Abstract
While it invites deep and sustained attention, Michael Ondaatje’s Handwriting has seldom been studied, since its publication in 1998, for the author’s concern with peace, even though this collection of poems highlights peace and war. I will argue that in Handwriting, Ondaatje proposes ways to achieve internal and external peace that are not only relevant to the Sri Lankan civil war but also to the wider contemporary world. In Handwriting, Ondaatje presents a narrator who returns to Sri Lanka because of a sense of dislocation, and who writes to understand the cause of ethnic violence and reconstruct the Sri Lankan past that was lost during the civil war. In doing this, Ondaatje shows a possibility of peace for Sri Lanka and his readers. People in conflict can be united when they are less obsessed with their different identities, recognize their shared desire for peace, respect one another’s differences, and work together to create a shared memory that does not homogenize and is open to new elements from other cultures. As the narrator investigates this situation by writing creatively about Sri Lankan people, his example also demonstrates a way to achieve mutual understanding by artistically constructing a shared memory. Alain Badiou’s views about events constitute the major theoretical framework of the present study.
According to Lee Spinks, “[Michael] Ondaatje’s acute sense of emotional dislocation in the early 1980s was undoubtedly one of the factors that led him to return once again to Sri Lanka to see if he could establish a closer relationship to his family roots” (2009: 11). While Ondaatje might have succeeded in this, he must also have noted the ethnic conflicts in his motherland. Regional Tamil opposition to the dictates of Colombo was firmly established in 1948 (Spencer, 1990: 9), and the dismal performance of the Sri Lankan economy, particularly after 1977, aggravated ethnic violence on this island (Nissan and Stirrat, 1990: 39). Ed Jewinski claims that Ondaatje was determined to be “more conscious of sociological factors than he had ever been before” (1994: 124) while writing In the Skin of a Lion (1987). This compassion is seen when he presents characters in Sri Lanka who suffer from violence, both in Handwriting (2000b/1998), a collection of poems, and Anil’s Ghost (2000a). However, scholars have not been as attentive to Handwriting as to The English Patient (1996) or Anil’s Ghost (Solecki, 2003: 4), and have also paid little attention to Ondaatje’s concern for peace in this book, even though, as Solecki notes, it “counterpoints poets and kings and, by extension, peace and war” (2003: 168).
I want to argue that in Handwriting, Ondaatje proposes ways to achieve peace that are not only relevant to the Sri Lankan civil war but also to the wider contemporary world. In Handwriting the narrator returns to Sri Lanka because of a sense of dislocation, and he writes to understand the cause of ethnic violence and to reconstruct the Sri Lankan past that was lost during the civil war. In doing this, Ondaatje shows a possibility of peace for Sri Lanka and his readers. People can be united in peace when they are less obsessed with their different identities, recognize their shared desire for peace, respect one another’s differences, and work together to create a shared memory that does not homogenize and is open to new elements from other cultures. Because the narrator investigates this situation by writing creatively about Sri Lankan people, his example also demonstrates a way to achieve mutual understanding by artistically constructing a shared memory.
Alain Badiou’s views about events constitute the major theoretical framework of the present study because they shed light on the neglected parts and the possibilities of change in people’s lives. A Badiouean event is an unpredictable and incalculable supplement to a situation (Badiou, 2005b: 46), and it comes into being when something is taken seriously and consequently investigated. This situation is a “presented multiplicity” (Badiou, 2005a: 24), that is, a collection of unique items that are counted as though they are the same. These items are then categorized and recounted. Badiou also argues that “[t]here is nothing apart from situation” (2005a: 25). People are countable items in a society, while the social groups they belong to are the result of a second count, or re-presentation. Badiou (2009: 36; 114; 101) also claims that a person can belong to different situations, and that each of these has a different established organizing structure. For example, a writer can belong to the everyday situation and to the fictive situation they construct.
Each situation has a void that escapes counting, which is “included in everything” (Badiou, 2005a: 87). The multiple that contains nothing other than the void is on the edge of the void (Badiou 2005a: 175). As a state does not tolerate the existence of the uncounted (the void), governments can prohibit “gatherings of more than three people” when “an emblem [such as ‘rioting crowds’] of their void wanders about” (Badiou 2005a: 109). Since everything else in a situation is represented and controlled by the state, change in the state must come from people on the edge of the void.
A subject is constituted because of its decision to be faithful to an event, whose existence is otherwise undecidable (Badiou, 2003: 63-4). A subject changes its previous way of perceiving reality, because an event makes visible what was previously dimly perceptible at most in the situation (Badiou, 2009: 452). The process of being faithful to an event consists of the subject making enquiries about how to transform a situation according to the revelation of the event. The subject connects everything it knows to that event (Badiou, 2011: 89), goes beyond representation in its perception of reality, and the truth it presents is subjective. Since this subjective truth is a process, its completion remains in the future (Badiou, 2004: 114-19). Therefore, to interrupt this process of producing truth is Evil, while the Good consists of the subject’s ability to keep enquiring about an event (Badiou, 2001: 85).
