Anil Tissera, the 33-year-old forensic pathologist-anthropologist who is the protagonist of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost (2000), returns to her birth country Sri Lanka after 15 years of being away. The purpose of her return is to investigate human rights violations in the country during a period of “terror,” a time when citizens are being disappeared en masse and when “[h]alf the world, it felt, was being buried, the truth hidden by fear” (Ondaatje 156). Sri Lanka “had been in continual emergency from 1983 onwards” (Ondaatje 42), had “existed in a rocking, self-burying motion,” and was marked by “disappearance of schoolboys, the death of lawyers by torture, the abduction of bodies from the Hokandara mass grave” (Ondaatje 157). In the “Author’s Note” included in the novel, Ondaatje provides the reader with the historical and political context for such mass disappearances and killings that took place in Sri Lanka as portrayed in his novel:

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Sri Lanka was in a crisis that involved three essential groups: the government, the antigovernment insurgents in the south and the separatist guerrillas in the north. Both the insurgents and the separatists had declared war on the government. Eventually, in response, legal and illegal government squads were known to have been sent out to hunt down the separatists and the insurgents. (Ondaatje, Author’s Note)

While there are references to the violence and killings perpetrated by the Tamil “separatist guerrillas in the north” or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the primary plot of the novel revolves around the discovery of a skeleton that belongs to a man abducted and killed in the south, presumably by the government. This political victim is believed to have been involved with “the antigovernment insurgents in the south,” who were primarily Sinhala (Buddhist) youth and who were part of the Marxist-Leninist political party called the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). According to forensic investigations, the skeletal remains initially labeled as “Sailor” are recognized as having belonged to a man by the name of Ruwan Kumara from the Ratnapura district, an area known for heavy insurgent activity during the period of “terror,” or bheeshanaya as it was known in the majority Sinhala language, and which is a region that “became unsafe and rife with disappearances” (Ondaatje 164). The bheeshanaya in Sri Lanka that Ondaatje draws on was marked by mass disappearance, wanton violence, and extrajudicial killings perpetrated by both governmental and non-governmental actors, and these past atrocities remain largely unaddressed and unreconciled to this day.[1]

Given this context, Anil’s Ghost is a novel that is recognized by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution as “a magnificent work of resistance literature.”[2] In this article, I explore how such resistance manifests itself in the novel, particularly through the refusal to succumb to the dominant governmental narrative that attempts to erase and suppress the stories of the disappeared. In doing so, I argue that Ondaatje utilizes what I call “necrotic presence” in the novel, indicated by skeletal remains, cadavers, and tortured bodies, to build and archive an alternative narrative that seeks to render some form of justice for the victims of political violence in the absence of legal- or state-initiated justice. In understanding acts of disappearance and extreme violence perpetrated by the government on its political opposition, I draw on “necropolitics” and “necropower” conceptualized by the Cameroonian political theorist and historian Achille Mbembe. 

One way in which Anil’s Ghost develops an alternative narrative that challenges the Master Narrative of the State is by referencing multiple instances of enforced disappearance and thereby reviving a history of disappearance and human rights violations that the government has diligently sought to deny, suppress, and dismiss. This aspect has been discussed by several scholars such as Teresa Derrickson (2004), Manav Ratti (2004), Emily S. Davis (2009), David Babcock (2014), and Heike Härting (2003), among others. For instance, Härting reads the novel as a “critique of the failure of global justice” (Härting 43), while Derrickson demonstrates how it highlights “the need for global justice” (Derrickson 149). Additionally, reports such as “Recurring Nightmare: State Responsibility for ‘Disappearance’ and Abductions in Sri Lanka” by Human Rights Watch and “‘Only Justice Can Heal Our Wounds’: Listening to the Demands of Families of the Disappeared in Sri Lanka” by Amnesty International provide comprehensive context to understanding enforced disappearance in Sri Lanka. Anil’s Ghost provides thinly veiled historical examples of such violations throughout the novel. For instance, Sarath, the archeologist who is paired to work with Anil, comments several times on the large number of disappeared individuals who have been anonymously buried all over the country: “Can you imagine how many bodies must be buried all over the country?” (Ondaatje 51). When Anil wonders how a recent skeleton is found in a cave that is supposed to contain prehistoric remains, Sarath comments that “[t]here are thousands of twentieth-century bodies, Anil. Can you imagine how many murders –” (Ondaatje 52). 

The novel in this instance functions as a creative archive that keeps alive the accounts of the disappeared and the murdered. Despite multiple complaints about human rights violations submitted to international civil rights groups, the government continues to deny any knowledge of organized violence: “Over the years complaints from Amnesty International and other civil rights groups had been sent to Switzerland and resided there, glacierlike. President Katugala claimed no knowledge of organized campaigns of murder on the island” (Ondaatje 16). However, the novel refers to lists of “government undesirables” (Ondaatje 269) that Sarath believes he could access in which he expects to find Ruwan Kumara’s name. Such lists were used by the JVP, the government, and other paramilitary groups during JVP insurrections as well as during the pogrom of Black July to target individuals who became victims of torture and enforced disappearance. In such a climate, the only reason why Anil is allowed to come to Sri Lanka as a forensic specialist affiliated with the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva is “to placate trading partners in the West” (Ondaatje 16). Although Anil and Sarath decide to pursue the case of Sailor, albeit at the cost of Sarath’s life, “[s]he and Sarath both knew that in all the turbulent history of the island’s recent civil wars, in all the token police investigations, not one murder charge had been made during the troubles. But this could be a clear case against the government” (Ondaatje 176). 

