#It's one they say has a ghost in the garden... (Ondaatje 30) Disappearance and Degeneration: The Ethicality of Bearing Witness in Michael O

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"It's one they say has a ghost in the garden..." (Ondaatje 30)

Disappearance and Degeneration: The Ethicality of Bearing Witness in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost 

One can only hope for ghosts to be contained within the garden. In Sri Lanka, there are so many ghosts that they walk, barely disguised, amongst the living. The Sri Lankan civil war relentlessly entrenched the deaths of “more than 20,000 people” (Nilsson 1329) into the psyche of civilians. Vibrant Sri Lanka was resultantly transformed into a macabre death world, where mortality and annihilation walked hand in hand, rather than ‘6 feet’ apart. Bearing witness aims to consolidate the trauma of loss, to provide retribution and composure in such troubled times to those afflicted. It proffers the preservation of sanity within gruelling scenarios, conserving those who have ‘disappeared’ and immortalising their legacies. However, time is a vital, fragmenting factor, enforcing a multiplicity of disappearances that transcends physicality. It eliminates the very essence of a human soul: the sound of the deceased’s voice is forgotten, their scent irretrievable, their very bones disintegrated. The temporality of what can be preserved and what we can ‘bear witness’ to is resultantly within a perpetual state of liminality. While this places boundaries upon bearing witness, the practice is necessitated by lack of alternative, it is the only requisite for peace. Samuel Hynes remarks that “if you make the truth survive, however terrible it is, you are retaliating against inhumanity, in the only way the powerless have” (Hynes 129). Ondaatje’s purpose for Anil’s Ghost is the ‘survival’ of the ‘terrible truth’. Anil and Sarath’s quest to identify Sailor’s remains transcends Sailor’s skeleton – it is the first step in denying the government absolution from blame. Solving Sailor’s mystery is ‘retaliating against inhumanity’ to provide a voice for the ‘powerless’ civilians such as Ananda who are affected.

This essay begins by exploring the ethics of bearing witness altogether in troubled states such as Sri Lanka. Should we bear witness? Can we explore ethics and ‘truth’ in a land devoid of ethics, as the designated protector of the people (government) transforms into the enemy? Most importantly, what allows Anil, a Sri Lankan expat, the agency to return to her origins and unsettle the narrative? Certainly, the notion of who is able to bear witness is certainly a focal point of Ondaatje’s novel. It is ultimately the ‘true’ Easterners, the truly ‘powerless’ who are able to access the ‘truth’, not the returning westerner who is allowed to admission to the truth. It is certainly Ananda whose narrative is most aligned with this depravity, as a victim himself, However, through Sailor’s tale, Ondaatje strays from the conventional narrative of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The advances towards identifying Sailor transpire via the necessity of touch. While Sailor is metaphorically ‘disappeared’, he retains a physical presence via his skeletal remains. Realistically, the ‘disappeared’ was literal: the bodily forms of those selected spirited away into thin air, without any clues towards deciphering events. Ananda’s wife is never found. He is resultantly our most apt and poignant source to analyse and divulge the true impact of being ‘disappeared’: the secondary effect of ‘degeneration’. His attempted suicide is one of the primary scenes within the novel, and his characterisation integral in divulging how to appropriately bear witness. Bearing witness is a highly complex system of trying to restore and rationalise what has been lost, yet as with all traumatic scenarios, one must be incredibly careful in how to enact the process. Through his complex and compelling narrative, Ondaatje sets up a riveting duality of disappearance/degeneration and physical/psychological effect. As the reader, we must probe towards the consequences of bearing witness itself, and Sarath’s murder is our gateway towards this, as while distressing and “undefended” (Ondaatje 286), or unjustified, it is arguably the only knock-on benefit of Anil and Sarath’s initial inquest. His sacrifice allows the potential for Anil to return to America with her evidence – yet we are intentionally left in the dark as to whether she successfully escapes. In such a precarious game of life or death, perhaps sometimes the injury outweighs the gain. More than simply a restoration, perhaps bearing witness is simply a wish to return to the past and find solidarity in relations. Palipana is the exemplary model for Ondaatje, as he bears witness in a unique way. He escapes the atrocity of Sri Lanka to inhibit a space that is pre-trauma, pre-pain, pre-loss. His ocular degradation is almost a blessing as he can identify the ‘truth’ without witnessing the visible trauma. Yet in the case of a death - a psychologically cruel event - the metaphorical sense of digging for the corpse is ultimately as traumatic as the physical. The soil of pain is occasionally best left unturned.

