Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost won the Kiriyama
Book Prize for fiction, 2000. It went on to win, in Canada, the Governor
General's Award and the Giller Prize, and, in France, the Prix Medicis. Anil's
Ghost is Ondaatje's first novel since The English Patien (1992),
which won the Booker Prize and was made into an Oscar-winning film
under the direction of Anthony Minghella.
Set in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where Michael Ondaatje was
born in 1943, Anil's Ghost has been acclaimed by Publishers
Weekly as "the capstone of Ondaatje's career." The Toronto
Globe and Mail has called it "a wonderful bookÖunquestionably
Ondaatje's finest work."
Coughlan: Anil's Ghost tells the story
of Anil who, like you, is both a native of the country and a stranger
to it. You have said in the past, "I am a Canadian citizen, but I
always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I am a member of both countries."
Sri Lanka. Ceylon. You moved from there to Britain when
you were 11 and then on to Canada at the age of 19. In your writings,
both poetry and prose, you have returned to Sri Lanka at different
times and in a diversity of ways. In Running in the Family,
a delightful blend of family memoir and travel narrative published
in the early 1980s, you spoke of your return to Ceylon in the late
1970s as "traveling back to a family I had grown from." Margaret Atwood
said of Running in the Family: "Michael Ondaatje is here at
his agile and evocative best.... Brightly colored, sweet and painful,
bloody-minded and other-worldly, this book achieves the status of
legend.
Bloody-minded and other-worldly! Do you think that is
a reasonable description of Michael Ondaatje?
Ondaatje (laughing): I think that is a
perfect summary of my life. It is the capstone of descriptions for
me. ...I believe in that kind of anarchic perversity when one writes
a book. And also, it is other-worldly in the sense that it is of a
time that's past, and it is bloody-minded in that the author insists
on presenting it in that way. I was very conscious when writing that
book that it was a book about an era long gone. One of the things
I had to try and do was defend the characters in the book, even though
they are indefensible in some ways.
And I think it was very easy in the 1980s, or whenever
it was I wrote the book, to talk about the 1940s or 1950s and say,
oh, how stupid or foolish or politically naïve these people were.
But I really wanted, in the book, to try and portray that world the
way they would have portrayed it if they were writers.
Coughlan: Yes, evocative, as Margaret Atwood
remarked. It is evocative of a different time, certainly very different
from the description of the Sri Lanka you found when you returned
to research Anil's Ghost. You say of that time: "The streets
are still streets. The citizens remain citizens. They shopped, changed
jobs, they loved. But the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared
to what was happening there." The contrast between the two periods,
as also between your different visits, reminds me of a striking passage
in Running in the Family, a passage to which you give the title "Tabula
Asiae."
Ondaatje: Yes, I remember that well. I have it
here: "On my brother's wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits
of Ceylon... The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations...
growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout
rectangle, and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the
ear of India."
Coughlan: That's a lovely image, "a pendant off
the ear of India." You go on to say that "the maps reveal rumors of
topography." Rumor. I have noticed that word elsewhere in your writings.
It is suggestive, evocative, a hint of what might be there. And gradually,
in your description of the maps, you come finally to your own ancestor,
arriving in 1600, marrying, having children, and remaining: "Here.
At the center of the rumor. At this point on the map."
I wondered, as I read that passage, whether it is a
sort of analogy for your own experience of Sri Lanka. Beginning with
Ceylon as you experienced it in your childhood and then in your different
writings, I wondered whether there is a gradually evolving vision.
Do you sense in the movement from mist, as it were, to amoeba and
gradually to the sharper, clearer perception of the pendant, any analogy
with your own gradually developing vision and insights, from a variety
of angles, into Sri Lanka?
Ondaatje: That's very interesting. Yes, I think
I can see a kind of movement in my work about Sri Lanka. I mean it
did begin with rumor. I left at the age of 11, and really from the
age of 11 till the age of about 35, when I went back for the first
time, what I got about Sri Lanka was rumor, you know, through relatives,
through uncles and aunts, letters and so on.