The government’s denial of the existence of death squads and mass disappearances is countered by references to multiple instances of enforced disappearances throughout the novel. These numerous references are important in reinforcing the fact that enforced disappearance was systematically being used by the government to quell political opposition. Through these references, Ondaatje generates a narrative that, as Margaret Scanlan observes, “replicates the experience of terror” (Scanlan 302). The significance of the theme of enforced disappearance is established at the outset of the novel via the prologue, which centers on the family members of the disappeared in Guatemala. In the prologue, family members in Guatemala patiently wait as exhumations take place, providing basic amenities such as tea to the forensic team working on uncovering skeletal remains of the disappeared. For the family, there was “always the fear, double-edged, that it was their son in the pit, or that it was not their son… If it became clear that the body was a stranger, then, after weeks of waiting, the family would rise and leave. They would travel to other excavations in the western highlands. The possibility of their lost son was everywhere” (Ondaatje 5). Anil, in fact, is part of this forensic team in Guatemala, and while Sri Lanka is a country that is geographically, socioculturally, and politically distant from Guatemala, Anil’s Ghost positions the enforced disappearances through Anil’s work in both contexts.

This prologue about the search for the remains of a young man in Guatemala mirrors the fate of Ruwan Kumara or Sailor, a victim of enforced disappearance and a case that Anil takes the lead in investigating. Sailor is the temporary name that is assigned to the skeletal remains found at a high-security government-run historic site amidst prehistoric bones. Driving the novel’s plot is a struggle to identify Sailor and to expose those behind such enforced disappearances and murder.

As the novel highlights, Sailor is the “representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest” (Ondaatje 56), which is the ethical imperative that drives Anil’s investigation. Anil expresses a similar view that she has learned from one of her teachers when she presents her findings to government authorities towards the end of the novel: “One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims” (Ondaatje 275, italics in the original). It is made evident that the disappearance and murder of Sailor is only one among many thousands that took place during the period of “terror” in Sri Lanka, which is referred to as a time when “a family member simply disappeared and there was no sighting or evidence of his existence or his death” (Ondaatje 184). Sailor’s identity is revealed to be that of a former toddy tapper, who, after breaking his leg in a tree fall, ends up working in a local mine. He was recognized by “a billa— someone from the community with a gunnysack over his head, slits cut out for his eyes—to anonymously identify the rebel sympathizer. A billa was a monster, a ghost, to scare children in games, and it had picked out Ruwan Kumara and he had been taken away” (Ondaatje 269). 

Acts of enforced disappearance committed by state agents are extended to school students, which drive home the indiscriminate violence that civilians of all ages and walks of life experienced during this time: “In 1989, forty-six students attending school in Ratnapura district and some of the staff who worked there disappeared. The vehicles that picked them up had no number plates. A yellow Lancer had been seen at the army camp and was recognized during the roundup” (Ondaatje 185). Painfully, even areas of Buddhist significance in the south of Sri Lanka such as Buduruvagala (the literal translation of which means “the rock with the image of the Buddha”) have become dumping grounds for disappeared victims. The fields around the ancient Buddhist statues have become “places of torture and burials…a place where trucks came to burn and hide victims who had been picked up…They were finding dead bodies daily, not even buried, in the adjoining fields” (Ondaatje 300-301). Places of torture are also located in the capital city of Colombo from where bodies are picked up and dropped in the ocean by helicopters: “There are at least two unauthorized places of detention in Colombo. One of the locations is off Havelock Road in Kollupitiya. Some of those picked up are there for a month, but the torture itself doesn’t last that long. Most can be broken within an hour” (Ondaatje 135). In the absence of law and order, Sarath identifies “fear” as the “one law to cover all of living” (Ondaatje 135), which indicates why the period referred to in the novel is labeled as the bheeshanaya or “terror” in Sri Lankan history. 

During this period, acts of enforced disappearances take place around the clock, whether they be “night interrogations” or “vans in daylight picking up citizens at random” (Ondaatje 156). At the beginning of her investigation, Anil goes through various reports and documents that list the names of the disappeared, and a section of this list is included on page 41 of the novel, which, as Ondaatje specifies in the “Acknowledgements” section at the end of the novel, is a partial list of the disappeared drawn from Amnesty International reports (Ondaatje 310). The names and information on the list indicate that these individuals, of ages ranging from 16 to 49, were abducted in 1989 and that they were Sinhalese, the main ethnicity in Sri Lanka. By including this factually accurate list of disappeared individuals in the novel (in addition to the inclusion of several thinly veiled references to what happened in Sri Lanka during the period of mass disappearances), Ondaatje positions the novel firmly within what I have elsewhere identified as the “archival novel” genre, generating what I term “archival narrative justice,” which is “a form of achieving justice through an archival narrative when legal and institutional justice is absent or inadequate” (Jayasinghe 1).

