Introduction

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Sonja Lehmann
of the typical migrant writing motifs in Ondaatje’s books as there certainly are
instances when his characters seem unsure of where they belong and who they are
and when they feel dislocated. If one approaches these texts with a different focus
– on the transnational aspects of the characters’ identities – the analysis must result
in a quite different interpretation. Through such a lense one can see that in
Ondaatje’s fiction complex questions of post-, trans-, or simply national belonging,
self-understanding, and connectedness are negotiated in subtle yet precise
ways that are never uncritical. On the contrary, the texts do not offer simple,
clear-cut answers to these issues and by this defy the categories that are usually
applied to migrant literature.
In order to capture these aspects of the novels and show how they differ from
other forms of migrant writing, I will therefore now analyze them with the help of
the results from the previous theoretical part. The different aspects of transnational
identities will be pointed out in the migrant characters in Ondaatje’s fiction
so that it will be possible to examine different approaches to transnational identities
that are juxtaposed, compared and contrasted. Special attention will also be
paid to the transnational spaces, metaphoric and real, that the characters are located
in because repeatedly the use of spaces, their boundaries, dissolution and
overlapping in the texts reflects the same questions concerning identities in highly
symbolic ways. As a result, the representation of characters’ identities in Ondaatje’s
fiction often almost seems like a direct engagement with the theoretical
concerns of transnational studies, relocated to a fictional arena, as the following
analysis will show.
5.1. Anil’s Ghost and Running in the Family: Journeying towards Belonging
Anil’s Ghost and Running in the Family do not only share a similar plot revolving
around a return journey to the protagonists’ country of origin, they are also equally
concerned with questions of identity. 26 Both protagonists, Anil Tissera and Michael
Ondaatje, the narrator of Running in the Family, are migrants whose lives have
lead them across the boundaries of several nation-states. 27 However, while this
situates both of them in a transnational social field, neither character seems aware
of that or particularly interested in a transnational life up to the point when they
suddenly feel the need to return. In Levitt and Glick Schiller’s terms, they are
engaged in transnational ways of being but not belonging. When they eventually
do engage in a journey to the country they came from this turns out to be not only
a literal journey but also a symbolic one in which they have to relocate the
26 The texts will in the following be abbreviated as AG and RF.
27 Running in the Family is by admission of its author a fictionalized account of two journeys to Sri
Lanka in 1978 and 1980 (Running in the Family 205-6) so that the narrator must be strictly separated
from the author Michael Ondaatje. Unless stated otherwise ‘Ondaatje’ will refer to the narrator
of Running in the Family in chapter 5.1.