When I would ask my mother something, I would hear that
one ancestor had been killed by being bitten by a horse or something
bizarre like this. So when you found out the story, you were hunting
down rumors more than anything else. And much of this stuff I discovered
in researching Running in the Family was told to me by uncles
and aunts and so forth. It has the aspect of rumor, and of family
lore, which can never be trusted (laughing), and that famous
phrase "nonfiction," which is of course always fiction. So I think,
when I came to write Anil's Ghost, what I was very interested
in doing was not to write the book from the point of view of my familyÖnot
that I think they are unreliable, because I think that my family is
just as reliable as anybody else's in some ways. I wanted the experience
of Sri Lanka not to be one I was used to, which was a family experience.
So when I went back and started to research the book carefully in
the early 90s, I intentionally kind of separated myself, and met and
went and stayed or traveled with people who are not family members.
So I got a larger perspective of the countryÖnot this, you know, kind
of remnant from the jazz age, somewhere I had been before.
Coughlan: And then there is the collection of
poems titled The Cinnamon Peeler, published in 1989. It offers
another perspective on Sri Lanka. Handwriting, which appeared
in 1998, gives another perspective, Anil's Ghost another, and
so on. Always that same reality, which began in myth and rumor, revealing
itself anew and in different guises.
Ondaatje: Right, and I don't believe that the
version in Anil's Ghost is a more faithful or more nonfictive
version. It's a fiction. It is a novel, and it is also a point of
view. I think one of the things I feel very strongly is that I do
not want people to see Anil's Ghost as a book that represents
Sri Lanka and that situationÖI think one has to remember that there
are many other novelists who are there who are writingÖany more than
you would pick John Updike as the representative of America. There
are 20 other novelists with their points of view and so on. It's a
point of view.
Coughlan: In an interview you did with Maya Jaggi,
published in the autumn issue of Wasafiri magazine, 2000, Maya
recalled your words that fiction is always the unofficial story, and
that you're interested in "unhistorical lives." Your reply to Maya
on that occasion is, for me, one of the most revealing and memorable
of your reflections on Anil's Ghost.
Reminds me of Michael's books! Perhaps you have been
influenced by Sinhalese architecture!
Ondaatje (laughing): I think so. I have always
thought that books are structured like houses, actually. I mean, when
I was writing or researching The English Patient, I met a Canadian
architect who was living in Rome. He took us for a wonderful day's
tour, guiding us round Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli, in the hills just
east of Rome. It was wonderful. I remember we went on this crowded
bus and we were both hanging on to these straps and he was saying, "You've
got to understand the poetics of the villa."
It was a wonderful phrase, a phrase I never fully discovered,
but it remained in my head. It gives a kind of structure that seems
closer to me to a novel than a novel is, you know, and the shape of
it. So, when you are standing here, you recognize that vista or that
person's personality. And I think, in many ways, that what you picked
up there about the three doors and the straight line, I think it is
quite true. You can't enter my novel with any sureness of where you
are going to go. You are going to have to go left, and then jag right
again, and so forth.
Coughlan: Again, we come to different standpoints,
different perspectives. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why your
writing is so evocative. Often enough, in the midst of matters that
might be delicate or even painful, we turn a corner and are met by
unexpected vistas of color or are caught up in sudden gusts of humor.
Lalla, your grandmother, comes to mind. The picture
we have of her in Running in the Family is of a highly colorful
character, the source of gales of humor and laughter, although you
suggest that this larger-than-life character was perhaps not always
easy to live with. You tell the story of one her grand dinner parties,
at which a shy man, Lionel Wendt, was asked to carve the meat. When
he removed the lid from the big pot that was placed in front of him,
a baby goat jumped out and skittered down the table. Lalla, meanwhile,
had been so caught up in setting up the joke, buying the goat and
so on, that she had forgotten about the real dinner and there was
nothing to eat.
Ondaatje: Yes, in fact, as a kind of gesture
of recognition, or something of an apology, the cover on Handwriting was
taken by that same Lionel Wendt. He became quite a famous photographer.
