While Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017 and other Asian-Anglophone writers have gained acclaim around the world, the general reading public in the Anglophone world continues to marginalize their contributions and to disregard the diversity and heterogeneity of topics and heritages expressed. Nonetheless, defying marginalization, many Asian-Anglophone writers expand their scope to global issues including that of human rights. Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost belongs to this emerging corpus of Asian-Anglophone novels. Anil’s Ghost describes the atrocious perils facing humanity in Sri Lanka where thousands of lives have been massacred due to “A triptych of civil chaos[:]...Tamil separatists in the north, anti-government insurgents in the south and, in the middle, a government at war against a citizenry whose loyalty it suspects” (Hoffman 446). While the civil war began in 1983, until recently, the ubiquitous violence in Sri Lanka that has resulted in massive casualties and breaches of human rights has received little attention from the West. Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer, poetically probes this pandemonium of his native country’s civil unrest and the West’s willful ignorance of it.

Most reviews of Anil’s Ghost have focused on postcolonialism, testimony, or political ambiguity. Mrinalini Chakravorty investigates the “representation of violence in Anil’s Ghost to probe paradoxes that arises in postcolonial fictions” (543). Chakravorty argues that Ondaatje avoids the West’s ideological approach to violence in the third world by focusing on subalternity and postcolonial melancholia. Lee Spinks argues that Anil’s Ghost contains “complexity and provocation of Ondaatje’s response to the Sri Lankan civil war” (207). Milena Marinkova regards Anil’s Ghost as witness writing emphasizing corporeal and tangible aspect of the novel. But reviewers have disagreed on whether the novel is political and whether Ondaatje presents a one-sided perspective on the civil war. Teresa Derrickson claims that Ondaatje’s novel seems to be apolitical because “it would have been careless for Ondaatje to have done otherwise” (148). She defends Ondaatje, arguing that “he succeeds in avoiding the narration of yet another Western historical account filled with “false empathy and blame” (148). Jon Kertzer also claims that this novel “offers little political analysis and foresees no political solutions” (131). Gillian Roberts rather focuses on ethics and argues that though the novel deals with political crisis, it insists “upon the ethical as a way to heal the nation” (962).

Though Ondaatje avoids blaming or falsely showing postcolonial empathy with war-torn Sri Lanka, I argue that Anil’s Ghost is nonetheless aesthetically political and deeply historical. From a thematic perspective, truth and death are the cruxes of the novel, reverberating with the dead and mutilated bodies during a chaotic civil war perpetrated and aggravated by both internal and international politics. The vociferous screams of suffering Sri Lankans ring out of Anil’s Ghost. Truth and justice are neither beautiful nor ideal as international humanitarian organizations expect. Rather, truth and justice are buried in dead bodies with petrified object signs that make the novel ethico-political. In Anil’s Ghost , death demands an ethical moment of epiphany; healing is possible only through physical interaction between the living and the dead, through tactile experience. This essay will dig into the natural/human history embedded in the bodies of the dead in order to disinter the voices Ondaatje tries to restore in his own ethico-politico-aesthetic moment of enlightenment.

The story of Anil’s Ghost emerges from Sri Lankan history which has endured colonization, civil wars, corruption, and all other turmoil postcolonial nations experience and raises serious questions about purpose of international humanitarian organizations’ intervention in human right issues through lens of a postcolonial subject, Anil Tissera. Anil, 33-year-old forensic pathologist who was born in Sri Lanka but has lived in the West for fifteen years, returns to her home country on the behalf of a U.N. human rights agency, the Center for Human Rights in Geneva, to investigate a civilian massacre supposedly committed by both anti-government insurgents and the government army during the civil wars. She no more understands Sri Lanka’s current situation than Westerners do. As a cosmopolitan, Anil has “courted foreignness” (54).

