Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Aestheticization of Human Rights Manav Ratti Violence draws on people’s capacity to serve a cause greater than themselves, to sacrifi ce for the common good, to put their indi- vidual welfare at the service of the nation and the people. And these are the noblest parts of the human soul. When exploited by these terrible people, when exploited by demagogues, they turn into a nightmare that can destroy society. But unless you understand that the appeal of violence is to that something deep and noble in the human heart that desires something bigger than yourself, you cannot understand violence at all. Michael Ignatieff “Nationalism and Self-Determination” I. How can we not want human rights?1 The question may seem ethi- cally intuitive, perhaps even prima facie naïve in a world where injus- tices and violations continue to expand with sobering, alarming in- exorability. But the challenge to my opening question is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the implementation of human rights legislation is no simple affair. The seeming universality of their ethical intuitiveness— the rights fought for through civil liberties movements and encoded in such treaties as the Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions—strikes crudely against their judicial enforcement to particular, differing cultural and state contexts. Who makes decisions about intervention? How is intervention received? Words such as the Sri Lankan “ethnic war” or “interethnic confl ict” have tremendous emotive resonances, urging ethically-motivated responses from those within and without Sri Lanka. For a novelist like Michael Ondaatje, who left Sri Lanka at age 19 and has been living in Canada now for four decades, 121 Manav Ratti the island nation-state demands a special attention and responsibil- ity. Ondaatje has written “to” Sri Lanka through his 1982 memoir, Running in the Family, his 1998 collection of poems, Handwriting, and most recently in 2000, through his latest novel, Anil’s Ghost, the fi rst novel-length treatment through which Ondaatje, in realist mode, rep- resents Sri Lanka. The protagonist, Anil, is a forensic anthropologist, a diasporic Sri Lankan based in the U.S. and educated in the U.K. who returns to Sri Lanka as part of a United Nations-sponsored human rights intervention to investigate the role of the government in the con- tinuing violence and terror that has now devastated Sri Lanka for more than two decades. Anil’s “in-between” location facilitates the ethical problematic refl ect- ing Ondaatje’s diasporic nationalist concerns: what is Sri Lanka, how can it be represented? It is precisely in that process of representation where there can be a rich convergence between human rights as a p olitico-legal discourse, the aesthetic space of the novel form, and the historical condi- tion of postcolonial Sri Lanka. What, indeed, is the violence and terror that has been devastating Sri Lanka now for over twenty years? What is Sinhalese majoritarianism? And Tamil minoritarianism? I shall argue in this article that Ondaatje invokes the discourse of human rights in order not only to elicit political and ethical responses to Sri Lanka, but also to show how the discourse itself can break down and become frustrated by its application to a particular nation-state context. It is the constitu- tively polyphonous space of literature—one with which Ondaatje has contionually experimented in his writing career—that allows Ondaatje to give dimension and voice to those affi rmative aspects of human rights concern that may not always be able to be expressed through what Ranajit Guha has termed the “abstract univocality” of law. In his article “Chandra’s Death,” Guha meticulously describes the process by which in 1849, a young woman in a Bengali village, Chandra, dies from medi- cine administered by her sister to abort an unwanted pregnancy, a preg- nancy that would have meant life expulsion from her village commu- nity due to the illegitimacy of the child, with her brother and two male relatives disposing of her body at night. When the “case” came before the colonial courts, however, Chandra’s death became a “murder,” with 122 Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Human Rights Chandra’s mother, sister, and the local producer of the medicine all be- coming arrested. Guha argues: a matrix of real historical experience was transformed into a matrix of abstract legality, so that the will of the state could be made to penetrate, reorganize part by part and eventually con- trol the will of a subject population in much the same way as Providence is brought to impose itself upon mere human des- tiny. (141) He continues: The outcome of this hypostasis is to assimilate the order of the depositions before us to another order, namely law and order, to select only one of all the possible relations that their con- tent has to their expression and designate that relation—that particular connotation—as the truth of an event already clas- sifi ed as crime. It is that privileged connotation which kneads the plurality of these utterances recorded from concerned indi- viduals—from a mother, a sister and a neighbour—into a set of judicial evidence, and allows thereby the stentorian voice of the state to subsume the humble peasant voices which speak here in sobs and whispers. To try and register the latter is to defy the pretensions of an abstract univocality which insists on naming this many-sided and complex tissue of human predicament as a ‘case’. (141) It is the abstracting and monological voice of the state that Ondaatje