I mean, poor guy, he was humiliated enough by my family!
Coughlan: You also describe a scene years later.
It was after you had sent your mother your first book of poems. You
describe Lalla, your grandmother, meeting your sister at the door
with a shocked face and saying, "What do you think, Janet?"Öher
hand holding her cheek to emphasize the tragedyÖ"Michael has become
a poet!" Actually, how did it happen? How did you become
a poet?
Ondaatje: Well, I had come to Canada when I was
19. In a way it was a perfect time for all those things to come together.
I was in a new country, I was naïve, and at the age of 19 everyone
remakes their lives in some way. I also was going to university, where
I met a fantastic English teacher who encouraged us. Every one of
us in the class wanted to become a poet after that, after the first
or second class. So all those things allowed me to move in this world
where I could begin to write. Anyhow, I had no idea at that point
that I would become a writer, a serious writer, a professional writer.
It was more the pleasure of writing poetry on the side, as it were.
And I must say that even now I still find I try and keep my work at
that level of hobby, or amateur work, as opposed to a professional
level. If I have to cover something, or represent something, I find
that I become wordless. Whereas if it is a kind of secret, or something
I am making on the side or on my own, for myself or for my family
as in Running in the Family, then it may or may not work out
as a public thing as well.
Coughlan: It leaves you free in a way.
Ondaatje: It leaves you very free. You can go
in any direction, you can fall flat on your face, you are not expected
to do anything. I think the minute you are expected to do something,
it partly blocks you.
Coughlan: Your teacher obviously made quite an
impact on you. Who was that?
Ondaatje: A man named Arthur Motyer. He was a
wonderful teacher and he was also a drama teacher. He taught drama
and he was a playwright and he wrote plays, so there was a combination
of theatre and writing.
Coughlan: I wonder how many writers, or people
in other artistic professions, owe so much to particular people, teachers,
mentors, role models, and so on. People who spark something in others.
Ondaatje: Yes, a catalyst. Such people are fantastic.
They are so important. I think that teachers, you know, they can have
such a great influence, or even a terrible influence. I think we are
all so influenced by example. It doesn't have to be someone in public,
who makes a political speech. It can be someone or something very
private that influences us.
Coughlan: Coming back to the how, why and when
of poetry, there was technique you used in The Cinnamon Peeler. You
gather a group of poems under a heading, and you also offer an unexpected
quotation on the same page that somehow sets it off. The group of
poems under the title, "There's a trick with a knife I'm learning
to do"Öthe quotation accompanying that is taken from a magazine description
of a wine: "Deep color and big, shaggy nose. Rather a jumbly, untidy
sort of wine, with fruitiness shooting off one way, firmness another,
and body pushing about underneath."
I think your quote is partly a send-up, but it also
echoes your "three door and no straight line" approach.
Ondaatje (laughing): Exactly. It's bloody-minded
and other-worldly!
Coughlan: And the quote ends, "It will be as
comfortable and comforting as the 1961 Nuit St Georges when it has
pulled its ends in and settled down." But I suspect you don't want
things to settle down too much?
Ondaatje (laughing): Well, these were self-selected
poems written over a period of time. I was sort of saying, if these
poems work, then perhaps the act might clean up in time.
Coughlan: And there is another set of poems in
the The Cinnamon Peeler that include the exquisite cinnamon
peeler poem itself. The set of poems I am referring to is gathered
together under the title "Tin Roof." The quotation chosen to set off
that title is taken from Elmore Leonard. It is typical of Leonard's
lapidary, laconic style: "She hesitated. ‘Are you being romantic
now?' ‘I'm trying to tell you how I feel without exposing myself.
You know what I mean.'"
Your own writing has something of that. It conveys a
great deal, without spelling it all out for the reader. This is evident
in The Skin of a Lion, the novel you brought out in 1987. Speaking
personally, I consider it an outstanding piece of writing, packed
with energy and imaginative power. It tells a story of immigrants
to Canada and of the building of Toronto as a great city through the
lives of different characters and from different angles. What was
the line from John Berger that you put as a frontispiece?
