Trauma Narratives in Canadian Fiction: A Chronotopic Analysis of Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces and Michael Ondaatjes Anils Ghost

Patty Kelly If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation has invented a new literature, that of testimony. Eli Weisel In recent years, a redoubling of efforts in Europe, the United States, and Canada, to memorialize the Holocaust derives from a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the desire to preserve, for future generations, the stories of an aging population of survivors. Contemporary scholarship in trauma studies considers the recorded testimony of survivors in a range of non-fiction genresmemoir, autobiography, and biography to name a few. Under extreme conditions, however, some individuals are unable to construct the necessary memory schemes to accommodate catastrophic circumstances and construct coherent narratives which adhere to an integrated chronology (narrative memory). Paradoxically, fragments of the traumatic event manifest in unsettling, repetitive flashbacks, dreams, and behaviours resisting narrative structure. Recently, categories of post-Holocaust literature have expanded to include fictional texts from second-generation witnesses, proxy witnesses, and witnesses by adoption who contribute to the growing body of creative and imaginative narratives with a new generic category known as trauma fiction. Anne MichaelsFugitive Pieces and Michael Ondaatjes Anils Ghost are two such narratives. Written fifty years after the Second World War, Fugitive Pieces narrates the devastating impact of Holocaust atrocities on Jakob Beer, a child torn from his family and homeland, and Ben, a young professor and second-generation survivor. With this fictional account Michaels attempts to speak of devastating historical events and to offer a means of remembering ineffable acts that must never be forgotten. Her narrative bears witness to the survivor Jakobs struggles with his own memories of the Holocaust, as well as those of the proxy witness Ben, and investigates the flawed connections between truth, history, and memory. In this text metaphors contribute to the ambiguous and reiterative nature of survivors partial recollections and non-integrated memory schemes that erupt, unbidden, into the present and demand reconstruction. Michaels relies on the ambiguity of figurative language to produce a haunting poetic narrative that champions the resiliency of the human spirit. She builds textual striations, through the repetition of the figurative in tandem with the narrative, to represent Jakobs memories, his trauma, and his loss. The narrative accumulates slippages of time, where the past bumps up against the present, and gestures toward obscene remembrances buried in the mud of a bog, in the deposits of volcanic ash, and in the sediment of a river bed. The geologic layers of Biskupin, Zakynthos, and the Humber River in Toronto conceal memories within their compressed folds only to toss them up later and unsettle the narratives chronology. Just as Jakob emerges from his hiding place between plaster and beams (6), memories emerge from the other side of the gossamer wall, that thin wall between the living and the dead (31). Michaels resists an integrated, cohesive account of the Holocaust, while at the same time she holds history accountable. For those who experienced the d ghetto she reminds us that [c]omplicity is not sudden, though it occurs in an instant (162). Fugitive Pieces demonstrates the unique relationship between poetic ambiguity and the reiterative compulsions of pathologized memory as well as the tenuous and frayed connections between personal memory, cultural memory, and history. In Anils Ghost, Ondaatje grapples with civil war atrocities and human rights violations in late twentieth-century Sri Lanka. The verdant, lush countryside acts as backdrop for the narrative and stands in stark contrast to the sinister geopolitical landscape. Like Michaels, Ondaatje draws on poetic tropes to

describe geographic, geologic, and psychic landscapes worn with time and fractured by destructive human impulses. In Sri Lanka, as in Biskupin, the ground ruptures, reveals its scars, and tosses up the secrets of individuals and the atrocities of nations. Torture, mass graves, and roadside crucifixion comingle with the idyllic landscape where, as Ondaatje tells us, the words beautiful and dangerous differ by only one Sinhala syllable (192). In Fugitive Pieces and Anils Ghost the fraught and ambiguous history of cataclysmic events elides memory and produces trauma narratives. Trauma fiction In trauma fiction questions of what is remembered give way to the cultural and ethical concerns of how and why events are remembered. Cathy Caruth, in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, calls these concerns the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and