I will first explain the cause of the war to support my argument about the usefulness of Ondaatje’s discovery in Handwriting to his Sri Lankan readers. Next I examine some poems in the last section of the book to establish the existence of a Badiouean event for the narrator. Then follow explanations of how each section of the book embodies a stage in the narrator’s enquiry into his event: the first two sections constitute a study of the cause of the war and Ondaatje’s attempt to build a home for his Sri Lankan readers, while the last section highlights creativity in constructing a shareable home and the role of writing in Ondaatje’s peace-making efforts. The conclusion discusses how Ondaatje’s strategy for peace can contribute to building peace in Sri Lanka and in the wider world.
Causes of the war
The standard view of historians on the causes of the Sri Lankan civil war focuses on the country’s ethnic divisions and the poor treatment of minority groups by the dominant one. Opposing political parties that represent different ethnic groups use history selectively, and present their own constructed histories as truth to justify their demands and policies (Hellmann-Rajanayagam, 1990: 120). While the civil war that has existed since 1983 is “primarily between the Sinhalese-dominated government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam” (Winslow and Woost, 2004: 5), 1 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah observes that the Sinhala and the Tamils have not always been at odds, and that from the thirteenth century up to the time of British colonization, “a social separation and a distancing rather than a steady symbiotic interaction better characterizes the state of coexistence between Tamil and Sinhala political formations inside the island” (Tambiah, 1992: 138). British colonization greatly contributed to ethnic divisions because it appointed Sri Lankan representatives on a communal basis (Nissan and Stirrat, 1990: 30-2). In recent years, particularly since 1977, when ethnic conflict began in earnest (Sabaratnam, 2001: 1), ethnic violence has been directly related to the dismal performance of the Sri Lankan economy (Nissan and Stirrat, 1997: 39). In short, politicians have aggravated ethnic divisions to divert attention from the country’s poor economic performance, and this has also led to the unfair distribution of resources, which in turn has led to further ethnic conflict. While in addition to the return to full-scale war, the government made several attempts to end the civil war by peaceful methods and each time the Sinhalese majority (74 per cent) insisted on “the solution of the conflict within the framework of a ‘unitary state’”, which the Tamil minority (18.2 per cent) could not accept (Akhtar, 2010: 160). War making has been the main path to state making for both Sinhalese and Tamil state formation efforts (Uyangoda, 2011: 17).
Ondaatje speaks of the civil war in the “Author’s Note” to Anil’s Ghost, and his description corresponds to the view here. He says that the war involved “three essential groups: the government, the antigovernment insurgents in the south and the separatist guerrillas in the north” (2000a: n.p.). Both the insurgents and the guerrillas declared war on the government, and legal and illegal government squads were sent out to hunt them.
On 18 May 2009, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Vellupillai Prabhakaran, and other senior cadre were killed, and the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared the end of the civil war.
An event of identity in Handwriting
There is no direct advice in Handwriting to Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan readers, possibly because as a long-term resident in Canada, he is conscious of being partly an outsider. Instead, he presents an unidentified narrator who returns to Sri Lanka because of a sense of dislocation. When the narrator is surprised by the loss of his Sri Lankan past during the war, he decides to trace the war to its source and artistically reconstructs this lost past so as to give himself a home. Constructing a lost, collective past can give a person the feeling of home, and can also unite people. In seeking to understand what a Jew is, Nicholas de Lange argues that “what binds the Jews together is ‘a strong sense of common origin, a shared past and a shared destiny’” (2000: 26). Ondaatje aims to construct a past that does not exclude anyone in Sri Lanka. While the home in Handwriting appears to be a resurrection of a lost historical past and accommodates all the different Sri Lankan people, Ondaatje makes it clear that the construction of this shareable home is constant and open to contributions from people of other countries.
The narrator decides to investigate the civil war when he discovers that his Sri Lankan past has disappeared during the conflict. In Running in the Family (1982), Ondaatje feels that his life is frozen and that with his return to Sri Lanka “everything would change” (1993/1982: 22). Such nostalgia and hope for a solacing motherland also appear in the case of the narrator of Handwriting. In “Flight”, the first poem of the last section of Handwriting, the narrator recalls his mother when seeing a seventy-year-old passenger on Air Lanka Flight 5 (Ondaatje, 2000b: 47). 2 In “Wells”, the second poem of the section, the water pouring over him after his arrival brings him “recognition and caress” (48). Eviatar Zerubavel (2003: 41) observes that “[c]onstance of place is a formidable basis for establishing a strong sense of sameness”. “In providing us with some sense of permanence, they [our physical surroundings] help promote the highly reassuring conservative illusion that nothing fundamental has really changed” (Zerubavel, 2003: 41). However, Handwriting’s narrator cannot find this sameness in his motherland. In the second part of “Wells”, an elegy over the loss of his ayah, or nursemaid, Rosalin Perera, he wonders, “Who abandoned who?” (50). Speaking of these lines, Amitav Ghosh observes that the narrator “mourns the passing of the paradise that made Rosalin possible” (2005: 38). After his return, the narrator soon realizes that he has lost what he hoped to recover in his motherland.
