Kai-su Wu
ABSTRACT
Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) is often regarded as a fictionalized memoir or auto/biographical fiction that transcends generic conventions. The narrative voice in the book engages the reader by weaving together diverse stories related to Ondaatje’s family history in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. The book records the life (“bios”) of his people as much as it is invested in his gesture of fragmentary writing (“graphy”). As argued in the article, this latter effort by Ondaatje, embodied in his employment of episodic and sometimes incomplete narrative to reproduce the transient and meandering nature of recollection on both parts of himself and the others, questions the imperative of foregrounding manifest historical accounts in an immigrant writer’s text, such as the British divide-and-rule policy in colonial Ceylon and the 1971 insurrection in postcolonial Sri Lanka. Ondaatje calls for a collective self-storytelling that coordinates the seemingly bifurcated personal and political aspects in such a way that the convergence of scandals, gossips, familial archives, and oneiric accounts enacts a dialogic performance. Ondaatje is both conscious of the unreachability of the truth from the outset and is conscientious about presenting the book as expressive of the Burgher people’s communal achievement, which counterbalances the nationalist narrative of history dominated by the Sinhalese and the Tamil. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s discussion of nation and narration, this article suggests reading the memoir as inscribing an aesthetic creation of the narrative process on the histories of the multi-ethnic people in the writer’s imaginary homeland.
KEYWORDS: Running in the Family, the Burgher people, Homi Bhabha, nation-building, narrative, poetics/politics debate
DOI: 10.30395/WSR.202506_18(2).0005
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