The events of the Sri Lankan Civil War did not only constitute a vast ‘disappearance’ in bodies but a shocking loss of social normality and created mass panic. As the ghosts walked along their familiarised routes, they permeated and altered the atmosphere in incomprehensible ways. The alteration within the general mood is palatable, as stereotypical “war brings to any society it’s electric, exhilarating atmosphere” (Hynes 111). This ‘atmosphere’ is not the reality of war, but rather the boyish glorification of war that existed in examples such as British enlistment propaganda. Stereotypical war is enacted upon other societies, perhaps subordinate or distant, but always the Other. Civil war is a subversion of conventional war. An ‘exhilarating’ atmosphere is replaced by tentative ‘sides’ and a detonation of all normalisation. Civil war is “a battlefield gothic without a battlefield – or a battle. It makes excruciatingly vivid what war may become when absolute power confronts absolute powerlessness” (Hynes 253). The tactics within the civil war are beyond immorality, they sabotage all formality of virtue as there is no clear division of friend/foe, any indication of what step, in any direction, will lead oneself into enemy territory. And “how is a formless war, a war without a front, to be won?”, after all? If there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ then there is resultantly no ‘truth’. The practice of bearing witness is resultantly inhibited within civil war, as without the ability to share one’s fears with friends, family, friends, there is inevitable severe psychological trauma. The internalisation of death through natural causes is difficult; the unjustified murders of entire families and communities are impossible to vindicate. Sri Lanka echoes George Orwell’s 1984, wherein the world is in a state of perpetual siege through an omnipresent governmental presence. However, instead of violence being enacted within the private eye as within Orwell’s novel, Sri Lanka is riddled with public torture wherein mutilated bodies bear enemy threats to… anyone. There is no particular message, nor is there a particular target. This is killing for the sake of killing, abasement and torture as threatening symbols, yet there is a state of warfare with no clear war. Milena Marinkova notes that:

“The numerous instances of display of tortured bodies in the novel suggest that the public humiliation of the corporeal serves not only to instil terror but also to affirm control in a moment of major epistemological slippage.” (Marinkova 120)

The public humiliation of the ‘corporeal’ is a brutalist method of dissuading civilians not to rebel against the government, to ‘instil terror’ to the point of silence. Foucault’s panopticon within Discipline and Punish is similar to the idea of what is occurring within Sri Lanka. We have civilians. similar to inmates, self-policing themselves in a state of terror. This is what transforms Sri Lanka into death world, the omnipresent ‘terror’ to ‘affirm control’. Similarly, to Foucault’s panoptical model, when civilians (or inmates) believe that they are being observed, they will regulate their behaviours to align with what they believe is expected of them. However, policing a society in such a manner completely eradicates individualism. The people are ‘powerless’ not only in their attempts to protect their lives but also due to their lack of agency and personality. These civilians are dead men walking, not only because of the omnipresent risk of death, their psychological trauma, but also because of eradication of language in the face of objection. Without language and communication, there is no community civilisation, a ‘powerlessness’ through a liminality of linguistics. Even aesthetic linguistics are shunned in fear of discovery, and so without verbalisation or written content, the lack of trust destroys all potential records of the ‘truth’. Anil and Sarath’s inaugural relationship is insight into the social atmosphere, permeated by a widespread hesitance to trust others. Anil immediately doubts Sarath’s position, wondering if he is “neutral in this war” (Ondaatje 25), and Sarath makes sure Anil’s tape recorder is off, “and only then answered her question” (Ondaatje 41). They are both alarmed to reveal any ammunition that could implicate themselves to the other. In the event of bearing witness, one would expect an intimate and personal relationship between a forensic pathologist and an archaeologist within a partnership. However, within the civil war, even professional modalities of bearing witness are redacted and proscribed towards neutrality. Ondaatje questions:

“How to render the act of witnessing ‘safe’ amidst the epistemic violence of hegemonic and hegemonising constructions of history and culture that provide the enabling context for extrajudicial killings and terrorism.” (Salgado 129)

Witnessing is naturally perilous under ‘epistemic violence’. Within civil war, it is precisely the ‘epistemic’ knowledge that renders witnessing ‘unsafe’. To be aware is to be at risk. Anil and Sarath’s bearing witness is enacted through verbal yet distant roundabouts until she directly confronts ‘which side’ he is on. Even though Sailor is already a skeleton, she is afraid Sarath may “disappear” (Ondaatje 49) him. Herein lies the problem: despite a skeleton’s lack of identity, the physical form is integral to bearing witness. This rationalises the vexed atmosphere of the war: identity with a physical loss. We cannot bear witness to invisible bones. Moreover, even when we believe Sarath and Anil have developed a confident relationship, it is undermined by Anil’s “fears” (Ondaatje 265) that Sarath has still betrayed her, despite his involvement in compiling a report that would condemn the Sri Lankan government. Ultimately, it is Anil’s ‘fears’ themselves that ‘render the act of witnessing’ unsafe. Her doubts of Sarath provide momentum, the premature delivery of their report to the government and its subsequent ruination, alongside Sarath’s murder. Reader, alongside Ananda, must bear witness to this hecatomb in various, yet ethical, ways, in which I return to later in this essay.

While Anil and Sarath’s modalities of bearing witness are not ‘safe’, Palipana’s practice of bearing witness is unique in his isolation. His rejection of a contemporary lifestyle and his preconceived notions of how to extract ‘truth’ are idiosyncratic. He is able to divulge through from the medium of touch alone, his senses heightened from ocular loss. While the fact is accessible, the truth is not. He suggests that “we have never had the truth” (Ondaatje 98). This undermines the entire ‘quest’ of Anil’s Ghost as we probe for Sailor’s ‘truth’: the details of his murder, the ‘how’ and the vital ‘why’? Minoli Salgado divulges that our “central concern is not so much how to bear witness to traumatic events, but how to find ‘truth’ – or rather truths – in variable and shifting registers of meaning” (Salgado 129). Ondaatje’s text is certainly concerned with multifarious truths, I concur that ‘how’ is our direct path to the truth. The novel is obsessed with ‘how’ – ‘how’ Sailor was murdered, ‘how’ he was chosen, ‘how’ he can be used as a voice for a subjugated voice of Sri Lanka. ‘How’ and ‘Truth’ are concurrent, and from an evidence point of view, intrinsically linked. Furthermore, how do we find truth within death, especially death as isolated as a ‘disappearance’? While we can clutch at the facts of Sailor’s death, we don’t ever know the ‘truth’. While identified as Ruwan Kumara, a mine worker, he was chosen by a “billa… a monster, a ghost” (Ondaatje 265) as ‘the rebel sympathiser’. The ��monster’ trope adds a black humour to the narrative. This is the demon that lurks under your bed, in the dark and inside your closet: except instead of being a wives’ tale or a child’s vivid imagination, it is a terrifying reality that at any moment, the ‘monster’ will snatch you.