Ondaatje: "Never again will a single story be
told as though it were the only one." Yes, it's funny, because I had
written The Skin of a Lion and I was talking to somebody and
he said, well, there's this John Berger quoteÖthe one we just talked
aboutÖwhy don't you put it in the book? And I replied, yes, maybe
I should, and the quote was so much at the top of my mind that I had
thought that it was too obvious to put it in.
In many ways I'm very glad it's there, because politically
nowadays, today especially, it seems essential for us to recognize
that no historical event, or no historical situation, or even human
or love story can rely on just one voice or one spokesperson. And,
you know, especially in this big, intricate and communal world of
politics today, and in Sri Lanka for example, you cannot rely on just
Anil to tell the truth, or just Gamini, or just Sarath, or just Palipana,
or just Ananda, or whoever it is, to have the only voice. Because
everything is shaded: one person's tragedy is another person's comedyÖor
not comedy but something else that is not that serious. So it seems
to me that a novelist has somehow, either through various narrators
or through suggestion or something else, or through juxtaposition
or collage, to suggest the complexity of any moment. It's the morality
of cubism in a way, to allow us to see the face four different ways
simultaneously.
Coughlan: That comes out particularly strongly
in Anil's Ghost. I am thinking of the section where Sarath
and Anil go to find Palipana, who has withdrawn from the world and
is living in the Grove of Ascetics with his niece. As you say, the
cubist approach comes out very strongly: you have no one particular
voice that is absolutely right, that enunciates "the truth," but many
voices. Palipana's voice, the girl's voice, Anil's voice, Sarath's
voiceÖall saying different things to some extent. Anil, for example,
has her very straightforward notion of truth, what it is, and how
to reach it. When Palipana says, "We never have the truth, even with
your work on bones," Anil responds with Western analytic surety, "We
use the bones to search for it. The truth shall set you free, I believe
that." Palipana replies, "Most of the time in our world, truth is
just opinion."
Your reference to cubism brings to mind something you
said about art and novels in The Skin of a Lion. It takes us
back to your structure, or lack of structure (laughing), in
the way you approach things, namely a gradual process of discovery.
You describe art, unlike official histories and news
stories, as reaching us langorously like messages in a bottle: "Only
the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best
can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become." And
you go further: "The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust
me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very
human.' Meander, if you want to get to town." What would you say about
that now?
Ondaatje: It has a kind of haunting sense for
me, because the first review I got of that book was in the Toronto Globe
and Mail. The reviewer didn't like the book at all. He thought
it was totally unstructured. He quoted that sentence and said, "very
faint indeed." (laughing) So I remember those lines! Yes, I
think that a book should feel unstructured, even if in some ways there
has to be a structure obviously, even if it seems to be chaotic.
Coughlan: As if the structure is gradually discovered.
Ondaatje: Yes, I think it is that. Yes, I think
for me that parallels how I write. You are stepping into the chaos
of a story, and all kinds of things are happening. It's like being
at the dinner table when you are with Palipana. You know, four people
are there. Everyone is talking, everyone is arguing, everyone has
a different opinion, and there's a pleasure in that. That's a section
of the book that I feel closest to in some way. It is the most cubist
section of the book. We have a 15-to-20 page scene, everyone thinking
simultaneously, and we're getting Anil's point of view, Palipana's
point of view, the girl's point of view. And it just seems to me the
closest I have got to expressing that in a larger form. I suppose
playwrights have to do it all the time when they have people talking.
Coughlan: I do find that the ends are gradually
drawn together, but are not totally closed, in your writings. Most
of your books, The Skin of a Lion, The English Patient,
Anil's Ghost, remain open-ended. They point us towards some future
time. The book on Billy the Kid is rather different. Billy is shot.
Period. But in most, you take us forward, seem to go back, sideways,
take unexpected leaps, but yes, orderÖor insightÖcertainly does emerge.
The characters begin to emerge, they are at least partially revealed
as we meander on our way to town. Do you find that the characters
take on their own personality, drawing you to follow them?
