“I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner”: Resisting the Exotic in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family

Abstract

In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan argues that while metropolitan audiences ostensibly embrace difference and celebrate the works of postcolonial writers, in reality, postcolonial difference is exoticized—a strategy by which the Other can be accepted without challenging the identity, culture, and conception of the metropolitan Self. However, Huggan also argues that postcolonial writers are aware that their texts are considered exotic, and while they realize that they must participate within this framework, they also develop strategies to resist this. In this paper, I argue that Michael Ondaatje Running in the Family, a memoir that is an attempt to come to terms with Ondaatje's experiences growing up in Sri Lanka, at once participates and critiques exoticism. Ondaatje recognizes how his memoir can be turned into a fetishized commodity (one of the ways through which exoticism works), and to resist this he deploys three strategies: requiring readers to consciously construct the text's meaning, thereby forcing them to take responsibility for their conclusions; confusing readers by avoiding any straight forward emotional response to his parents' failed marriage; and by making readers uncomfortable by drawing intimate connections between the Western literary canon and his family in Sri Lanka.