the stories associated with it (4), and, she contends, the wounded voice of traumatic experience cries out and attempts to tell us, paradoxically, of haunting events that are both known and not known (4 italics original). Truth questions arise, not because of cultural and historical perceptions of the catastrophe as partial, indirect, or delayed, but rather because of the memorys insistent immediacy, its latent literality. The catastrophic nature of the event results in the survivors inability to witness the event in its entirety as it occurs, or to witness the event at great cost to oneself, in effect becoming ones own witness. As such, the crisis extends beyond the individuals possessed by an event, who often question their own dreams, hallucinations and insistent images, outward into the larger community of proxy witnesses, and results in ethical truth questions at the center of trauma research. The paradoxical nature of the truth of trauma questions the veracity of survivors memories and creates cultural, historical, and personal narratives at odds with each other. In her introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth explores the complex category of symptoms within the classification Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a diagnostic tool and classification system for mental health professionals, defines mental disorders, establishes categories of illnesses, and lists diagnostic criteria. Classified as an Anxiety Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is defined in the DSM in this way: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is characterized by the reexperiencing of an extremely traumatic event accompanied by symptoms of increased arousal and by avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma (DSM). The reiteration of uncontrollable compulsive details that surface during traumatic recollection struggle to provide access to memories hidden from conscious recall, and these unassimilated fragments return to reinscribe the original traumatic wound. Complex and paradoxical, recollections exhibit variously during sleep as dreams and nightmares and as intrusive flashbacks during waking hours. In the wounded psyche, the traumatic experience resides in the past and the present, in what is known and what is unknown. Pathologies of memory associated with PTSD include Dissociative Fugue classified as a Disorder Dissociative. The DSM tells us that [t]he essential feature of Dissociative Disorders is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception. The disturbance may be sudden or gradual, transient or chronic (DSM). Dissociative Fugue is characterized by sudden, unexpected travel away from home or ones customary place of work, accompanied by an inability to recall ones past and confusion about personal identity or the assumption of a new identity (DSM). Fugue is thought to represent a response to the overwhelming emotional trauma of an insurmountable crisis, and the state may last for days, months, or years, and protect the person from suicidal or homicidal impulses. The inclusion of PTSD in the DSM-III in 1980 and the emergence of trauma studies in the 1990s exemplify the textual negotiation of political, social, and scientific forces which result in new conceptions of the disruptive impact of traumatic events that fail to integrate into narrative memory. Caruth uncovers several recurring figures in texts from the disciplines of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory and suggests that these figures produce a literary dimension that extends beyond theory and thematic concerns to an enigmatic testimony that stubbornly bear[s] witness to some forgotten wound (5). In

these texts she uncovers the key figures departure, falling, burning and awakening. In this paper, I deploy terms from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and sociology to speak and listen through the gaps and unassimilated fragments of traumatic experience and find a location, perhaps uneasy and unsettled, and rightly so, in the domain of literature. For the purposes of this paper, I pursue the term diaspora, which shares some associations with Caruths departure, toward an investigation of time and place in trauma narratives. Diaspora studies contribute new terms such as Benedict Andersons imagined communities to describe a variety of transnational influences on complex networks within societies and cultures. I will interrogate the chronotopic characteristics of diaspora when viewed as a cataclysmic uprooting of individuals, whose lives are torn asunder and scattered to new locations within, and without, the borders of the homeland. In addition to fugue and diaspora the term, anomie, may prove helpful in a chronotopic investigation of memory in trauma narratives. Associated with French sociologist mile Durkheim, anomie refers to a state of society in