Word: sri
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Although Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, he moved to England and then to Canada, where he studied and became a Canadian citizen...
Ondaatje also wrote a semi-fictional memoir, titled “Running in the Family,” about his childhood in Sri Lanka...
...title poem, which at some 70 pages could be described as an attempt to resurrect the genre of the poetic epic. The shorter works are slight and awkward; Alexander’s fulsome imagery is suffocating in the absence of meaning. It is only in “The Sri Lankan Loxodrome” that he creates a thematic and narrative canvas vast enough to contain his ambition. The result, however, is decidedly...
...treatise. Alexander provides a glossary at the end, but this covers only the most obscure and technical areas of his vocabulary. As overbearing and unnecessary as his lexical tendencies can be, if they’re at home anywhere, it’s in the narrative monologue of a Sri Lankan sailor, Loxodrome, “whose commission is to de-poison sea snakes / to somehow bottle their arteries in clouds... [his] command / to capture them as beasts / whose colour is aurulent and xanthic.” Throughout, the atmosphere is ethereal; yet the narrator’s fantastical adventures...
Alexander’s inspiration seems to be culled as much from the natural beauty of Sri Lanka as the sufferings of its people, who have endured 26 years of civil war. As an African American writer in the tradition of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, Alexander sometimes goes astray in his characterization of the post-colonial experience, misguidedly evoking a universalized disposition in Africa as in South Asia. He transposes this affinity onto his narrator, who makes the reverse gesture: “I am Mahayana & of Africa / both Sri Lankan & non-Sri Lankan...