How is intervention received? The protagonist, Anil, is a forensic anthropologist, a diasporic Sri Lankan based in the U. It is precisely in that process of representation where there can be a rich convergence between human rights as a politico-legal discourse, the aesthetic space of the novel form, and the historical condi- tion of postcolonial Sri Lanka.
What, indeed, is the violence and terror that has been devastating Sri Lanka now for over twenty years? What is Sinhalese majoritarianism? And Tamil minoritarianism? I shall argue in this article that Ondaatje invokes the discourse of human rights in order not only to elicit political and ethical responses to Sri Lanka, but also to show how the discourse itself can break down and become frustrated by its application to a particular nation-state context.
Guha argues: a matrix of real historical experience was transformed into a matrix of abstract legality, so that the will of the state could be made to penetrate, reorganize part by part and eventually con- trol the will of a subject population in much the same way as Providence is brought to impose itself upon mere human des- tiny.
It is that privileged connotation which kneads the plurality of these utterances recorded from concerned indi- viduals—from a mother, a sister and a neighbour—into a set of judicial evidence, and allows thereby the stentorian voice of the state to subsume the humble peasant voices which speak here in sobs and whispers.
The novel presents us with, and takes us along the path of, a process. Ondaatje begins the novel with human rights on the scene of the international, by referring to human rights abuses in Guatemala, and moves to the increasingly particular: as Anil moves from the U.
Daniel then concludes that: The worldly-wise in Sri Lanka too, when called upon to de- scribe the current turmoil in their island nation, do so by call- ing it an interethnic conflict.
One immediately senses the mighty hand of nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship beginning to cast its long shadow of the classification of languages on the politi- cal and demographic landscape.
Though useful to those readers unfa- miliar with some of the politics of the conflict, the terms that such de- scriptions usually invoke are themselves problematic for the very reasons that Daniel so cogently discusses. Officially gaining independence from Britain in , Sri Lanka found itself marked by a postcolonial condition with each of its two dominant ethnic groups, the minority Tamils and the majority Sinhalese, enforcing their own brands of ethnic nationalism.
The Tamil communities, concentrated mainly in the north and east of the island, looked to the neighboring south Indian state of Tamil Nadu for cultural and social support.
Indeed, Tamils had been brought from southern India by the British in order to provide labour for the tea plantations. Bandaranaike, active- ly promoted Sinhalese nationalism. The Tamils claimed systemic discrimination, not just lin- guistically, but also socio-economically, particularly through the intro- duction of university entrance quotas in the early s which further limited opportunities for personal advancement.
As a backlash, Sinhalese mobs stormed Colombo, burning and destroy- ing Tamil homes. The Representational Dilemmas of Human Rights How might a novelist such as Ondaatje represent the postcolonial com- plexity of ongoing violence, international demands for peace, and the need for human rights? In his family memoir Running in the Family, written in after a long-due visit to Sri Lanka from Canada, Ondaatje is thoughtful about the constructed nature of ethnic iden- tities in Sri Lanka.
Is violence the only western understanding of Sri Lanka? The space of literature can contribute to knowledge. How do we know Sri Lanka? Because such ethically-charged phenom- ena as violence and catastrophe are particularly resistant to representa- tion, any effort at representing them will always already be haunted by a heightened, if indeed not anxious, self-consciousness riven by both aesthetic and ethical concerns.
To put this differently: as place, Sri Lanka is best understood as a text in the strict Barthesian sense. Sri Lanka, to the post-empiricist, is a reading; it emerges when the reader Ismail responds to written De Silva, Kennanayake, Jeganathan, Scott, Tiruchelvam. This relation, between reader and writer, is in one sense reciprocal: to read textually is to deny the written authority, primacy or priority over the reader.
This is why Sri Lanka, as productivity, can be thought of as subject. For him, the debate: does not turn around culture or violence, but the terms nation, majority, minority and democracy. To browse Academia. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Anil's ghost. Sol Sosa. A short summary of this paper. It had been the third time in a month she had missed the wake up alarm.
Wearily, she tossed the covers off and shuffled to the bathroom. Every morning she felt numb and stupefied because of the pills. Maybe it was time to stop taking them -doctor Mosey might agree to it.
There was no harm in trying. No more blurry images from the previous night. While they were driving away she gave a glance to the new house. Some of the techniques listed in Anils Ghost may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to fiction, cultural lovers. Jul 05, Minutes Buy. With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient , Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.
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. 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.
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. Access options available:. Novel 1 August ; 45 2 : — This essay proposes that Michael Ondaatje's novels develop an archival method that adapts the historical novel to the globalized era. The circulation of these legends, namely Billy the Kid and Sailor, turns the historical novel toward a disruption of national myth rather than the production of it.
That disruption is made possible by Ondaatje's use of the archive as a formal paradigm for the novel—one that is open-ended, unsynthesized, and shape shifting.
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