Michael Ondaatje once explained his interest in medical work in broadly existential terms: “after all, our lives are all so dangerous, precarious—you could even say abandoned. Rescue and healing are essential things” (qtd. in Matousek 58–59). These reflections on human precariousness and the perennial centrality of “rescue and healing” were delivered in 2000, the year Ondaatje, as writer-in-residence, led seminars in the Program in Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center. The same year also saw the publication of Anil’s Ghost, his novel about civil war Sri Lanka.¹ Here, too, the writer expresses a deep regard for doctors and nurses, specifically those laboring “in hospitals of chaos and dedication” remote from the medical centers of the global North (309).² In the situations the novel references, it is not universal precariousness but precarity, in Judith Butler’s sense (Frames 25), that is at issue. Quotidian and tangible, precarity in Anil’s Ghost becomes a technology of war, its violent shocks daily feared and felt by caregivers as much as by victims. Taking its cue from the novel’s interest in “[r]escue and healing” and Ondaatje’s continuing public recall of his time “witnessing how one lived” in conditions of permanent emergency (qtd. in McCann), this essay pursues the question of what it means to be a doctor in such “death-worlds” (Mbembe 40) as Ondaatje’s Sri Lanka.³

The way Anil’s Ghost represents it, what it means to be a doctor is exactly as we might expect, based on the regulative ideals that universally organize professional practice within biomedicine. Doctors operate humanely, saving lives without exception on a near-eschatological landscape where they carry on, unrelentingly, their “offstage battle with the war” (Anil’s Ghost 209). Their rescue work acts as a foil to the gruesome war-text inscribed by massacre, suicide bombings, disappearances, and homemade bombs, employed with impunity by all against all. Against this backdrop of mutilating terror, surgical handiwork stands as a humane reproach to the “demiurgic surgery” of necropower (Mbembe 35).⁴ Adopting a Levinasian approach that highlights tactile aspects of care in Anil’s Ghost, Jon Kerzer notes that the primary ethical encounter takes place between doctors and suffering victims, “the hand of a surgeon opposed to the hand of a torturer” (118–19). The moral significance of the surgeon’s hand is perhaps most powerfully implied in the novel’s image of the artist as demiurge, rearranging and restoring the broken body parts of a fallen monument of the Buddha. The surgical conceit that develops this closing apotheosis of Buddhist Sinhala art as restorative for the body politic arguably privileges medicine as well, as a healing art going forward, into the distance.

If medicine’s elevation in Anil’s Ghost’s closing description of the recovery and repair of the Buddha is somewhat oblique, this subtleness is not inconsistent with the novel’s general habit of placing its highly valorized if minor medical characters on the narrative margin. In a novel engaged with the fate and ethics of professional work in the context of protracted internecine violence, many reconstructive disciplinary practices—forensics, archaeology, sculpture— gain precedence through mechanisms of plot, event, and character. Medical work, however, remains peripheral, unanchored to the main plot or characters. While the main action in its early stages does take place in and around Colombo hospitals inundated by the dying, doctors (like the vaguely sinister Perera) function as minor characters or remain (like Skanda, Fonseka, and Lakdasa) in the background, surfacing only sporadically, mostly when the narrative cuts away from Colombo and moves to base hospitals or makeshift village clinics in the island’s northeast. Even here, the spotlight on emergency medical action continues mostly to serve the novel’s explicit remit, which is to inventory the “distant suffering” (Boltanski xiv) inflicted on anonymous masses by “furious and tired professional men of death” (Anil’s Ghost 174).

Anil’s Ghost fulfills this remit in several ways, chiefly through...