which rules and standards of belief and conduct have weakened or broken down or an analogous condition in an individual, characterized by hopelessness, disorientation, loss of belief and sense of purpose, and social isolation (Anomie 1). Fugitive Pieces and Anils Ghost, which I refer to as trauma narratives, produce the chronotopic motif I call trauma-time. The convergence of trauma studies with M.M. Bakhtins theory of time-space (chronotope) assists the identification of trauma-time and three chronotopes diaspora and fugue in Fugitive Pieces and anomie in Anils Ghost, which operate and cooperate within that motif. Trauma theory provides the terms with which to analyze these chronotopes. In Fugitive Pieces, Michaels metaphoric discourse, an accretion of history and cataclysm, repeats a gradual instant where every moment is two moments (138,140,143) and her repeated phrases, an accretion of language, mimic the geologic formations and the reiterative traumatic event. Images and metaphors rise like bruises (19) on Jakobs skin, like rocks in a fallow field that deny the pressure of the earth. Each spring the rocks work their way to the surface, just as Jakob resurfaces from behind the wallpaper in the cupboard (6) where he had been deliberately hidden. A seven-year old bog-boy alone in Biskupin he submits to burial and rebirth, as a means of survival, planting himself in the ground like a turnip (8), walking out into the depths of a river so that only the tip of his nose and mouth breach the surface. Again, and again, Jakob emerges, as his past emerges in his present, and he figures himself as the afterbirth of earth (5). Jakob, flung from behind the wall, crosses forest, bog, and riverbed while the rim of the saucer on the floor, and the spray of buttons, little white teeth (7), echo the brutal deaths of his parents and the disappearance of his sister Bella. The murders occur while he hides in a closet and the loss of his beloved sister Bella, at the time of these murders, haunts him: I did not witness the most important events of my life, Jakob laments. My deepest story must be told by a blind man, a prisoner of sound. From behind a wall, from underground (17). Jakobs saviour, Athos Roussos, spirits him out of Poland and into the safety of Greece, hidden in his trousers, while the memory of Bella clings to him and the three become Russian dolls. I inside Athos, Bella inside me (14). The traumatic scattering of survivors, such as Jakob, results in a fragmented Jewish community, a diaspora. The present and the past intersect in the peat bogs of Biskupin, on the Greek island of Zakynthos, through Toronto ravines, and along the banks of the Humber River in Toronto. Through archaeological and geological places and metaphors, Michaels constructs time as vertical layers: a shelf of limestone; the silted mud of a riverbed; eskers of ash. Time surfaces like Tollund Man, like the bog-boy Jakob, and like the second narrator Ben, a post-Holocaust proxy witness. Memories in tandem with time are yanked through the scalp and tossed up like scattered household artifacts on the Toronto river bank. Jakob and Athos travel from Biskupin and Greece, sites of antiquity and preservation, to Toronto a city of immigrants where almost everyone has come from elsewhere (89). Athos and Jakob explore Toronto ravines while discussing the ancient geologic past situated beneath their feet and Jakob tries to make sense of his immigrant present, in his current locale. Years later, Jakob publishes his first volume of poetry, Groundwork, the title a testament to the metaphors of earth and excavation, memory and retrieval that pervade Fugitive Pieces. Michaels assigns Athos, Jakob, and Ben literary professions and through their writing lays down a rich polyphonic narrative: chapter titles from Part I reappear in Part II; italicized

writings offer geologic details from Athos texts, lines of poetry from Jakobs published writings, and Jakobs childhood reminiscences of Bella. Trauma-time motif Bakhtins concept of the chronotope offers insight into the interrelationships of time, space, and history, and expresses the inseparability of these dimensions where [t]ime, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history ( 84). The chronotope, Bakhtin argues, produces generic characteristics that in turn reinforce generic forms through their iteration and reiteration. These recurrent representations establish generic traditions and constitute generic conventions. Each chronotope carries alongside it any number of minor chronotopes and a motif may have a chronotope of its own and chronotopes co-exist as threads or story lines woven throughout, sometimes apparent and at the forefront of the narrative, other times receding into the background. Minor chronotopes in narratives may contradict, oppose, and replace one another. In order to identify the features of