Anil is called “swimmer,” referring not primarily to her success at a swimming competition before she left Sri Lanka but mainly to her diasporic identity; she crossed the Pacific to achieve a hybrid identity. Anil’s gaze is circumscribed within and refracted through double consciousness of the colonizer and the colonized. Anil “had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze” (11). This superficial gaze is in compliance with her job as a forensic pathologist. Anil has an adamant belief in science and assumes that the “scientific tools at her disposal enable her to access and explain the painful experiences of many others” (Marinkova 112). But her intrusive, scientific and “long-distance gaze” cannot penetrate the surface. What she has interest in is dead bodies and anthropological evidence rather than Sri Lankan’s suffering and the complexity of political situation. Anil’s investigation as refracted through her postcolonial gaze corresponds with function of the human rights organization. The truth for Anil might turn out to be no more than an interesting source of exotic news or a book topic for Western journalists or writers. As Derrikson points out, Anil’s UN mission is “about catering to the global ideology of justice than acting in the best interests of the Sri Lankan people” (144).¹

Anil gradually understands the futility of the U.N.; she “realizes, there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance of time. For now it would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it” (55). Anil is skeptical of her work even before beginning the investigation. Her doubt corresponds with other Westerners in the UN who would not be able to realize the meaning of human violence by “the power of language and logic” (55). The reason of war cannot be explained. Superficially, in global politics “political enemies were secretly joined in financial arms deals. ‘the reason for war was war.’” (Italics in original 43). The West utilizes such violence in the third world to gain self-complacency and prove how stable it is, surreptitiously selling weapons both to the government and to guerrilla forces.

For the investigation Anil is paired with Sarath Diyasena, a 49-year-old archeologist who “can read a bucket of soil as if it were a complex historical novel” (151). Sarath unsettles Anil’s cosmopolitan belief in the Western ideology of justice and lets her bear witness to the complexity and brutality of the Sri Lankan situation. Contrasted to Anil, Sarath investigates the historical ruins deeply and “believes in truth as the ethical basis of life” (Spinks 216). Sarath plays the role of “link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more” (278). Sarath goes beyond Anil’s scientific reasoning; while Anil closely reads the bones and judges inductively to determine the cause of death, Sarath transcends the scientific findings—archeological evidence—to imagine the world of the human beings buried in the ruins. Sarath reads ontologically, ethically, and historically the archeological materials—bones and stones—to build a world virtually and to find meaning of the human beings buried in the site. While Anil focuses on the present, Sarath projects the past into the future. While Anil looks at the bodies with Western gaze, Sarath is filled with empathy with Sri Lankans refusing to move past their sufferings. Sarath has the eye of ethics and history.

Anil and Sarath cooperate to uncover the identity of a skeleton, recently exhumed at a government-restricted archeological site and provisionally named “Sailor,” because they suspect that the victim of the skeleton was recently killed by the Sri Lankan government. The stark differences in personalities and perspectives of these two characters reverberate with their different perspectives on truth. Anil represents a scientific understanding of truth but Sarath accuses Anil of relying on “false belief and blame” (44). Ignoring Sarath’s criticism, Anil devotedly believes that “truth shall set you free” though her truth is limited to a scientific one (213). Anil endeavors to find skin-deep truth, while Sarath digs up “the imprints of the suffering of those disempowered” out of the depths of history (Marinkova 109). This odd pair signifies contradiction between the surface of the human body and the depth of history which dialectically interact and produce a unique understanding of the interconnections between body and history as well as individual and collective traumas. The investigation probes into not just buried or burned bodies but also into internal and international politics contextualized with history in the baffling pursuit of justice in Sri Lanka. From death, politics, ethics and aesthetics emerge.

Body and history, Anil and Sarath work towards finding in the visceral, the truth that belongs to the realm of death. Anil’s Ghost requires readers to open their eyes wide to “reenvision human subjectivity” via a close-up gaze upon dead bodies or mutilated body parts (Chakravorty 543). To accomplish this awakenment, Ondaatje presents graphic descriptions of bloody carnage replete with stomach-churning body images. The scenes of the novel overflow with “hideous mutilation…mud, grass, metal, the remnant of leg and boot all blasted up into the thigh and genitals when the bomb they stepped on went off” (133). There are bodies of which “every tooth had been removed, the nose cut apart, the eyes humiliated with liquids, the ear entered” (289). Anil and Sarath bear witness to a decapitated body skewered by a stick and a truck driver lying on the road with his hands nailed as though crucified. These gory descriptions of the dead bodies or body parts of Sri Lankans evoke fundamental questions: What is the purpose of these appalling depiction? Are these visceral representations ethical? Are representations of atrocious and barbaric historical moments allowable?

