Date of Award

5-23-2022

Publication Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing

Keywords

Canadian-Sri Lankan writers;Memory;Nostalgia;Trauma

Supervisor

Nicole Markotić

Abstract

This thesis analyzes three Canadian Sri Lankan writers’ representations of “Home” in Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, The Boat People by Sharon Bala and Anil’s Ghost also by Ondaatje. Most of the novels capture some of the “crucial junctures” in Sri Lankan history that intersect with political, ethnic, and national conflict; and how traversing these intersections causes trauma in the characters. Each writer in their text examines Sri Lankan history from a distance, while renegotiating their characters’ ties to their homeland. I examine existing theory by Susan Stanford Friedman and Vijay Agnew as they define what a home is, and look at displacement and belonging simultaneously to examine what they have to say about the home as a construct. In my thesis, I explore how each writer reinvigorates what “home” means to their characters, via the fictional representations of their emotional and expatriate longings, through memory, trauma and nostalgia. I particularly focus on these four texts by referring to Marianne Hirsch’s discussion of “postmemory” and Edward Mallot’s theory examining the role of witness writing in each text. Finally, I consider the role of the body in transferring memory and trauma, both in the representations of literal bodies of slain characters, but also through the recollected memory of forebears, and how those familial predecessors transfer history by creating witnesses to their memories and trauma.

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