However, unlike Ruwan, Palipana is safe in his grove, “governed only by the elements” (Ondaatje 80), his bearing witness towards history is convoluted. He does not have the threat of the panopticon, perhaps in his age, he is moreover exempt from ‘fear’. After all, “the survivor is the one who, having stood in the path of death, knowing of many deaths and standing in the midst of the fallen, is still alive” (Mmbebe 30) Palipana is not only surviving ‘disappearance’ and psychological ‘degeneration’, he directly challenges it. He is embedded in Sri Lanka’s roots both literally and metaphysically and thus has the power to not only bear witness but moreover to create witness.  Can we trust a man who invents facts, rather than deciphers them? Is this not what every author does? His tactics to propel himself into scholarly fame are perhaps overly ambitious and consequently calamitous, but simultaneously genius in their genesis:

“He had discovered and translated a linguistic subtext that explained the political tides and royal eddies of the island in the sixth century… [yet] there was no real evidence for the existence of these texts” (Ondaatje 77)

Is linguistic truth is limited to certitude? Everything that has been created, whether linguistically, physically, has stolen a prerequisite of what has come before. For Ondaatje’s text, fiction certainly has the potential to resemble while not replicating truth. Through informing westernised readers of the events happening in Sri Lanka, knowledge is spread. The narratives will not be exactly akin to reality, yet similar to Palipana’s oeuvre, they are nugatory. Ondaatje’s text resultantly bears witness even unto itself, as it both educates and simultaneously mourns the transgressions of civil war.

Once again, we must consider the ethicality of bearing witness as a whole. Anil’s intrusion into Sri Lanka is certainly well-intentioned, yet an extreme failure of bearing witness is the insensitivity and precautions granted towards locals by westernised influence. A pivotal example is via looking forward to the 2004 Tsunami and the extant ramifications of the civil war:

“The humanitarian system also showed limited competence and creativity in challenging the inhumanity of a war that set new precedents in a pattern of abuse and instrumentalization of relief programs that deepened the humanitarian consequences of the war.” (Niland 3)

Anil’s system shows ‘limited competence’ in how she enacts her agency. She submits the incomplete government report through bearing witness in an act of self-preservation. In prioritising herself, she damns Sarath. As a westerner, she exempts herself from the repercussions of opening Pandora’s box: she knows she can return to England and begin a new narrative. Ondaatje recognises the westerner’s ability to “opt out” (Ondaatje 283) of the atrocities within the Eastern world. “The American or Englishman gets on the plane and leaves. That’s it… the tired hero… he’s going home. So the war to all purposes, is over. Go home. Write a Book. Hit the circuit” (Ondaatje 282). This statement exudes undertones of hostility. Is this Ondaatje’s own internalised guilt from not being present in Sri Lanka throughout the war, an expat similar to Anil? It is a directly hostile social commentary perhaps on the system of bearing witness as a whole as system congruent to cultural appropriation. I infer that the westerner may leave the area of subjugation with a stupendous tale, yet they retain none of the calamity they have caused or intercepted. The story of the Sri Lankan skeleton is colonised, adapted to a western rhetoric of storytelling while ignoring the detrimental reality – a ‘reality fiction’ that excludes those affected.

It is not only literal ghosts but metaphysical ghosts that haunt the streets of Sri Lanka due to both ‘disappearance’ and ‘degradation’. One could surmise that degradation is the secondary effect of disappearance. As the numbers of fatalities soar, the psychological climate concurrently ebbs. Ananda’s attempted suicide, following by Sarath’s murder, are both incredibly important in exploring nuances of sensitivity within Anil’s Ghost. Through including Ananda within their search for ‘truth’, Sarath and Anil severely err by forcing him to relive his trauma of losing his wife. He has clearly decided, in a deep state of depression, to leave the home of his in-laws and to isolate himself to a “petrol station” (Ondaatje 157). In a move similar to Palipana, we can assume he has done so not only to avoid the potential damnation of isolation but detach himself from reality. Perhaps his self-banishment from society, especially within a petrol station is a sign of incoming suicidal intentions. Surrounded by petrol (if the station has not been ransacked for use in homemade bombs), he is in a site of danger, easily set ablaze. Initially asked only to identify a skeleton, we may assume that he is unaware of the ‘digging’ he must partake. His revived trauma is evident through his decline into alcoholism. His drinking “hadn’t become serious until he began working on the head” (Ondaatje 164). As a man, formerly “unconcerned’ (Ondaatje 159), even as they cross a roadblock, this is a steep emotive declination. Something is unmistakeably triggering Ananda to reject sobriety alongside reality. A particular scene predicates the incoming trauma of Ananda’s inimical personality. Anil discovers Ananda drunk, playing her headphones upon his head:

“Tom Waits singing ‘Dig, Dig, Dig… channelled itself into his inner brain, and he rose off the floor terrified. He was hearing, he must have thought, voices of the dead. He reeled, as if unable to escape the sounds within him”. (Ondaatje 165)

The ‘dig, dig, dig’ is no linguistic coincidence by Ondaatje. Ananda does not speak English but the particular scene stands an allegory for his suppressed anguish. In handling Sailor’s skull, he is plunged into a death narrative. In ‘digging’ for Sailor, or Ruwan Kumara as he is identified, he must ponder the fate of the skull. Unfortunately, “war persists in the minds of those who have fought or suffered” (Hynes 282) and Ananda’s mind is in perpetual conflict. He cannot ‘escape the sounds within him’. Put simply, the civil war has rewritten Ananda’s account. His narrative is a perverse amalgamation of various modalities of trauma and suffering. Unfortunately, Anil has proved that Humanitarian influence ‘deepened’ the ‘pattern of abuse and instrumentalization’. To return to ‘Dig Dig Dig’, a particular lyric is “But we don't know what we dig 'em for.” We must ask of Anil: Why do we dig in gardens that do not belong to us? Human nature is a labyrinthine maze, yet I proffer the reason of self-gain. In self-bettering, of resolving her absence from the country, her giving back is a selfish modem of internalised conciliation for her abandonment of her ‘roots’. Such regrets are inappropriate to the extent of appropriating Ananda’s sadness through the loss of his wife. By openly weeping in front of his recreation of Sailor’s likeness, it is near insulting. Ananda’s narrative of loss, the entire archive of Sri Lankan loss is not Anil’s to lament. In a culturally appropriating narrative, one must not impose as Anil does so by openly weeping. Ananda resultantly attempts suicide directly after this event:

“Ananda was lying against a corner, trying with what energy he had left to stab himself in the throat. The blood on the knife and in his fingers and down his arm. His eyes like a deer in her light. The sound coming from God knows where. Not his throat. It couldn’t be his throat.” (Ondaatje 191)

Ananda has “called forth the dead” (Ondaatje 192) and this phrase has a duplicity. Ananda is presumably gurgling, blood seeping from his throat in an unnatural, guttural tone. The repetition of ‘dig, dig, dig’ when the ‘d’ is emphasised resembles a noise akin to heavy dripping, as Ananda’s blood seeps into the floor. We can read this as Ananda’s ‘truth’ leaking, his blood akin to his mental state. Something that should not be revealed leaking from private to public sphere. His truth. Anil recognises her miscalculation in saving him soon after, “she had interrupted his death. She was the obstacle to what he wanted” (Ondaatje 193). This does not only provide commentary upon the appropriation of bearing witness but any form of appropriation that involves a narrative outside of one’s own. One simply does not have the right to invade upon anyone else’s narrative.

However, in the bare honesty of suicide, Salgado observes that “Ananda represents the artist as a truth seeker, and it is his fate, according to Ondaatje, that forms “the central core of the book’ as “he is the only person to effectively humanise sailor” (Salgado 137). Ananda’s ‘humanisation’ of Sailor is not only through providing a rough cranial reconstruction, but the addition of emotion within his facial attributes. Instead of simple phrenology, we possess characterisation. Ananda manages to encapsulate the true pain of the Sri Lankan war and integrate it because it is a necessity, because it is his own. It is his own method of bearing witness to the tragedy that has befallen his wife.  Beyond his work, he is attuned to Sailor. Ananda is a working-class man from a village seemingly as remote as Sailor. Perhaps Ananda is alarmed that it could easily have been him, rather than Sailor, who was chosen as a sacrifice to police civilians. Familiar narrative, especially that of tribulation, is perturbing. We reject intimate narratives in our own way of self-preservation. To further unsettle and humanise his characters, Ondaatje provides a short story based upon Ananda’s wife, Sirissa. Her story only serves as an extension of his tragedy, a wife with ‘silk-like hair’ (Ondaatje 169) who teaches in a school, a woman who is inherently good. Who, within her narrative, lacks any implication of being an insurgent. Through a personal narrative, an injection of compassion, our personal narratives are brought into account to bear witness to the afflictions of others. Yet this injection of such tales ethical? “The human heart may be colder and crueller than our experience has shown us” (Hynes 269). Through providing a narrative as such, purposefully upsetting a reader, we empathise. We posit ourselves in their shoes, replace their familial relations with our own. We imagine and feel the torture and pain the government inflicted. Is this not triggering for people who have lost their loved ones or recently experienced a great trauma, such as death? While I doubt that Ondaatje purposefully sets out to trigger people, this kind of deviance from the path, similarly to what the government have done in their attack upon the insurgents, can have expansive ramifications that may inspire further events. Hynes probes into this narrative style:

“Personal narratives are not like that… they don’t glorify war, or aestheticize it, or make it literary or heroic; they speak in their own voices, in their own plain language… they make war actual, without making it familiar. They bear witness” (Hynes 30)

Personal narratives can certainly aestheticize war, as Ondaatje has proven. Moreover, despite being a fiction, it has been noted that fiction borrows from reality, except in the case of fantasy novels. Could Ondaatje’s novel not be read as a personal narrative? A non-fiction? It certainly isn’t heroic, but it is definitely familiarised through a variety of voices that bear witness to the reality of atrocity. Perhaps it is the provision of ‘calm’ scenes, cut into a disturbing narrative that only confounds our emotive selves. We will all experience loss in the trajectory of existence. It is merely a sliding scale, afflicted by a conglomeration of factors, that decrees how potent this loss may be. We cannot help but bear witness in any atrocity, as all atrocities are part of the human condition.

Alternatively, Sarath’s death at the conclusion of the novel, sacrificing himself so Anil can (potentially) escape with their results, can be read as the sole ‘ethical’ death within the novel. His suicide provides plausible cause for the retribution of thousands of others within Sri Lanka. Sarath, resultantly, ascends toward the status of a Bodhisattva. It is no coincidence that Ondaatje mentions that ‘he [Ananda] and the woman Anil would always carry the ghost of Sarath Diyasena” (Ondaatje 301) before the carving of the statue begins. This directly proposes the idea of bearing witness within one’s heart and the liminality of linguistics. Bearing witness is something that is best kept within the private sphere, the psyche, rather than exposed. It is the only way it can be retained as a ‘truth’, without adaptation. Ananda wears, both physically and mentally, “Sarath’s cotton shirt – the one he had promised himself he would wear for this morning’s ceremony” (Ondaatje 301). These subtle references to Sarath, assuming Ananda is aware of his fate, implies not only Sarath’s embodiment within Ananda’s identity, but within the statue, as it looks toward the ‘ceremony’, a new way to celebrate bearing witness. There is necessitation to wearing Sarath’s shirt and thus this ceremony patently involves his physical (cotton shirt) and metaphysical (ghost) presence. The Buddha statue in question possesses a “pure sad glance” (Ondaatje 303) which encapsulates a man such as Sarath, or anyone who has born witness to the events in Sri Lanka. Yet this statue stands as more than a nod towards Sarath, it is the representation of anyone subjected to injustice. The eyes being painted are an allegory for truth, not only within Sri Lanka but all depraved narrative. The act of painting, of ‘opening’, stands for raising awareness of trauma and injustice. Ananda’s mentioning that the statue is looking ‘north’ is a nod to the ‘true north’ as upon a compass. Not only a physical guide such as upon a compass, but a metaphysical representation the ‘truth’ one so desperately seeks.