Enquiry into everyday life and people’s desire
The narrator starts his enquiry when he, as a Badiouean enquirer does, connects elements in Sri Lanka to the war. With war in the background, he notes in section one people’s past and present everyday lives, and their neglected desires. Since an event makes visible what was earlier at most dimly perceptible in the situation (Badiou, 2009: 452), the narrator, understandably, focuses on what he finds has been lost. Moreover, as he investigates by writing about the lost past, his writing reconstructs the lost Sri Lanka, and thus builds a home for himself.
The prose poem, “Death at Kataragama”, shows the narrator’s painful recognition of his present situation and his attempt to understand his event by writing about what normally escapes his attention. He says, “A constant fall of leaf around me in this time of no rain like the continual habit of death. Someone soon will say of me, ‘his body was lying in Kataragama like a pauper’” (55). Because of blackouts, the narrator writes in darkness, and writing enables him to understand: “What I write will drift away. I will be able to understand the world only at arm’s length” (55). Writing in darkness implies the narrator’s reliance on his hands rather than on his eyes. He does not approach reality in the usual way, and this unusual approach can perhaps shed light on what is usually invisible.
This reconstruction of Sri Lanka’s lost life makes the narrator an insider in Sri Lanka. Maurice Halbwachs (1992: 38) argues that “it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories”. The narrator reconstructs collective memory, and writes in “What we lost” that “[t]he interior love poem / the deeper levels of the self / landscapes of daily life” should be brought back to people’s attention (24-5). He treats “the deeper levels of the self” and “the landscapes of daily life” in the first section of the book. Rochelle Vigurs observes that “[i]n the first section […] Ondaatje steps inside the history of Sri Lanka to unearth the conflict of two millennia and to bear witness to those who attempt to defend a way of life, and to remember it” (2001: 78). War is the background of the first section, and by writing about what is excluded from official texts, Ondaatje makes possible the re-structuring of a Badiouean situation, or social improvement for the Sri Lankan people.
In the first section the narrator discovers that people contradict themselves: they love life, hope for peace, are aware of the fluidity of identity, and do not care very much about it in their daily lives, but they still fight over both identity and other possessions. In “The Siyabaslakara” he describes a rainmaking ritual in the tenth century. He notes “[t]he path from the king to rainmaking” (52). In “Driving with Dominic in the Southern Province We see Hints of the Circus” he is delighted to see, like fruit falling from a tree, “[c]hildren in the trees, / one falling / into the grip of another” (54). In these past times, the preservation and improvement of people’s lives were a king’s main duties. In their daily lives, people help and love one another as if each were fruit from the same tree. People are also aware of the gap between a signifier and the signified, although they do not take this awareness seriously. He writes, “We believed in the intimate life, an inner self” (4). Identities are fluid, and people were familiar with the fact that in “theatres human beings / wondrously became other human beings” (4). The meaning of a sign is arbitrary: bamboo can signify poems because some poets would hide their works in bamboo tubes. In contrast to the government’s “formalization of the vernacular” (4), people’s everyday lives are more natural: they “aligned [their] holidays with the full moon” (4).
Because of his concern with desire, the narrator discovers people’s love of peace. In “Buried”, the narrator pays attention to people who disappeared from natural disaster or from war. In this poem he learns that “750 AD the statue of a Samadhi Buddha / was carefully hidden, escaping war, the treasure hunters, fifty-year feuds” (9). Monks carried statues into forests, and would “carry the statues deeper / into jungle” when war reached them (11). By paralleling the images of “[m]en carrying recumbent Buddhas” and “men carrying mortars” (11-12), the narrator points out that the monks vainly tried to escape from war, just as people now both fight and hope for peace. People secretly desire peace, and the buried Buddha statues signify such a longing:
Burying the Buddha in stone Covered with soft earth then the corpse of an animal, planting a seed there. (12)
Like most other poems in Handwriting, this poem is in free verse form, devoid of most punctuation. The last line here follows a comma and emphasizes his discovery of people’s hope for a more peaceful future.
People contradict themselves when they fight over possessions. In “A Gentleman Compares His Virtue to a Piece of Jade”, a poem about people’s perception of reality, the narrator shows the connection of war to people’s obsession with representation, or the correspondence between the signifier and the signified. He first observes that “We [the Sri Lankan people] began with myths and later included actual events” (3), and then he points out the reduction of life to signs during a war. In the mythic past, “[t]he enemy was always identified in art by a lion” (3). In the Book of Victories, a parasol signifies that a king is under its shadow (3). The relationship between signs and their referents thus seems to be a stable one.
The artificial demarcation of reality distorts it and makes people set aside their love of peace. In the fifth poem of “Buried 2”, he traces the conflicts in Sri Lanka to people’s obsession with representation. He writes,
In the south most violence began over the ownership of trees, boundary lines—the fruit and where it fell Several murders over one jak fruit tree (26)
The one tree in the last line contrasts with the serious crimes, and the stressed monosyllabic words in close proximity to one another imply the narrator’s sure grasp of the situation. The artificial demarcation of reality makes possession possible. People fight because of their desire for “power and wealth” (25), and those who cannot possess these suffer from feelings of “vengeance” and “envy” (25), which are the seeds of future conflicts.