trauma-time, Bakhtins identification of adventure-time in the Greek Romance warrants a close look. The most important constitutive category of the Greek romance is the chronotope adventure-time. In the Greek romance, adventure-time is not measured off in the novel and does not add up to biographical time. There exists, Bakhtin claims, two moments in adventure-time, the arousal of passion and its satisfaction in marriage with an extratemporal hiatus between these two moments which cannot be measured and clocked in the usual biographical sense (90). The hero and heroine satisfy their passion, in marriage, after a number of adventures yet they remain as youthful as when the passion was first ignited. Quotidian and historical cycles are absent, although the characters may be surrounded by historical sites and objects. Where the Greek romance produces adventure-time, trauma narratives produce trauma-time. Adventure-time and trauma-time share some distinguishing characteristics such as a broad and varied geographical landscape; however, trauma time lacks the encyclopedic qualities, and most importantly the extratemporal hiatus. All of the adventures strung together in the Greek romance bear no relationship to real time; there are no internal limits. Adventure-time is fraught with a series of occurrences that come about suddenly, and at just that moment, through fate, and chance and they do not become the days and hours of a human life. These hours and days leave no trace, and therefore, one may have as many of them as one likes (94). The heroic deeds of adventure-time, which serve to glorify the hero, exist as deeds of necessity and survival in trauma-time. The Greek adventure requires vast amounts of space at once in proximity to and at a distance from plot encounters and meetings. Encountersabductions, pursuits, escapescover vast unquantifiable spaces, immense expanses that occupy regions and countries, and cross oceans and continents (102). Each geographic locale exists unto itself and not in relation to the whole, much in the same way that time exists apart from history and remains unmeasurable in terms of quotidian cycles. Customs and daily events are not articulated in everyday terms. Instead, the unusual, the rare, the oddity is expanded upon and thus objects and the spaces they occupy are presented in isolation without connections to each other. The objects are as random and unexpected as the adventures themselves: they are made of the same material, they are congealed suddenlys, adventures turned into things, offspring of the same chance (102). Spaces, then, in adventure-time take on an aura of randomness and rarity that produce a sudden and random temporal structure. The peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness, which Caruth identifies as characteristic of a traumatic event, yields an equally peculiar temporal structure, trauma-time, in Fugitive Pieces. I suggest that this narrative, produces trauma-time and chronotopes emerge that bear investigation through an application of the distinctive features identified in current trauma theory. A traumatic event not fully experienced as it occurs creates the following characteristics of trauma-time: temporal delay; temporal paradoxes; fundamental dislocation of time and space; refusal of historical boundaries; possession by the past; repetition compulsion of flashbacks and nightmares; insistent vivid and precise return of details. As

we will see, the temporal structure of Anils Ghost exhibits similar dislocations, delays, and paradoxes characteristic of trauma-time and the anomie chronotope. In trauma narratives extratemporal moments exist; however, there is no extratemporal hiatus. Instead the reiteration and reinscribing of the original moment of trauma insistently intrudes, delays psychological maturation and memory integration, while biological maturation proceeds uninterrupted. To rephrase this in Michaels language, History and memory share events; that is they share time and space. Every moment is two moments (138). Reiteration and reinscribing of the originary moment stalls or delays psychological maturation as biological and biographical maturation proceed: children mature; adults age; genealogies progress. The social rituals that propel persons forward in the novels Bakhtin exploresGreek Romance, Idyll, Rabelaisian novelcease to be of concern in trauma narratives where the normalized measures and evaluative tools of comparison are discarded and replaced with measures of survivaldiaspora, fugue, and anomie. Diaspora chronotope Diaspora, a dispersion of people, was first applied to the Jewish community during the Babylonian exile (beginning in 587 B.C.E.) and in the modern period to Jews living outside of Palestine. Originally the term referred to a forced migration, with no recourse of return to the homeland. Now, diaspora studies include all persons identified