Migration and Memory in Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie

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Memory, in all its forms, is a significant component within the contexts of migration, immigration, resettlement, and diasporas and it offers a continuity to the disconnections of individual and social identity. There is a special relationship of place and memory in the various practices that set out to locate the past through objects and spatial traces. Individuals visit memorials, look at photo albums, read through old diaries, hold on to material and travel to locations of past experiences. Migration involves people moving from their native home to another place, and also returning back, time and again.

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Individuals settle and assimilate into a new life in a different nation and take on a new identity, however they never stop remembering their roots and search for their identity in the mirrors of the past. As a migrant writer himself, Michael Ondaatje, through his work Running In The Family (1982), searches for his roots, his family, the socio-cultural, political and economic relationships of his family tree.

Running in the family is more than an autobiography for Ondaatje. In contrast, the author uses it as a way of self-discovery through his writing. The quest for his history is in fact, a quest for his identity through the novel. Moreover, Running In The Family serves as an account of his journeys to Sri Lanka in 1978 and 1980, and it demonstrates that it analyses colonial identity and culture. Running In The Family not only serves as an account of Ondaatje’s family history but also as a way to travel through the historical origins and internal cultural divisions of modern Sri Lanka.

Drawing upon Ondaatje’s second published prose work Running In The Family, in this essay I will set out to explore how memory and migration intersect.

Having left Ceylon for England and then Canada at the age of 11, and after his parents’ separation, Ondaatje in Running In The Family writes down his two journeys back to Ceylon after 25 years. Ondaatje stayed in Sri Lanka for a few months gathering stories, rumours, memories of relatives, archival evidence, oral and recorded history, photographs and news material to find out more about his genealogy. Therefore, it is an attempt to learn more about Sri Lanka which he remembered vaguely throughout his early childhood. Accompanied by his own family, the author tried to recapture the world of his parents, and more particularly Ondaatje is on a quest to understand his father, Mervyn Ondaatje.

While doing so, Ondaatje struggles with issues around his personal identity, origin as well as native country. It may be enticing to present this work as autobiographical, however it is far from a straight forward life narrative. Formed by randomly placed and without a structure vignettes, presented with poetry, images of life in Ceylon and snapshots from the family album, the work is filled with narratives and first-person voices other than the author. Moreover, there are also some abrupt changes from the narrator’s first to third person narration which can imply that the book is written by a community instead of a single author. As part of the introduction, the narrator calls himself into existence, placing himself as a writer at the centre when coming up with the conclusion that: “Half a page - and the morning is already ancient.' Furthermore, in the first chapter the reader finds out that the topic of Ondaatje’s story is in fact his father, that is concerning his father’s land - about the history of Ceylon as part of his identity.

The author is now the missing protagonist of his story. At the end of the novel, the author himself acknowledges that the book is the outcome of “a communal act…not a history but a portrait or ‘gesture’”, which was the result of help received from a lot of people. The idea that a whole community contributes on writing the book, is not an original, postmodern finding. When the author establishes a sympathetic association with its environment permitting a variety of perspectives to be heard, the work then turns into a product of a communal act. According a contemporary critic: “Artistic expression is never perfectly self-contained and abstract, nor can it be derived satisfactorily from the subjective consciousness of an isolated creator. Collective actions, ritual gestures, paradigms of relationship, and shared images of authority penetrate the work of art and shape it from within.” 2 The collective side of the work of art is what makes possible for it to live through the disappearance of its enabling social state and also be accepted by audiences in the long run.

Ondaatje’s raw materials emerge mainly from the stories which are accumulated from family members as well as friends throughout his trip. While recollecting and recovering his memories, the author incorporates a fictional aspect in the episodes. The real experiences intersect with imagination in order to fill the missing gaps and document the truths of the time as well as the people. As Ondaatje encounters his family and relatives as a foreigner, he wants to learn more about it but also trying to escape from it. By creating some distance between himself and his family, he desires to retrieve his lost identity and roots. As a migrant writer, he writes as an outsider but also as a native. He acknowledges, “ I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner.”

Although Ondaatje wishes to recover his past and battles to grasp his sense of belonging, the author still believes he is the exile. Salman Rushdie also makes a reference to this marginal and contradictory position of writers in his Rushdie Homelands (2010) “It may be the writers in my position, exiles or immigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back... But even if we look back, we must also do so in knowledge— which gives rise to profound uncertainties— that our physical alienation from India almost inevitable means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will in short, create fictions, not actual cities or village, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”

Ondaatje reflects a similar orientation in his writing. He seems to be retrieving the past as well as remaking the numerous images of his past. While trying to reclaim the past, the author also seems like he is reconstructing, recollecting the pieces, altered, “imagined” and recovered via collective familial memories. By drawing a distinct line between his book and history, Ondaatje points out the extent to which the rational, experiential and practical view has destroyed all other ways of experiential reality; the imaginative - that is, the visionary and creative - has been diminished to the imaginary - that is, the untrue and the unreal. 6 Opposed to the historian who obliges one to regard as true literally in that they say, yet ironically based on fiction in historiographic practices, the writer does not restrict the readers imagination; the writer offers a broader vision built upon what individuals see and comprehend, but also upon what they desire and do not desire, hence improve moral awareness as well as discrimination.

Ondaatje writes from the perspective of a lived duality- from the position of those individuals who are “born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives,” 8 and therefore, the author suits modern theoretical bodies in terms of the content and theme of his fictionalised memoir. The past is a foreign country to everyone, however, the pastness of the past - the experience of loss - is particularly intense in an immigrant, who is faraway in space and time, removed from the country and out of language. To remake the land and family one abandoned years ago is automatically connected with failure to get to any objective truth since the distances of time and space alter facts, and memories are shaped by insufficient truths, the only material that the dual writer can document.