49 pages • 1 hour read
Michael OndaatjeAnil's Ghost
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Swimming
Swimming is a motif that runs throughout the book, from Anil’s triumphant days as a teenage talent to Dr. Linus Corea’s forced swims with the rebels to Lee Marvin’s watery escape from Alcatraz in Point Blank. Swimming also invokes Anil’s youth and the expectations thrust upon her, which she fled.
Early in the novel, Anil regards an old photograph of one of her swimming victories, noticing “her right arm bent up to tear off her rubber swimming cap” (11). Anil expresses discomfort with the way that people view pictures from her swimming days, focusing more on her body than her skill. In this way, Ondaatje connects Anil’s discomfort with swimming to her discomfort with gender roles in Sri Lanka, and ultimately with the country itself. Whenever anyone mentions Anil’s swimming success, she immediately demurs, telling Dr. Perera, for instance, “The swimming was a long time ago” (16). It reminds her of her youth, when her world felt too narrow for her ambition. She worked hard to put all of that behind her.
Later, swimming represents endurance and escape. When insurgents kidnap Dr. Linus Corea and force him to become their personal doctor, for example, they push him, blindfolded, into the sea. He can either swim or drown. While the rebels ostensibly set this scenario up to celebrate the doctor’s birthday, their intentions behind it remain murky and ominous. Corea enjoys the activity, however: “He always thought of it before he fell asleep. It heightened his excitement about the oncoming day. The swim” (124). Here, swimming represents a kind of freedom, floating about on the waves and away from the land with its destruction and death.
The Natural World
The novel’s many descriptions of the weather and natural beauty of Sri Lanka juxtapose those of the human-generated horrors of war. This motif emphasizes the primacy and timelessness of nature, underpinning the theme of The Presence of the Past. Nature, the author suggests, endures past human concerns, even those as brutal as civil war. Nature is eternal and sacred compared to humanity’s fleeting presence.
Anil and Sarath’s visit to Palipana’s forest monastery serves as a particular example of this juxtaposition. The forest grew up around a monastery, which “vanished from people’s minds,” leaving the area “an abandoned forest sea” (190); the forest outlasted even the memory of the monastery. Insects destroy its altars and plants overtake the bathing pools. Thus, nature has the power to subsume human history, to erase its footprints on the earth. In that sanctuary, though still audible, the war is distant, and in its contrast with the calm of the forest, Ondaatje suggests that the war, though long, will ultimately be overtaken by nature. Neither Anil nor Sarath wishes to leave.
Ananda’s restoration of the Buddha statue further exemplifies this motif. He notes that the statue will look out over the activities of humans, but more importantly, it will stand watch over the changing, yet eternal, natural world: “It was the figure of the world the statue would see forever, in rainlight and sunlight, a combustible world of weather even without the human element” (306). Humanity and its brutality and wars, the author implies, shall pass. The solitude and serenity of nature will endure, watched over by sacred forces.
The West
The West in this narrative refers to centers of metropolitan power far from Sri Lanka, including its former colonizer, Great Britain, and the United States. The author often juxtaposes the West against the East, as represented here by Sri Lanka. While these two terms—“West” and “East”—have no specific cultural valence or location, they are weighted with the cultural baggage of colonialism, oppression, dominance, and difference. Though in some ways, the West begins the narrative as a symbol of reason and authority, it ultimately becomes one of political interference and cultural appropriation. This links it to the themes of The Perversion of Politics and the presence of the past.
For example, when Palipana talks about the cave temples in China, he mentions that the scene represented a “crime:” “the Bodhisattvas [were] quickly bought up by museums in the West” (12). The statues, sacred in their context within Shanxi province, become appropriated objects of art in the West, representing a perversion of their political and religious purpose. This experience relates to Palipana’s later desire to break with the archeological standards of and practitioners from the West. In corrupting historical civilizations and their artifacts, the West becomes untrustworthy to study them. Further linking the West to the perversion of politics, Ondaatje suggests that the West, for all its wealth and power, is incompetent in the face of postcolonial conflict. As Anil understands during her time working for human rights organizations, “[t]he grand logos on letterheads and European office doors mean nothing where there [is] a crisis” (29). The West, as a notional ideal, is also a symbol of Anil’s alienation from Sri Lanka. For example, when her former lover asks her about her background, Anil simply replies, “‘I live here [. . .] In the West” (36). This effectively mirrors the deculturalization wrought by colonialism in occupied foreign spaces.
The West is also central to the Sri Lankan conflict in unexpected ways. For example, Sarath is wary of foreign journalists, who create the lens through which the rest of the world sees Sri Lanka, devoid of context, Indigenous history, and culture. Further, when Sarath and Gamini discuss the cultural imperialism that continues to impose Western ideologies on Eastern culture—“‘American movies, English books” (285)—they note that the story of the colonized place ends when the Westerner leaves: “‘The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him” (285). That is, the formerly colonized place is seen through the Western, imperial gaze. Thus, “‘the war, to all purposes, is over [when the Western observer leaves]. That’s enough reality for the West,” as Gamini says (286). This begs the question of whether Anil is a representative of the West, of the imperial eye, as she escapes the country, while Sarath dies. Ondaatje does subvert this idea, however, ending the novel not with Anil’s escape or even Sarath’s death, but Ananda’s restoring the Buddha.
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By Michael Ondaatje