Ondaatje: They do take on their own personalities,
but it is your action as author that does it. It's not as if they
suddenly step off the page and say, let's go left here and go to Spain
for the weekend. I have talked about the discovery of a character
as being rather archeological in the sense that Anil is a vague figure,
or the English patient is a very vague figure at the beginning of
the book, and gradually you are, as it were, unearthing his full portrait.
In that sense, as you are unearthing it you are also of course inventing
it simultaneously.
Coughlan: Unearthing! It reminds me of a BookPage
interview you gave to Ellen Kanner. "A writer uses a pen instead of
a scalpel or blow torch," you said there. "As a writer, one is busy
with archeology. It's what the writer does with any character. On
the one level you're moving forward, but on the other you're revealing
the past."
Ondaatje: Yes, it's something I didn't recognize
in terms of this movement until the last book. You do have in fact,
literally, an archeologist at work here. The book seems to move in Anil's
Ghost over a plot of time that lasts about seven weeksÖthat's
the time Anil is in Sri Lanka. What you are getting is that, while
you are moving forward in that seven-week period, you are also moving
backwards to discover who Sailor was, you are discovering about Sarath's
marriage, you're discovering about Anil's love life in the past, and
about the two brothers, what happened 10 years earlier.... In human
terms, several lives are revealed.
Coughlan: It seems to me that you are stating
in a number of ways that we are all linked.
Ondaatje: Oh, yes, I think so. Even if it is
not a physical link, there is some kind of recognition between people.
Coughlan: Communal, I think you said at some
point, so that none of our histories is entirely personal. Could I
turn to another question? You have said that you do not plan out the
structure of your novels in advance. Where, then, are your starting
points when you begin a new novel?
Ondaatje: I usually begin with a situation. In The
English Patient I began with a plane crash. I did not know who
was in the plane. I did not know how many people were in the plane.
It was an image I had in my head: a crash in the desert. And there
was the image of a patient talking to a nurse. The book began for
me as a kind of canvas, with this two-person conversation. And then
you start finding out who this person is, what's his background,
what's her background... and that is what began the book. And gradually
finding out the situation and the surroundings, you build up other
characters and then others come in unexpectedly, like Kip.
In Anil's Ghost, I had always wanted to write
about what was happening in Sri Lanka. I didn't know how to, until
I thought that perhaps by combining two people, by having two people
investigating a situation... one was a contemporary historian, a forensic
specialist such as Anil, and the other was a kind of ancient historian,
in the sense of Sarath, who was studying archeological backgrounds.
So you are getting a portrait of Sri Lanka that is not just the usual
journalistic contemporary situation, where you read in the paper that
three bombs have gone off, and people forget about it 10 minutes later.
And put that alongside what happens in an archeological way, where
you get a whole background of culture.
Coughlan: You are a Canadian citizen and you
were born in Sri Lanka. You said that you wanted to write something
about Sri Lanka for a long time, but that it took some time to see
how you wanted to write Anil's Ghost. Does this book have a
particular meaning for you? Is it important to you as a work that
you have, how can I put it, sought to offer on behalf of the people
of Sri Lanka? Something to offer understanding, to bring attention
to their situation, or is that too moralistic?
Ondaatje: It might be a bit too moralistic. I
don't really see it as something I am giving to the people in Sri
Lanka. Everyone in Sri Lanka has his or her own point of view of the
war. It is difficult to find more than four people who agree. That
is part of the tragedy. I mean, in a way it was a very personal act.
I wanted to try and meditate on it. And this is the result of that
obsession and that meditation, a meditation upon all the ways of putting
myself in that situation. And also, I guess to make it very real to
people outside of Sri Lanka.
Coughlan: That it most certainly has. Richard
Eder, writing about Anil's Ghost in The New York Times Book
Review, put it well. He wrote, "It is Ondaatje's extraordinary
achievement to use magic in order to make the blood of his own country
real." In that sense this is probably a very important book for you.
