In Memoriam Nihal de Silva

La linea che divide il mare dalla laguna è visibile, precaria e
ineludibile, come tutti i confini, con la loro necessità e la loro
vanità, poco importa se si tratta di confini fra le acque, i colori, i
paesi o i dieletti.1
Claudio Magris, Microcosmi (77)

1Claudio Magris has highlighted the diversity as well as the fatal attraction of border spaces. His insights can provide a conceptual basis to analyze terror and civil war. Focusing on two novels by two Sri Lankan expatriates, this paper investigates the ideological tensions and ambiguities that are inherent in narratives of return. Anticipating recent diaspora fiction, Kiran Desai’s Biju and Hamid Mohsin’s Changez, both Michael Ondaatje’s Anil and Romesh Gunesekera’s Marc are problematic returnees. Both novels raise the issues around the notion of home, which I shall examine together with survival in the face of terror as well as paradigms of regeneration.

2The narrator of Anil’s Ghost2 has hardly set foot on her native island when she is greeted with ‘the return of the prodigal’ tag (10) to which she immediately takes exception. The reference to the parable and Anil Tissera’s refusal to play the role of the penitent absconder readmitted into the fold sets the tone of the novel—relocation does not signify reconnection.

3Even before her fact-finding mission, Anil has been marginalized— she is perceived as an alien, a Westerner working for a Geneva-based foreign institution, travelling on a British passport (16), and claiming a loose affiliation to her native Sri Lanka, which she can only ‘interpret […] with a long-distance gaze’ (11). Thus her forensic work is monitored by a native expert appointed by the authorities and officials seem anxious to derail her investigation.

4A thread of belonging and unbelonging runs throughout the novel. This is graphically conveyed by the reference to the discoloured raksha bandhana, the sacred thread tied on Anil’s wrist to ward off evil at a Hindu ceremony (18-19). Furthermore, the narrator who has ‘courted foreignness’ to the extent that London underground stations or U. S area codes are imprinted on her brain, struggles on the island ‘with one arm of language’ (54). The East/West, nativist/foreign polarities are exemplified by her marked preference for ‘the language of science’, ‘the language of the bones’ over male-dominated Sinhala culture. In the course of her investigation, the narrator belatedly realizes that her Western-style neutrality is considered an obstacle by her fellow Sri Lankan colleagues Chitra or Sarath Diyasena. For all her denunciation of human rights abuse and her rhetoric of compassion, she can slip in and out like internationally accredited journalists and leave the victims to fend for themselves and to face their fate. Gamini’s wry observation on Anil’s sanitized Western engagement serves as a metacommentary on the writer’s scripting Sri Lanka from the West and for the benefit of a mostly Western audience:

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. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. […] [T]he war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit. (285-86)

5Gamini’s condemnation echoes Rajiva Wijesinha’s critique of Anil’s Ghost and Heaven’s Edge3 as Orientalist texts scripted for Western consumption. In a similar vein to Anil, Marc’s migrant quest narrative is defined by estrangement and emotional ‘orphanhood’. He is educated by Eldon, his South Asian grandfather (Eldorado— London?) and Cleo, his Caribbean grandmother following the death of his parents in tragic circumstances—his father in a plane crash over the jungle and his mother by committing suicide.4 However, Marc’s return—if the term can be used—is vicarious. The narrator of HE is left an unlikely family chattel or ‘lodestar’ in the shape of a video cassette by his dead father in which Lee invites his son to embark on ‘a journey of love’ to reconnect with the family’s roots in an unnamed war-torn tropical island which both is and is not Sri Lanka (6, 18). Actually, wanderlust is inscribed in the family genes— the text is replete with references to The Odyssey and The Telemachia, Ulysses, Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad and, more significantly, Robinson Crusoe—and this deferred homecoming is intended to re-enact an earlier pilgrimage by Eldon and Lee to ‘the ancestral home’ (8).