challenges through the space of literature and in particular through the genre of the novel, one which—through a realist mode of narrative no less—promises the offer of the “real” and “particular.” With the thema- tization of human rights within literary space, the empire of the sign be- comes coextensive with an empire of ethics, a twinning I shall express, and later elaborate upon, through the concept of the “semioethical.” The aestheticization and literarization of the letter of the law allows for a form of witnessing—characters universalize, particular identities become represented—that challenges the limits of the law’s abstract uni- 123 Manav Ratti vocality. That witnessing is not simply, in Ondaatje’s literary case, spec- ular detachment, or detached legal formulation, but rather a kind of participation. The novel presents us with, and takes us along the path of, a process. Ondaatje begins the novel with human rights on the scene of the international, by referring to human rights abuses in Guatemala, and moves to the increasingly particular: as Anil moves from the U.S. to Sri Lanka, she moves toward greater understanding of the Sri Lankans with whom she works closely, and she moves toward a deeper examina- tion of her diasporic identity so that by the end of the novel she is able to proclaim, “I think you murdered hundreds of us” (272). Such a move allows Ondaatje to collapse the abstractness of the elsewhere and of the national-ethnic other, a thematized collapsing of boundaries consonant with the formal impulse of this novel to demonstrate the polyphonous “sobs and whispers” that defy the univocality of legal discourses. Before offering some background on the civil war in Sri Lanka, I’d fi rst like to offer a deconstructive moment to signal, as a political self- conscious gesture, the fraught textual and political terrain, both literal and metaphorical, one must negotiate when writing about the continu- ing “crisis” in Sri Lanka. The “story” that I shall tell—in giving “back- ground” to Sri Lanka will participate in the same problematics of ref- erence to and representation of the “Sri Lankan civil war” with which Ondaatje is faced. Val Daniel argues that “[e]very story in the press has somewhere buried in it a key sentence, intended to provide a funda- mental bit of information, without which, it would seem, the story as a whole will not be adequately understood” (15). He then offers the fol- lowing as a typical press sentence: “Ethnic Tamils speak the Tamil lan- guage and are Hindus, and ethnic Sinhalas speak the Sinhala language and are Buddhists” (15). Daniel then concludes that: The worldly-wise in Sri Lanka too, when called upon to de- scribe the current turmoil in their island nation, do so by call- ing it an interethnic confl ict. They may refi ne this bit of fun- damental information by adding: Sinhala is a language that belongs to the Indo-Aryan family of languages, its speakers, mostly Buddhists, making up the island’s majority; Tamil is a 124 Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Human Rights language belonging to the Dravidian family of languages and is spoken by the island’s most populous minority, who are most likely to be Hindus. One immediately senses the mighty hand of nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship beginning to cast its long shadow of the classifi cation of languages on the politi- cal and demographic landscape. (15) Conventional descriptions reify the war as one between ethnicities (“Tamils,” “Sinhalese,” that thus constitute a country, “Sri Lanka”), whereas such “ethnicities” are not so stable, homogenous, and pure as some members of both ethnicities may wish to assert—and for which they are prepared to die. The story I shall thus tell about the “Sri Lankan war” will be a palimpsest of sorts. Though useful to those readers unfa- miliar with some of the politics of the confl ict, the terms that such de- scriptions usually invoke are themselves problematic for the very reasons that Daniel so cogently discusses. Offi cially gaining independence from Britain in 1948, Sri Lanka found itself marked by a postcolonial condition with each of its two dominant ethnic groups, the minority Tamils and the majority Sinhalese, enforcing their own brands of ethnic nationalism. The Sinhalese used the Sinhala language and Buddhism as markers for amplifying “their” particular eth- nicity. The Tamil communities, concentrated mainly in the north and east of the island, looked to the neighboring south Indian state of Tamil Nadu for cultural and social support. Indeed, Tamils had been brought from southern India by the British in order to provide labour for the tea plantations. Sri Lanka’s fi rst Prime Minister, R. Bandaranaike, active- ly promoted Sinhalese nationalism. Perhaps his most aggressive move was the 1956 “Sinhala Language Act,” making Sinhala the offi cial na- tional language (Bandaranaike had promised to do so within 24 hours of election). The Tamils claimed systemic discrimination, not just lin- guistically, but also socio-economically, particularly through the intro- duction of university entrance quotas in the early 1970s which further limited opportunities for personal advancement. Although Sinhalese- Tamil violence in postcolonial Sri Lanka has occurred since at least 1956, the greatest eruption took place in July 1983, precipitated after 125 Manav Ratti the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam committed a suicide attack in the northern town of Jaffna, which killed thirteen Sinhalese soldiers. As a backlash, Sinhalese mobs stormed Colombo, burning and destroy- ing Tamil