When state and legal bodies tasked with generating justice become the perpetrators of violence and suppress justice, literary narratives such as Anil’s Ghost play an important role in preserving histories of injustice and violence, thereby providing an alternate platform for those who seek justice. As Sarath, the archeologist paired to work with Anil and who is himself abducted, tortured, and killed at the end of the novel explains, this is particularly relevant in instances where “law is on the side of power and not truth” (Ondaatje 44), and in a context where it is “sometimes more dangerous here if you tell the truth” (Ondaatje 53). Truth has become “a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol” (Ondaatje 156), which consumes anyone who tries to seek it. Sarath claims that “[e]veryone’s scared…It’s a national disease” (Ondaatje 53). Furthermore, as Sarath’s brother Gamini points out, “[i]t’s the wrong time for unburials. They don’t want results. They’re fighting a war on two sides now, the government. They don’t need more criticism” (Ondaatje 132). The fact that Gamini, a doctor, who is not that familiar with what Anil is working on, immediately identifies government forces as the primary suspect for the abduction and murder of Sailor is significant, demonstrating that the general identity of the perpetrators of enforced disappearances was not a secret. In such a climate of fear and “scarring psychosis,” where “[i]f a father protested a son’s death, it was feared another family member would be killed” (Ondaatje 56), it becomes critical to use other means to archive the histories of victims and their families. As a result of enforced disappearance, “[d]eath, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it. There had been years of night visitations, kidnappings or murders in broad daylight” (Ondaatje 56). Literary narratives such as Anil’s Ghost, though not equipped to directly generate legal or executive justice, nevertheless provide a form of closure through their ability to preserve truth and memory against the state machine of suppressive systemic amnesia. 

Archival novels, while fictional, provide a means via which the past and its atrocities are kept alive through the representation of facts in the face of institutional injustice and obfuscation. Through memorialization, remembrance, and archiving, such novels generate resistance against the Master Narrative of Amnesia that is enforced by the state. As I argue, “archival narrative justice” recognizes that:

[I]ndividual and collective experiences, particularly those of marginalized, colonized, or oppressed groups, are often shaped by the stories that are told about them, regardless of the truth-value of these stories, and by the ways in which they are (under/mis)represented in History and in the Archive. Archival narrative justice is achieved when narratives draw from histories and archives of such marginalized groups and give voice to their lived realities, ensuring that they are heard, validated, and integrated into larger conversations about justice, fairness, and equity (Jayasinghe 4). 

The very act of repeatedly narrating these stories, contexts, pasts, and histories through various platforms such as the novel has significance in itself. As novelist Valeria Luiselli points out in an interview with The New Yorker, novels specifically and narrative at large play a role in representing and engendering justice when prevailing legal bodies fail to engage with injustice: “Perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us” (quoted in Wood, 2019). In Tell Me How It Ends, she reinstates this point by stating that “the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds” (Luiselli, 96-97). The importance of repeating stories about past injustices so that they return “to haunt and shame us” is pertinent to Anil’s Ghost as well as Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, another Sri Lankan novel that highlights political violence and enforced disappearance. As Sena, one of the characters in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida who used to be a member of the JVP and who was abducted and murdered by the government during the same timeframe referred to in Ondaatje’s novel, states, “‘I am working against The Light. Against the forgetting. We must never forget. We must help the forgotten. We must destroy the lies and the boru’” (Karunatilaka 95).[3] 

As Anil in Ondaatje’s novel concedes, the accuracy of forensic investigations in terms of identifying bodies and skeletal remains runs up against various obstacles and can be turned into “muted statements for the ‘good of the nation’” (Ondaatje 28). Thus, alternative platforms for recording and preserving the truth become critically important. As Antoinette Burton writes, “forensic scientists have labored to extract the kinds of testimony that living witnesses often cannot, despite and of course because of the pathos of their memories, provide: objective and verifiable evidence of criminal intent which becomes, in turn, the basis for the pursuit of justice in local, national and international tribunals” (Burton 39). However, it is precisely this objective, verifiable, and accurate nature of the evidence from forensic investigations and the ability of such evidence to support the pursuit of justice that motivate government authorities to sabotage and suppress such investigations. Additionally, international organizations that have the authority to hold countries that violate human rights accountable are depicted as impotent and not able to intervene in the mass disappearances and killings: “The grand logos on letterheads and European office doors meant nothing where there was crisis” (Ondaatje 29), which makes it even more important for other means of creatively holding governments accountable to exist. At the end of Anil’s Ghost, Sarath is abducted, tortured, and killed, presumably as punishment for being involved in the investigation that sought to expose the government, for covertly recovering Sailor’s confiscated body and returning it to Anil, and for facilitating her escape. The novel enacts the sudden disappearance of Sarath at a textual level by maintaining a narrative lacuna between the last time the reader encounters him getting into a trishaw taxi after the meeting with government officials at the Armoury Auditorium, which was part of “the anti-terrorist unit building in Gregory’s Road” (Ondaatje 271), and when the reader encounters the tortured cadaver at the hospital in which his brother works. 