with a widely spread migrant group, their distinctive identities, and their imaginings of home and homeland where a sense of belonging sustains or maintains a collective identity. Diaspora studies interrogate the complexity and diversity of communities and critique the transnational migrational experiences of individuals and communities and the associated terminology: scatter, migrant, exile, margin, and refugee, to name a few. The Shoah, a cataclysmic rupture in history, scatters the genealogies of the survivors across continents and produces a complex, fragmented communitythe diaspora. In Fugitive Pieces, and Anils Ghost, trauma-time produces the chronotope diaspora which renders place and home as displacement and dislocation. Jakobs sudden expulsion, as a child, from his home and his homeland produces a traumatic event not limited to an experience of migration. In the diaspora chronotope doors burst open, buttons scatter on the floor like teeth. This spray of buttons, little white teeth (7), stands as the diasporic metaphor where the subject is a spray and time is burst, ripped, torn, sudden, and memories are yanked through the scalp (13). In the diaspora chronotope, place is often an enclosed or submerged space: in the wall; in the drowned city; in the bog; in the forest as a turnip, wherever the spray lands on the ground. Later in the novel, when Jakob is an adult, his first wife Alex returns home and, finding him already in bed, lies down so that the lines of her body mimic his. The paragraph begins I draw, and each succeeding sentence begins, I feel, I pull, I work, I circle, I imagine, as Jakob describes touching her hair, her skin, massaging her back, as she lies fully clothed, her limbs outline mine under the blanket now Im inside Athoss coat (145). The repetition of I, combined with the tactile experience of Alexs body, creates a rhetorically charged, intimate space. The strategic placement of now creates a rupture in present time, compresses past with present, and brings about a temporal collapse. The reader, launched backward in time and space, recalls Jakobs escape from Biskupin, I inside Athos, Bella inside me (14). The temporal collapse achieves an uncanny spatial collapse and places Athos (and Bella) in bed with husband and wife and Jakobs shadow past which never happened (17 emphasis added) intrudes into his present. As trauma-time progresses the individual may develop new relationships and create a new home and homeland. Biological and biographical maturation proceed and the traumatic rupture may narrow and, to some extent, heal; however, as Jakob laments, I did not witness the most important events of my life (17), as he continues to be possessed by the event not fully witnessed at the time.

Fugue chronotope As we have seen, fugue, a Dissociative Disorder, exhibits as one or more episodes of amnesia in which the inability to recall some or all of ones past and complete or partial loss of ones identity occur with sudden, unexpected, purposeful travel away from home (DSM emphasis added). Instances of psychological conflict and depression accompany fugue, and all Dissociative Disorders operate as extreme defence mechanisms and include loss of memory for important personal details. The traumatic event brings about a psychological departure, which manifests as the inability to recall and integrate the past occurrence, and, at other times, as a physical departure away from the location of the traumatic event. In Fugitive Pieces, Jakobs older sister Bella has outgrown their hiding place in the wall behind the closet and in an un-witnessed event disappears, never to be seen again. Jakob discovers the bodies of his parents, murdered during the Nazi soldiers invasion of their home, but Bellas fate remains forever unknown. Thus, for Jakob, Bella becomes a spectre, a ghost, whose disappearance haunts Jakob, and paradoxically this un-witnessed event resurfaces, unbidden. Jakobs sudden and unexpected travel away from his home triggered by the murder of his parents and the disappearance of his beloved sister Bella I did not witness the most important events of my life (17)continues to haunt Jakob. As Jakob frames it, each time a memory or a story slinks away, it takes more of me with it (144). His new, enforced identity as a refugee orphan causes psychological conflict, survivors guilt, and periods of dissociation. Later, in the safety of Greece, cared for by Athos, Bellas disappearance continues to haunt Jakob and he experiences depression, the isolation of traumatic memory, and a fugue state: Athos didnt understand, as I hesitated in the doorway, that I was letting Bella enter ahead of me, making sure she was not left behind. . . . Awake at night, Id hear her breathing or singing next to me in the dark, and I felt her touch on my back, my shoulders, my hair (31). During sleep Jakobs repetitive nightmares manifest as a