“The Reason for War is War”: Western and Eastern Interrogations of Violence in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) is set in civil war-torn Sri Lanka. This contemporary violent moment becomes a rupture through which the writer interrogates the division between Western and Eastern ways of approaching a violent situation. This essay sets out to investigate historical instances of violence and justifications for violence in the Buddhist context. The essay then turns to Buddhist scholars’ contemporary critical examination of violence and war in light of the teachings of ancient Buddhist texts. Then, having established the Buddhist history and contemporary debate around violence and war, the essay explores how Ondaatje comments on this history through the contemporary moment of civil war in Sri Lanka. The essay argues that rather than illustrating the need for a purer Buddhism or the separation between the political and the religious, as some scholars have argued in relation to Anil’s Ghost, according to Ondaatje, the only way to approach the problem of violence with any hope of reaching understanding is through appreciating the different ways of knowing offered by the East and the West.

Invisible Victims, Visible Absences

Chapter 3 explores the haunting traces that remain in the wake of political disappearance in the novel Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje, and the American film Missing (1982), directed by Costa-Gavras. Although ostensibly dedicated to recovering the identities of individual victims, both works ultimately subordinate the mimetic particularity of these individuals to their larger thematic projects, insuring their enduring relevance long after the conflicts they depict have been consigned to history. While these thematic frameworks allow these works to become meaningful—and ethically consequential—beyond the particular contexts that inspire them, they also exclude entire categories of victims from the compass of their recuperative efforts.