People also fail to follow their inner desire for peace because of a need for security and fear of strangers. In “The First Rule of Sinhalese Architecture” the narrator notes that because of a desire for security, ordinary people do not build their doors in a straight line (19). Although this prevents devils from entering deep into a house, it also reveals a fear of strangers and distrust of the unfamiliar. Therefore, in the next poem, “The Medieval Coast”, the narrator illustrates this mutual distrust: “Every stone-cutter has his secret mark, angle of his chisel” (20), and the village people’s wisdom “extends no more than thirty miles” (20). Wisdom is localized because of a lack of communication, and this can cause serious misunderstandings and fear.
Another contradiction in people is their refusal to confront reality. According to the last complete census carried out in 1981, before the war, Buddhists constitute 67 per cent of the population (Tambiah, 1992: 4). Understandably, the narrator pays attention to religion and sees that it does not offer an answer to people’s need for peace. In “Buried”, people hide “the gestures of the Buddha” during political crises (7). When war ends, statues of Buddha are unearthed. Then, “Bronze became bronze / around him, / colour became colour” (9), but these statues cannot stop war or protect religious people, even when they are sincerely worshipped. In “Buried 2”, instead of Buddha statues, and in contrast to the books that were burned by invaders (21), the narrator speaks of the “tooth of the Buddha” that can be “hidden in our hair and buried again” (21). Nevertheless, the desire for peace remains hidden in individuals, and monks who hide with the Buddha statues can only attempt a futile escape from society with them:
When war reaches them they carry the statues deeper into jungle and vanish. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The lost monks who are overtaken or are silent the rest of their lives, who face away thin as the skeletons of leaf. (11)
As Palipana says in Anil’s Ghost, “Even if you are a monk, like my brother [Nārada], passion or slaughter will meet you someday. For you cannot survive as a monk if society does not exist. You renounce society, but to do so you must first be a part of it” (Ondaatje, 2000a: 103). Peace demands action, and inner peace cannot be separated from external peace.
As an example of the people’s contradictions, the poem, “To Anuradhapura”, presents a contrast between people of the “dry lands” and those in Anuradhapura, “[a] city with the lap / and spell of a river” (18). The contrast is between people whose actions in the daytime demonstrate their obsession with representation, and those who perform a ritual at night and see reality differently. In the “dry lands” the narrator finds stilt-walkers with “lying legs” “in the small village / of Ilukwewa” (17). Stilt-walkers with lying legs “become gods” (17), and their godhead ironically implies the narrator’s disapproval of their reliance on artificial tools and their own self-importance (17). Indeed, the village’s name, Ilukwewa, suggests illusion. In contrast, Anuradhapura is a city with “its night faith” (17), where religious families walk like a river, being “tributaries / from the small villages / of the dry zone” (18), and circle a dagoba – “a Theravada Buddhist ritual in Sri Lanka” (von Memerty, 2009: 12) – in homage to the dead. As there are no boundaries in water, the description of these people caring about beings from another world implies that their “night faith” goes beyond representation.
With this contrast in mind, the narrator indicates his preference in the second poem of “Buried 2”, in which another comparison is made. There are the common Sri Lankan people, who drove cylinders into the earth to mark where Persian ships were sunk in the eighth century, but,
Where we saw forests the king saw water gardens and ordered river’s path circling and falling, he could almost see the silver light of it come rushing towards us (22)
The king here does not refer to the political leader of a country, and unlike people who divide and fight over possessions, the king is someone who is unselfish and cares for life, and whose vision – emphasized by the rhyming of “he” with “see” – goes beyond artificial boundaries.
The demand for respect for life leads the narrator to praise poets in the past who loved life and believed that people should take action to change their situation. Jacques Rancière observes how poetry once united people:
The old “naïve” poetry was the expression of a world where poetry did not exist as a separate activity, where the very logic of separate spheres of activity did not exist. It was the emanation of a civilization where private life was not opposed to public life. (2011: 17)
The poets mentioned by the narrator in the third poem of “Buried 2” did not believe in the opposition of private and public life, and wrote “to celebrate the work of the day, / the shadow pleasures of night” (23), and “were hunted” because of “composing the arts of love and science / while there was war to celebrate” (23). They “were killed and made more famous” (23), with this fame based on their popularity with the otherwise neglected ordinary people.
The importance of the common people becomes more evident in the seventh poem of “Buried 2”, which is about the assassination of the President and resonates with the murder of President Katugala in Anil’s Ghost: in both works the assassination of a leader is presented more in terms of a celebration of the common people than the murder of a single person. In Anil’s Ghost, “the Silver President” Katugala is assassinated by a suicide bomber, and his body cannot be found (Ondaatje, 2000a: 294). The question “Where was the President?” is repeated and unnoticed in the context of people celebrating the National Heroes Day. In “Buried 2”, the narrator writes of an explosion that killed the President in the subsequent poem:
Men without balance surrounding the dead President on Armour Street. Those whose bodies could not be found. (28)
This explosion is another Badiouean event, whereby what was formerly eclipsed – here, the people – becomes visible and thus taken seriously.
