the camp experience in comic form, as an absurd
predicament. Her illustrations humanize Japanese
Americans, and she praises their adjustment to
their situation.
Citizen 13660 was Okubo’s only published
writing during her lifetime, although she wrote
unpublished children’s stories. In subsequent de-
cades, she devoted herself primarily to painting
and book illustration, and her art was featured in
countless exhibitions. Also active in the Japanese-
American redress movement, she testified in 1981
before an official government committee and pre-
sented her book as evidence. In 1983, at the height
of the redress struggle, a reprint edition of Citizen
appeared, with a new introduction by Okubo. The
acclaim it received brought the book squarely into
the Asian-American canon. It is also noticeable as
a precursor to today’s graphic novels.
Greg RobinsonOndaatje, Michael (1943– )
Sri Lankan–Canadian poet and novelist Philip Mi-
chael Ondaatje was born in Kegalle, Ceylon. His
Dutch-Sinhala-Tamil family once owned a pros-
perous tea plantation; Ondaatje’s father, however,
having succumbed to alcoholism, had lost much
of the family fortune by the time Michael arrived.
When his parents were divorced in 1945, Michael
remained with his mother and moved to London
with her in 1952.
Toward the end of his teenage years, Ondaatje
believed that a more promising life awaited him
elsewhere, and he followed his older brother to
Canada. There he attended Bishop’s University
and met Kim Jones, the wife of a professor/men-
tor. Jones would leave her husband and marry
Ondaatje in 1964. The young student continued at
the University of Toronto and Queen’s University
in Kingston; throughout this period Ondaatje de-
veloped his own poetry. In 1966 he was featured
in a major anthology entitled New Wave Canada,
and began to win awards for his work. The follow-
ing year his first collection of poems, The Dainty
Monsters, appeared, and Ondaatje began to teach
at the University of Western Ontario.
His career soon encompassed not only poetry
but performance; an actor as a young man, the
writer composed the man with seven toes in 1969,
a poetic piece intended for the stage. Cinematic
efforts include The Clinton Special and Carry On
Crime and Punishment. Perhaps all of his inter-
ests in various literary forms can be seen in The
Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), a book
that earned Ondaatje awards and higher visibil-
ity. Alternately described as fiction and poetry,
this collage work includes poems, dime novels,
eyewitness accounts, period photographs, and
startling images both visual and verbal. Billy the
Kid represents the work that may ultimately be
remembered as the “most classically Ondaatjean,”
because he uses multiple narrators, genres, and
registers, and because it explores many of the
author’s recurrent themes. Neither wholly history
nor fiction, it interrogates and reshapes historical
themes; the photograph that concludes the work
is a picture of Ondaatje himself, dressed in Billy
the Kid–like costume.
Billy the Kid coincided with public turmoil in
Ondaatje’s academic career, as the University of
Western Ontario refused him continued employ-
ment on the grounds that he was not producing
enough literary criticism—this while his book
won the Governor General’s Award. Ondaatje soon
found a post at York University, and his writing
career began to flourish. Subsequent volumes of
poetry include Elimination Dance (1978), There’s
a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do (1979),
Secular Love (1984), and The Cinnamon Peeler
(1991). Secular Love dwells on a number of pain-
ful themes for Ondaatje, who wrote it as his mar-
riage was falling apart. By 1980 Ondaatje had met
and fallen in love with writer Linda Spalding, with
whom he would eventually coedit Brick: A Journal
of Reviews.
Ondaatje’s continuing prose work includes
Running in the Family (1982), a text illustrating
various events in family history. Ondaatje himself
prefers to think of the work as a “gesture” rather
than a memoir; the author considers memoir as
“fiction... full of [its creator’s] defences and am-
bitions.” If anything, the book is a “gesture” of
love and regret directed toward his father, whose228 Ondaatje, Michael