At the meeting at the Armoury Auditorium, which is attended by “military and police personnel trained in counter-insurgency methods” (Ondaatje 272), Anil perhaps makes the wrong call by calling out the complicity and responsibility of government authorities. She states that “I think you murdered hundreds of us” (Ondaatje 272) and that “some government forces have possibly murdered innocent people” (Ondaatje 275). Naturally, once the meeting concludes, all of Anil’s documentation as well as the tape recorder are confiscated. Sarath’s observation early on in the novel that “[i]nternational investigations don’t mean a lot” (Ondaatje 45) is confirmed at the novel’s conclusion. Despite a similar incident that Anil had experienced in the Congo where “their collection of data had disappeared overnight, their paperwork burned. As if a city from the past had been reburied” (Ondaatje 29), she does not seem to have understood the irreversible consequences of challenging murderous governments, and that being a representative of an international human rights organization is inadequate to hold such governments accountable: “[i]f and when you were asked by a government to leave, you left. You took nothing with you. Not a slide tray, not a piece of film. At the airport, while they searched her clothing, she’d sat almost naked on a stool” (Ondaatje 29). This example as well as the conclusion of the novel reiterate the ultimate ineffectiveness of international organizations and civil rights groups in bringing about justice and intervening in human rights violations such as enforced disappearances, which makes archival narrative justice that literary texts can produce and their ethical ability to preserve the stories and memories of victims all the more important. 

While the novel draws attention to widespread enforced disappearances, it also highlights how the government prevented such instances of enforced disappearance from being investigated or addressed through legal bodies. For instance, when a parent recognizes bloodstained clothing found at the mass grave in Naipattimunai in 1985 as belonging to his son at the time of his arrest and disappearance, and when an ID card is found in the shirt pocket that confirms the identity of the missing person, the police “called an immediate halt to the unburial, and the following day the president of the Citizens’ Committee—who had brought the police to the location—was arrested,” (Ondaatje 42) demonstrating how the government not only wants to keep the evidence of these abductions and murders secret, but also blatantly penalize innocent citizens for attempting to uncover the truth. With such repressive and punitive action, the government ensures that the truth behind such mass graves and abductions remain uninvestigated: “The identity of others in this grave in the Eastern Province—how they died, who they were—was never discovered” (Ondaatje 42). Furthermore, “[t]he warden of an orphanage who reported cases of annihilation was jailed. A human rights lawyer was shot and the body removed by army personnel…Early investigations had led to no arrests, and protests from organizations had never reached even the mid-level of police or government. Requests for help by parents in their search for teenagers were impotent” (Ondaatje 42). These examples reinforce the extent to which the state was invested in suppressing any attempts at uncovering the truth about mass disappearances and bringing the perpetrators to justice. 

The state’s use of arbitrary power to disappear, torture, and kill citizens should be understood through the ideas of “necropolitics” and “necropower” conceptualized by the Cameroonian political theorist and historian Achille Mbembe. “Necropolitics” and “necropower” generate forms of “death / deathly politics,” which is evident in the context explored in Anil’s Ghost. Mbembe writes that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitutes the limits of sovereignty” (Mbembe 2003, 11). He emphasizes that “sovereignty, [is] expressed predominantly as the right to kill” (Mbembe 2003, 11). According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, the prefix “necro-” originates from the Greek nekro-, associated with a dead body, a corpse, or a dead person. The English prefix is present in a variety of words that are associated with death such as necrosis (the death of cells or tissues), necropsy (the examination of a body after death), necrophobia (the fear of death or dead bodies), necromancy (the practice of communicating with the dead), necroptosis (a form of programmed cell death) and many others. Mbembe argues that “necropower” (Mbembe 2003, 25) gives rise to “death-worlds” (Mbembe 2003, 40). Such “death-worlds” are defined as “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (Mbembe 2003, 40, italics in the original). Certain populations are forced to become the “living dead”; in particular, those who challenge the political status quo are forced to experience heightened degrees of precarity and proximity to death as in the case of members of the JVP political party during the period of “terror” in Sri Lanka. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopower,” laid out in Society Must Be Defended: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76 (1976), Mbembe establishes that “[t]o exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power” (Mbembe 2003, 12). A state that practices necropower and necropolitics treats certain groups of people, which I call “necropolitical subjects,” as lacking “specifically human character, the specifically human reality” (Mbembe 2003, 24), a rationalization of the dehumanization and extermination of such groups. 