return to the site of trauma: Night after night, I endlessly follow Bellas path from the front door of my parents house. In order to give death a place. This becomes my task. I collect facts, trying to reconstruct events in minute detail (139). Jakob, aware of the intrusive nature of his traumatic memory, describes his inability to resolve his dissociative disorder. Locked within the solitary confines of traumatic memory Jakob tells us, I couldnt turn my anguish from that precise moment of death. I was focused on that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinityperpetrator, victim, witness (140). His failure to integrate the haunting trinity dislocates his sense of self and impedes his relationship with Alex. His obsession with that precise moment results in imagined travels to the site of the traumatic event and the double-voiced refrain, every moment is two moments, laments personal losses and historys betrayal of humankind. In the fugue chronotope Jakobs psychological conflict causes a fundamental dislocation of time and space and compels him to pathologically retrace the events that propelled the diasporic journey and, at times, to imagine impossible details of a non-existent life with Bella. In the trauma-time motif, however, unlike Bakhtins adventure-time, time is connected to history, and pursuits and abductions leave a discernible trace. The young boy Jakob begins his new life in Greece with his koumbaros, Athos, while Bellas unresolved abduction and assumed murder scar Jakobs inner landscape and pollute the geographic landscape of Biskupin. Anomie chronotope Whereas dissociative fugue may operate in part to protect an individual from potential self-destructive behaviour and suicidal tendencies, Durkheim found a correlation between suicide rates and social indicators of anomie and identified anomie as one of the four causes of suicide. A Dictionary of Sociology states that at this point, anomie becomes almost a psychological state of disorder and meaninglessness, rather than the structural characteristic of society and social order that Durkheim originally intended (Anomie 2). Where there is a lessening of normative regulations individuals challenge or ignore social norms and in the individual, according to Durkheim, anomie expresses, in the extreme, as suicide. Social and individual lawlessness characterize the anomie chronotope. The sense of immediacy and suddenness, present in the diaspora chronotope, is lacking. Laws are not violated suddenly, nor as a result of an immediate rupture, nor is their violation unexpected. Lawlessness becomes normalized in the

anomie chronotope; as a result the temporal and spatial configurement differs from diaspora, which emerges at the point of rupture when a hiatus opens up. The anomie chronotope operates where the social infrastructure has crumbled, fragmentation and isolation inhibit trust in relationships, and lawlessness reigns. In short, isolation, fragmentation, and alienation characterize the anomie chronotope. The chronotopic structure anomie shares distinctive features with Bakhtins vertical chronotope (158), which contains within it the result of a struggle between living historical time and the extratemporal other-worldly ideal. The vertical, as it were, compresses within itself the horizontal, which powerfully thrusts itself forward (158). Bakhtin asserts that within this vertical chronotopic construction there is an acute feeling for the epochs contradictions, long overripe; this is, in essence, a feeling for the end of an epoch (156). Divisions that characterize horizontal time, earlier and later, compress into a vertical hierarchy and result in temporal paradoxes where all time is perceived as simultaneous (vertical); however, the individuals who populate this world bear the distinctive marks of trauma and anomie. In Anils Ghost, a deep sense of isolation and fragmentation inhabit characters that remain, with one exception, citizens of their originary country. A brutal civil war in Sri Lanka results in widespread alienation and dislocation amongst the peoplesSinhalese and Tamiland throughout the Teardrop Island. Each person, concerned with their own survival, becomes the marginal, the minority, the migrant, inside the borders of a nation gone mad. Intolerant warring factions silence the Sri Lankans and ravage the countryside with a casual sense of massacre (283), as human rights organizations fight to expose the murderous campaigns. Set in the midst of political terrorism and human rights violations, Anils Ghost reproduces no partisan political rhetoric, supports no political claims, and offers no solutions to the civil war turmoil that engulfed Sri Lanka during the 1980s and the 1990s. Anil Tessera, a forensic pathologist working for an international human rights organization, returns to her birthplace, Sri Lanka, to search for verifiable traceable