Although Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) and his ancestors lived and died there, he himself left family and country behind when he was 11. As a Sri Lankan adult who now lives in Canada, Ondaatje’s alienation from his native culture leaves him feeling that he does not understand who he truly is, especially since he also knows nothing about his father, Mervyn. This “uncertainty […] regarding my own identity” inspires two investigative journeys back to his homeland and extended family to rediscover his own sense of identity and determine his place in the world, eventually providing the subject matter for his memoir. Ondaatje’s quest to know his ancestry and his homeland suggests that one’s personal identity develops from understanding their place both amidst their family legacy and in the world at large.
Ondaatje’s lack of knowledge about his own family or the country he left behind leaves him unsure of his own identity, suggesting that it is difficult for an individual to know who they are without the context of their family’s past. While staying at a friend’s house in Canada, Ondaatje has a nightmare about Mervyn surrounded by vicious dogs. As Ondaatje wakes, he realizes that he does not know who his father truly was or what the dream means, but only that Ondaatje has long felt a sense of “malice towards him due to the scarce, negative information I knew about him.” This epiphany makes Ondaatje further realize he knows little about his family history at all: “In my mid-thirties I realized that I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood.” He states that this lack of knowledge leaves him with “uncertainty […] regarding my own identity.” Ondaatje’s feeling of not knowing himself due to not knowing his family suggests that one’s sense of identity is deeply tied to the family legacy into which they are born. Ondaatje confirms this when he writes, “At certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. […] So our job becomes to […] with ‘the mercy of distance’ write the histories.” His statement suggests that his family history, and particularly the absence of his father, influences his own life as an adult in significant but unseen ways, and thus understanding that history is key to understanding himself.
Ondaatje dwells heavily on the sensory details of Ceylon and the ways they recall his childhood, which suggests that along with family, the environment one is born into shapes one’s identity as well. The first environment that Ondaatje describes is Canada’s brutal winter,—during which he wraps himself in a quilt to keep warm—in contrast with Ceylon’s “delicious heat,” indicating that despite living in Canada, Ondaatje’s body is not suited to the cold climate. He notes, “It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia,” indicating that the environment Ondaatje currently lives in is not the one that he naturally belongs to, adding to his conflicted sense of identity. In Ceylon, Ondaatje meticulously records sensory details and describes them at length in the narrative. He makes long audio recordings of the jungle sounds and bird calls. He lists the smells. In his last morning in Ceylon, Ondaatje says, “My body must remember everything, this brief insect bite, the smell of wet fruit, the slow snail light, rain, rain.” The sensory details remind him of his childhood, of the land from which he came from and in which his mother and father lived their lives. Ondaatje’s meticulous focus on the sensory details of his homeland suggests that, like family history, the environment one is born in plays a significant role in shaping their identity.
By uncovering and recording stories about his family and home country, Ondaatje is able to see himself as a part of a long and complex family legacy rather than a lone Sri Lankan living in Canada. This ultimately suggests that knowing one’s place in the context of one’s family and homeland is central to understanding one’s own identity. After days of conversations, memories, and stories about his family members in Ceylon, Ondaatje sees a recurring vision in his mind: “I see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realize gradually I am part of a human pyramid. Below me are other bodies that I am standing on and above me are several more, though I am quite near the top.” In the vision, the pyramid lumbers slowly about the room while all of the people in it “chatter” to one another. Ondaatje’s vision suggests that he now recognizes himself as simply one member in a long family legacy, standing upon the shoulders of those relatives who went before him just as his children stand on his. This sense of belonging to a larger group of people suggests that for any individual, finding and recognizing their place in their familial and cultural legacies defines their own identity as a person who is influenced by the past and who will contribute to the future of their lineage.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Ancestry, Homeland, and Identity ThemeTracker
Ancestry, Homeland, and Identity Quotes in Running in the Family
In my mid-thirties I realized I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not understood.
I see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realize gradually that I am part of a human pyramid. Below me there are other bodies that I am standing on and above me there are several more, though I am quite near the top. With cumbersome slowness we are walking from one end of the huge living room to another.
[Mervyn] bought Doris a huge emerald engagement ring which he charged to his father’s account. His father refused to pay and my father threatened to shoot himself. Eventually, it was paid for by the family.
Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity. From the twenties until the war nobody really had to grow up. The remained wild and spoiled.
I witnessed everything. One morning I would wake and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses.
I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner.
Ceylon always did have too many foreigners…the “Karapothas” as my niece calls them—the beetles with white spots who never grew ancient here, who stepped in, admired the landscape, dislike the “inquisitive natives” and left.
Ceylon falls on a map and its outline is the shape of a tear. After the spaces of India and Canada it is so small. A miniature. Drive ten miles and you are in a landscape so different that by rights it should belong to another country.
[Mervyn and Doris] were both from gracious, genteel families, but my father went down a path unknown to his parents and wife. She followed him and coped with him for fourteen years, surrounding his behavior like a tough and demure breeze.
Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humor, and the fact that both them are hams of a very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making.
It is the only photograph I have found of them together.
“[Doris] belonged to a type of Ceylonese family whose women would take the minutest reaction from another and blow it up into a tremendously exciting tale, then later use it as an example of someone’s strain of character. If anything kept their generation alive, it was this recording by exaggeration.
[Mervyn and Doris] had come a long way in fourteen years from being the products of two of the best known and wealthiest families in Ceylon: my father now owning only a chicken farm at Rock Hill, my mother working in a hotel.
Words such as love, passion, duty, are so continually used they grow to have no meaning—except as coins or weapons […] I never knew what my father felt of these “things.” My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult. Was he locked in the ceremony of being “a father”? He died before I even thought of such things […] I am now part of an adult’s ceremony, but I want to say I am writing book about you at a time when I am least sure about such words.
The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man [Mervyn] who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like large dark magnets. […] He had captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it.
“You must get this book right,” my brother tells me, “You can only write it once.” But the book is again incomplete. In the end, all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. Whatever brought you solace we would have applauded. Whatever controlled the fear we all share we would have embraced.