Ondaatje: Yes, it is. It was certainly a much
more difficult book to write than anything else. Usually in a novel
I am making inventions and discoveries for myself. That's true in
this book as well, but there is also almost a kind of tapestry that
I had to portray as faithfully as possible. In that sense there was
a kind of greater responsibility.
Coughlan: You have written about Sri Lanka in
poetry and in prose. You have even been described as "a poet in the
skin of a novelist." The implied contrast between poetry and prose
brings to mind a much wider contrast, namely between novels and film,
or, to put it another way, between written fiction and the moving
image.
You have spoken about your admiration for Anthony Minghella's
outstanding direction of the film version of The English Patient and
of your esteem for his artistic technique and ability. What would
you say are the strengths of the two genres, film and written fiction?
In what way are they different?
Ondaatje: I think books are much more meditative.
They allow you to think, they allow you to respond to the text. The
reader and the book are like dancing partners, you know, and we can
put a book down, and say, I'm going for a walk first. Whereas in a
film you are on a treadmill and you cannot stop. You have to watch
the two-hour film and thenÖwell, we do have video now that allows
us to stop and start, but the dramatic act of watching a film is a
one-way street. You receive it. And that is a huge difference. That
allows you to be much more manipulated by film, and you can't talk
back. So it's more powerful as a medium, but at the same time it's
more limited in its range, I think. It can take us to Spain, or Brazil,
or Taiwan, or something like that at the drop of a hat. But you can't
have someone say, You know, there's an old story I heard in Greenland,
and then have someone take time talking in and around that, because
in a film we would feel the wrong reel has been put on. The length
of the hug is different.
Coughlan: The length of the hug, the reader and
the book like dancing partnersÖstriking images of the difference.
You have said it is much more difficult to express history in film.
You cannot flash back in the same way. Otherwise, as you once remarked,
it seems you are walking backwards.
Ondaatje: One of the complicated virtues of books
is that you and I do not read a book in the same way. I can take the
argument in The Brothers Karamazov and say, This is what it
is saying, and you can disagree with me, and there can be just as
much validity in that. Film has changed, and movies are getting more
subtle now. We just watched a film called In the Mood for Love,
a wonderful film, and we came out of the movie arguing about what
was really happening. So films are getting more subtle, but I still
think books can suggest more. That is why I think we have better criticism
of film than books, in some odd way, because you have a very real
thing to respond to. It is a more definite picture to quote as an
example. Whereas in a book, for example if you say about Dombey
and Son, the scene at the wharf, everyone would say, Well,
what happened at the wharf? I can't remember what happens. Whereas
in a film, say The Godfather, when Michael Corleone
killed his first victim, it's so visceral and tactile we have it in
our head. So I think that's why film criticism in fact works better.
If it's good.
Coughlan: Caravaggio and Hanna figured in the
film version of The English Patient as well as in the book.
And they both appeared as characters in The Skin of a Lion.
They've been in two books now. Will there be a third book with these
two characters?
Ondaatje: I never really planned to write a third
one. In a way (laughing), the film is the third version, the
sequel.
Coughlan: It would certainly be difficult through
the medium of film, the moving image, to treat in depth questions
of truth and perception, as you succeed in doing in Anil's Ghost.
You succeed in doing it without losing the reader's interest or attention.
You come at truth and perception through people, through situations,
through contrasts in people's lives and in their responses.
Ondaatje: The truth! One of the things I wanted
to get at was that we in the West have a tradition of believing that
there are always answers, always solutions. American foreign policy
is based on that belief. You can bomb your way to victory if you want,
or you can bomb your way to having your truth accepted in another
country. I think that one of the important things that comes up in
Asian writing is that sometimes you can have tragedy and light simultaneously,
tragedy and almost comedy simultaneously. There's an odd kind of balance.
It's a terrible thing to admit to or to accept, but there is an acceptance
of it. Truth sometimes can be, you know, as dangerous as falseness.
Coughlan: Anil's Ghost hints at that idea.
Ondaatje: I think that's the kind of aspect that
we don't like seriously to considerÖit threatens to muddy the waters
and some of our foreign policies.