The narrator’s emphasis on the common people recalls Badiou’s observation about justice. For Badiou (2008:153), justice is synonymous with community, while community is a medium through which “the collective emerges in the form of a coming forth devoid of substance or founding narrative, of territory or borders” (Badiou 2008: 148). In other words, justice exists in a situation where each element expresses itself “without any differential trait that would allow it to be placed in a hierarchy on the basis of a predicate” (Badiou, 2008: 174). Indeed, in the sixth poem of “Buried 2”, the President appears more as a symbol than a specific person. In his lifetime the unidentified President was more interested in controlling life and homogenizing people than in caring for their self-expression, since he “built nothing but clock-towers” to regulate life (27). His government forgot its people’s sufferings. It is ironically claimed that “[t]he main causes of death / were ‘extra-judicial execution’ / and ‘exemplary killings’” (27), as if the state did not kill its people, although an excerpt from Daily News reveals the government’s part in the murders (27). By writing about the killings, the narrator highlights the importance of letting the silent people speak.
Badiou (2010) writes, during discussion of Theodor W. Adorno and the difference eclipsed by identity, “Difference is not merely what was repressed by identity; as an expression or an assertion of itself, it has not even begun as yet. We do not really even know what the different is yet” (2010: 33). Caring for life in Handwriting does not mean homogenizing people by identifying each individual, since the narrator destroys the representative President and celebrates the unidentified many. In the scene of destruction and reconstruction at the end of Anil’s Ghost, in which a statue of Buddha has been blown to pieces and Ananda is brought to attempt its reconstruction, he decides not to “homogenize the stone”, and so the old one remains “quilted” (Ondaatje, 2000a: 303). The result is two Buddha figures – “one of scarred grey rock, one of white plaster – standing now in the open valley a half-mile away from each other” (Ondaatje, 2000a: 304-5). The “quilted” Buddha testifies to the author’s belief in respecting the differences in people’s lives.
Having reconstructed the Sri Lankan past and present in Handwriting, the narrator has also considered “the landscapes of daily life” and “the deeper levels of the self”, and seen the possibilities of peace (24). To retrieve “what was lost”, he also has to study the possibilities of peace in “[t]he interior love poem” (24). This study is relevant to the issue of peace, because of the contradiction between people’s love of peace and their violent actions. Since love between men and women is the most possessive kind, the narrator has to probe deeper into this love to see how people can engage in it without causing violence. He reconstructs and studies love in “The Nine Sentiments (Historical Illustrations on Rock and Book and Leaf)” (31), which consists of eleven poems on the love between unidentified men and women.
Enquiry into love between men and women
Ondaatje says in the acknowledgements to Handwriting that there are connections to some of “the traditions and marginalia of classical Sanskrit poetry and Tamil love poetry” (78). In other words, the narrator tries not to be exclusive in his selection of materials when enquiring into and constructing the Sri Lankan past. Ondaatje also points out that “[i]n Indian love poetry, the nine sentiments are romantic/erotic, humorous, pathetic, angry, heroic, fearful, disgustful, amazed, and peaceful. Corresponding to these are the aesthetic emotional experiences, which are called rasas, or flavours” (78). However, since the narrator considers people’s obsession with representation to be a cause of conflict, he shows no real correspondence between the nine sentiments and the eleven poems in “The Nine Sentiments” to mock people’s obsession. For example, no poem in this sequence conveys the sentiment of peace. In this poem sequence the narrator places love in different contexts and tries to see how peace can coexist with heterosexual love. Here the narrator discovers that possessive love not only leads to conflict but also hurts itself. It is not until he starts to look for peaceful love outside the Sri Lankan past – actually in an overlapping situation, a Chinese story – that he finds a solution.
In his study of the love relationship between unidentified lovers, the narrator notices the connection between love and violence. In the first poem of “The Nine Sentiments”, women’s hair becomes “[a]rrows of flint” when “desire / enters the hearts of men” (33). In the second poem, there is a woman “painting her eye, / holding a small mirror” (34). Yet her attempt to make herself physically attractive causes a dry palate to the man who sees her (34). The narrator highlights the man’s conflicting feelings in the humorous third poem, in which that same woman in the green dress is happy because she has successfully attracted the man, who is “tugging his lotus stalk / (the literal translation) / on Edith Grove” (35).
The narrator evidently feels troubled in the sixth poem, while the fourth and the fifth make it clear to him that the conflicting feelings he observes in the first to the third poems do not contribute to peace. In the fourth poem the king’s war echoes the battle between a pair of lovers. In this poem a man visits his lover when “[t]he king’s elephants / have left for war / crossing the rivers” (36). The justice of the war is undermined when the narrator says that the king’s “guards loiter in the dark corridors” (36): even his guards care little about his war. The lovers also have forgotten the war, though their lovemaking constitutes another: “Your powdered anus / your hair on my stomach / releasing its heavy arrow” (36). The man is revealed to be wounded in the next poem. There are echoes of images in this poem, such as the curving bridge and the woman’s foot, her shadow falling and the water movement, the woman kicking and the flower blossoming, as well as her painted eye and its reflection in the mirror her lover holds. The echoing images imply that the watcher is attracted by the representation of his lover, and the bee’s drunkenness ending this poem recalls the arrow aiming at the man that ends the last poem:
The Bhramarah bee is drunk from the south pasture This insect that has the letter “r” twice in its name (37)
The double “r” and “the south pasture” echo the last word (arrow) in the preceding poem and suggest that the man is reeling from his wounds.
