Introduction

Transnational Identities 313
(Pesch 57). Anil on the other hand searches for the truth in the war crimes she
investigates. However, as Woznialis explains, “Anil’s ‘getting to the truth’ comes
to imply a struggle for self-discovery as well” (282). In addition, both quests can
also be seen as struggles to overcome the boundaries that separate the characters
from past aspects of their lives and show their developing a new more transnational
self-understanding.
For Ondaatje, the enterprise seems simple at first since his extended family
still offers him a familiar social location in the country. He thus still has a place in
Sri Lankan society and can use this to learn about the family’s past. It seems only a
matter of collecting information through his various aunts that can then be organized
into a family history (RF 26). Yet, his search is soon complicated when Ondaatje
realizes that in his family “[e]veryone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese,
Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many generations”
(RF 41) so that it becomes impossible to say for certain were the family’s roots lie
and what its nationality is. “God alone knows” as one of his relatives once said
(RF 41). In addition, Ondaatje realizes that the past he put together from his
sources “was part of another lost world” (RF 51) that ended with the decolonization
of the island (RF 53) and does not exist in this form anymore. With regard to
his parents, Ondaatje furthermore recognizes that “[t]ruth disappears with history
and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships” (RF 53). The past
he wanted to get to know eludes him and strongly resembles the image of the
“human pyramid” formed by his family members, which he saw in a dream (RF
27). Just as the pyramid naturally walks through the living-room wall, his family is
not stopped by the seemingly distinct boundaries between nationalities, countries,
truth and lies.
Ondaatje also realizes that present day Sri Lanka is not his home anymore.
While several critics have voiced the opinion that Running in the Family is mostly
concerned with creating the Ondaatjes’ past as indicated in the narrator’s continually
calling Sri Lanka by its colonial name ‘Ceylon’ (Kamboureli, “Alphabet” 91;
Woznialis 276) this is clearly not the case. Ondaatje likewise also reflects on his
position in contemporary Sri Lanka which he encounters in his journeys. For example,
in the chapter titled “Monsoon Notebook (i)” he lists impressions of every
mundane detail that he sees and notices in run-on sentences:
Watched leopards sip slowly, watched the crow sitting restless on his
branch peering about with his beak open. Have seen the outline of a large
fish caught and thrown in the curl of a wave, been where nobody wears
socks, where you wash your feet before you go to bed, where I watch my
sister who alternatively reminds me of my father, mother and brother.
Driven through rainstorms that flood the streets for an hour and suddenly
evaporate, where sweat falls in the path of this ballpoint, where the jak fruit
rolls across your feet in the back of the jeep, where there are eighteen ways