Contents Contents ........................................................................................................... 3 Introduction .................................................................................................... 5 Previous research focusing on history .......................................................... 12 Early prose.......................................................................................... 13 Historical characters in America .......................................................... 13 Family history in Sri Lanka ................................................................. 15 Late prose ........................................................................................... 19 Marginalized history in Toronto .......................................................... 19 Historical glimpses from the Second World War ................................. 21 The present and the past in Sri Lanka .................................................. 24 Theoretical base ............................................................................................ 29 Historiographical metafiction .............................................................. 30 Nationalism and nationalist history-writing in relation to colonialism and postcolonialism ................................................................................... 31 Nationalist history-writing ................................................................... 33 Minority histories ................................................................................ 35 The growth and establishment of the historiographically metafictional novel .................................................................................................. 37 Genre characteristics ........................................................................... 41 The history of Sri Lanka in Anil’s Ghost ...................................................... 44 A discussion of historical moments ..................................................... 46 Prehistory and the arrival of Buddhism – the 6th century B.C............... 47 The Kingdom of Anuradhapura – 6th and 10th centuries (AD) ............. 49 The British Empire – the 19th and 20th centuries ................................. 53 Independence, the second half of the 20th century ............................... 57 3 Downtoned ethnicity ........................................................................... 59 A historical context or a text containing historical moments? ............... 61 The fight for history ...................................................................................... 62 The character of Palipana and the historical Paranavitana..................... 63 Sri Lanka’s silent victims.............................................................................. 67 An incident in Guatemala mirrors the situation in Sri Lanka................. 67 One victim can speak for many victims. .............................................. 68 Victims and their families ................................................................... 71 The pattern of victims and their families is repeated ............................. 74 Decay and reconstruction?................................................................... 76 A decaying nation ............................................................................... 76 Peace and reconstruction? ................................................................... 77 Summary ....................................................................................................... 79 References ..................................................................................................... 81 Unprinted material .............................................................................. 81 Printed material ................................................................................... 81 Other printed material ......................................................................... 82 4 Introduction Every history book is in some ways one man’s (or woman’s) view of the past. Yet, it is but fair to acknowledge that this book owes much to a galaxy of historians, archaeologists, economists, anthropologists, political scientists and creative writers. The collective labours of several generations have helped illumine Sri Lanka’s past. [---] It was written in the belief that knowledge of Sri Lankan history would be of some assistance in understanding not only the past but even the current issues and problems in Sri Lanka.1 The civil war in Sri Lanka came to a violent end in May 2009. The government forces defeated the Tamil guerilla, but once again the civilian population suffered great losses. Ever since the 1948 independence the country has been torn by the rivalry between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Over and over again the civil war flares up between the two population groups and today we can state that the sinister figure of war victims is three to four times as huge as, for example, in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Civil war is ruthless, since anyone may obviously be killed, tortured or disappear anywhere and at any time. After the joint enemy of the different population groups, in this case the British Empire, had left the island, a country remained that would once more rise from the ashes and a population that had to recreate to live in together. The nation-building in the Ceylon of the past had serious consequences for the Tamils, including anything from a discriminating language policy to armed conflict. War, of course, also affects groups that do not take part. In Sri Lanka there are basically two other minorities, Burghers and Moslems, who were also occasional victims of war. Several novels by contemporary authors like Romesh Gunesekera, A. Sivanandan and Michael Ondaatje portray the different conflicts and their consequences both before and after independence. It is the work of these creative writers that form part of the history-writing mentioned by de Silva in the above quotation, with Ondaatje and several others trying to describe and to some extent reveal the violence which has continuously stamped the country, especially since the 1980s. This thesis is an analysis of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, which appeared in the spring of 20002. 1 Chandra Richard De Silva, Sri Lanka – A History, Second Revised Edition, New Delhi 1997 (1987), Preface. 2Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, New York 2000. The novel was published in April 2000. It came out simultaneously in several countries around the world. The copy used by me is the first American edition. The text is identical with the Canadian edition. 5 The thesis examines history-writing and the way this is described in the text of a novel. The research questions are presented in greater detail a few pages ahead, but our first task will be to make a presentation of the author and his prose works. Philip Michael Ondaatje was born on September 12, 1943, in Ceylon. At the age of 11 he and his family moved to England. After passing ordinary school Ondaatje decided to emigrate to Canada. The author is thus a young man of 24 when he makes his debut with an experimental collection of poetry, probably influenced by the experimenting and creative Toronto of the 1960s. Several poets in his surroundings are engaged in form experiments. Short phrases are interwoven with prose-like passages, and sometimes the poem is introduced by a motto or a photo. Experiments are made with film or recitals to music, and the writers wish to have their novels and short stories produced by the theater or film industry, but there are few who succeed, with the result that one low budget version follows on another. This experimenting springing out of the creative 1960s environment characterizes Ondaatje’s first two long works. What he actually wrote were collage novels of a kind, composed of both poetry and prose and accompanied by black and white photos. The first work that may be called a novel was Coming through Slaughter (1976). It contains a coherent plot and, despite daring form experiments, it hangs together well. Actually, it was only with two books receiving international attention, In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and The English Patient (1992), that the form of the novels began to resemble other fiction.3 The most elaborate novel from a formal perspective is, however, Anil’s Ghost. Ondaatje’s latest novel Divisadero (2007) is largely reminiscent of the form of In the Skin of a Lion in that the author to some extent returns to experimenting by including pictures of playing-cards, documents and three stories interwoven in time and space.4 The form experiments of the early novels are accompanied by a parallel pattern in which the descriptions are coloured by history, history-writing, historical persons and places. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), for example, focuses on a historical person, namely the gunman and western legend of the title. Coming through Slaughter concentrates on the life of Buddy Bolden as a jazz musician in New Orleans at the turn of the last century. These two novels are followed by a book about the fairly happy 1920s circling around Ondaatje’s own family in Sri Lanka. It came out in 1982 with the title Running in the Family. Large parts portray his Burgher minority parents and their lives in Colombo, the capital, but the author also describes a journey back to his native country in the 1980s. His encounters with relatives and their memories from