These questions resonate with Theodor Adorno’s most poignant and acerbic adage, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric ” (Prisms 34). This statement in which Adorno considers the contradictory relationship between poetry and Auschwitz can be interpreted in two ways. First, that to represent historic barbarity after humanity bore witness to such abhorrent historic events as Auschwitz is barbaric because it is mediated by complex mimesis between nature and civilization, only to found the barbarity of Western rationality and its feat of knowledge accumulated through the history of its totalitarian and colonial civilization and art. Or, barbarity is not a trait of art in the primitive era but relevant to contemporary artistic representation that tends to be complicit with cultural industry. Overall, this dictum reveals Adorno’s resistance to reconciling the cultural industry and totalitarian discourse that makes Auschwitz and its unethical, cultural representation in administrated society possible.

But are all artists’ endeavors to represent appalling historic moments barbaric? Adorno’s adage is conditional in that his criticism targets only realistic, sensational and pretentious representations. Adorno fundamentally denies so-called ‘reconciliation’ with the cultural industry’s taking advantage of human suffering via realistic renditions and proposes that art itself cannot atone for its mimetic impulse to represent the society as much as it cannot be totally autonomous; thus, refracted imagination is necessary (Aesthetic 4). Refracted imagination and refusal of reconciliation through formal correspondence with suffering ensue art’s irreconciliation, refusal to reconcile, with the episteme of identity on which fascism and colonialism are established. In other words, art cannot ignore the barbaric world but it represents ethically its painful content through experiment on the art form.

Ondaatje visualizes suffering human beings and their bodies through unreconciled and refracted images and via fragmentary, ambiguous and multiple narratives. In Anil’s Ghost, chapters and sections are dislocated, jumbled in time, so that a reader must contend with physical blank spaces on the pages and along with the disintegration of narrative structure to make sense the story. Sometimes, Ondaatje inserts episodic stories or segments of lists of the names of the disappeared out of context (41).² The structure of the novel, through refracted imagination, is folded within ambiguity but, resonating with the ambiguity of truth, it “allow[s] this ambiguity to speak for itself” (Hoffman 150). Though some critics such as Allen Brooke critiques the ambiguity in favor of a more realistic depiction of Sri Lankan politics, I argue that paradoxically, ambiguity makes it possible to understand the intersection between real human suffering and politics.

Through this narrative form, Anil’s Ghost avoids the abuse of human suffering and achieves an ethical representation of humanity on the edge of chaos. The vulnerable and weak bodies that have been maimed, exploited, and tortured reverberate with the screaming psychosomatic structure of the novel and cannot be integrated seamlessly. Only in this disheveled structure can the novel avoid barbarity. Flesh and bones, the site of human suffering, are as opaque as historical meanings of truth. Within this kind of structure, the truth of history and humanity can be delineated through the constellation of signs—especially material/bodily signs which elude general concepts and stimulate imagination and thought without fixed concept.

Sarath supposes that, in parallel with the fragmented and ambiguous structure of the novel, truth is affective and ambiguous. Sarath argues “truth is in character and nuance and mood” (259). Truth is complicated and nuanced, thus it is as much political as aesthetic on the condition that ‘aesthetic experience’ includes affects or emotion. Sarath argues that truth can be both political and aesthetic by recounting his previous archeological experience in China when he participated in an excavation of a coffin that, long immersed in water, revealed a male body and the bodies of twenty female musicians with instruments. About the musicians, he explains, “You must understand their state of acceptance somehow such a death. The way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler…Music was not entertainment, it is a link with ancestors who had led us here, it was a moral and spiritual force” (260-61). In this anecdote, musical instruments represent the aesthetic experiences and emotions those musicians had while it also points at the political violence that forced them to die alongside their ruler. Politics not so much accompanies aesthetics as it is in itself another form of aesthetics. Then, what does this contextualization of aesthetics and politics signify?³ How can the bodily parts and archeological findings be explained?

