Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and the “familia-graphic” gaze

ABSTRACT

In Running in the Family Michael Ondaatje plays the “family history detective” as he searches for his ancestry in Sri Lanka. This article explores the workings of family memory and the diasporic imagination as it emerges from both the colonial archive and the oral histories of his relatives in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. It argues that the text’s “familia-graphic” gaze reveals how “evidence” of inherited material culture, while touchable and concrete, remains ambiguous and interpretive. Through close analysis of both the text and images within the book, the article shows that a “familia-graphic” gaze is directed at Sri Lanka, its colonial history, and Ondaatje’s ancestors. This archaeological approach to family history differentiates between the role of the map and photograph in prompting familia-graphic memory as it seeks to piece together the traces of family, memory, and place held within the maps and photographs scattered throughout Running in the Family.

KEYWORDS:

• Family history
• Michael Ondaatje
• Sri Lanka
• photography
• maps
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Cummins

Joseph Cummins is a scholar of literature and music. He is the author of The ‘Imagined Sound’ of Australian Literature and Music (2019) and co-author of Reckoning with the Past: Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australian Literature (with Ashley Barnwell, 2019). He has also written numerous articles on sound in literature, and serves as co-editor of The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Ashley Barnwell

Ashley Barnwell is a sociologist at the University of Melbourne. She is author of Critical Affect: The Politics of Method (2020) and co-editor of Research Methods for Autobiography Studies (2019). She writes about sociological aspects of memory, emotion, and narrative and is working on a project about family secrets.