The narrator points out the problem with heterosexual love in the one-line sixth poem: “Five poems without mentioning the river prawn” (38). The earlier five poems discuss love between men and women. In the sixth poem the repetition of the letter “r” in the name of the river prawn echoes the same repetition in the words “arrow” and “Bhramarah bee” in the earlier poems and continues the themes of life and desire. By highlighting the forgetting of river prawns, the narrator indicates that river prawns are insignificant to, and neglected by, the lovers and reveals that love works through representation that eclipses reality, and that it can lead to conflicts like the aforementioned jak tree.
Thus, while the narrator affirms the expression of life, he notes that love also objectifies, and that the loss of a beloved person can cause life in death. The next poem includes the women of Boralesgamuwa who seek love and are happy “when husbands are away” (39), and there is “[a]n uncaught prawn hiding by their feet” (39). People live better when they do not have to suppress their desire, but in the ninth poem the lover objectifies the beloved. Here the lover tries to console himself through signs of the beloved, but his reduction of the beloved to representation also causes loss. The lover says, “I hold only your shadow / since those days I drove / your nature away” (41). Love also causes a death-like life when a person out of love cannot recover. In the tenth poem, after portraying a lover’s recollections about his beloved, the narrator writes: “Love arrives and dies in all disguises / and we fear to move […] So our withdrawing words / our skating hearts” (42). The “withdrawing words” and the “skating hearts” clearly show that, while the inability to love can stem from a person’s painful past, people cannot stop desire, however feeble it may be. The narrator writes in the stanza that ends the last poem of “The Nine Sentiments”, “Where is there a room / without the damn god of love?” (43). The desire to possess is inherent in life.
The narrator’s despair reaches its nadir in “Death at Kataragama”, a poem in the last section of Handwriting. At that time, his quest for a solution to possessive love has almost failed, and he is nearly overwhelmed by the thought of social violence and personal loss. Thinking of a woodpecker and a water buffalo he saw earlier, the narrator writes, “The place bodies meet is the place of escape” (56). His thought about merging with the woodpecker and the water buffalo reveals two things. One is his despair of being a human. The failure to find an answer to the problem of violence in the Sri Lankan past greatly depresses him. The other is his ability to go beyond his own limitations and look for an answer elsewhere. Just as handwriting in darkness signifies his search for marginalized elements in a society, the desire to be something between a human and an animal helps him cross the boundary of his earlier search.
Situations overlap, and elements from other situations can be useful (Badiou, 2009: 36; 101; 114). Likewise, the narrator looks beyond the Sri Lankan past, visits upon Chinese culture for a solution to possessive love, and finds it in “The Great Tree”. In addition to showing a love that is not possessive, this poem is also significant because it indicates the necessity for an enquirer to be sensitive to the unapparent and the new in his situation. Here, the narrator explores the issue of love by imagining what happens to the poet calligrapher, Yang Weizhen (楊維禎), after the death of the Taoist painter, Zou Fulei (鄒復雷). He sees that Yang merges with his dead friend because Yang always keeps Zou in his mind (59). Yang works in his “plum-surrounded library […] to ensure his solitary concentration” (59), and reaches Zou through “a path of blossoms” (59). By making himself familiar with Zou’s painting style, Young assimilates that style and expresses it in his calligraphy as if Zou lived in him. As a result, while the two friends pursue different kinds of art, their artworks echo each other because of their similarities (58). From the case of these two Chinese artists, the narrator can see that love does not necessarily cause objectification and the loss of the desired. To have and preserve the beloved, a lover must not be obsessed with possessing the body of the beloved. Love is a kind of deep concern. It is life-centred, not self-centred.
The functions of writing and the event of making peace creatively
Generally speaking, the narrator’s search for a home and personal peace ends with his treatment of “[t]he interior love poem / the deeper levels of the self / [and] landscapes of daily life” (24), since he has reconstructed his Sri Lankan home and has found his answer to the cause of Sri Lankan civil war. Ondaatje highlights the role of the narrator’s tool of enquiry in the third section of Handwriting because that tool helps the narrator in his search and it constitutes part of Ondaatje’s advice to peace lovers in Sri Lanka.
Writing helps the narrator’s enquiry for three reasons. First, by writing of the lost Sri Lanka, the narrator reconstructs it and is able to understand his situation at an emotionally safe distance. In the last poem of Handwriting, “Last Ink”, the narrator points out that one can immerse oneself in writing while “the rest of the world” is “chaos, / circling your winter boat” (72). This separation of the writer from himself allows him to understand what he writes about. Speaking of how resonation illuminates, Jean-Luc Nancy observes that the differences between perceived and intended senses are the condition for resonance: “The difference between cultures, the difference between the arts, and the difference between the senses are the conditions, and not the limitations, of experience in general” (Nancy, 2007: 11). Echoes between similar situations can shed light on each other. In Handwriting, the narrator writes to achieve insights. His writing belongs to “this mirror-world of art / − lying on it as if a bed” (73). Writing helps him see his world when it “hold[s] the vista of a life” (72).