These necropolitical subjects form “an entire crowd of people who specifically live at the edge of life, or even on its outer edge—people for whom living means continually standing up to death” (Mbembe 2019, 37). Their condition is so dire that “[n]obody even bears the slightest feelings of responsibility or justice towards this sort of life or, rather, death” (Mbembe 2019, 38). Necropolitical subjects are placed outside legal and institutional recognition, and their suffering and death are therefore nonevents that state and legal institutions do not recognize or validate. In this sense, the term “extrajudicial executions” that is commonly used for such deaths, and the phrase that Sarath uses for the murders carried out by “the insurgents, or by the government or the guerilla separatists” (Ondaatje 18) is rendered redundant and meaningless, given that the judiciary, state, police, army, and other institutional bodies are fully complicit in the disappearances and killings. Individuals aligned with the JVP and its uprisings against the government were abducted and disappeared en masse. The novel frequently reminds the reader that “[i]n nearly every house, in nearly every family, there was knowledge of someone’s murder or abduction by one side or another” (Ondaatje 154), that “[t]here had been so many disappearances” (Ondaatje 205), and that “thousands…had disappeared” (Ondaatje 300). While some maimed and tortured cadavers resurfaced and were identified, the majority of those who were abducted and disappeared continued to be “disappeared,” a way to avoid the perpetrators being identified and held accountable as their families continued to search for the bodies of their loved ones. 

This echoes the larger discourse of global disappearance narratives, and Anil’s Ghost makes evident how the government took measures to prevent the discovery of the bodies of the forcibly disappeared as was the case in many other contexts. In addition to the novel’s prologue set at a dig site in Guatemala, Ondaatje’s novel alludes to violences exercised by Southern Cone dictatorships, among other cases. For instance, in the novel, bodies washed onto the shore, the corpses of “the victims of politically motivated murders—victims of torture at Gower Street or a house off Galle Road—lifted into the air by helicopter, flown a couple of miles out to sea and dropped through the fathoms of air. But only a few of these ever came back as evidence into the arms of the country” (Ondaatje 212). The bodies that did make it back bear the marks of their violent end: “The next corpse brought in had flail fractures on the rib cage. It meant he had fallen from a great height – at least five hundred feet—before hitting the water belly-down. The air knocked out of the body. It meant a helicopter” (Ondaatje 14). Such a horrific practice parallels that of vuelos de la muerte, or “death flights,” used by countries including Argentina (during the Argentine Dirty War of 1976-1983), Colombia (during the “Violencia” from 1948 to 1958), Chile during the rule of Augusto Pinochet, as well as France (in French Algeria and French Madagascar), among others. 

However, it is important to note how the novel indicates that the violence that took place during the bheeshanaya in Sri Lanka is different from that which transpired in other contexts: “Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it’s secret gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only one doing the killing” (Ondaatje 17). Yet, given the novel’s focus on the skeletal remains of Sailor and those who were disappeared because of their affiliation with the JVP, the main critique of Anil’s Ghost can be read as that of the state violence perpetrated on its civilians. The novel repeatedly reminds the reader how the parties involved in enforced disappearance ensured that the bodies of the disappeared would not be discoverable and / or recognizable: “The disposal of bodies by fire. The disposal of bodies in rivers or the sea. The hiding and then reburial of corpses” (Ondaatje 43). Bodies that float down the four main rivers are recognized as those of tortured victims: “Inland the bodies came down the four main rivers—the Maheveli Ganga, the Kalu Ganga, the Kelani Ganga, the Bentota Ganga” (Ondaatje 212). 

Further, there is specific reference to how victims were purposefully disposed of in areas far from where they were picked up to prevent discovery: “Victims picked up as far away as Kalutara were brought here, out of family range” (Ondaatje 301).[4] The body of Sailor, or Ruwan Kumara, which is at the heart of the novel’s plot, was similarly moved from its first burial place in Ratnapura to the Bandarawela caves, a historical site that contains prehistoric bones that were originally discovered in 1911. It is a “sacred historical site…constantly under government or police supervision…in a place that only a government official could get into” (Ondaatje 52), and “accessible only to the police or the army or some high-level government officials” (Ondaatje 89), which indicates the complicity of the state in this murder even before Sailor’s identity is confirmed as someone who was likely politically involved with the JVP. 

These enforced disappearances as well as the inhuman ways in which such victims are treated during life and after death, particularly the denial of the rights and dignities of the dead, are clear articulations of the government’s practice of necropower, or “deathly power,” through its necropolitics, transforming such individuals into necropolitical subjects. While the necropower of the government remains all powerful and near impossible to challenge, and although the government’s attempts to erase all markers of the destruction of necropolitical subjects are mostly successful, the residue of its abuses is archived and articulated in the remains that survive willful destruction and concealment. The “necrotic presence” of murdered necropolitical subjects, a term that I introduce to explore how such remains of the dead function as a mode of resistance and challenge to the necropower of the state, plays an important narrative and ethical role in Anil’s Ghost. As early as page 11 of the novel, the reader is informed that there are “[h]eads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale” (Ondaatje 11). References to such disembodied heads appear several times in the novel, indicating the frequency with which such horrors took place: “We have seen so many heads stuck on poles here, these last few years” (Ondaatje 184). 

