As the “storm” rages outside, on this dark, gloomy Saturday morning, I am finally able to take the time I wanted to read through this week’s selection of my classmate’s blogs. Our ASTU 100 class just finished reading Michael Ondaatje’s “historiographic metafiction”, Running in the Family. For our class the text induced questions of identity, memory, genre, and “truth” and, further still, how these topics blurred together and intermingled throughout the text and our own lives.

Through the haze of repetitive scrolling and clicking on each personal blog page, reading only slightly into the minds of my classmates, I began to see a general, overarching theme in the majority of the posts I read, of identity formation.

As we traveled across Canada to Asia with Ondaatje through Running, we also traveled through the through the ideas of the unique genre of “historiographic metafiction”, to the inconsistencies in truth, to the fluidity of memory, and finally to the understanding and reflection of identity.

Running, “challenges categorization” explains Tuti, and is not simply a memoir as Alex brings up. Therefore, as Kia says, it’s not appropriate to read it with the expectations a memoir evokes in us. Ella argues, to read the text open-mindedly without the preconceived notions of memoir. Coined by Linda Hutcheon, Historiographic metafiction is the way Bolton defined Running; it is a mix between history and fiction. Ondaatje invites us to us to see that not everything he writes is truth, he writes as if blurring truth and fiction. This disrupts our traditional way of thinking about memoirs, as unquestionably “truthful” and “accurate”. By creating a disruption in the traditional way of thinking about memoir, we are also invited to question the authority of historical fact and the stagnation of memory. History reflects the present it was written in, it is always written by a person with a certain perspective, it was remembered by a non-objective source and therefore reflects that view. In the same way memory is not remembered objectively, it, like history, has an author. It doesn’t reflect accuracy and isn’t even remembered in the same way throughout the years. Memory resembles water, it is fluid, it has to be retold, reedited, rearranged, and judged constantly. Identity is also fluid, it’s dynamic, and always in motion.

The majority of the class talked about the theme of identity as evoked by Ondaatje. Like Ondaatje, much of the class identifies with many different cultures or countries. In fact, many of them were “third culture kids” themselves. For example, Christopher identifies as a Jordanian – Taiwanese – Canadian, while Aaliya originates from Pakistan but has lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia. Karolina, prompted by Ondaatje’s journey through his and his family’s past, brought up a compelling story of identity, in the narrative of her grandmother. Her grandmother, a Yugoslav, left home to move to Sweden. Then after the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, her country dissolved. Yet, she refused give up her Yugoslav identity. Ondaatje alludes to the complexity in identity as well. Born and raised in Sri Lanka but now living in Canada, he complicates the identity of a man who is both a local and a traveler. A local born traveler, a foreigner with native roots? Who is he?

Ondaatje sums this up in one sentence, “I am the foreigner, I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner” (61).

Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2011. Print.