A Crucifixion in their Headlights

A review of Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost...

Ondaatje is a frightfully good stylist for the book removes us to a strange and heightened kind of poetic reality – but what he chooses to fill this reality with is (with a number of extraordinary exceptions) anything but poetic. He writes about Sri Lanka, his own native country, during the last years of its unspeakably brutal civil war. Acts of brutality are random, inevitable and filled with the inhuman creativity of torture – all painted against a tropical darkness, all of them (except for the last one) committed by nameless and faceless shadows. And so the books main concern is with identity. To find out the identity of a murder victim of whom nothing but an exhumed skeleton named Sailor remains is the main point that drives the plot. The heroine, Anil, almost expatriate Sri Lankan and forensic anthropologist, is a rootless creature whose very life is filled with so many questions about identity that she seems almost protean; even her name was, rather memorably, acquired in a deal with Anil’s own brother. Through Anil’s eyes we are introduced to more questions about identities. Who are Sarath, her colleague, Gamini, Sarath’s brother, and Ananda, the artist who “rebuilds” Sailor for them? From Anil’s conversations, her thoughts and actions we can glean many intimate and immediate details about those men’s pasts and inner worlds, but nonetheless we will close the book with not a single question answered about who they are. This is not meant to condemn the author – quite the contrary. It evokes many things: the self destruction of a country , of a national entity, embroiled in civil war; the very essence of violence, which renders all questions of identity futile, except maybe for the one essential to any conflict – who is the victim?; another essential matter – one of identity itself…we aren’t offered any authorial or definite voice, not even the conceit of a knowledgeable teller. Ondaatje achieves such realistic and convincing people that it is always them speaking to us and so we are faced with the same questions we would be faced with when looking upon people that we have known for a long time, people we have shared intimacies with…we know them from such close quarters that we cannot look at them from any other perspective and their minutiae become absolute to us. We look on helplessly as they move through the chaos, knowing that they will not offer a heroic solution.
The book moves along at a feverish pace, broken only by a few moments of contemplation. The protagonists are spurned by their own merciless ghosts, never meant to escape. Solace is a moment, reading a cheap book in a bloodstained coat, or engulfed in work with one’s earphones on. They move from one state to the next, unable to reflect, their senses heightened, always aware and yet trying their best not to be aware of the importance and necessity of their actions. But one is never allowed to forget what drives them – fierce ghosts of sadness, guilt, pain, loss, confusion. Gamini is a doctor who has lost himself in his work and to an addiction to stimulants after his wife left him. Sarath’s wife is dead and he has closed himself from apparently everything. Anada’s wife has vanished and he drinks heavily. Anil has left everything behind, for no reason at all, haunted by memories of her married ex-lover.
It is strange, for the tale seems desperate and depressing only in hindsight and reflection. The language moves and carries us like angelic dirges through the mud and mire of this particular hell, plunging us deep into the fever and frenzy, so inescapable it almost seems placid at times even when describing atrocities. It’s rare to feel the effects of a collapsing world so immediately through a book and through language, but this is where Ondaatje has succeeded utterly. There is no time to think and whatever beauty or comfort there is along the rushing path, it has to be absorbed immediately. We are left to wonder about how much of our identity or the perceived lack of identity comes from our surroundings and the stability, perceived or actual, of our world. Memories of the time before the war have almost been obliterated from everyone’s minds and the few moments when Sri Lanka’s rich history becomes palpable and enters the text, it offers an immense solace. A certainty that whatever happens, however cruel and hellish it is, it is only a chapter and a brief one at that.

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Speaking in Severed Tongues

Ma Jian’s collection of stories “Stick Out Your Tongue”. The title itself is a little provocative and maybe off-putting. One wonders what it refers to. A suggestion to offer childlike resistance? A doctor’s request?
It is a collection of stories set in Tibet. Ma Jian is Chinese (currently living in exile in Europe) and he travelled in Tibet for several months where, as he writes in a very disillusioned but still inspired preface, he wanted to see the “true Tibet”. He quickly and rather mercilessly deals with all the preconceptions that people in the West have of Tibet, offering that there is very little romanticism to a poor and downtrodden country, one that is as filled with cruelty and corruption as any other country. Curiously enough his stories belie his sober preface, for they are filled with mysteries and with a sense of divinity. The divine, in Ma Jian’s stories, mostly takes on threatening and terrible forms. His protagonists are haunted by specters of loneliness or guilt or ill-handled sexual desires. Tibet creeps into his stories as something spiritually overpowering and frightful. One gets a clear sense of someone who has wandered into a country of unfriendly ghosts. A country that wants to see him gone. And so the preface and the disillusionment take on the form of personal disappointment – albeit the disappointment of an intelligent man – the grumblings of someone who finds only closed doors. It is not hard to imagine that the Tibetans would treat a Chinese traveler with less than kindness.
The stories are very dark. They are filled with death. A minute description of the dismemberment of a woman before a sky burial that is almost as cleansing as it is cruel. A man searching for his family, which might be long dead, and crossing into the realm of spirits through his exhaustion. A woman monk who dies after ritual rape. They are a fascinating look at rituals and superstitions from a completely unromantic set of eyes. But the rationality that we Westerners usually pair with lack of romanticism is absolutely lacking, so there is no attempt to defuse the mystic and divine aspect of Tibet which explodes into the text from time to time. Ma Jian’s dreamlike language does not question, it describes and meanders from one reality into the next, leaving the reader as baffled and willing a follower to the strange powers evoked as the protagonists.
Some of the stories almost read like supernatural horror. The story about the man who dissolves during the search for his family shows man at the supreme mercy of a cruel nature and the people often seem like the landscape. Barren, with hidden and treacherous depths. Most impressive, though, is the tale of the female monk. It is a mixture of wild superstition and spiritual reality – a woman, after long study to take up a high rank in the monastic hierarchy has to undergo a ritual sexual union with a senior monk. After the ritual she is required to sit in freezing water for a period of several days, to confirm that her nature has gone past the human. Her yogic powers, though, desert her and she freezes to death. It is too easy and convenient to see it as a condemnation of spiritual practices, I think. The author has no interest in condemnation. There is the beautiful inevitability of myth in this story, alongside an all too real cruelty and inhumanity. Both exist side by side, without denying each other or intervening with each others powerful effect. The idea to go past the human into the reality of angels is as real in Tibetan spirituality as the idea to go past the human into the reality of dogs.

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