topics: |  autobiography | essay | sri-lanka | poetry

this quasi-autobiographical poem / fictional narrative recalls the history
of the ondaatje family in sri lanka, interweaving conflicting memories into
a pastiche in which it becomes difficult to identify any single truth.
at one level, a re-discovery of the dutch-srilankan roots of the family, as
Ondaatje he travels in the intoxicating heat, meeting aunts that regale us
with stories  that may not quite the paradigms of veracity.  This theme is
interspersed with poetry and fables of his own, like that of the
thalagoya (a monitor, it seems) whose tongue has magic powers:

	the tongue should be sliced off and eaten as soon as possible after
	the animal dies.  You take a plantain or banana, remove the skin and
	cut it lenghtwise in half, place the grey tongue between two pieces
	of banana making a sandwich and then swallow the thing without
	chewing, letting it slide down the throat whole.  Many years later
	this will result in verbal brilliance, though sometimes it will be
	combined with bad behaviour (the burning of furniture, etc.). 74

intrinsic to the tale is the landscape of sri lanka, which forms the
backdrop to stories such as how his father, completely naked, once jumped
off a moving train in a drunken state.

Excerpts

    Asia.  The name was a gasp from a dying mouth.  An ancient word that
    had to be whispered... The word sprawled.  It had none of the clipped
    sound of Europe, America, Canada.  The vowels took over, slept on the map
    with the S.  22

I remember the wedding...  Halfway between Colombo and Kegalle we recognised
a car in the ditch and beside it was the bishop of Colombo who everyone knew
was a terrible driver. He was supposed to marry them so we had to give him a
lift.  [his luggage - mitre and sceptre and whatnot were loaded - his
vestments could not be crushed.] we were so croweded and the bishop couldn't
sit on anyone's lap -- and as no one could really sit on the bishop’s lap, we
let him drive the Fiat.”

  "The brown people of this island seem to me odiously inquisitive and
  bothery-idiotic. ALl the while the savages go on grinning and chattering
  to each other.  - from the journals of Edward Lear in Ceylon, 1875

Ceylon always did have too many foreigners... the 'Karapothas' as my niece
calls them -- the beetles with white spots who never grew ancient here, who
stepped in and admired the landscape, disliked the "inquisitive natives" and
left.  They came originally and overpowered the land obsessive for something
as delicate as the smell of cinnamon.  80

[he is shown the poetry of recently drowned Lakdasa Wikkramasinha] p.85

Sweet like a crow (poem) p76

	for Hetti Corea, 8 years old

	“The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in
	 the world.  It would be quite impossible to have less sense of
	 pitch, line or rhythm.’ - Paul Bowles

  Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed
  through a glass tube
  like someone has just trod on a peacock
  like wind howling in a coconut
  like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire
  across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,
  a vattacka being fried
  a bone shaking hands
  a frog singing at Carnegie Hall.
  Like a crow swimming in milk,
  like a nose being hit by a mango
  like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match,
  a womb full of twins, a pariah dog
  with a magpie in its mouth
  like the midnight jet from Casablanca
  like Air Pakistan curry,
  a typewriter on fire, like a hundred
  pappadans being crunched, like someone
  trying to light matches in a dark room,
  the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea,
  a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience,
  the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it,
  like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market
  like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air
  like a whole village running naked onto the street
  and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family
  pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle,
  like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle
  like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory
  like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep
  and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.

---
  During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as
  remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. 179

In Sri Lanka, a well told lie is worth a thousand truths.
	- [Acknowledgments p. 206, while apologizing to those who "disapprove
	   of the fictional air"].

Oter reviews: kirkus

Canadian poet Ondaatje (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid) made two return
journeys to his birthplace, Ceylon, in 1978 and 1980--and the result is this
slight, graceful mosaic: a collection of poetic impressions and less poetic
(but far more involving) Ondaatje-family stories. "How I have used
them. . . . They knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the
sarong." Thus, Ondaatje pieces together his parents' histories from elderly
relatives still living in Ceylon -- Aunt Dolly, for instance, whose
"80-year-old brain leaps like a spark plug bringing this year that year to
life." And the world of these memories is primarily that of 1920s/1930s
Ceylon high-society--not the European colonials, but the resident elite:
"Everyone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and
Burgher blood in them going back many generations"; the preoccupations were
gambling, drink, romance.

So most of the friends and family hardly noticed at first that Ondaatje's
suave soldier-father was an alcoholic--until he began ripping off his
clothes on the railway or (in desperation) draining the liquid from
kerosene lamps into his mouth. And grandmother Lalla, too, was an ancestor
worth reconstructing: an earthy, merry widow ("loved most by people who saw
her arriving from the distance like a storm"), the first woman in Ceylon to
have a mastectomy, the triumphant victim of a 1947 flood--"her last perfect
journey," evoked in imaginative detail here. Ondaatje captures less
personally particular aspects of Ceylon as well: the heat, the snakes, the
beautiful alphabet, the exotic wildlife.

But, while there's no strong dramatic shape to his rediscovery of his
parents' past (Ondaatje himself remains a blur), it's the family history
that almost always holds this delicate assemblage together-and extends its
appeal to a readership beyond Ondaatje's poetry-oriented following.  The
emphasis that Ondaatje places on the importance of particularity,
individual life and imagination as moral force shows that he has no
interest in dismantling his identity but instead wants to confirm it,
albeit in its hyphenated form.

other links:
  wikipedia |  % NPR interview | review