his first fiction about his native Sri Lanka. Anil,
a forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka and
educated in the West, is sent to Sri Lanka by an
international human rights group to investigate
alleged government-sponsored killings. If she can
identify the corpse known as “Sailor,” and connect
his death to a broader statist campaign of violence,
she might spark an international intervention in
Sri Lanka’s cycles of bloodshed. Her task, how-
ever, proves enormously complicated, particularly
as she learns that corpses are often exhumed and
interred again far from their original burial sites.
Convinced that her work is being undermined, she
unwittingly begins a dangerous, semipublic report,
using a substitute corpse for the suddenly missing
Sailor. Her research is dismissed in humiliating
fashion by her Sri Lankan contact, Sarath, who re-
alizes that the only way to prevent Anil’s own im-
minent death lies in openly renouncing not only
her findings but all similar investigations. His plan
succeeds: Anil safely leaves the country and dis-
covers that Sarath hid Sailor for her ongoing in-
vestigation. Sarath, however, will be killed for his
involvement in the project.
Ondaatje’s latest novel did not garner the criti-
cal praise that greeted earlier efforts. Critics occa-
sionally considered this work cold and passionless;
the author’s insistence that Anil’s Ghost was “apo-
litical” disappointed readers who felt that the
novelist should have adopted a polemic, decisive
argument. But these criticisms may simply reflect
theoretical issues Ondaatje is unwilling, or unable,
to overcome. His choice of a principal character
who assumes she can “read” both individual vic-
tims and the contemporary Sri Lankan conflict
seems an unself-conscious attempt at reconcilia-
tion by a writer returning to write about an ongo-
ing communal conflict. The novel’s insistence that
all groups perpetrate violence complicates Anil’s
own mission to isolate government-sponsored
murders, which perhaps explains why Ondaatje
sends her home well before the novel’s conclusion.
As Teresa Derrickson argues, the novel raises ques-
tions concerning the discovery of human rights
abuses and the desirability of this knowledge; what
the novel does not provide is a clear mandate on
what “evidence” should emerge, and how. The idea
that bodies themselves contain memories and his-
tories is fascinatingly deployed here, despite ques-
tions concerning the validity of any single body to
speak for a broader collective. Perhaps Ondaatje’s
greatest contribution is what Antoinette Burton
identifies as the central problem of the novel:
how to evaluate Western notions of empirical and
epistemological histories in a Sri Lankan context,
where Anil’s paradigms ultimately fail.Bibliography
Burton, Antoinette. “Archive of Bones: Anil’s Ghost
and the Ends of History.” Journal of Common-
wealth Literature 38, no. 1 (2003): 39–56.
Derrickson, Teresa. “Will the ‘Un-Truth’ Set You Free?
A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse
in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” LIT: Litera-
ture-Interpretation-Theory 15, no. 2 (April–June
2004): 131–152.
Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. New York: Knopf,
2000.
Scanlan, Margaret. “Anil’s Ghost and Terrorism’s
Time.” Studies in the Novel 36, no. 3 (Fall 2004):
302–317.
J. Edward MallotAoki, Brenda Wong (1953– )
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised in Los
Angeles, California, Brenda Wong Aoki is a con-
temporary storyteller whose solo performances
challenge conventional genre categories through
their eclectic combination of theater, dance, and
music. Of Japanese descent on her father’s side
and Chinese, Spanish, and Scottish descent on her
mother’s side, Aoki’s work draws from her unique
background and consciously evokes both East-
ern and Western theater traditions. In 1976, Aoki
earned her B.A. in community studies from the
University of California at Santa Cruz and went on
to spend a decade as a community organizer work-
ing with youth groups in Long Beach and Watts,
in the Los Angeles area, and with immigrants in
San Francisco’s Chinatown. During the 1970s and
1980s, she helped to found the Asian American
Dance Collective and the Asian American Theatre18 Aoki, Brenda Wong