Rancière’s theory of art offers one way to answer these questions. In The Rancière , Rancière, mostly exemplifying Gustave Flaubert’s novels, theorizes about the novelists’ works and their merging of politics with aesthetics through ‘signs,’ arguing that sentences or images in novels “could be compared to muted stones” (Rancière 12). Literature deals with “distribution of the perceptible” in the same way of politics that configure the limits of what can be said and seen; literature assigns where “space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and invisible” can be distributed. Rancière utilizes signs to indicate new sensorium, “a different way of linking a power to perceptibly affect and a power to signify” (Rancière 14).⁴ Literary signs with intensity does not belong to logos but ignites burning senses and affects in readers’ heart, which is the reason why aesthetic experience literature offers is politico-aesthetic. Signs are not symbols or metaphors but the carriers of pre-individual affects and intensity because they deter hermeneutical interpretation or sympathy without intensity. In Anil’s Ghost, objects are center of the novel rather than characters. Objects such as mutilated human bodies and body parts alongside stones including Buddha’s status or natural objects are distributed signs that generate new sensorium to bring forth burning senses and affects in readers’ heart.

Rancière maintains that different from previous literary styles in its ethical or representative artistic regime, the novel, whose sentences deal with specific objects, images, and words for a specific readership rather than human subjects, unfolds the hidden truth of history, distributes various signs equally, and makes the unseen seen, the unsaid said, the untouched touched, and the unrepresented represented. Objects as signs center the art, especially novel. Through signs, “works of literature give material form, which is to say being, to its potential for democratic disturbance” (Davis 115). Moreover, writing a novel in the context of modern democracy is akin to the disinterment of muted politico-aesthetic petrified objects. This petrification⁵ in modern literature enables those words or signs to bear their petrified history like archeological findings or fossils; in this way, literature becomes a “relationship of sign to sign, a relationship written on mute things and on the body of language itself” (Rancière 15). On both social and aesthetic planes, literature contains a symptomatic reading of historical events filled with signs that bear history much as do mute fossils or body parts. However, any fixation of meaning would be challenged by the intensity of signs because “the mute word becomes the sheer intensity of things without rhythm or reason, which opposes at once the democratic dispersal of the letter-at-large and the hermeneutic chatter of the universal deciphering of signs” (Rancière 25). Rancièrian signs, I will employ for this essay, “bear, as written, the history of a time, a civilization or a society” denying easy interpretation (Rancière 15).

In Anil’s Ghost, petrified body parts or objects as Rancierian signs render the unseen seen, unsensed sensed, thereby deterring an easy interpretation of political justice, truth and history. On the one hand, body parts and bones that have been reduced to inanimate objects reveal the inhumane war crimes and make them possible to be punished though resisting mere sympathy or easy interpretation. The forensic investigation Anil takes part in is possible because of these petrified objects. They become signs when they are distributed, networked and intensified on the literary space to testify aesthetically and ethically. On the other hand, through networking these signs within a fragmentary and ambiguous structure and contextualizing them with history, Sarath endeavors to disinter the hidden suffering and pain Sri Lankans experienced during the civil wars. Bodies or body parts are also signs of silence and ambiguity since “In a fearfulnation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. If a father protested a son’s death, it is feared another family member would be killed” (56). Bodies as signs of inhumane violence eschew meaning because “those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic” (55).

Maimed bodies and lost bodies seem mute but in fact are vociferous signs hidden under politics importuning silence and insisting on disclosure. With “Sailor,” the evidence to prove the massacre is primarily made visible through the signs held by the body: “One forearm broken. Partial burning. Vertebrae damage in the neck. The possibility of a small bullet wound in the Skull” (65). These signs taken together tell the cause of death and truth of the massacre. “Sailor” as a sign no less holds the truth than contains the pain and suffering inflicted upon a body. Democracy in literature deliberately delineating inhumane war crimes requires the writer to function as a forensic specialist, to expose the cause of death by collecting bones and forensic evidence so as to create a network of those parts and finally restore “all those lost voices” to bring about justice (56). Thus, the bodies of the dead are signs of justice and truth. As signs, they attain meanings by when placed in the history of (post)colonialism and national violence.

