Anil’s Ghost

In 1943, Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, which was then a British colony known as Ceylon. Ondaatje’s mother and father separated when Ondaatje was 5, and his mother moved to England. Ondaatje continued living in Sri Lanka until he was 11, at which point he moved to England to join his mother. Ondaatje then went on to study at the University of Toronto, where he received a BA in English, and at Queen’s University, from which he received a master’s degree in 1967. Ondaatje began his writing career as a poet, publishing formally inventive collections including 1967’s The Dainty Monsters and 1970’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems. Ondaatje’s first novel, Coming Through the Slaughter, was published in 1976, and he is perhaps most well-known for his 1992 novel The English Patient, which tells the story of four people who find themselves together at an Italian villa during World War II. The novel won the 1992 Booker Prize, a prestigious literary award for books published in the UK and Ireland. The English Patient is a sequel of sorts to Ondaatje’s earlier novel, In the Skin of a Lion, which was published in 1987. Ondaatje has published eight novels in total, including Anil’s Ghost in 2000. In 1988, Ondaatje was named to the Order of Canada.

Sri Lanka was a British colony, known as Ceylon, from 1815 to 1948. Anil’s Ghost centers on the civil war in Sri Lanka, which lasted from 1983 to 2009. During that conflict, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fought a guerrilla war against the Sri Lankan government. The roots of that conflict stem from the violent persecution and disenfranchisement Tamil people faced in Sri Lanka at the hands of the majority Sinhalese population of the country. That violent persecution dates back to at least 1956, when the first of a series of violent massacres occurred in which mobs made up largely of Sinhalese people massacred Tamil people in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan Tamil people and Sinhalese Tamil people both belong to ethnic groups that are native to Sri Lanka. Tamil people in Sri Lanka (including Sri Lankan Tamil people and Indian Tamil people) account for about 15 percent of the population, while about 75 percent of Sri Lanka’s population are Sinhalese people. In the civil war, the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) aimed to form an independent country called Tamil Eelam in the north of Sri Lanka. The civil war resulted in an estimated 80,000-100,000 deaths. The Sri Lankan government has never allowed a thorough human rights investigation into the government’s role in alleged war crimes, human rights abuses, sexual violence, extrajudicial killings, and state-sponsored terrorism, which has led to widespread condemnation from the international community. The Tamil Tigers have been accused of using child soldiers, suicide bombers, and attacks against civilians, especially groups of Sinhalese and Sri Lankan Muslim people, during the civil war. Notably, in Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje describes three warring factions in Sri Lanka’s civil war: the guerrillas, insurgents, and the government. The insurgents Ondaatje refers to seem to be Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a communist group that staged two attempted armed insurrections in Sri Lanka—the first in 1971, and the second from 1987-1989, which is closer to when the novel takes place. To put down that second uprising, the government responded with politicide and reportedly killed tens of thousands of JVP supporters.  

Ondaatje’s most well-known work is perhaps his novel The English Patient, which is a sequel of sorts to his earlier-published book, In the Skin of a Lion. Anil’s Ghost centers on Sri Lanka’s civil war, a conflict that lasted from 1983 to 2009. One notable nonfiction book that covers the civil war is This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War by Samanth Subramanian. Novels that take place during the Sri Lankan civil war include Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan, A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. In Anil’s Ghost, Anil previously worked as a forensic anthropologist exhuming bodies of people murdered during Guatemala’s civil war, which occurred from 1960-1996. The nonfiction book Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala by Victoria Sanford documents Guatemala’s civil war and also includes interviews with a team of forensic anthropologists working on human rights cases related to the civil war. Alexa Hagerty’s book Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains also details the role that forensic anthropologists have played in the aftermath of Guatemala’s civil war. Additionally, Ondaatje cited the book Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell by Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover as influential for his understanding of forensic anthropology.