Abstract
Abstract Coming from a Dutch-Ceylonese family, educated in Sri Lanka, England, and Canada, Michael Ondaatje develops from his multicultural experiences an interracial and international consciousness that flourishes in his latest novel Anil’s Ghost (2000). Set against the historical background of political upheaval engulfed in Sri Lanka from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the novel represents in Ondaatje’s unique artistic way a brutal war against unknown enemies, an authoritarian government under suspicion of murdering its innocent civilians, and a suffering people. Tracing back to the specific social and historical context of the novel, this thesis begins by outlining the general history of the colonial past and by mapping the ongoing process of decolonization in Sri Lanka. With specific reference to the colonial imprint of racial categorization and social discrimination on the island, this thesis reads the current civil war as a continuation of the previous conflicts among fictive ethnicities and racial communities. In the light of Benedict Anderson’s insightful observation on the spectre of comparisons, this thesis proposes that “Anil’s Ghost” is not a fixed entity or a particular dead person but a complex assemblage of haunting images and memorable figures that surface one after one from Anil’s childhood memory in Sri Lanka and adulthood experience in the west. With respect to Etienne Balibar’s studies on the relations between racism and nationalism, this thesis argues that “the prodigal” Anil has constantly been caught between the past and the present, between the internal racism and the external racism in the nation formation of the post-independence Sri Lanka. Consequently, she is inevitably haunted by the Ghost, that is, the spectre of comparisons—the “strange experience” of simultaneously seeing things “close up and from afar.”