6The novel bears the hallmarks of a tourist narrative with which it struggles. Touristic discourse—masquerading as a traveller’s discovery exists in tension with the anxiety of origins or recovery. Both novels articulate such problematics. In HE, the video that prompts the narrator to undertake ‘the journey home’ glamorizes warfare as ‘a sort of Disneyland’ (153). The tourist time warp is suggested by the description of a colonial palace floating atop a hill ‘like an empyreal pagoda crested with balconies and glazed ochre tiles. The scene was a picture held in a glass’ (129). Marc’s petulance and proprietary arrogance at the Palm Beach Hotel match Anil’s frustrations and assumptions on her return to Colombo. His tribulations to reach Samandia and his lurid depiction of the paradise seem to replicate a travelogue (175, 177, 179-80). Samandia’s riotous jungle echoes the colonizer’s perception of the lush Caribbean landscape in The Wide Sargasso Sea: ‘Everything is too much… too much blue, too much purple, too much green.’ (89-90) The main protagonist is ascribed the place of tourist outsider by friend and foe alike. A militia commander refers to him as a ‘tourfucker’ (165), while Uva, the Amazon-like eco-warrior, whose name is borrowed from a Lankan mountain region, mistrusts this latter-day avatar of ‘your brass-balled colonizers’ (282).5 Furthermore, Uva punctures Marc’s disquisitions on the foreigner’s superior sense of belonging by pointing to his exoticizing / eroticizing gaze (39, 41)—an oblique commentary on critics who only read Gunesekera’s fiction through the lens of stereotyping and exoticism.

7 Both Michael Ondaatje and Romesh Gunesekera have been criticized for their negative take on Sri Lanka, a reflection on the Trojan-horse duplicity of their narrators—the word Trojan is mentioned in HE (154). Short of being excoriated for crafting fiction, the two writers have also been accused by Chelva Kanaganayakam, Qadri Ismail or Kanishka Goonewardena amongst others of writing apolitical or ahistorical novels that alternately misrepresent Sinhala culture—particularly Theravada Buddhism— or fail to adequately engage Tamil issues. Goonewardena dismisses AG for only dealing with the symptoms of the civil war:

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? (Goonewardena, quoted in Goldman 2)

8I would argue with Minoli Salgado that in both AG and HE, ‘the presentation of violence […] works from a spatio-temporal dynamic that recodes and displaces the past to serve the needs of a disjunctive, ruptured and misplaced present’ (151) to which I would add, irrespective of the belligerents’ agendas.

9In other words, the novels are loosely based on the violence unleashed in the course of the JVP 1971 insurrection and the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms contrary to the exploration of the historical and social tensions leading up to communal riots and full-blown civil war in Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies. Their main focus is the effect of sectarian violence on the victims while they suggest tentative mediations for survival and healing.6

10Both AG and HE describe a global civil war—the island is caught in a ‘self-burying motion’, there was ‘terror everywhere, from all sides’, ‘the justice of death’. Anil also refers to ‘a poison into the bloodstream’ (AG 154, 156, 157), phrases which resonate with Uva’s denunciation of a ‘state of terror’, a ‘Hydra’, ‘a monster’, an ‘ugly war’, ‘a malady’ with its ‘ingrained’ violence and reminiscent of Camus’s The Plague (HE 27, 37, 39, 99). Eldon’s Gandhi-like pacifist belief that ’the art of killing cannot be our finest achievement’ (HE 100) echoes Anil’s translation of Archilocus: ‘In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead’ (AG 11, confer 55). In the context of their respective quests, Anil like Marc encounters a traumatized orphan— Lakma or Pushpa ‘ [whose] eyes have destroyed her tongue’ (HE 108). Even hospitals are not immune from sectarian reprisals and Dr Gamini Diyasena confesses that he has ‘lost faith in man’s rule on earth’ (AG 119). He seeks invisibility and solace from ‘the war rooms’ by the refrigerated plasma bank or in the children’s ward.

11While both novels deterritorialize violence to highlight its systemic nature, Ondaatje through metafiction and the whodunit genre, Gunesekera through a combination of manhunt, atemporality and fantasy, they do so from different perspectives. Using Anil’s human rights work in Guatemala as well as Palipana’s epigraphic research, Ondaatje’s narrator learns to ascribe ‘meaning’ to violence through the ‘distance of time’ (AG 55). In the light of the book’s universal appeal to transcend communal boundaries, the charge of partisanship becomes irrelevant. In this respect it is worth examining the political and symbolic dimension of Sailor—the name given to the anonymous body hidden among ‘the unhistorical dead’, which Anil has to investigate.

