Authorship of the Postcolonial Body in Michael Ondaatje’s No

The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was ’eighty-eight and ’eighty-nine, but of course it was going on long before that. Every side was killing and hiding evidence…bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There’s no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are.

The premise of this essay is that the remains of Sailor are allegorical to the national/postcolonial body of Sri Lanka, and that Anil’s pathology represents a form of authorship that is posited for Michael Ondaatje’s own experience of exile and return, his own relationship to the Sri Lankan killing ground that form its stage. The intention of the essay is to examine that which informs the novel’s ‘postcolonialness’ is affixed upon but also to examine the ways in which Ondaatje’s postcolonialism manifests itself.

How we ‘remember’ the dead is invariably how we reclaim the future – about the struggle to reclaim memory, shape its contours…

The mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of a de

Therein Ondaatje’s textually would speak in terms the notion of the postcolonial body that morphology does not speak of the rigid unity of the ‘pure body’ that postcolonial discourse maintains to represent but rather something isomorphism, a constant ‘self-touching’ of the contingent and continuous discourse that englobe all centers and peripheries creating a negotiated national identity.

The corpse, that for Bataille is the unhealing and the most open wound that’s interior and exterior create a continuous yet broken surface, may be refashioned in the manner of Foucault’s author as dead man enacts the writing of postcolonial excess/jouissance. For Bataille the dialogue of the corpse, that infects both toward itself and outwardly to its executor, describes the transcendental manner of discourse that ‘relinquishes its dependence on a belief in the purity of its discourse.’

Anil at first fails to coax verisimilitude from the cipher of Sailor’s bones ‘she realized that there were two possible versions of a life that she could deduce from the skeleton in front of her. And two aspects of the skeleton that did not logically fit together.’ Until she observes the living Ananda at work. When Anil and Sarath (the foreign-trained and the locally trained) accomplish identification Sailor as Ruwan Kumara even this report contains an alterity between subsumed versions of competing truths.

Some topics in this essay:
Sri Lankan, Elaine Scarry, Homi Bhabba, Sarath Palipana, Julia Kristeva, Author Foucault, Chris Prentice, Sailor Anil, Horror Kristeva, Mary Douglas, sri lankan, national identity, sri lanka, ruwan kumara, ondaatje’s novel, postcolonial body, role dead, lost voices name, lacanian mirror-stage, kristeva reflects, chris prentice, sri lankan killing, able move freely, voices name name, dead buried rotting,