Running in the Family: The Karapothas Summary & Analysis

Ondaatje includes writings from famous English authors and artists. Edward Lear writes that Ceylon is gorgeous, but its people are “bothery-idiotic.” D.H. Lawrence writes that Ceylon is nice to see but ultimately unlivable. Leonard Woolf states, “All jungles are evil.” Ondaatje writes, “I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner.” He sits in the heat of midday and reflects that this same heat “drove Englishmen crazy,” such as D.H. Lawrence, who apparently hated the six weeks he spent in Ceylon in 1922. The day before, Ondaatje’s own children grew grouchy and vicious toward each other because of the heat.

Ondaatje reflects that Ceylon has always had too many foreigners, particularly the Europeans who came and robbed the island of its cinnamon. Ship captains used to spread cinnamon on their decks so that passengers could “smell Ceylon” even when they were miles offshore. They saw Ceylon as a “paradise to be sacked.” Amidst the paradise, there are also multitudes of deadly plants, though this remained hidden from most Europeans’ view. As the Europeans encroached, the “island hid its knowledge” and the Ceylon’s native people fled the cities with their rituals and ceremonies, hiding themselves deep inland. Ondaatje thinks that the sailor Robert Knox, imprisoned by a local king for 20 years in the 1600s, was one of the few foreigners who truly understood Ceylon.

Ondaatje muses that the Sinhalese created the most beautiful alphabet in all the world. It resembles Sanskrit but is composed of curving lines rather than straight, since straight pen strokes sliced through the brittle leaves used as parchment. Ondaatje loves learning to write when he is five, but as a teenager writing becomes a punishment for rebellious actions, and literature becomes a torment rather than a freedom. In the 5th century BCE, folk poems celebrating real and mythological women were scratched on the walls of an evil king’s fortress. In 1971, captured insurgents secretly wrote revolutionary poems on the walls of their university-turned-prison-camp.

Ondaatje spends hours with a historical librarian who compiled a book of Insurgency writings and photographs of charcoal drawings down by a young insurgent. Most of the insurgents were teenagers, and thousands were killed by the police and military and thrown into the river. The librarian’s book is the only record of much of their work. The librarian tells Ondaatje about his friend, a “powerful and angry poet,” who wrote, “Don’t talk to me about Matisse […] talk to me instead about the culture generally— / how the murderers were sustained by the beauty robbed of savages [.]”