Dearest reader!
For this week’s blog post I will discuss something that was touched upon the other day in my ASTU class when discussing one of the literary works we have read as a class. As part of our Global Citizens CAP stream, my Art Studies course puts an emphasis on the exploration of personal experiences and public depictions of historically told memories and stories. It is not surprising that our second literary work, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family especially touches on these core stones through a poetic and sensational perspective.
In our class discussions, we analyzed how Ondaatje tells the story of his own return as he writes about his own process of remembering both the journey and his past. Integrating non-chronological perspectives and time-lapses, in order to catalyze the reader to recognize that memory just by being remembered, is a construction of imagination. Indeed, the memoir puts a large emphasis on the poetic and romantic narration, heavily relying on sensational imagery, often leaving the reader questioning where reality and imagination meet. Running in the Family, thus, invites the reader to view their own and other’s memories in a different light. Doing so, I would argue, Ondaatje manages to expand this message of his memoir to go far beyond his own work. Before having explored memory through this new lens, I subconsciously made a distinction between memory as a “truth” and stories as “Imagination”. However, reading Running in the Family catalyzed a paradigm shift, allowing me to merge the two together. Ondaatje’s delicate depiction of a journey returning to something familiar, yet as a stranger and outsider, made me reflect over my own family’s historical background. Reminding me of my grandmother, who grew up in the communist nation of Yugoslavia, Ondaatje´s way of referring back to the history of Ceylon and the sensation this history creates undeniably goes way beyond his own personal memoir.
Originally from Sri Lanka, but long immigrated to Toronto, Ondaatje´s Running in the Family deeply explores themes of identity and memory through Ondaatje´s personal experience returning to a home that may not longer be his. What struck me as I read this convoluted memoir is the fashion in which Ondaatje addresses memory, and in particular, when remembered together, how it comports the strange quality of establishing a collective identity. This sort of enchanted aspect of a memory connected to an identity, which Ondaatje depicts, can be utterly difficult. This conflicted sensation of personal identity and memory can especially be noticed by the integration of short, shattered parts of family history. The memoir goes way back in the history of the family, telling stories about Ondaatje’s great-grandfather to continue with a description of his grandparents and later his parents. Additionally, it holds several stories from Ondaatje’s own childhood. This is similar to how my grandmother would tell me about her memories of her childhood in Yugoslavia. Just like Ondaatje, my grandmother left her native country when she moved to Sweden, and after the Balkan Wars in 1990’s her country Yugoslavia, ceased to exist. Refusing to identify as anything other than Yugoslav, she became a victim of extreme nationalism and was left without a nation. The romanticized life of living under Tito’s rule became the stories of my childhood. Fragmented memories, that I remember taking with the deepest gravity, I now view as a manifestation of how she feels when she remembers, rather than literary descriptions.
Indeed, this romanticized aspect of memory has been explored and celebrated by several other poets. Maya Angelou has a famous quote that I believe captures the core of what Ondaatje attempts to convey; “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Because what matters are not the empirical facts like what has been said, but the sensation that comes along with them. That is to say that when Ondaatje’s changing of the “truth” of his stories with the purpose of accentuating the sensation brings them closer to the true nature of memory, which also links back to how sensation shapes us as individuals. Indeed, another way Ondaatje’s background is similarly emphasized through when addressing identity. One example of the romanticized idea of identity and the past can be addressed through the poem “The Cinnamon Peelers Wife” (77), which we also discussed in class. On a surface level, this poem describes the prohibited relationship between a Cinnamon Peeler and his lover. On a more profound level this poem explores the individual desire to belong to and identify with something. Using both olfactory and tactile imagery the smell of the Cinnamon Peeler is conveyed as a metaphor for an individual’s identity. For instance, the speaker of the poem describes how he has tried to hide this smell, identity by burying it in “saffron”, but never manages to escape the smell (96). This example links back to how my grandmother, although no longer lives in Yugoslavia, still has that strong identity of being Yugoslav.
To conclude, Running in the Family has made a deep impact on my personal perspective when I look back at my own memories and identity.
See you next time!