There is also reference to communities who had to “deal with beheaded bodies” (Ondaatje 186). Large numbers of “bodies turn up weekly” and most of these are unrecognizable: “A couple of years ago people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition” (Ondaatje 17). Bodies are discovered in mass graves in places like Naipattimunai, Ankumbura, Akmeemana, and Hokandara with markers of identification: “At a mass grave found in Naipattimunai in 1985, bloodstained clothing was identified by a parent as that worn by his son at the time of his arrest and disappearance. When an ID card was found in a shirt pocket, the police called an immediate halt to the unburial” (Ondaatje 42). Perhaps one of the most haunting moments from the novel is when a character witnesses the severed heads of teenage students on stakes left on either side of the road. This exhibitionist violence and the indiscriminate butchering of such young individuals highlight the utter disregard for human life during the height of the “terror”: “…the heads of the two students on stakes, on either side of the bridge, facing each other. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old…She sees two more heads on the far side of the bridge and can tell even from here that she recognizes one of them…She keeps running forward, and then she sees more” (Ondaatje 174-75, italics in the original).

While necrotic elements and their presence facilitate recognition and identification in such examples, Gamini, Sarath’s younger brother who is a doctor at the Dean Street Hospital in Colombo, actively refuses to engage with such necrotic presence, even when it is present secondhand via photographs, by covering the faces of the victims in the photographs with his hand while he interprets the wounds on the bodies. Rather than examine the bodies of these torture victims firsthand, Gamini only accepts “the terrible photographs” (Ondaatje 213) of the torture victims prepared by interns so that “there was no danger of his recognizing the dead” (Ondaatje 213). In fact, Gamini “had chosen not to deal with the dead…[h]e avoided the south-wing corridors [of the hospital], where they brought the torture victims to be identified” (Ondaatje 212). Yet, given that he is a doctor who must sign the files related to these victims, he cannot fully escape the necrotic presence of the dead despite these precautions. His interpretations related to the cause of the wounds on victims’ cadavers and how they may have been killed are recorded onto a tape recorder “left for him by an Amnesty man” (Ondaatje 213), and the official records are essential to finalizing postmortem reports that help families obtain some form of compensation (Ondaatje 243). It is during one of these sessions when he routinely reports on the photographs of tortured victims that Gamini recognizes the photographs depicting his own brother’s tortured cadaver. This episode reinforces the role that necrotic elements play through their presence beyond death in maintaining a living record of the dead against the anonymous amnesia that government bodies mandate in cases of disappearance.

The most important necrotic presence is that of the skeletal remains that Anil names Sailor, which are later identified as having belonged to Ruwan Kumara. It is the discovery of this skeleton that drives Anil and Sarath to launch their ill-fated mission to identify the dead individual and to expose the perpetrators of his abduction, torture, and murder. In the absence of the victim’s ability to represent himself and seek justice, and given that, as previously highlighted, families were largely prevented from seeking any form of justice through fear and the likelihood of facing penalization, it is, ironically and paradoxically, the decaying remains of the dead body that create visibility for suppressed injustices. Despite the best efforts of the government and other nefarious bodies responsible for mass disappearances to keep the evidence of their crimes buried and unacknowledged, the necrotic presence of the dead, through their material presence, fractures the Master Narrative of the state. Necrotic presence is an oxymoron given that what is “necro,” and therefore dead, is generally no longer alive or in existence and is therefore devoid of any agency. It is of the past and has no place among the living. 

Similar to the dialectical specter in Jacques Derrida’s work on hauntology, which is neither present nor absent, necrotic presence is dead and alive and absent and present simultaneously. Derrida establishes that “one does not know whether the specter is living or if it is dead” (« On ne sait pas si c’est vivant ou si c’est mort », Derrida 25-26) and that it is important to engage with the specter: “however, that which seems almost impossible, is always to speak of the specter, of speaking to the specter, of speaking with him, so above all to make or let a spirit speak” (« Or ce qui paraît presque impossible, c’est toujours de parler du spectre, de parler au spectre, de parler avec lui, donc surtout de faire ou de laisser parler un esprit. », Derrida 32 ; italics in the original, translations are by the author). Accordingly, engaging with the necrotic presence manifest in skeletal remains, maimed bodies, and cadavers creates an access point to recuperating the dead as well as a means of addressing the wrongs done to them. 

This presence is acknowledged in the novel by Anil and others, who treat Sailor not as a mere decaying skeleton but as a liminal presence of Ruwan Kumara by addressing him with the “he / him / his” pronouns and by respecting him as an individual rather than treating him as an inanimate object. Anil and others pick up the skeleton and carry Sailor in their arms as if they are carrying a person. Anil would “lift Sailor into her arms, to remind herself he was like her. Not just evidence, but someone with charms and flaws, part of a family, a member of a village who in the sudden lightening of politics raised his hand at the last minute, so they were broken” (Ondaatje 170). The image of the small yellow leaf that “floated down and slipped into the skeleton’s ribs and pulsed there” (Ondaatje 170) as Sailor lay on the table adds to the personification and anthropomorphism of the skeleton. Margaret Herrick writes how “Anil’s time in Sri Lanka is a descent into the underworld, a descent that mirrors the experience of grief” and that “her journey is a realization of shared vulnerability, shared human precarity” (Herrick 35). Anil’s relationship with Sailor, although it is all that remains of Ruwan Kumara, highlights such a shared vulnerability. Given the political context and considering that it was a time when a certain degree of insensitivity to and normalization of the dead and associated bodily remains had set in, the act of treating Sailor with such humanity, dignity, and empathy plays an important role in the narrative by reminding the reader of the value and irretrievable cost of the lives that have been disappeared. 