Body signs are also records of individual/collective traumas exemplified by a cryptic part of the brain, the “amygdala” (134). The amygdala is a body sign saturated with collective trauma and “fear” (5). In London, Anil had learned that this “dark aspect of the brain” contains “Anger…pure emotion” (134). Interestingly enough, the amygdala, as a reservoir of trauma and fear, materially projects “fantasies of fear in the body” as if “in dream” so that “it is something created and made by us, by our own histories” (134). According to this theory, each individual has a different amygdala because each has different trauma; but an individual amygdala conjointly generates the network of trauma and fear inflicted by experience of violence. The amygdala is similar to an archeological site inside individual brain, corresponding with collective memory and history, where “Half the world…was being buried, the truth hidden by fear, while the past revealed itself in the light of a burning rhododendron bush” (156).

Alongside body signs, petrified object signs are tactile signs of melancholia corresponding with the subplots of Anil’s Ghost that contains interwoven structure of melancholia and touch the main characters have experienced differently: Anil, equipped with science, having been mourning of death of her parents, touches the skeleton to discover the scientific cause of his death in order to appeal to the international human rights organizations; Gamini, a skeptical doctor and antagonistic brother of Sarath, armed with meticulous medical skill, touches mutilated or burnt body parts to cure, albeit without sympathy; Sarath, in deep mourning of his dead wife, touches the stones and skulls to identify the victims and mourn over their suffering with compassion; Palipana, once a preeminent epigraphist and a mentor to Sarath, touches the ancient Pali texts to deliver the truth of history and life and care for his traumatized niece. This structure of touch and mourning materially embodies Sri Lankan history and her people in melancholia as well as people’s denial of painful memory resulting in their numbness.

Melancholic tactile experience reverberates with both natural and human histories. Body signs with petrified object signs reveal that the current peril in Sri Lanka is not just a contemporary phenomenon but, as Sarath’s excavation at China reveals, historical. As Rancière argues, “The truth of literature is inscribed in the path opened by…sciences which get lifeless debris to talk…ruins for the archeologist” (Rancière 16). Signs are not limited to body parts; they expand into the realm of natural objects through bodily touch conjugated with an understanding humanity through its history. Of this perspective, Sarath exclaims, “Wonderful! To study history as if it were a body” (193). Body parts, alive or dead, resonate with petrified objects via tactile experience because human history and natural history are relational. Being blind, Palipana is like “the Homer of Anil’s Ghost ” (Kertzer 121). To Palipana, natural and human histories have been “ever-present around him” (80). Palipana speaks about “wars and medieval slokas and Pali texts and language, and…how history faded too, as much as battle did, and how it could exist only with remembrance…only stone and rock could hold one person’s loss and another’s beauty forever” (104). According to Rancière, “the writer is the archeologist or geologist who gets the mute witness of common history to speak” (Rancière 15). However, Palipana is not just dealing with common history. Palipana represents the postcolonial Asian consciousness of history; “While West saw history as a faint horizon where Europe joined the East, Palipana saw his country in fathoms and color, and Europe simply as a landmass on the end of the peninsular of Asia” (79). Palipana is an Ondaatje’s avatar.⁶

