Identity And Exile In Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient

The aim of this paper is analyze identity and exile in Michael Ondaatje’s The English

Patient from a postcolonial and postmodern perspective through the concept of nationalism, and national identity, emphasizing culture, colonialism, travelling, exploration and space/place, with reference to the theories of Frantz Fanon and Homi

Bhaba. The paper will mainly focus on the erasure of the national identities and selves of a group of European explorers, scientist and spies. Even though these scientists’ mission is to map the desert, they can hardly achieve it. The desert is the metaphor of their unreliable national identities that are fragmented and varied because of their traumatic personal experiences in this non-native landscape and culture.

Just as in The Wretched of the Earth Fanon insists on a sense of national identity of national consciousness that gives form to “that revolutionary capital which is the people” so a loss of that identity can be the foundation of trauma. The predicament of exile can in itself be accompanied by the sense of oppression, and of injustice.

The politics of one’s country and home is a dimension that has been explored in many facets in

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

In The English Patient, the space of exile is the war-torn landscape as the allies move up into northern Italy at the end of the Second World War. The novel takes place in a deserted Italian villa named villa San Giroloma and in the Sahara desert, Canada, America, England and Asia. All these countries are represented by bringing together characters from various nations with various identities and negotiating their multicultural zones. The aforementioned villa is later converted into a war hospital. The novel is a confluence of four characters Hana, a Canadian born Italian nurse, Caravaggio, a spy and a thief who is Hana’s father’s friend, Almasy the titular character who also happens to be her well-wisher and Kip, an Indian Sikh who is posted at

In Ondaatje’s novel identity becomes a textual construct, as its characters perceive themselves not so much through their gender, race or culture, but through their experience. They appear in the narratives that have the form of memories or stories told to others, and are defined by the shifts in their individual time, space, speech, rather than by belonging to a certain social group.

As an expatriate writer the author brings out transnational identities and cross-cultural meeting across the barriers. Multiculturalism like Indian, British and Canadian is one of the aspects dealt with in the novel. Two Canadians in the villa Hana and Caravaggio, the Greek Almasy and the

Indian Kip meet and form a relationship. In the personal recounts of the four occupants of the villa, Ondaatje ingeniously asserts the notion that all people are creatures of the past and tries to define future events accordingly by incorporating a variety of nationalistic themes into the novel. While depicting the last stages of the war, Ondaatje investigates the perception