12Anil’s mission is complex. Not only does she assign herself the task of finishing the ‘unfinished’ business of death by identifying the victim—‘give him a name would name the rest’ (AG 56). But her post-mortem does also have a national import. One of the key questions about the novel concerns the process by which Anil becomes ‘citizened’ by Ananda’s and Sarath’s friendship (AG 200). And to what extent Michael Ondaatje’s orchestrating the change works.

13Apart from solving the crime, the objectives of the whodunit are to hold the perpetrator to account and to restore some sense of order to the community—a prerequisite for reconciliation. On that basis alone, Anil’s aborted investigation counts as a failure. Her trenchant exposure of the authorities triggers off Sarath Diyasena’s murder as well as her own rape in a government-run hospital (AG 282). Furthermore, the endless cycle of violence and communalism continues with the penultimate assassination of President Katugala by a suicide bomber on National Heroes Day.

14However, at the very juncture when she sees her own foreignness being projected back to her as a mark of stigma and exclusion, Sarath admits that she has gained legitimacy: ‘He heard her say, “I think you murdered hundreds of us”. Hundreds of us. Sarath thought to himself. Fifteen years away and she is finally us’ (AG 272). As Sarath’s parting words suggest, Anil does not entirely leave Sailor behind nor consign her findings to the anonymous files of history. She has espoused Sailor in more ways than one. It is no coincidence that the bond between them is highlighted by the popular marriage-related counting game:

When shall I marry?
This year, next year, some time, never.
What will my husband be?
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich-man, poor-man, beggar-man, thief.7

15This interpretation is further substantiated by Anil’s discordant song: ‘Hey honey, I’m home’, when conducting a post-mortem. Thus, for all her limitations, Anil becomes instrumental in bonding the victims even if she fails to bring the government to book.

16 Unlike Michael Ondaatje, whose representation of violence relies on fictional—whodunit genre—and metafictional devices such as song, poetry, list of maps, catalogue of extrajudicial killings, Romesh Gunesekera dislocates time and place more radically; the novel combines a chronotopia—an imaginary locale situated in future projected virtual time—and a dystopia—a fictional state turned into chaos and brutality—in keeping with the themes of paradise and hell or the post-nuclear holocaust which has ‘neutered’ most of the island in the wake of the civil war. Hence, the symbiotic relationship between the toxic landscape and the feral marauding militias that have carved up the island.8 Maravil, ‘the quarantined north resort’, from which violence erupts, comprises an Orwellian detention camp, an ersatz cityscape with a ramshackle market, a military monument displaying ‘collective hubris’ and a Carnival Mall underworld, only accessible to pass-holders.9 The monument has a symbolic dimension since it celebrates a victory of military might over Uva’s world, represented by garuda-like warriors (40, 55, 61).

17Contrapuntal to the materialist scripting of exoticism in the text, ecology offers in Heaven’s Edge a counter-discourse of resistance to systemic violence. The message of conservation is delivered by Uva who acts as the steward of the island’s pre and post-lapsarian sanctuary. Uva’s name is associated with ‘venerable old gods’ and ‘forest folk in perennial rebellion’ (22). She also has close affinities with the fairy world of Titania and Ariel. Against all odds and random violence, the heroine strives to pursue her murdered parents’ alternative sustainable projects first with her ‘ashram’ and later with Samandia. Although Gunesekera emphasizes the sanctuary’s ‘pristine’, or ‘primeval’ nature with its ‘last gene pool’, the tenor of the message has an anti-Darwinian connotation as the text advocates both an aversion to selection and the survival of the weakest (HE 186). In this cornucopia there are no predators other than humans—the soldiers who plunder natural resources and kill the monkey that Marc has been nursing. As his shallow embrace of exotica is sorely tested, by the end of the novel Marc realizes that he has to make his own decisions at a cost. He can no longer countenance Eldon’s pacifism if he is to safeguard Samandia from violent intruders.

