Over the past couple of weeks in ASTU 100–a reading/writing course in the Coordinated-Arts Program at UBC–we have read and discussed Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. As a historiographic metafiction of sorts, Ondaatje’s constantly plays with themes such as memory and identity. But it wasn’t until I read Matthew Bolton’s academic article regarding Running that I realized there was more to Ondaatje’s ‘playful’ writing.
In Bolton’s Michael Ondaatje’s “Well-Told Lie”, he mentions Arun Mukherjee’s argument that “Ondaatje’s success has been won largely through a sacrifice of his regionality, his past and most importantly, his experience of otherness in Canada” (Bolton, 222). As I continued to read Bolton take a stance against Ondaatje’s critiques of “race blindness” and “evasion,” his arguments and the critiques he fights against started to get me thinking about the word “identity.”
It was when I read that there were “concerns that Ondaatje has not sufficiently met the responsibility his ethnicity creates” (Bolton, 223), that I began to ponder on my personal identity. Who–or what–exactly dictates what our identity as individuals are? Our beliefs and values? Our ethnicity and citizenship? I would argue that all of these contribute to our personal identity.
But then again, what exactly dictates how we identify ourselves versus how others identify us? Through the ongoing controversy regarding Ondaatje’s responsibility to his ethnicity, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own life. Personally, if I had to identify myself as a nationality the first thing that would come to mind is “Canadian.” But too often do I get people coming up to me for the first time, not even asking me for my name. Instead, the first question they ask me is if I’m Filipino (which I am proud to say that I am). How much obligation do we have to our ethnic identities? Bolton mentions a critique of Ondaatje, in that “[he fails] to acknowledge his family’s complicity in the Ceylonese colonial exploitation… [and is] not being non-Western and Other enough in acknowledging his own ethnic background” (Bolton, 223).
If we tell people that they have an obligation to acknowledge their cultural backgrounds, there must be a limit to when it goes “too far.” I am embarrassed to say that I have witnessed instances of racial prejudice without doing anything about the situation–but as the young 13 year old that I was, I didn’t think my voice mattered. So in my mind, there was nothing I could have done to stop a Caucasian woman from angrily demanding a young East Indian man to “go back to [his] own country,” despite him yelling back that “[he] was born in Canada.” (All this happened in a fast food restaurant, unfortunately with no interference whatsoever.)
How much farther is defining and categorizing people’s responsibilities based on their cultural heritage, from racial judgement? Although I do believe it is important to acknowledge one’s ancestral past and history, I would argue that holding presumptions regarding individual’s obligations to only pieces of their identity leads to the dismissal of the whole person. This I think is what Bolton is trying to portray in his article, claiming that “…it is not a particularly productive approach… to ask whether it is better (or more ethical) to fully represent one’s own ethnic diversity… because within the covers of a book, at least, the answer will always be that it depends” (Bolton, 223-224). Close-mindedness can be a scary thing. One must try to understand what the author of a book (or any individual in the world) is trying to accomplish or achieve, before making assumptions regarding what is right or wrong. We should first understand how an individual identifies themselves, before we decide how we will identify them.