homes. Three major actants continue to operate in the on- going war: (1) the LTTE, concentrated in the north and the east; (2) the Government itself; and (3) the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP, or People’s Liberation Front), an anti-State socialist group formed in the south to attack the government for its political and economic policies. Since September 2002, six international rounds of peace talks between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government have been held in Thailand, Germany, and Japan, mediated throughout by Norway. In December 2002, a Canadian group formed the Forum of Federations to help both the government and LTTE establish a federal solution. II. The Representational Dilemmas of Human Rights How might a novelist such as Ondaatje represent the postcolonial com- plexity of ongoing violence, international demands for peace, and the need for human rights? A strong challenge to the hegemony and spe- ciousness of homogenous, “pure” ethnic identities would be a turn to some “commonality”—some measure of sameness, let us say—that disrupts and subverts the differences-promulgating ideologies which produce violence in Sri Lanka. In his family memoir Running in the Family, written in 1982 after a long-due visit to Sri Lanka from Canada, Ondaatje is thoughtful about the constructed nature of ethnic iden- tities in Sri Lanka. He states: “Everyone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many generations. . . . Emil Daniels summed up the situation for most of them when he was asked by one of the British governors what his nationality was—‘God alone knows, Your Excellency’” (41). Ondaatje’s emphasis on everyone’s being related and on hybrid ethnicities challeng- es myths of a “pure” national identity. In the same way that hybridized identities—resulting in people’s having the “same” blood in them—can disrupt polarized ethnic categories, so too can a concept of individual human rights stand as a challenge to the disjunctioning category of eth- nicity (and the differences that category can fuel). Yet the constitutive 126 Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Human Rights dilemma for a human rights discourse is that while it affi rms the catego- ry of “human,” it emerges, and must function as, a legalistic response to cases so often fraught with problems and inequities because of “specifi c” categories—occurring “elsewhere” from the West. We may ask, then, are human rights ‘shorthand’ for representing the third world? Is violence the only western understanding of Sri Lanka? Ondaatje’s female protagonist Anil functions as an emissary of human rights, but hers is no simple intervention. Returning to Sri Lanka, re- turning “home,” she undergoes a process of learning, of revising her beliefs, of developing humility. The abstract univocality that produces a signifi cation such as “violence” becomes translated and aestheticized by Ondaatje within the polyphony of the novel form. It is the malleabil- ity of the aesthetic space of literature that will allow Ondaatje the op- portunity to explore the ways in which human rights may both succeed and break down in differing nation-state contexts, a “literarization” that helps to address questions of law concerning precisely the application and enforcement of such rights. The space of literature can contribute to knowledge. Literary appre- ciation becomes literary cognition: “representation” thus appears again. How do we know Sri Lanka? Because such ethically-charged phenom- ena as violence and catastrophe are particularly resistant to representa- tion, any effort at representing them will always already be haunted by a heightened, if indeed not anxious, self-consciousness riven by both aesthetic and ethical concerns. I shall express this twin (and twinned) problem of representation and ethics as the “semioethical.” The prob- lem becomes contiguous with its own solution: any representation will be an auto-representation, an auto-critique, launched from the domain of the semioethical itself. In her forthcoming piece, “Aestheticizing Catastrophe,” Mieke Bal argues that it is the catastrophic nature of an event—and the resulting trauma—that creates a special interest in viewers toward the work of art and, ultimately, toward the artist. In contradistinction to Kant’s and Shaftesbury’s insistence on the “disinterestedness” necessary in forming aesthetic judgment, Bal argues for an “interestingness”: an interest in the suffering caused by the catastrophe, an interest that undermines the 127 Manav Ratti public-private divide. Such commitment results in a form of witnessing, or sharing of the trauma, and it is precisely the catastrophic, overwhelm- ing quality of the initial “event” that elicits and rivets such committed interest. Thus we can think of the discourse of human rights as a form of “wit- nessing” the other, so often the third world. The challenge for Ondaatje, with a novel like Anil’s Ghost, is not simply to reproduce the asymme- tries suggested by “witnessing,” thus reifying Sri Lanka as simply the other of the west. Instead, the challenge becomes how Ondaatje can work to enable some kind of insight and knowledge, so as to move away from impressionistic understandings that uncritically equate “violence” with “Sri Lanka.” It is precisely the dense complicity between the con- cept of “violence” and “Sri Lanka” that will serve as the starting point for theorizations by Sri Lankan intellectuals on the nature and deep prob- lematics of what I shall term “nation-writing.” For instance, Qadri Ismail argues for lending a certain “subjectivity” to Sri Lanka so as