The very act of naming the skeleton “Sailor” despite its provisional and constructed nature until his identity is revealed, and refusing to use depersonalized numbers and letters to identify him, indicates an attempt to assign him the humanity that he was denied during his last moments. In the vein of a detective novel, Anil’s Ghost does not reveal Sailor’s real identity and his actual name until page 269, which is close to the conclusion of the novel. Using Sailor as a provisional name is an attempt to resist the anonymized void into which such disappeared individuals have been pushed. The use of the name “Sailor” and the associated pronouns personify and anthropomorphize Ruwan Kumara’s skeletal remains, giving him a presence and a form of life, albeit transient. It restores individuality to the anonymous dead, resists bureaucratic erasure, and acknowledges personhood. For instance, Anil asks “[w]here is he?” referring to Sailor, to which Sarath responds with “He’s safe. In the van” (Ondaatje 60-61). Early on in the novel, Anil points out that “[t]here are so many bodies in the ground now…murdered, anonymous…Some people let their ghosts die, some don’t” (Ondaatje 53). Literary narratives become a platform via which such “ghosts” are given a means to “speak” in a Derridean sense. Anil’s Ghost is therefore not only an archival novel that witnesses and records the violence of enforced disappearances, but also, as mentioned earlier, a “work of resistance literature” in its ability to give voice to the “ghosts” and “specters” through the necrotic presence of the dead. 

In “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” Colin Davis argues that “Derrida calls on us to endeavour to speak and listen to the spectre, despite the reluctance inherited from our intellectual traditions and because of the challenge it may pose them” (Davis 376-77). Similarly, the novel demonstrates how when Anil and Sarath “listen” to the paradoxical absence-presence of the necrotic presence, truth emerges and concrete means of closure can be forged. For instance, the skeleton provides a number of clues that help to reconstruct his past life and how he may have been killed. Sailor’s skeleton is described as having bones that “were still held together by dried ligaments, partially burned” (Ondaatje 50). The bones look twisted, which, as Anil points out, indicates that he was likely burned while he was still alive: “Twisting happens to bones that get burned when they are ‘green,’ that is, flesh-covered…This one was barely dead…when they tried to burn him. Or worse, they tried to burn him alive” (Ondaatje 51). Based on her forensic investigations, particularly given the nature of the wounds on his bones, Anil concludes that Sailor was shot with a rifle, set on fire, buried hurriedly in one location closer to the murder site and then moved to the historic cave for better concealment where they eventually discovered him. Necrotic presence thus makes possible discovery and recovery, which in turn could lead to accountability and closure, which is precisely why the authorities take pains to keep the bodies of the disappeared hidden and undiscoverable. 

The word “ghost” in the title of the novel Anil’s Ghost alludes to such methodical and systemic disappearance orchestrated and executed by government authorities rather than to actual ghosts and specters. It can be understood as representing unresolved political trauma and the absence of justice vis-à-vis enforced disappearance represented through Sailor and others like him that Anil discovers in the historic caves. Anil’s “ghost” can also be understood as the skeletal remains of Ruwan Kumara, the inconclusive conclusion of the novel, the absence of justice, the suppressed and erased history of enforced disappearance, the continuing remembrance of the disappeared, and recollections that still live in collective memory of the period of terror. Because of ghosts’ absence of material and biological presence, their absence in official records, they maintain a haunting presence in the collective consciousness as well as a legal presence through their status as disappeared.

Anil’s forensic investigation of the skeleton, while an investigation of the actual bones, is also a metaphor for reconstructing suppressed history. The necrotic presence of the skeleton functions symbolically as silent witness, fragments of obscured and buried truth, and as resistant material evidence. In this light, Ondaatje’s novel is one of witness. Scholars such as Milena Marinkova, for instance, identify Anil’s Ghost as “a form of witness writing” where “witnessing emerges in the novel as a gesture of micropolitical empowerment whereby unwitnessed stories and unacknowledged witnesses are recognized and validated” (Marinkova 107). However, perhaps precisely because of their ability to bear witness, forensic science and its investigations are restricted and thwarted by political systems that refuse to listen or accept the “truth” established by forensic investigations, dramatizing the tension between truth and necropower / necropolitics of the state. The open-ended conclusion of the novel with its abduction, torture, and murder of Sarath, and Anil’s uncertain future (the reader does not know for certain whether she escapes a fate similar to that of Sarath or not), represents how justice remains uncertain and unfulfilled, and how truth is partial / obfuscated and controlled by state necropower. 