Coughlan: At the ceremony for the Governor General's
Award for Anil's Ghost you remarked that you began your writing
career as a reader. "In Sri Lanka, where no one I knew actually wrote
books, we read only books from England and watched films from America.
When I came to Canada in the early 1960s, most of the books we read
came from England and most of the films we saw were made in the United
States." Now that's really changed, hasn't it? Both in Canada and
in Sri Lanka you have a growing body of literature.You also remarked
that Hugh McClennan's The Watch that Ends the Night and Leonard
Cohen's The Favourite Game gave you your true introduction
to Canada. "Nothing is as thrilling," you said, "as recognizing one's
own world in a book, one's own self-portrait in an invented story." What
would those last words mean to you?
Ondaatje: Well, I think there is nothing like
that experience for excitement, particularly for someone like me who
grew up reading about other people, reading about other cultures,
reading about Mayfair and the Mississippi, as opposed to Colombo Seven.
For me to read about Colombo, or to read about Quebec when I was living
in Canada, was thrilling.
It is such an accepted fact in America or in England
that people there do not realize how thrilling it is to be an Australian
and read Peter Carey or David Malouf, or to be in the Caribbean and
read Derek Walcott. There is a wonderful book by Derek Walcott, a
book of poems called Another Life, where he talks about this
battleÖgrowing up and being educated by English poetry and finding
none of the landscapes he was in, landscapes which are twice as beautiful,
being recorded.
Neruda talks about this in a wonderful essay. He says
everything has been said in Europe, everything's been recorded in
Europe. You know, you can't walk down a street in Europe without going
down history. Whereas there are countries in South America that have
never been named yet. And that thrill of naming things, there's nothing
like it. What has happened in terms of literature over the last 10
or 15 years is that we've finally got free of England and New York
as centers of literature. And things such as you are doing with the
Kiriyama Prize: you are recognizing and emphasizing and celebrating
work from countries around the Pacific Rim and in Asia, where you
have, in fact, an equally valid and serious literature.
Coughlan: Equally valid and equally serious.
Exactly.
Ondaatje: And we live in a world, in America,
where we have John Updike and Norman Mailer as major writers. Well,
would they be major writers in Singapore and Guatemala? They would
not be major writers. They are major writers because of their celebrity,
which has to do with literary worlds that are publishing the books
that get read.
Coughlan: One of the things that those of us
at the Kiriyama Prize want to do, to be part of, is precisely the
recognition of writers not only from the major publishing centers,
but from many other areas as well. We want, without I hope being patronizing
about it, to help these writers from other places to be recognized
and read.
Ondaatje: One of the things I did in Sri Lanka
when I received the Booker Prize was to set up an award there. Its
aim was to have books celebrated in some way, and also to have these
books translated from language to language.
Coughlan: That's wonderful. What is the name
of the prize?
Ondaatje: It's called the Gratian Prize. I think
it creates all sorts of turmoil as well, because it's a prize, which
is a problem. But the translation thing has been particularly interesting.
I think it will be more important in the long run.
Coughlan: There's no absolute in prizes, of course.
You can't say this and only this is "the one." But I think one of
the values of prizes is that they do allow someone or something to
stand out of the pack, as it were, and receive recognition. At least
a prize says here is a book that says something really worthwhile,
or is worthwhile, or is worth looking at.
Ondaatje: Yes, it is also the alternative to
mass media sales and purchase. If you are a small press and you bring
out a book, the chance of your getting advertised, compared to a major
press and a major author, is minimal. So hopefully juries will read
those further books and pick one that is not judged by its advertising
campaign.
Coughlan: Yes, and this is where the shortlists
of finalists and lists of notable books and so on can be important.
Winning books can help point to the books considered alongside them.
One final word from your address at the Governor General's
Awards. This word makes direct reference to Anil's Ghost. It
offers yet further insight into your mind and heart as you gradually
wrote this book over many years. Would you kindly read out those words
again?
Ondaatje: Certainly. When I returned to Sri Lanka
to research and write Anil's Ghost, I was helped by many people.
