armavirumque

Page numbers refer to this edition:

• Ondaatje, Michael. 2001. Anil’s Ghost. New York: Vintage.

secondary literature:

• Burton, Antoinette. 2003. “Archive of Bones: Anil’s Ghost and the Ends of History“. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38.1: 39-56.
• Cook, Victoria. 2004. “Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost“. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.3 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol6/iss3/2/> (accessed April 15, 2009).
• Farrier, David. 2005. “Gesturing towards the Local: Intimate Histories in Anil’s Ghost“. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41.1: 83-93.
• Ganapathy-Doré, Geetha. 2002. “Fathoming Private Woes in a Public Story: A Study of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost“. Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6.1 <http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v613/anil.htm> (accessed April 15, 2009).
• Ha?rting, Heike. 2003. “Diasporic Cross-Currents in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Anita Ran Badami’s The Hero’s Walk“. Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 28.1: 43-70.
• Scanlan, Margaret. 2004. “Anil’s Ghost and Terrorism’s Time“. Studies in the Novel 36.3: 302-317.
• Spurr, David. 1993. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press.

Victoria Cook once speaks of “the fluid whole that is Anil Tissera” (2004, 3) and I think this is a very good expression to describe Anil’s identity. As I have shown, Anil’s journey around the world is not only a geographical one, but also metaphorical. With the purchase of her brother’s name she starts a process of emancipation, but during this purchase she is still in a position inferior to her brother. Later, in England, she still does not let go of her Sri Lankan roots, which leads her into the marriage with a Sri Lankan.

It is only after her divorce, when she moves to the United States, that she finally liberates herself from male power and finds her own independent identity. At the beginning of her time in Sri Lanka, she also sees herself as an outsider, or at least as someone who can judge the events from the outside, but during the course of her investigations she starts to see herself as a Sri Lankan again. Anil moves away from and back to Sri Lanka as she did in the swim race, her title ‘swimmer‘ therefore is in this context very appropriate.

Anil’s story ends as Gamini has predicted it: “‘American movies, English books–remember how they all end? [...] The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him.’” (285). It is unfortunate that we have to leave Anil at this moment and can not follow her further, because the very interesting question of her new destination after Sri Lanka – she has nowhere and nobody to go to – has to be left unanswered. In this respect, the novel offers its readers a slightly negative prospect.

Bibliography

Throughout the novel there is one prominent recurring motif to be encountered, namely the motif of water or, in a more figurative sense, the motif of fluidity. Before I link this idea to Anil and her identity, I want to go through the several occasions where the motif can be found.

To begin with, Anil’s and Sarath’s working place in Colombo is set up on a ship with the name Oronsay, which has been put out of service and has been “berthed permanently in an unused quay at the north end of Colombo harbour” (18). The ship is apparently named after a Scottish island with the same name and has “once travelled between Asia and England” (18), so there is a strong connection to Great Britain. Ganapathy-Doré sees the ship as “an island of confidentiality in the murky political waters of Sri Lanka” (2002), but since government officials certainly know that Anil and Sarath are working on the ship, it is in my opinion as safe or unsafe as any other place in Colombo. I would rather claim that the ship represents the insecurity of their whole enterprise. Just as the ship is not connected to the safety of the mainland and is therefore subject to dangers such as storms, Anil’s and Sarath’s actions are constantly endangered of being exposed.

Speaking of the Scottish island Oronsay, islands in general play a significant role in the novel. Sri Lanka itself is of course an island, Anil is legally a citizen of another island, the United Kingdom (cf. 16), and Anil’s and Leaf’s most discussed film is Point Blank because of a scene in which Lee Marvin swims from the prison island Alcatraz to San Francisco (cf. 237). Anil and Leaf ask themselves where exactly Lee Marvin was shot: “When they looked at the scene closely they saw Lee Marvin’s hand leap up to his chest. ‘See, he has difficulty on his right side. When he swims later in the bay he uses his left arm.’” (238).

To return to Anil, she uses exactly the same image earlier in the novel: “But here, on the island, she realized she was moving with only one arm of language among uncertain laws and a fear that was everywhere” (54). In this quote, Anil mentions “the island” explicitly and connects it to uncertainty and fear. In my view, this is the main characteristic of the islands in the novel. Not only does Sri Lanka cause uncertainty and fear in Anil, but she is also lonely and uncertain during her time in Great Britain, her legal country of residence, as I have elaborated in chapter 2. 2.

When we look at the already mentioned process of naming, we come across two further references to water. “They had labelled the bodies TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SAILOR” (51). The names that Anil and Sarath give their four unburied bodies are taken from a children’s counting game that begins with these four words. What is notable about these namings, however, is that the three ancient bodies are named ‘tinker’, ‘tailor’ and ‘soldier’, and that the important fourth body, which turns out to be a murder victim, is called and from then on referred to as ‘sailor’. This could be read as connoting the body with the same uncertainty I have assigned to the role of the islands. A sailor is someone without a fixed home, or at least with a home unknown to Anil and Sarath. They want to give him back that missing part of his identity and reconstruct it, mainly by finding out his real name, because they see him as a “representative of all those lost voices”. They argue that “[giving] him a name would name the rest” (56).

The second example of naming involving the motif of water is the name that Anil is known by in Sri Lanka. It is also the name that Sarath addresses her by at their first meeting: “‘So–you are the swimmer!’” (16). The reader already knows where this title comes from:

Anil at sixteen had won the two-mile swim race that was held by the Mount Lavinia Hotel.