18To try to understand the significance of Samandia it may be worth drawing a parallel with Wilpattu, another liminal space in Nihal de Silva’s The Road From Elephant Pass.10 In this novel that pits two unlikely fugitives—a Singha officer and an LTTE informer—against communal violence, nature is a full-blown character. This is to be expected from a novelist who draws his inspiration from his work as a conservationist and naturalist. There are obvious similarities between the trajectory of Marc and the maze of tracks followed by Kamala Velaithan and Wasantha Ratnayake. Both sets of character rediscover the rules of survival as they ‘have to live off the land’ (73). In both sanctuaries, water plays a central role. In TRFEP, the villus do not only serve as landmarks, they also provide irrigation, sustenance, purification and peace of body and mind. Likewise the lake in Samandia symbolizes rebirth with ‘the heavy smell of warm water, the fecundity of low-lying leaves, steaming chlorophyll, and hot moist air raddled with pollen’ (HE 171).11 In Wilpattu as in Samandia, the rainforest canopy teems with life in a cacophony of songs and a Gauguin-like riot of colours. All resemblances, however, have to stop at this point. Despite his characters’ shared love of birds, Nihal de Silva’s Wilpattu has a plethora of big cats on the prowl, herds of stampeding buffalos or elephants and ‘pitiless yellow eyes searching for prey’ (TRFEP 161).

19 Quite differently, Marc’s project is about rootedness, homecoming: ‘knew then this had to be the place I had always been yearning for without quite knowing it’ (HE 176). In Samandia, Gunesekera’s protagonist envisions himself as ‘Crusoe’ stamping his own mark, shaping the haven to his needs:

I wanted space and order, light and colour, I wanted the place teeming with a hundred different types of birds, of bees, of squirrels. I wanted them to all come, drawn by a lodestone of passion and the heady, overpowering scent of a garden in the middle of a jungle; to bring Uva with them, and if she could not come here, I wanted the garden to become her. (HE 193, confer 188)

20Herein Marc conflates wilderness with its very opposite—the Garden of Eden. Unlike Nihal de Silva’s magnetic feral jungle grounded on realism, Gunesekera’s ‘hallucinogenic’ sanctuary acquires a noumenal dimension (180). In this respect, the numerous syncretic echoes of the paradise of Dharma or the Garden of Eden, as well as references to samsara and death and rebirth— ‘rot’, ‘fertilise’, ‘recycle’, ‘antenatal’, ‘cocoon’, ‘incarnation’—should be noted. Marc’s voyage of love is completed when Lee’s and Uva’s phantasmagorical landscapes merge. The process of regeneration culminates with Uva’s rebirth in the amniotic fluid of the lake, a scene that is heralded by the hatching of a myriad butterflies from their chrysales (205-6). The narrator is enthralled by the sight of Uva emerging from the water like Venus Anadyomene. In addition to resistance and ecofeminism, Uva’s sudden re-emergence celebrates the indomitable power of imagination. In this light one should interpret the bird imagery in reference to the heroine, more particularly the association with the Garuda, a mythical bird inspired from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Rukh / Simurgh in Persian epics and Sūfi poetry or similar to Quetzalcoatl and a ‘memory of our evolution’ (30, 38).12 In this respect, it is worth mentioning the peacock-like craft inspired from the Hindu Vimanas which Lee had panned in his video for his son when trying to promote his ‘fabulous past of magic heroism and fantastic celestial odyssey’ (154).13 Later, Marc reenacts the scene with the ‘Trojan peacock’, as he alights in Samandia and becomes a reborn phoenix (167).

21In Anil’s Ghost, human agency can help alleviate trauma if not give meaning to indiscriminate violence. As the text suggests an awareness of fractured selves and national wounds can pave the way for regeneration.14 Apart from Anil and Sarath, this process hinges on the character of Palipana. The venerable monk plays a key role at three different levels. He is a seer who connects Anil to Ananda Udagama, the eye-painter and thereby initiates the process of catharsis, which will be discussed below. Secondly, Palipana has experienced sectarian violence with the murder of his brother by a novice and the rape of his relative, Lakma. Thirdly, Palipana epitomizes the epistemological limitations of reading the truth.

22The ostracization of the reclusive monk who interpolated old Sinhala inscriptions with his own apocryphal text points to the dangers of summoning the past for one’s political or ethnic agenda. Truth can only be a personal journey. The epigraphist’s story, based on the controversy over Paranavitana’s controversial decoding of the Vallipuram inscription, reflects the manipulation by Theravada Buddhism of canonical texts such as the Mahavamsa and the Culavamsa (Kaferer 38, 105; Goldman 5). One particular example is deployment of the mythical war between King Dutthagamani and King Elara to essentialize Sinhala ethnicity through its core tenets of Sihadipa and Dhammadipa.

23Through Palipana and the nostalgic evocation of a forest monastery, Ondaatje portrays an older, less politicized and more inclusive form of Buddhism. Departing from the officially sanctioned, ethnicized and politicized Theravadic orthodoxy, the distinct Mahayanist tradition which reduces hierarchical barriers between bhikkhus and laity places emphasis on community and connection.

