From the mass burial ground to the literary text: Reading Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Résumé
Social scientists know how crucial it is to identify the bodies of those who have died at sea, on land, or have been buried in mass burial grounds. They know how consequential it is to engage (or not) in some form of identification, of ritual, of memorialization. More and more scholars are focusing on locating, numbering and identifying the bodies of those who die in, and of, migration (Heller and Pécoud 2017) but also, more generally, during wars and conflicts. Others have used forensic science to identify the bodies so that the families can get them back (Cattaneo 2018) and engage in the necessary mourning.
This paper will bring together one novel, one short story and one play in one act. In Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Sri Lankan-born and North American-educated Anil Tissera goes back to Sri Lanka as a forensic anthropologist. She is sent by a human rights group to investigate mass burials during the Civil war. In Edwidge Danticat’s ‘The Missing Peace’ (Krik? Krak!) Haitian-born and North American-educated Emilie Gallant goes back to Haiti to search for her mother’s bones after she was probably dumped in a mass burial site during the Duvalier dictatorship. Nadia Davids’ What Remains tells the story of the unexpected uncovering of a slave burial ground in Cape Town.
These texts have in common a context of colonization, conflict and migration, a painful history, the search for the bones of people who were killed violently and, for two of them, the return of the protagonist from their diasporic abode. They all raise the question of what happens when a 21st century community reckons with the bones that are literally unearthed from past conflict. What does the literary text perform for those bodies caught up in conflict, that could not be accomplished directly? What kind of engagement, possibly of resolution, does literature offer? This paper will shine a light on the fraught relationship between literature and forensics, pointing at the possibility some justice could be enabled in the open court of the text, a public space to be shared by all.