The second reason is that writing enables the narrator to perceive the uncounted elements in a Badiouean situation. He says that “A seal, the Masters said, / must contain bowing and leaping, / ‘and that which hides in waters’” (73). “[B]owing and leaping” refer to border-crossing:
[he] roam[s] restless, searching for the thin border of the fence to break through or leap. Leaping and bowing. (74-5)
What “hides in waters” recalls “the uncaught prawn” in “The Nine Sentiments”. The title of Handwriting corroborates this argument. In “Monsoon Notebook (iii)” of Running in the Family, Ondaatje (1993/1982: 190) claims that the writing subject is his hand: “Watch the hand move. Waiting for it to say something, to stumble casually on perception, the shape of an unknown thing”. Writing enables an enquirer to approach reality in a new way and perceive what might otherwise have been overlooked. Moreover, as one can write creatively, writing also allows an enquirer to create many overlapping situations in order to better understand an event. In a study of the Tamils’ efforts to restore their community past so as to justify the claim for a Tamil nation-state, Qadri Ismail observes that “within the terms of the present argument, the domination, suppression, marginalization and exclusion of social groups continue” (2000: 280). Ondaatje has probably discovered the same problem; thus by the example of the unexpected Chinese story, he points out the necessity for the Sri Lankan people to accept different cultures when they try to construct a shared past.
While writing enables a person to perceive the uncounted in a situation, it also shows that an enquiry cannot come to an end. If in Handwriting writing is “a river journey” (73), and the paper to be written on “unrolls to the west” (73), a writer has to remain ever attentive to what escapes attention. In Handwriting, Ondaatje does not present any enquirer other than the narrator, and one of the difficulties in enquiring more effectively is the lack of coworkers. Badiou argues that an enquirer can only achieve a subjective truth (Badiou, 2004: 114-9). By highlighting the solitariness of the narrator in the third section of Handwriting, Ondaatje asks his readers to participate in making peace in Sri Lanka.
The third reason concerns reforming the Sri Lankan society. The last step for a Badiouian subject to do in the investigation of an event consists in taking action to reshape the situation according to knowledge gained about the event. By writing about the lost Sri Lanka and people’s desire for peace, the narrator produces an event of peace. Speaking of where the new comes from, Badiou notes the importance of the proletariat and the void. In a historical-social context, the state of a situation is “the law [of the ruling class] that guarantees that there is Oneness, not in the immediacy of society − that is always provided for by a non-state structure [the first count-as-one] − but amongst the set of its subsets” (Badiou, 2005a: 105). For example, members (elements) of a family (subset) belong to the family while the family is included in a nation (set). Also, in a capitalist society the proletariat can find itself presented but not represented (109). Badiou calls what is uncounted the void, which is “included in everything” (2005a: 87). He argues that the multiple that contains nothing other than the void is on the edge of the void (2005a: 175). He further suggests that as states do not support the existence of the uncounted (the void), governments can prohibit groups of more than three people meeting in public, as these are emblematic of rioting crowds and of the void (Badiou 2005a: 109). Since everything else in a situation is represented and controlled by the state, change in the state comes from socially marginalized people. In Handwriting, the narrator brings into visibility what has been neglected in Sri Lankan society, and he makes the new appear there. Badiou claims that “the subjects of the process opened up by the event…are the coworkers” (2003: 64). By Handwriting, Ondaatje invites his Sri Lankan readers to be his coworkers. Moreover, since situations overlap, the potential coworkers can also be those from other countries.
The need for coworkers explains the narrator’s talk of the need to be careful about the next step in “House on a Red Cliff”, the existence of Sri Lankan traditions in “Step”, and the importance of creatively reviving the past in “The Story”. In “House on a Red Cliff” the context of the tree is worn down, and much hangs on the ability to make the best of the present:
The flamboyant a grandfather planted having lived through fire lifts itself over the roof unframed the house an open net where the night concentrates on a breath on a step a thing or gesture we cannot be attached to (67)
Eluned Summers-Bremner (2005: 111) claims that the unframed flamboyant here implies homelessness, such as that Anil feels when she returns to Sri Lanka. However, the flamboyant can also symbolize the remnant tradition since a grandfather planted the tree, and the homelessness here refers to the loss of some traditional beliefs and practices. The last four short enjambed lines indicate, through “step” and “gesture”, fleeting life (von Memerty, 2009: 13), and conclude with the narrator’s understanding of the fragility of tradition.
The narrator continues to treat tradition in the next poem, “Step”, in which he depicts the funeral of a respected monk and shows that tradition does not disappear along with its physical supports. At the site of the monk’s funeral, there is a pavilion with only its pillars left:
And though it is no longer there, the pillars once let you step to a higher room where there was worship, lighter air. (71)
There are thirty devotional women in the monastery who are able to “walk those abstract paths” and meditate (70). They perform their religious rites as usual because, as the rhymed “there”, “where”, and “air” suggest, the “abstract paths” are visible to them and exist in their memories. The Sri Lankan past has not totally disappeared. It still exists in people’s memory, and it is for them to decide whether or not they want to reconstruct it.