The novel’s ending mirrors the uncertainty of enforced disappearances. Many cases remain unresolved decades later, demonstrating the limits of legal, political, and forensic systems in their inability and/or unwillingness to deliver justice to the forcibly disappeared and their families. Such cases dramatize the chasm between epistemological truth, which can be known scientifically, and legal truth, which is what is acknowledged and recognized juridically. Law depends on documentation based on evidence from sources such as records, files, reports, witness statements, medical documents, and forensic investigations. However, the novel demonstrates how records are incomplete, institutions are compromised, and how archives conceal as much as they reveal. In Anil’s Ghost, enforced disappearance thrives on the manipulation, destruction, suppression, and denial of records, leading to legal systems contributing to the institutionalization of forgetting. It thus exposes the fragility of legal recognition and how in the context of enforced disappearance, the necropolitical state exercises necropower by erasing individuals from legal recognition and thereby the possibility of obtaining legal justice. 

In the face of such legal failure to deliver justice, Ondaatje’s novel insists on the ethics of memorialization, the importance of the recognition of the disappeared, and the ethical work accomplished by literary narratives in functioning as a parallel tribunal and by maintaining an alternative archive of enforced disappearance. Anil’s Ghost reveals that enforced disappearance is not only a human rights violation but a crisis of legal representation where evidence exists but cannot secure recognition within compromised state, legal, and political systems. By insisting on visibility and memorialization for the disappeared, which the state and the law withhold, Ondaatje’s novel itself becomes testimonial, enacting a form of witness that legal institutions cannot and would not facilitate.

Notes

[1] Here, it is worth signaling that the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) dealt with what happened during the civil war between the government and the LTTE, not the JVP. There was no LLRC that focused on the violence perpetrated by the JVP or the counterviolence of the state aimed at the JVP. The bheeshanaya does not refer to the war; it is a word used exclusively to refer to the violence in the south committed by the majority ethnicity on the majority ethnicity (the war was in the north and between the majority ethnicity and the minority ethnicity). Although the time period of Anil's Ghost overlaps with that of the civil war, the novel is primarily about the bheeshanaya. In other words, cases such as that of Sailor and others who faced enforced disappearance during the bheeshanaya have not been addressed by transitional-justice mechanisms.

[2] Cited in the “Acclaim” section of the novel.

[3] Note that “boru” is the Sinhala word for “lies,” and “The Light” is offered as the only pathway via which the dead can free themselves from their past and be reborn. However, entering The Light also necessitates forgetting, and in Karunatilaka’s novel, Sena and his revolutionary crew actively fight against such forgetting that generates political disenfranchisement.

[4] The distance between the commercial capital of Colombo and Kalutara, located south of Colombo on the western coast, is roughly 44 kilometers. While this distance may seem insignificant in the context of certain countries where cities are connected by highways and methods of fast public transportation, this was a considerable distance in a context where such highways and ease of travel did not exist and where emergency law necessitated the frequent enforcement of curfew periods and army checkpoints.

Works Cited

Babcock, David. “Professional Intimacies: Human Right and Specialized Bodies in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost." Cultural Critique, vol. 87, 2014, pp. 60–83. https://doi.org/10.5749/culturalcritique.87.2014.0060.

Burton, Antoinette. “Archive of Bones: Anil’s Ghost and the Ends of History.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, Mar. 2003, pp. 39–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989404381005.

Davis, Colin. “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” French Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, July 2005, pp. 373–79. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kni143.

Davis, Emily S. “Investigating Truth, History, and Human Rights in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World, Routledge, 2009, pp. 15–30.

Derrickson, Teresa. “Will the 'Un-Truth' Set You Free? A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost." Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 15, no. 2, Apr. 2004, pp. 131–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/10436920490452092.

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Editions Galilée, 1993. Collection La Philosophie En Effet.

Härting, Heike. “Diasporic Cross-Currents in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études En Littérature Canadienne, vol. 28, no. 1, 2003, pp. 43–70.

Herrick, Margaret CS. “Katabasis and the Politics of Grief in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 51, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 35–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989414553242.

Jayasinghe, Dharshani Lakmali. “Archival Narrative Justice in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive.” Humanities, vol. 14, no. 4, Mar. 2025. https://doi.org/10.3390/h14040074.

Karunatilaka, Shehan. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Penguin Books, 2022.

Luiselli, Valeria. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Coffee House Press, 2017.

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, vol. 44, no. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 107–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989409342158.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Duke University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478007227.

———. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40.

Neistat, Anna. Recurring Nightmare: State Responsibility for “Disappearances” and Abductions in Sri Lanka. Human Rights Watch, 2008, https://www.hrw.org/report/2008/03/05/recurring-nightmare/state-responsibility-disappearances-and-abductions-sri-lanka.

Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. Vintage Books, 2001. Vintage International.

“Only Justice Can Heal Our Wounds”: Listening to the Demands of Families of the Disappeared in Sri Lanka. ASA 37/5853/2017, Amnesty International, 2017, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa37/5853/2017/en/.

Ratti, Manav. “Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Aestheticization of Human Rights.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 35, 2004, pp. 121–39.

Scanlan, Margaret. “Anil's Ghost and Terrorism's Time." ANIL’S  Studies in the Novel, vol. 36, no. 3. pp 302–317, 2004.

Wood, James. “Writing About Writing About the Border Crisis.” The New Yorker, 28 Jan. 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/writing-about-writing-about-the-border-crisis.