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.