Doctors, human rights workers, civil rights organizations, other writers
in Sri Lanka. The book could not have been written without their generosity
and, more importantly, the evidence and example of their furious heroic
pacifism.
I hope Anil's Ghost is seen as a communal book,
in a time when there seems to be little chance of a solution to the
acts of violence, on all sides. Pacifism, reconciliation, forgiveness
are easily mocked and dismissed words. But only those principles will
save us.
Coughlan: Would you have any further comment,
or does that say it?
Ondaatje: No, I think that says it. It is one
of the situations where there is not much hope at the moment for what
is happening in Sri Lanka, unless something magical happens. It is
much more difficult to be a pacifist than it is to be a man of action.
There are organizations there that have been going for years, organizations
of lawyers for example. There are lots of pacifists on all sides,
people who are between the warring camps. And these are always the
ones who are attacked, of course. So it's difficult to have too much
hope. I think in some ways the plot of Anil's Ghost is that
the hope is in the characters, the human beings in the book. Most
of them just try to keep going.
Coughlan: You mention writers in Sri Lanka who
have helped you. You try, in fact, in many ways to encourage other
writers. Brick: A Literary Journal, to which you are a contributing
editor, is one of these ways. I note that a new book has just come
out in Canada, and is due out shortly in the States and in Britain,
titled Lost Classics. Edited by Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill,
Esta Spalding, and Linda Spalding.
Ondaatje: Yes, in Brick magazine about
three years ago we did an issue where we asked various writers what
books they thought had been overlooked or forgotten but which they
remembered very well. We got about 30 writers submitting responses,
so we decided to make a book out of it. We were approached by Knopf,
and we then asked about 30 more writers. So the book is made up of
these responses. Linda, for example, writes about an excellent book, The
Ten Thousand Things, which really should have won the Kiriyama
Prize when it came out in 1945 (laughing)Öif, that is, the
prize had been around at the time. The book was a lot of fun to do.
Actually, it's a book we all feel very proud of.
Coughlan: Let's hope that some of these books
come bounding back to life again. You have chosen, for example, a
book from Sri Lanka titled Bringing Tony Home. It is by Tissa
Abeysekara, a contemporary Sri Lankan filmmaker, who in mid-life wrote
this novella or memoir about a disappearing moment from his childhood.
It is, you say, about a mutual era of childhood. And you make a very
moving statement: "We hold on to favorite books for reasons that are
not universal. Each word and sentence in this one carried me into
arms I'd been in before. No other book brings me as close to my lost
self." Whatever that lost self may be?
Ondaatje: Yes, I don't know exactly what that
lost self is either. I am not saying this is the greatest book ever
written, but it was a book I just fell into. Everything was familiar,
even though it was new to me. That was the point, I think.
Coughlan: And you and the other editors hope
that Lost Classics will assist some of these books to come
back.
Ondaatje: Oh, yes. I hope so.
Coughlan: And one last point, if I may. The
New York Times Book Review describes Anil's Ghost in this
way: "In the end this intensely theatrical tour de force reveals,
if not a great peace at the heart of the human mystery, nevertheless
a vision of how heroic the struggle is." I sense, having dipped in
and out of your books, that while there is considerable irony about
the human condition in your writings, occasional flashes of acerbic
wit, and an impatience with pomposity and self-righteousness, there
is also a tenderness and deep compassion. This is evident in many
places. I noticed it particularly when you speak of your father's
courtesy and modesty towards the end of Running in the Family.
"He was in the end a miniaturist," you write, "pleased
by small things, the decent gestures among a small circle of family
and friends. He made up lovely songs about every dog he had ownedÖeach
of them had a different tune and in the verses he celebrated their
natures."
I am left wondering, as we see one kind of anthology
just coming out from the editors of Brick magazine, whether,
following your father, you and your brother and sisters are quietly
writing songs about all the various dogs the family has known. Perhaps
some future anthology, together with tunes, will come from your father
and from all of you as a gift for future generations?
Ondaatje (laughing): I think that would
be a good idea. I approve of anthologies about dogs. Kennels of dogs!
Toronto, March 28, 2001
