In Michael Ondatjee’s novel Anil’s Ghost the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009) is represented as debilitating in the most severe ways. But unlike global media representations and political discourses that continue to highlight only the deprivations, destructions, disablements and penury resulting from the war, thereby relegating Sri Lanka to the ranks of ‘failed’/’disabled’ postcolonial Third World nation-states, I argue that Anil’s Ghost trains the spotlight on enabling ecologies and empowering sites of the uncanny amidst the war violence that make for robust postcolonial belonging/s and becoming/s. While the bricolage-like organization and the rapid pace of the narrative recreates for the readers the relentless battering violence of the war, the ending returns the narrative to the vortex of violence as the UN forensic investigator Anil Tissera and the local Sri Lankan archaeologist Sarath’s joint investigation reports of government culpability in the war brutalities are effaced by the government. Sarath is killed and Anil has to flee the country to save her own life. This seems to squash all hopes of any relief for the country and its inhabitants. However, I argue that in failing to imagine (structurally and in the story line) a secure, sanitized ‘after’ for the post-colonial nation-state wherein it conforms to First World standards of civilizational progress and modernity, Anil’s Ghost engenders a more useful and critical imagination of postcolonial futurity/ies. One based in local experiences and agencies thereby mobilizing ‘democracy-in-praxis’. Futurities wherein inclusive communal belongings are contingent and dynamic and organized around affective ecologies produced at moments of encounter amongst humans, humans and nature and humans and other “vibrant materialities” (Jane Bennett,Vibrant Matter,6). Such inclusive communities are most promising because they allow for myriad potentialities of ‘living’ amongst and in tension with everyday and exceptional violence/s, of always being ‘in relation’ with others in life and beyond.
About the presenterSreyoshi Sarkar
Currently an ABD candidate at The George Washington University, Washington D.C., my research interests include diaspora studies, Anglophone women’s writing, conflict literatures and children’s literature. I have also published in these fields and taught undergraduate courses in them both at GWU & in Delhi University, India.