The need for creative reconstruction appears in “The Story”. In this poem the possibility for the prince to escape from the enemy’s palace depends as much on his ability to recall his father’s talk before his birth as on his ability to devise new means for his escape. The king once braided his wife’s bitten-off hair into his own, and talked to his pregnant wife about war, about the need to “leave another way” after the battle (62), and about the need to respect rope-makers (61). Now the prince and six other warriors have to leave through a high window after their battle if they want to survive, and they may succeed if they can braid their long hair into one rope long enough for them to descend to the ground. The king did not finish his story, and his son has no chance to know that braiding hair into a long rope might save his and the other six warriors’ lives: his father braided his hair with his wife’s before he fell asleep. The son has to recall the past and be creative, and, since the rope must be long, the rope must come from collective efforts.
Erangee Kaushalya Kumarage (2004: 139; 152; 154; 162-4) claims that all the main characters in Anil’s Ghost are artistic craftsmen because, like the novelist, they are all involved in making a whole out of fragments. Kumarage’s insight supports the argument here about collective enquiry and creative reconstruction. However, if creativity is a necessity, it could also be because, as the narrator’s writing shows, peace has never existed in Sri Lanka. Indeed, Ondaatje’s writing and the other people’s creative reconstruction of a home for all the Sri Lankan people can also be an event, an event that brings peace to the land.
Conclusion
Nilanjana Premaratna and Roland Bleiker point out that “[a]ll too often peacebuilding efforts focus on processes of institution-building or on holding formal elections. The result is a top-down approach that risks imposing a particular notion of a Western and liberal understanding of peace” (2010: 377). In dealing with people’s desires and their everyday lives, Ondaatje highlights the importance of making peace from the grassroots level up. Peacemaking starts from people, either Sri Lankan or not, who care about peace. It also demands imagination, understanding, and action. In the case of Sri Lanka, realizing the prevalent desire for peace, peace lovers should also take seriously their understandings about the gap between reality and representation and the illusion of possessing by objectification. Instead of treating one another as objects to be feared, people of different cultures should collaborate and welcome the new, endeavouring to build a shared base for their peaceful coexistence – though Ondaatje’s emphasis on the past Sri Lankan people’s desire for peace already fills in a lacunae in a history full of conflicts. Admittedly, Ondaatje offers no concrete measures for peace to his Sri Lankan readers, but, in Badiou’s terms, he should not have. A Badiouean enquirer can only reach a subjective truth, and it is wrong to stop enquiring and take any truth reached to be the final one. Ondaatje has enquired into the civil war through his narrator, and he has taken his action to help improve the country, as Rancière (2007: 277) observes, “‘interpreting the world’ is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it”. Since the book was published, it is his readers’ turn to join the enquiry and be his coworkers. 2
Ondaatje’s peace solution and the functions of writing in Handwriting are relevant to the present Sri Lanka. Admittedly, eight days after the President’s declaration of the end of war, the United Nations passed a resolution to congratulate Sri Lanka on its triumph over the LTTE (Holt, 2011: 152). It remains unclear whether the end of large-scale military confrontations will lead to a lasting peace or a new form of conflict (Goodhand and Korf, 2011: 1). Liz Philipson observes that “while the government’s war for peace transformed the balance of power on the battlefield, the underlying roots of the conflict remain unaddressed” (2011: 117). The present government has not reformed its structures so that the ethnic minorities can be fairly treated, and people who “challenge the state on its human rights are threatened and murdered with impunity” (Holt, 2011: 163). The solid foundation for a superficial peace is in urgent need.
Ondaatje’s writing of Handwriting and the role of writing in this book also deserve attention from peace lovers. First, a Badiouean event comes into being when it is taken seriously. Likewise, the writing of Handwriting is an event for people who take this book seriously and want to join Ondaatje in his unfinished enquiry into the cause of Sri Lankan civil war and act to make peace there and elsewhere.
Second, the narrator in Handwriting explores the Sri Lankan past by writing about it, and his writing shows how it is a good tool for people to understand themselves and others and to construct a shareable home. Writing here is an example of what people can do to make peace. The meaning of peace changes with its context. Different times need different kinds of peace and different methods to make peace. Making peace requires imagination. Also, just as Handwriting can lead to collective writing when more and more people take this book seriously, people of different times are supposed to be creative coworkers in peacemaking when they agree to the importance of peace and devote themselves to its making.
Lastly, it might seem a pity that Ondaatje does not describe a peaceful world in Handwriting because readers would not be able to see the attractiveness of such a world and desire it wholeheartedly. Yet, if a peaceful world never existed, either in or out of Sri Lanka, if it is wrong to have one idea of peace for all the people, the picture of an attractive peaceful world is a lie that does not enhance the ever-changing expression of life. The narrator in Handwriting writes creatively and shows that elements relevant to an event can be infinite, and that making peace is constant and endless. Peace, ever elusive and ephemeral, must remain a dream for many people. It is worth pursuing because caring for life ought to be just.
Footnotes
Funding
This research is funded by the National Science Council, Taiwan, R.O.C. Project grant number is NSC 100-2410-H-024-024.