Body/petrified object signs become tactile signs whose final function possess healing, a way to overcome trauma and melancholia. Roughly speaking, touch is the most sensitive and ambiguous perception as well as the most humanistic one. Although we touch only the surface of skin or an object, touching can deliver the feeling and meaning such that it brings forth healing. Palipana reveals the truth of history and the significance of caregiving through tactile interaction with rocks and runes as well as with the human body. Blind Palipana communicates with these objects by touching them as though he is touching human bodies. For him, blindness is blessing. Palipana “spread his fingers over every discovered rune. He traced each letter…Still, the patterns that emerged for Palipana had begun to coalesce. They linked hands. They allowed walking across water…The water filled a cut alphabet and linked this shore and that. And so the unproven truth emerged” (83). Tactile experience of both natural objects and human bodies is aesthetic; the tactile experience is an aesthetic experience in that philosophically speaking aesthetic means sensation. In the venue of tactile experience, in Ondaatje’s novels, “hands evoke our grasp of the heft of being: how we fumble with the cumbersome foreignness of things even as we caress them into human shape through work and art” (Kertzer 118). Natural objects such as rocks become artworks and historical monuments. Truth also emerges from tactile experience; furthermore, truth heals.

Tactile interaction is tantamount to healing because healing happens through bodily touches among people. Thus, tactile experience is ethical. Ondaatje may consider that only nursing through physical touch can truly help others. But nursing is not limited to the living body. The true humanism, according to Emmanuel Levinas, is expanded to the body of the dead; while “[d]eath in Heidegger is an event of freedom…for [Levinas] the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive” (71). The body of the dead is not just the site of investigation for forensic purposes but also the site of the ultimate passivity the Other projects to us as our own final moment. Though “death is ungraspable” for the subject, touching the dead body ensures understanding that his world and my world are in co-inhabitance and finitude (Levinas 71). By touching objects and dead/living bodies, ethics emerges, contextualized with politico-aesthetics viano one c sacrifice and the aesthetic act of painting the eye of Buddha in order to break down the vicious circuit of bad Karma.

The last scene in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost is problematic. Margaret Scanlan likens the demolition of the Buddha’s statues at the end of the novel to an image of terrorism and argues that Ondaatje is politically aestheticizing terror. However, a later scene where Ananda drawing the eyes on Buddha’s reconstructed statue contradicts Scanlan’s claim. Are these aesthetic acts in the novel political or apolitical? And what does this act signify in terms of history and ethics? What Ondaatje strives to show in these scenes is an epiphanic moment of truth. But truth requires sacrifice.

In the novel, Ananda’s two aesthetic acts are political and ethico-religious: the reconstruction of Sailor’s face and Netra Mangala. Ananda reconstructs the face of ‘Sailor’ to reveal the truth, though its faciality is in fact similar to that of his wife, Sirissa, who had been kidnapped and possibly killed during the civil war, and is imbued with the mysterious peacefulness. Ultimately, ‘Sailor’ is identified as Ruwan Kumara, a toddy tapper whose legs were fractured while working at the local mines and who was later taken away by government soldiers. The soldiers branded him as “rebel sympathize” and butchered him after torturing him (269). With help of Palipana and Ananda, Anil and Sarath can reveal the truth that Kumara was killed by the government army. After identifying the victim, however, Sarath attempts to warn Anil that her efforts to find the truth endanger their lives; he knows that the government would do everything to foil Anil’s efforts to report their findings to the international agency. Though Anil is frustrated when the government confiscates all the evidence including “Sailor,” thanks to Sarath’s surreptitious help, Anil is able to escape the government’s trap with “Sailor” back in her possession. But due to the intrigue, Sarath is tortured and killed. Sarath, though knowing that the truth can be dangerous, sacrifices himself to save Anil and to expose the evidence to the world for the sake of justice. Despite finally accomplishing her task and delivering “enough reality for the West” (286), Anil “would carry the ghost of Sarath Diyasena” (305). Anil’s justice and truth bring forth another ghost she has to bear; the ghost of Sarath puts Anil into the circuit of karma.

All signs of justice, history, and truth convolute around the idea of karma. Within karma, personal violence converges in collective violence. Guerilla mobs lynch innocent people without any political motives; the mobs may be expressing pure anger, initiating a circuit of violence. In Buddhism, one way to break bad karma is to overcome desire and obsession. For example, Gamini was jealous over Sarath when he was child and tried to steal Sarath’s wife, which resulted in a tragedy of Sarath’s wife committing suicide. Afterwards, Gamini becomes addicted to alcohol and pills, turning from a meaningful life and his job to save the patients who are severely injured due to the civil war.

