ABSTRACT
The fort is in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Built by the Portuguese in 1560, rebuilt by the Dutch in 1686, surrendered to the British in 1705, half demolished in 1994 during the war between the Tamils and Sinhalese, at the time when Ondaatje publishes Running in the Family in 1983 the fort is still intact and serves as the temporary residence of his politician uncle assigned to dealing with race riots. It is in this secluded if beleaguered fort that Ondaatje assembles his story-part fact, part rumour, the two interlocking like the hull of a ship. The metaphor is apt. In its terrestrial echo, the fort, whose very existence assumes the ship, Ondaatje sets the stage for the trading of anecdotes and blurred memories. Like the ebb and fl ow of the ocean that wash this arrested world, Ondaatje seeks to “swell” anecdote and memory with chronology and interlineary gloss; interlocking them “as if assembling the hull of a ship.”1
