I. Introduction: Anil’s Ghost and Politics
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
Most reviews of
Though Ondaatje avoids blaming or falsely showing postcolonial empathy with war-torn Sri Lanka, I argue that
II. Humanity at Crisis and the Odd Pairing of Archeology and Forensic investigation
The story of
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).
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. ‘
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.
These questions resonate with Theodor Adorno’s most poignant and acerbic adage, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is
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 (
Ondaatje visualizes suffering human beings and their bodies through unreconciled and refracted images and via fragmentary, ambiguous and multiple narratives. In
Through this narrative form,
III. Body Signs and Petrified Object Signs
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?
Rancière’s theory of art offers one way to answer these questions. In
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 petrification
In
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
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
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.
IV. Enlightenment and Epiphany
The last scene in Michael Ondaatje’s
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
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.
V. Conclusion: Touch and Dharma
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.