Violence inside this family mirrors the civil war in Sri Lanka. Like bad karma between Gamini and Sarath, the government and insurrectionists kill each other because of their competing desires and their obsession with previous traumas. However, healing arrives through tactile experiences with the dead. Gamini inadvertently finds and touches the dead body of Sarath and creates “a pieta between brothers” as a way of resolving the circuit of karma (288). Gamini touches the childhood scar on the dead body of his brother and feels empathy just as Sarath touches archeological findings and feels the truth. Touching the scars on Sarath’s body, Gamini abruptly and ingenuously experiences an epiphany of compassion. His epiphany resonates with collective moment of Dharma.

In Buddhism, ‘Dharma’ (the true law) can break karma and enlighten human beings so that they can escape the circuit of violence begotten by desire and obsession with trauma. However, Dharma in Anil’s Ghost is inexplicable but felt through touch and compassion. Dhama in this sense is closer to “the sexuality of care” (119). ‘Care’ here is not Heideggerian care ( sorge ) but tactile interaction between two individuals caring for each one’s bodies. In this sense, care is a way to uncover the truth of humanity. The most striking example of this is Lakma, Palipana’s niece. Her parents were massacred without any specific reasons and afterwards Lakma, due to trauma, lost her voice and mobility. However, Palipana’s unconditional, benevolent care is given to Lakma as the way to break the bad karma. After Palipana dies, Lakma carves an epitaph on a rock, which is an aesthetic act of healing as well as epiphanic moment.

Care brings about the moment of epiphany or enlightenment, the moment of dharma. Palipana tells Anil that the ‘Netra Mangala’ ceremony used to paint eyes on the Buddha is an epiphanic moment. Palipana explains, “The eyes must be painted in the morning, at five. The hour the Buddha attained enlightenment…Around him the mantras continue. May thou become possessed of the fruits of deeds” (Italics in original 99). In the final scene, fictional Sri Lankan President Katugala is assassinated by a bomb. Interestingly, the president’s body couldn’t be identified among the heaps of bodies. He becomes one of the signs of dead body parts. This is a moment that causes karma to resolve. With the backdrop of this assassination, Ananda, while wearing one of Sarath’s “Indian cotton shirts,” paints eyes on immense statue of Buddha that has been reconstructed after it was demolished by bombing. His touching of the restored Buddha’s statue and the aesthetic-tactile-epiphanic moment of painting Buddha’s eyes also evoke the act of opening people’s eyes to ethico-politico-aesthetic truth and enlightening human beings to realize the importance of care rather than destruction.

Curiously, eyes on the Buddha statue “would always look north” with “only the pure sad glance” (306). It is left ambiguous why the eyes look north but it is obvious that the glance cannot help but be sad considering postcolonial Sri Lankan history. Sugar-coated humanitarian support cannot solve problems in postcolonial nations where, in the pit of bloody civil wars initiated by colonial rulers, human beings are petrified into forensic or archeological objects. Ananda, when painting eyes, “with human sight…[is] seeing all the fibers of natural history” (307). In parallel with human history, natural history suffers, so that aesthetic representation, Anil’s Ghost, is necessarily saturated with painful signs and disheveled structure in order to avoid barbarity. Interestingly, Ananda cannot look at the Buddha’s eyes directly but has to paint the eyes while looking at their reflections in the mirror; it is profane to paint the eyes of Buddha while looking directly at them. Likewise, in some sense it is profane to merely watch the suffering of human beings or observe the dead in that without compassion we cannot ethically represent suffering others. However, through this mirroring, “Ananda briefly saw this angle of the world” (307). The statue is not holy and is “no longer a god” (307). What is required for Dharma is the “sweet touch form the world” (307). Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost aims to aesthetically and ethically share this tactile experience as true care, though we, cohabitants with Sri Lankans on this planet, bear their ghosts as our ontological responsibility. Anil’s Ghost compels us, as Others, not to forget Myanmar’s current political strife and reminds us of our role.