evidence of government involvement in the torture, disappearance, and mass murder of its citizens. The nations contested ground becomes the broader landscape of national and individual dislocation where material remains testify to an insidious terror that saturates the ground and the national psyche. Buried amidst bones of antiquity the unquiet recent remains of the disappeared refuse silencing and offer a form of testimony that living witnesses cannot provide. Two estranged brothers Sarath, a pathologist, and Gamini, a doctor, share a conversation about the war in their country and what each of them had done during it and what each would not do (285). Silenced and alienated, they agree they will not leave Sri Lanka in spite of everything. No Westerner would understand the love they had for their country (285). In the end, Anil, cast in the role of Westerner, the outsider, flees the country and escapes with her life, while Sarath is less fortunate. One morning at the hospital, Gamini looks through the days photographic record of bodies, their faces covered to conceal their identity, and recognizes, on Saraths brutalized body, the gash of scar on the side of your elbow you got crashing a bike on the Kandy Hill. This scar I gave you hitting you with a cricket stump (287), the innocent scars of childhood. Ondaatje represents anomie as a social state, war torn Sri Lanka, and as an individual condition, a psychological state of disorder and meaninglessness. This condition exhibits in the amphetamine-addicted doctor, Gamini; in Saraths wife who takes her own life; and in the alcoholic gem cutter Ananda, whose wife, Sarissa, numbers among the countless disappeared. In Anils Ghost, where all that was left of law was a belief in an eventual revenge towards those who had power (56), the horizontal axis of time is replaced with a vertical world populated with individuals who are, according to Bakhtin, filled with a powerful desire to escape this world (157 Bakhtin). Ananda, in his desire to escape the trauma of his wife Sarissas disappearance, drinks to excess and, while working on the skeleton Sailors facial reconstruction, tries to take his own life. Anandas alcoholism and Gaminis drug abuse blur the temporal divisions earlier and later and contribute to the geologic temporal collapse in a country where the bones of the disappeared are buried with ancient skeletal remains. After years abroad, Anil returns to her homeland and ruminates on the scale of brutality and human violence in Sri Lanka: In a fearful nation, public sorrow was stamped down by the climate of uncertainty. . . If people you knew

disappeared, there was a chance they might stay alive if you did not cause trouble. This was the scarring psychosis in the country (56). When applied to Anils Ghost, Benedict Andersons imagined communitynation and nationnessbecomes poisoned and infected and results in a state of anomie. Andersons assertion, that a citizen within the borders of a nation has no idea of what his fellow citizens are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity (26), takes on new and threatening meaning in the context of civil war. Within the closed borders of Sri Lanka a climate of fear and distrust pervades all social interactions and all narratives risk silencing: Youre six hours away from Colombo and youre whispering (54 emphasis original). In a nation divided, the government equates narration, citizens telling stories of their missing family members, with insurgency and treason. Andersons imagined citizen, the newspaper reader, who observes exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life (35-36 Anderson), whereas, with the anonymous citizens of Sri Lanka truth bounced between gossip and vengeance. Rumour slipped into every car and barbershop (54 Ondaatje) and anonymity becomes a protective device for oneself and ones family in a country where state-run newspapers reject narratives of dissent and reproduce and disseminate state sanctioned ideologies. The metaphoric prose of Michaels and Ondaatje is often referred to as fragmentary and in trauma narratives these poetic fragments resist recuperation, and maintain their ethos of fugitive pieces, dissident scraps that assert the reiterative ambiguity of their trajectory. Both authors connect the ambiguity of poetic tropes to the pathologies of memory and locate compulsive repetitive actions in geographic sites rich with geologic stratification. Individuals psychologically damaged and struggling with their fragmented histories, read and record the wounded geography of persons and places. Whether in a peat bog in Biskupin or a grove in Sri Lanka, these trauma narratives preoccupations with place and memory, truth and history entangle with the reiterative elements of poetry to produce landscapes where history and memory share time and space. Each palimpsestic text engages with the paradoxes of