Each year a hundred people ran into the sea, swam out to a buoy a mile away and swam back to the same beach, the fastest male and the fastest female fêted in the sports pages for a day or so. (10)

The idea of this swim race is very striking and it can be interpreted as an analogy to Anil’s life and her identity. As a swimmer she swam one mile away from the island, which is quite a distance in water, turned around and swam back. In the same way she leaves Sri Lanka at the age of eighteen and also gradually leaves her Sri Lankan background, until she is very far away from her home country. After her physical return to Sri Lanka, during her investigations, she gradually returns emotionally, too, and she becomes a Sri Lankan again.

Bibliography

One of the first things Anil does after her return to Sri Lanka is to examine a body together with two young students at Kynsey Road Hospital. Anil is so affected by the recently killed victim that her hands begin to tremble – the two students look at each other and one of them says pertly: “‘Is this your first corpse, then?’” (13). This consternation is an unexpected experience for Anil, who “never usually translated the time of a death into personal time” (13) and it shows for a short moment that she is not as confident as she wants herself to be.

A similar incident happens to her during her visit to Lalitha, which I have already mentioned in chapter 2. 3. Lalitha’s granddaughter disturbs the emotional reunion between Anil and her childhood nanny with her disapproving glance:

Anil could hardly recognize the tiny aged woman. They stood facing each other. Anil stepped forward to embrace her. Just then a young woman walked out and watched them without a smile. Anil was aware of the stern eyes that were taking in this sentimental moment. (22)

Anil is literally under the surveillance of Lalitha’s granddaughter, who shows her power and excludes her from the conversation by deliberately speaking in Tamil, a language that Anil is unable to understand.

In these two examples, Anil feels disturbed, but although she is in an inferior position she is in no real danger. Things are different when she, Sarath and Ananda are confronted with soldiers who stop their car in a roadblock. One of them takes Anil’s bag, empties it and searches its contents in front of everybody (cf. 162f). Anil is embarrassed about her personal things being looked through so thoroughly. The structures of power are very evident during this encounter. Anil knows that “the international authority of Geneva” (29) does not mean much in a critical situation, but that she has no other option than to comply with the soldier’s orders.

It becomes even more dangerous for Anil during the hearing at the Armoury Auditorium. What happens to her there is similar to the events at the roadblock. Again, she is questioned by a group of men who are in a superior position. The setup of the Auditorium alone makes these power relationships clear: Anil is in the front and everybody is looking towards her, while she tries to make her case without any real evidence. Sarath makes the situation worse and intimidates her even more during his questioning, but of course that is the only way he can save her.

Were told about the following events only indirectly by the thoughts of Sarath, but we can assume that she is facing tough searches on her way out of the building.

Sarath knew they would halt her at each corridor level, check her papers again and again to irritate and humiliate her. He knew she would be searched, vials and slides removed from her briefcase or pockets, made to undress and dress again. (277)

While Anil leaves the building and has to undergo all the examinations, she is certainly in the most humiliating situation of the ones I have mentioned so far and her inferior position and powerlessness in the face of the local authorities become very evident.

Bibliography

After the analysis of Anil’s relationships, I now want to examine Anil’s behaviour during acts of surveillance. In this chapter I will look at Anil as the person who surveys, and in the next chapter as the person who is under surveillance. An exploration of these situations will help us position Anil’s character within the framework of power relationships and therefore bring us closer to Anil’s identity.

The most important task of Anil’s profession itself involves already a great deal of surveying. When she examines a body as a forensic doctor, she has to look at it very closely in order to find out the causes of it’s death, its age and how long the person has been dead. Very often, and in particular during her work in Sri Lanka, she also has to identify the dead body by giving it a name and by assigning it to the life and the history of a missing person. Anil’s job is the first and a vital step in the course of serving justice – based on her results the police and a judge can accuse the culprit and solve a murder case. Being the first link in this chain of justice puts Anil in a position of great responsibility, her examinations are very important and her surveying actions are a sign of the power that she has in the whole process.

A concrete example of Anil surveying her surroundings can be found in the scene where she films Cullis. While he is still asleep in the morning of their meeting in Miami, she takes her video camera and films him and various things in their hotel room: “She stood on the bed and shot down at Cullis’s sleeping head, his left arm out to where she had been all night beside him. Her pillow. Back to Cullis, his mouth, his lovely rips, [...] down to his ankles” (35). That procedure is an act of power similar to her forensic work. She documents what she sees, preserves memory and, most importantly, she looks at someone who can not look back, which causes the power relationships to be one-sided. That interpretation supports my analysis of Anil’s relationship with Cullis in chapter 2. 4., where I have claimed that Anil is in a position superior to Cullis.

When Anil returns to Sri Lanka, she tries to exercise this power over her new environment, too. She claims that “[t]he island no longer held her by the past”, and that “she had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze” (11), which she metaphorically does a few days later when she sees a bird:

She put herself into the position of the bird as it took off, and was suddenly vertiginous, realizing how high they were above the valley, the landscape like a green fjord beneath them. In the distance the open plain was bleached white, resembling the sea. (45)

These examples show that Anil is used to having an overview over the events that take place around her. She thinks that she is in control of the situation. This soon changes during her stay in Sri Lanka, which will be the topic of the next chapter.

Bibliography