Marilyn Hoder-Salmon, right, with her honors students.

Anil's Ghost and the Attack on America By Marilyn Hoder-Salmon

On September 11, 2001, students in Florida International University’s Honors College seminar, “Aesthetics, Values and Authority,” were set to continue their discussion of Michael Ondaatje’s novel, Anil’s Ghost. Since the 1970s, a brutal internecine war of terror and fear has held the people of Ondaatje’s native Sri Lanka hostage. The writer transposed the sickening madness and chaos of terror’s aftermath through the device of a riveting plot. Anil, a forensic anthropologist, is in the war-torn island on a dangerous mission to uncover the identity of skeletal remains. The class and I had previously agreed that Ondaatje’s central theme is that while horror and fear leave no one untouched, goodness and heroism survive.

In the classroom on September 11, Anil’s Ghost was on every desk, and the death and destruction in America on every mind and the subject of every remark. Like Ondaatje, many of the students’ families had also fled countries torn by political upheaval and danger. Now America had been attacked. Days later, to no one’s surprise, papers written by students reflected this startling juxtaposition of literature and current event; excerpts follow:

Anil’s Ghost made me think about why my family left Peru; terrorism, at its peak in 1986, forced us to leave. Like Anil, I too have a “ghost” of a country. The novel seemed to foreshadow a possible future of fear and uncertainty for our lives. Innocent people dying for a reason we cannot comprehend, a war being waged in our land by evil men. I doubt we will ever understand what they are trying to accomplish. Violence breeds more death. What Ondaatje is telling us in Anil’s Ghost is that desperate people commit desperate acts.
—Carlo

That the torrid images of war depicted in Anil’s Ghost create an uncanny parallelism to our current events is astounding. Ondaatje’s description of terror’s destruction in Sri Lanka reflects the devastation violence may create for any country. In the past week, moments of silence and tears served as our only antidote. Like Ondaatje’s character Ananda, many Americans still search for their loved ones, “groping for words to describe” their feelings of grief. Could Anil’s Ghost “foretell the global future” as our teacher asked us to think about before September 11? I am left with a degree of uncertainty as I recall my parents telling me that they brought us here so that we would be safe.
—Graciela

To explain the war to Anil, Sarath tells her “you must understand their state of acceptance somehow of such a death. The way terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler”. For Americans, this concept is no longer alien. Anil’s friend remarks, “American movies … remember how they all end? The American gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. He looks out of the window…the tired hero…he’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West.” Not anymore.
—Adrianna

The people of Sri Lanka who have not yet lost loved ones live in fear; as anyone can be murdered in this war: “For when people leave our company in our time we are never certain of seeing them again, or seeing them unaltered.” The World Trade Center bombing forced Americans to experience similar fear, pain, and anger due to terrorists. The people in this book are surrounded by war and death; however, they are also surrounded by love. The terrorist attack on America will cause people to focus on the important things in life. America might have to go to war, many lives may be lost, but we cannot lose our ability to love. No terrorist can stop love.
—Maria

Religion always seems to be something that survives during times of war. The events of “9/11” have led to an increase in prayer and attendance at religious ceremonies. While some people destroy religious emblems of the perceived “enemy,” like the men who ransacked a mosque in the American West, the people of the mosque will repair the damage. In Anil’s Ghost the destroyed statue of Buddha and the work of Ananda to repair it is a central element of the story because it shows that throughout adversity, faith prevails.
—Cecilia

The recent attack on the twin towers in New York was a rude awakening for me. Since then I feel the hurt and pain that Sarath and Ananda feel when they lose their wives, and that Gamini feels when he loses his brother. I feel the fear that Gunesena feels when Anil and Sarath return to him, not knowing if they are there to kill or help him. I feel that fear and uncertainty.
—Karen

Having a Colombian background, I have witnessed senseless violence eerily similar to the incidents in Anil’s Ghost. My immediate family in Colombia recounts the uncertainties in which they live on a daily basis. Simple luxuries such as an evening stroll in the park have been stripped away by the insurgent military forces. Much like the people of Sri Lanka, Colombians have a strong sense of nationalism and hope for a peaceful future. Not until the tragedies of September 11 has the United States felt such a severe threat to its citizens; the former sense of invincibility has disappeared.
—John

Since the World Trade Center was bombed, our class is better able to relate to many subtle aspects of the novel. I understand more keenly the need for closure of those characters with missing loved ones. The frustration in surpassing the obstacles to truth is a universal human reaction.
—Cary

Anil’s Ghost is brilliant; it carries a political-philosophical-human message. Now what? After September 11, we, too, are going to fight the fight for a better future. I want to think that I can make a difference.
—Ana

Both in the novel and in our country we have seen the horror of deliberate acts of violence against large groups of people and the effects are devastating. The group of terrorists that have attacked America hate us, not only for political reasons, but because we are not like them. In a literal sense, Anil’s career and mission in the novel mirrors the work presently being done in the aftermath of the attack on America, to fearlessly search for truth in spite of the danger, like the volunteers in New York are now doing.
—Lara
The timing of this book assignment and the attack on America chills me. I’m now able to understand the terror and feelings of paralysis. In the novel, the enemy is unknown and hard to distinguish. The lack of respect for others’ religious symbols nurture more advanced crimes. We spoke in class about this; I can only hope that Sri Lanka’s past does not become our future.
—Angie

The spirit of Anil’s Ghost is the awareness it gives people in Western society about life when safety and certainty are taken away. My family is from Lebanon. I have friends who have escaped the military in Lebanon and may never return; as there is a great chance they will be arrested. They have made clear to me that the life in the Middle East is a life of constant war. The North Americans knew of no such life; now they are awakened.
—Tamara

Learning to find and take one’s place in a world bereft of security and peace, in desperate need of reasoned logic in coalition with others must come from many sources and directions. Books are but one. To recognize that experience of treacherous politics and violence may be rendered through aesthetic sensibility, is to recognize that there is a literature that “speaks to the major issues of our times, looks terror in the eye, measures the human consequences, rejects the simplicities of public rhetoric, and refuses to be consoled.”