inscription and reinscription on the memory, on the body, and on the landscape. Yet there is a recuperative impulse in both these novels. In the final chapter Distance, Anandas narrative achieves integration during the restoration of a massive Buddha. Ananda overcomes incomprehensible memories and anomie to achieve the reconstruction of the BuddhaOndaatjes poignant metaphor for the reconstruction of the psyche. As Ananda performs the ancient Buddhist ceremony, Ondaatje allows the construction and reconstruction of the two Buddhas one of scarred grey rock, one of white plaster (304-05), to signal the dual processes of creation and repair in Sri Lanka. Ananda returns to the world of the living, reconstructs the vandalized Buddha, and paints the eyes onto the new white plaster. As Ananda performs the ancient Buddhist Ntra Mangala ceremony, Ondaatje allows the construction and reconstruction of the two Buddhas to signal the dual processes of creation and repair in Sri Lanka. As the ceremony nears completion, Ananda, working alongside his nephew, felt the boys concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world (307). In Fugitive Pieces, the adult Jakob picks up the pieces of his fractured life and rediscovers the capacity for love and personal peace. Thus restored, he speaks to his unborn child: My son, my daughter: May you never be deaf to love (195). In both novels the poetic trope recedes and gives way to dialogic prose and this transition articulates a translation from the field of the solitary poetic trope into the social realm of integrated memories and actions. Michaels and Ondaatje grapple with presenting the unspeakable in fictional narratives and choose to do so by relaxing the generic boundaries between prose and poetry. Anils Ghost and Fugitive Pieces demonstrate the unique relationship between poetry and fictional trauma narratives and the surprising power of metaphor to effectively and sensitively portray the fraught relationships between history, truth, and memory without becoming monologic. Trauma theorists search for an opening, a liminal space, to accommodate past, present, and future generations, presences and absences, spectres and spirits seeking a community willing to listen to their stories. Traumas become narratable and survivors stories listened to

when we cease to define individuals and landscapes as decayed, polluted, and shameful, and begin instead, to investigate our relationships with these witnesses, listening for what they have to say, not to put to rest an historical atrocity, rather to be attentive to whom and what, historically, we have been unable and unwilling to listen. Trauma work is also memory work, and the testimony of the survivor does not, in its articulation, determine meaning, and thus close a familial, cultural, or historical chapter. Rather, the speaking of the trauma opens meaning, is productive of meaning, and necessitates a willingness on the part of the listener to bear witness to the catastrophic event, to untangle the narrative knots, and to listen through the gaps and ruptures, which takes precedence over any desire for finality. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Cultural Criticism and Society Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT P (1967):17-34. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th ed. Text Rev. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. University of British Columbia. 6 April 2006. <http://online.statref.com/Document/Document.aspx?DocId=7&FxId=37&Scroll=47&Index=0& SessionId=68C2F5UJEMBOVQJX> Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. London; New York: Verso, 1991. Anomie 1. A Dictionary of Psychology. Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of British Columbia. 9 June 2006 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t87.e486> Anomie 2. A Dictionary of Sociology. John Scott and Gordon Marshall. Oxford University Press 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of British Columbia. 7 June 2006 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t88.e77> Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Caruth, Cathy. Introduction. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 312 . Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Diaspora. A Dictionary of Sociology. John Scott and Gordon Marshall. Oxford University Press 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of British Columbia. 8 June 2006 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t88.e582> Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. 1996. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999. Ondaatje, Michael. Anils Ghost. 2000. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. Weisel, Elie. The Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration. Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University. Evanston Ill: Northwestern UP, 1977.