24Its message of pluralism and hybridity can be detected in the raksha bandhana, the frayed thread that Anil is wearing to ward off evil (19). Symbolically, Anil sports a Hindu bracelet in the context of a Buddhist apotropaic ceremony. Pirith or Paritta—the term designates protection—is chanted in the hope of obtaining blessings of the Dhamma—the sacred words of Lord Buddha and pirith-nula is a white thread protecting all the participants.

25The eye-opening ceremony further explores the syncretic nature of Buddhism. It should be stressed that the scene is located at Buduruvagala, a seat of Mahayanist devotion. Moreover, Netrā Mangala or Netrā Pinkama, as it is sometimes called, is a complex apotropaic Buddhist ceremony, which has fused pre-Buddhist rites. A. K. Coomraswamy whose work, Elements of Buddhist Iconography, has inspired Michael Ondaatje, emphasizes the Hindu origin of the eye-opening ceremony. It culminates an elaborate consecration ritual in an auspicious full moon day and only after the vivification ritual does the painter complete the eyes in swift assured strokes. As in Gunesekera’s novel, the symbolism of death and rebirth should be noted. Describing the eye-opening ritual, Palipana observes: ‘Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing’ (99). More than a meta-commentary on his failing eyesight, the ascetic’s remark can also apply to the nation’s myopia. Hence, it is no coincidence that Ondaatje entrusts the eye painting to Ananda Udugama, whose wife Sirissa has been a victim of extrajudicial killing.

26The novel’s final episode draws attention to the process of remembering and regeneration, a process which is introduced in the prologue with the wheel in the Miner’s folk song and which echoes and complements Anil’s reconstruction of Ruwan Kumara, aka Sailor. Buduruvagala, the place where the Buddha statue is reconstructed was also used as a killing field and a place of torture (300). Ananda—whose name has strong resonances in both Pali and Sanskrit suggesting bliss—does not only play the part of devout attendant by refocusing the Buddha, he is also instrumental in rebuilding a giant statue.15 The fragmented Buddha statue whose face has been broken into more than ‘one hundred chips and splinters of stone’ and ‘whose eyes would [symbolically] always look north’ serves as a haunting reminder of the pitfalls of hegemonic racial constructs (303). Significantly, rather than homogenize the face into ‘a [cosmetic] unit’, Ananda elects to ‘leave the statue as it was’, to respect the scars on the ‘quilted face’ (AG 302). The choice of the word is apposite as it refers to sutures and a soft material in keeping with Mahayanist gentleness. Besides the evocation of a quilt patchwork strikes a chord with the novel’s message of division and plurality.

27Both AG and HE explore genocidal or institutional violence in ways that confound some of their critics’ expectations in terms of political engagement. One can only marvel at the way critics give expatriates like Michael Ondaatje and Romesh Gunesekera the highest accolades and reclaim them as native writers, as they are in the limelight, only to declare them persona non grata and diasporize their œuvre when they explore unchartered territory or portray their homelands in less favourable terms.

28Far from sidelining political issues, both novels attend to the victims and give meaning to Achille Mbembe’s nameless disposable bodies. Hence, their universal appeal, either through indeterminacy in the case of HE or through the symbolic affiliation of Sailor and a framing text about human rights abuse in Guatemala in AG.

29 Both heterogeneous works resist pigeonholing along simplistic binaries that buttress communal violence as is evidenced in David Blacker’s A Cause Untrue. On their personal journeys the two narrators encounter paradigms of regeneration through human agency and reconciliation with their environment and their past. Ondaatje’s message of ecumenism bears resemblance to Gunesekera’s ecology. The two terms, derived from the Greek word meaning home, suggest the uniqueness of home as well as its symbiotic hybridity. Revisiting paradise or pre-Buddhist rituals, Gunesekera like Ondaatje propounds paradigms of harmony and mutual understanding transcending boundaries or revisionist theories premised on racial purity and ethnocentric nativism. Thus, there can be no process of working through trauma or regeneration without due acknowledgement of the sutures, the scars of human folly, without a recognition of hybridity, a space mediated outside hegemonic narratives through which the West gives itself a clean conscience, portraying itself as a civilizing bulwark against recalcitrant colonized others.