Michael Ondaatje and Sri Lankan - Canadian diaspora
This week, continuing on the writings of diasporic writers, I will
examine the life and works of Sri Lankan born Canadian author Michael
Ondaatje mainly focusing on few of his selected novels. In doing so, I
intend to focus what lessons that we could learn from some of these
internationally acclaimed diasporic writers to enrich Sri Lankan fiction
and creative work.
Today, Ondaatje is considered, one of Canada's most recognized
contemporary writers. His literary achievements are mainly due to the
success of his Booker prize winning novel, The English Patient (1992)
and, Anil's Ghost (2000) and more recently, Divisadero, a book which was
shortlisted for Commonwealth Writers Prize (Caribbean and Canada Region,
Best Book).
Despite his recognition as a widely acclaimed novelist today,
Ondaatje first achieved critical acclaim as a poet with early
collections like The Dainty Monsters (1967), and his long poem The Man
with Seven Toes (1969: Rat Jelly (1980) His collections of poetry
include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1981),
which won the Canadian Governor General's Award in 1971; The Cinnamon
Peeler: Selected Poems (1989); and Handwriting: Poems (1998). More
recently he has returned to poetry with the publication of his long
poem, The Story (2005).
According to the Canadian Encyclopaedia, "Ondaatje's imagery is
characterized by its preoccupation with romantic exoticism and
multiculturalism; its gravitation towards the bizarre, the exaggerated,
and the unlikely; its fascination with the secret codes of violence in
both personal and political life; and with its continued delving into
the world of movies, jazz and friendship." The same source highlights a
unique feature of Ondaatje's "... for its cinematic qualities [and] in
its frequent use of montage techniques and spare dramatic dialogue."
Life and journeys across oceans
Michael Ondaatje was born on 12 September 1943 in Sri Lanka. He moved
to England with his mother in 1954, and moved to Canada in 1962 where he
has settled ever since.
He had his initial schooling in Sri Lanka and England, and later
studied at the University of Toronto and Queen's University in Kingston,
Ontario. Ondaatje began teaching at York University in Toronto in 1971.
Ondaatje's semi autobiographical work; entitled Running in the Family,
(1983) covers his life and time in Sri Lanka and his inner search for
his farther whom he never knew well in this lyrical memoir.
Key novels
Ondaatje's first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976) is a
fictional portrait of jazz musician Buddy Bolden. The English Patient
(1992), set in Italy at the end of the Second World War, was joint
winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into an Academy
Award-winning film in 1996. Anil's Ghost (2000), set in Sri Lanka, tells
the story of a female forensic anthropologist who investigates human
rights issues as a UN consultant in the 1990s in Sri Lanka.
Anil's Ghost takes us to Sri Lanka during a time of civil discord
during the 1990s. On a international human rights mission, Anil Tissera,
a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America,
returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an group to
discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder. What follows
is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown
enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past-a story unfolding
against the ancient and modern cultural milieus of Sri Lanka's
socio-political issues in the mid to late 1990s. In an academic paper
read at the Western Social Science Association 49th Conference held in
Calgary Canada, (2007) Sunil Govinnage has identified that Ondaatje's
Anil's Ghost as a representation of a "clash of good and evil or more
specifically, Eastern and Western cultural values as represented by two
main protagonists-Sarath and Anil."
Govinnage's paper makes a case that the "... most important aspect of
the novel is the 'alienness' of Anil who has been away from her native
country for fifteen years. Anil's parents were killed in a car crash
while she was studying abroad.
The novel does not reveal her interaction with any old friends or
relatives, creating suspicion in the mind of a reader who has insights
into the culture and ways of life in Sri Lanka. Anil's only personal
contact is a meeting with an old servant woman whom she knew as a child.
To a Sri Lankan, this particular aspect of Anil's behaviour is quite
strange and unrealistic. Is it due to Anil's newly acquired Western
values, including a reconditioned memory where foreign area codes are
retained instead of local history, language, culture, or people of her
native country? On her arrival in Sri Lanka the officer at the airport
asks in Sri Lankan English:
"You were born here, no?" Her reply is convoluted: "Fifteen years."
"You still speak Sinhala?" asks the officer. Anil's reply is just two
words: "A little..." (p.9)."
This analysis supports the school of thought that diasporic writers
could bring their biases and perspectives into their creative work
providing an outsider's point of view though may be distorted on some
occasion...
Ondaatje's latest novel is Divisadero, (1995) with a title that
denotes a street name in San Francisco, California. The novel opens up
in a rural setting in California. The novel reveals a story of a group
of family members whose relationships are more acts of will, than
accidents of birth. (The protagonists, Claire and Anna were born at the
same hospital and have been raised as twins, although they had different
mothers.)
Their father provides displays a total rejection when he discover
that Anna has developed a passionate relationship with a man called
Coop, who was the family's hired worker. Coop has also been made part of
this family, but that counts for nothing when father catches him with
Anna. After this discovery, a violent attack destroys this rural
family's life with long lasting scars.
Aravinda Adiga, who may be described as a diasporic writer, in his
review of Ondaatje's Divisadero highlights: "Ondaatje has a gift for
capturing music and landscape in words, and there are gorgeous
descriptions of strumming guitars, running horses and swooping hawks.
But the second part of the book is a letdown; the descriptions in France
are often too contrived, too literary. We want less about Segura's art,
more about Coop and his crooked card games. And then there's the
question of whether the book coheres. (...) But for once, the ... master
has failed at his game: for all the delight of the slips and falls, it
doesn't all add up to one story."
Despite some of these shortcomings, one of the significant aspects of
Ondaatje's writing is that they appeal to a wider international and
globalized audience. It is stated that the first print order of Anil's
Ghost was 100,000 copies.
Most diasporic writings stand out for elegant diction, master
portrayal of characters and settings and well crafted plots. Most
important lesson that Sri Lankan writers in English can learn from
diasporic writers is that despite occasional deficiencies in their
fiction, these writers present their work using an international
Standard English.
In any creative effort, literary and copy editing of the manuscripts
will result in the production of exemplary literature, appealing to an
international audience.
This is one of the lessons that our Sinhala writers (who fight
against yearly cycle of deadlines to write novels to win literary awards
ignoring grammar, syntax and even basic rules of spellings) could learn
from writers such as Ondaatje.
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