Ondaatje has proven that “the helpless man opposes by bearing witness” (Hynes 274) yet this is clearly uncomplicated when the nonhelpless intervenes. Bearing witness is a complex manner of responding to tragedy, insofar as there are no limits as to how we enact it, only limits within its truth. We can expose our response to trauma in abundant and diverse ways because pain is monolithic. I propose that one could compare Anil’s Ghost to Edward Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of The Mountain King’ (YouTube, In the Hall of the Mountain King). The erratic narrative arch of the novel is concurrent with the thunderous and frenzied climaxes of the orchestra as the protagonist of the musical piece, Peer Gynt, ‘digs’, or travels, deeper into a mountain, similarly as Sarath and Anil grow closer to the facts of their investigation. Ondaatje’s interruptions of narrative to include snippets of other tales, such as that of Sirissa’s, collude with the backing strings coming in. This is the narrative decide in which Ondaatje builds up a more cohesive account of degradation, how the orchestra raises tension. The repetition of the music becomes familiar, as do the characters within the novel. With each stroke of a bow, or page, the composition accelerates. This shadows the urgency and macabre pressure upon Anil and Sarath to resolve their transgression promptly as they attempt to outpace the ‘degeneration’ unfolding. Time, as the combatant threatens governmental disarray alongside destroying keystones who would have witnessed the epoch within Sailor’s history. The culmination of the orchestral piece is a terrific clatter. It echoes the narrative arch in which we discover that Sarath has been murdered before the crescendo fades to a peaceful silence. For we certainly experience a ‘clatter’ in the form of shock as Gamini pulls the blanket away to expose a mutilated Sarath. The silence of Grieg’s opus resonates with the scene in which Ananda paints the eyes of the reconstructed Buddha, a resolution despite a precarious journey.

Comparing aesthetic linguistics to audible shift proves that the process of internalising events and trauma is consistently similar. We could compare these patterns to a panic attack, the tension building as the heartbeat increases before, suddenly, everything is just as before – although it is not. Something is different, slightly skewed from before. The same applies to civil war, if not all mediums of conflict. Post-event, normality resumes, although there is a marked difference amongst those who have opened their eyes to ‘truth’. Bearing witness is a modality divulging truth that is so prolifically complicated that perhaps it cannot ever bear ethics, as it is an art so subjective within itself that it can never be truly understood, except within a personal narrative.

Yet ultimately, no matter how we choose to bear witness, it requires a semblance of physicality. If not the body of the ‘disappeared’ or lost, the emotions that internally bear witness. We use bearing witness as our fight against ‘degeneration’, yet the two are mutually exclusive. We cannot experience trauma without long-term, widespread effect. And so, eternally amongst us, but just out of reach, these ghosts reside under unmarked gravestones. Is a gravestone not a flower, a graveyard not a garden? Civil injustice waters the stones and the flowers bloom at an alarming rate. Occasionally the weeds of a government official infiltrate the garden, entangling with the countless young infantile stems, suffocating their narratives. But there is no one left to tend for the plot, for all the gardeners, like their crops, have wilted, traumatised by the effects of the deathly drought. Perhaps one day, a visitor will tend the garden, but the eternal question will be if they can do so without damaging the indigenous crops.

Works Cited

• Berliner Philharmoniker. “Grieg: Peer Gynt/Järvi” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, June 14.   2010. Web.   29 Dec. 2017.

• Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.  

• Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1997. Print.

• Marinkova, Milena. "Perceiving […] in one’s own body: The Violence of History, Politics and Writing: Anil’s Ghost and Witness Writing." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.3 (2009): 107-25. Web. 01 Jan. 2018.

• Niland, Noah. Inhumanity and Humanitarian Action: Protection Failures in Sri Lanka. Feinstein International Center, Tufts University: Medford, USA. Web.

• Nilsson, Ann-Charlotte. Children and Youth in Armed Conflict. Nijhoff, 2013. Print.

• Ondaatje, Michael. Anil's Ghost. London: Vintage, 2011. Print.

• Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print.

• Rosenblatt, Adam. "Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity.” Human Rights Quarterly 38.1 (2016): 224-28. Web. 05 Jan. 2018.

• Salgado, Minoli. Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance & the Politics of Place. Routledge, 2012. Print.