to avoid anthropological and anthropologizing de- scriptions which represent the country as such for largely western audi- ences. He writes, “thinking of Sri Lanka insists upon the (special) re- sponsibility of postcolonial scholarship not to continue to address the west exclusively; to insist upon the distinction between addressing the west and interrogating eurocentrism; and in so doing to ‘fi nish’ (Mowitt 1992) the critique of anthropology” (“Speaking” 298). The semiotic im- plications of such anthropologizing rest on “representation” as both de- scription and substitution, so that what may be seen as simply a repre- sentation of Sri Lanka becomes a de facto substitution, effectively “sub- alternizing” the nation: while representation, whether in anthropology or elsewhere, might depict itself as engaged in the innocent activity of de- scription, retransmission, or portrait, it often becomes proxy, a substitute for the other: who is then replaced, effectively sup- pressed, “cannot speak.” (300) Such “speaking” stems from Gayatri Spivak’s questioning of whether the subaltern is able to “speak” (metaphorically), and the institutional 128 Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Human Rights forms of power and misrepresentation that thwart both the subaltern’s ability to represent herself, and also the ability of those “outside” her context to “listen” to her. Whereas Spivak questions representability by framing her concerns through the terms of an individual, Ismail frames his concerns by fi guring an entire “country”—Sri Lanka—as a sort of subaltern. Ismail’s admirable reminder of the “responsibility” of postco- lonial scholarship may help us conceptualize Anil as a fi gure of the post- colonial intellectual or critic. As I mentioned earlier, Anil’s is a process of negotiation through learning, revision, understanding. Ismail draws a subtle and potent distinction between Sri Lanka as “country” and Sri Lanka as “place.” When I stated above that my “story” about postcolonial Sri Lankan violence would be a palimp- sest, it is (1) the idea of Sri Lanka as “country” and Tamil and Sinhala as uncontested “ethnicities” that becomes reifi ed through press and conventional descriptions; but it is (2) a more critical reading of Sri Lanka, attendant to its historical complexities, that can palimpsestu- ally re-signify “Sri Lanka,” “Tamil,” or “Sinhala” so as to restore some unhegemonic referentiality to those, and similar, signifi ers. It is in this sense that conceptualizing Sri Lanka as place allows Ismail to apply to Sri Lanka the Barthesian concept of text as “productivity,” thus res- cuing Sri Lanka from existing as passive, subalternized object subser- vient to any and all conventional, uncritical representations. Ismail’s distinction: Sri Lanka, the country, is to be understood as this debate: be- tween Tamil and Sinhala nationalism, liberalism and the left; and containing a multiplicity of other positions. To put this differently: as place, Sri Lanka is best understood as a text in the strict Barthesian sense. Indeed, the above might be clari- fi ed by turning to Barthes and his conceptualization of text as a ‘productivity,’ as the meeting place of reader and written. Sri Lanka, to the post-empiricist, is a reading; it emerges when the reader (Ismail) responds to written (De Silva, Kennanayake, Jeganathan, Scott, Tiruchelvam). From which it follows that, since De Silva and others are also readers, they too will pro- 129 Manav Ratti duce the country; thus no single Sri Lanka can, by defi nition, succeed in capturing or encompassing the infi nitude of its sig- nifi cance; thus no two Sri Lankas are likely to coincide, though some will overlap. This relation, between reader and writer, is in one sense reciprocal: to read textually is to deny the written authority, primacy or priority over the reader. This is why Sri Lanka, as productivity, can be thought of as subject. (304) Positing such a “subjectivity”—the productivity of place—to Sri Lanka conceives of the island with an agency from within, an “inter- nal” logic resistant to easy translations—misrepresentations, innocent descriptions—within the discourse of an orientalizing anthropology, or indeed any form of representation that seeks to fi x one authoritative meaning for readers. Ismail argues that “culture” and “violence” are not categories central to the Sri Lankan debate. For him, the debate: does not turn around culture or violence, but the terms nation, majority, minority and democracy. (Indeed, the debate could be summarily caricatured as pivoting around the signifi cance— value—of one word: majority.) To speak to the question of peace in Sri Lanka in the current conjecture is to address their relation. (306; italics in original) What may be confi gured from outside Sri Lanka as “culture” and “ violence” can easily become, in Ismail’s view, inaccurate ways of under- standing those phenomena that are manifest because of the specifi c cate- gories of nation, democracy, majority, and minority. Pradeep Jeganathan succinctly notes that “[v]iolence is an analytical name for events of polit- ical incomprehensibility” (41). Jeganathan’s analysis of the historical rise of “violence” as a distinct category of Sri Lankan anthropology would mark Sri Lanka, in Ismail’s terms, as country: [U]nlike ritual, violence is not a well worn, fi rmly canonized category in anthropology. In fact, the concern with violence in Sri Lankan anthropology is extremely recent, arising only after the massive anti-Tamil violence of July 1983. This event pro- duces a profound rupture in the narration of Sri Lanka’s mo- 130