Introduction

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Sonja Lehmann
most often sold to readers in Africa (199) so that the choice of topics in recent
postcolonial writing seems to be more complex. 3
Michael Ondaatje’s writing has also been included in this debate. On the one
hand, his fiction has been described as being marked by “a series of international
influences where cultures blend into one another with the continuous movement
and accidental meetings of peoples across the globe” (Bowers 153). On the other
hand, Ondaatje could easily be found guilty of weightlessness and lack of commitment
because of that and his work be seen as a celebration of rootlessness. In
fact, Arun P. Mukherjee accuses him of exactly this and asks, “[H]ow has Ondaatje
managed to remain silent about his experience of displacement or otherness
in Canada when it is generally known to be quite a traumatic experience?” (50).
Mukherjee unites both strands of criticism towards postcolonial migrant writing in
this: Ondaatje is seen guilty of betraying his Sri Lankan roots because he does not
write about his alienation in the West. In addition, Mukherjee’s criticism that Ondaatje
does not address typical migrant concerns oddly emphasizes the stereotypical
restriction of acceptable topics in literature by migrants. It is surprising that
Mukherjee does not also explicitly accuse him of being elitist which would not be
far-fetched considering Ondaatje’s celebration of his family as part of a Ceylonese
elite in Running in the Family. 4 In any case, Mukherjee’s critique exemplifies the rigid
nature of the debate about migrant writing in postcolonial literary studies: writers
like Ondaatje who do not adhere to an accepted way of writing about the experience
of migration are ruthlessly criticized. This is not to say that it is justified to
read such a literature as a celebration of the effortless blending of different cultures
as Maggie Ann Bowers appears to be doing. Neither extreme does these
texts justice. It appears that there are texts that do not fit the conventional categorization
and that new perspectives are needed to analyze such writing.
In order to escape these dichotomous approaches it is necessary to focus on
the subtleties of these texts and to consider literature from a cultural studies perspective
and not only a political one. As White argues, literature echoes “the circumstances
that lead to its creation” (15). Debbie Lisle also supports this claim,
stating “a cultural product cannot be understood in isolation from its social and
political environment” (17). This necessarily leads to the question of whether this
kind of migrant literature was created in a different context altogether in which
there was no dominant “traumatic experience” and that it maybe does not celebrate
the rootlessness of a displaced, unbelonging migrant but that it reflects de-
3 For a discussion of the influence of market forces on topics in and publishing and funding of
minority literatures see for example Mahlete-Tsigé Getachew’s essay “Marginalia: Black Literature
and the Problem of Recognition” (332 ff.), and Barbara Godard’s analysis of the marketing
of minority literatures in Canada (226 ff.).
4 Admittedly, Mukherjee only addresses the lack of attention to migrant concerns in Ondaatje’s
early writing. While Ondaatje’s later texts increasingly focus on migrants and their questions of
displacement and identity, he nevertheless still avoids talking directly about his immigration experience
so that Mukherjee’s criticism would most likely still apply.