We have become familiar with disappearances as a form of state terrorism. Someone of German descent can hardly think of the politics of disappearance without being reminded of the infamous Night and Fog Decree (Nacht-und-Nebel-Erlass), designed by Adolf Hitler and Wilhelm Keitel.² Established in 1941, the Decree initially targeted the resistance in the occupied territories and contained secret directives to kidnap suspicious persons in order to deport them to Germany without leaving any trace. Family and friends of the disappeared were left completely in the dark. Over 7000 people were disappeared at the time; many received death sentences while others perished as a result of random killings, illness and starvation. Explicitly designed by Hitler with the goal of an instant, yet enduring, intimidation of the population by terror, this first systematic politics of disappearance in the twentieth century was soon extended to include Nazi raids on the homes of Jewish, Roma and Sinti citizens as well as political opponents and the mentally ill. Eventually, this state terrorism resulted in the systematic disappearance of citizens into the camps and gas chambers, with the genocide of Jews, Roma and Sinti.

Lifted from none other than Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, the term Nacht und Nebel was later also used in the abbreviation NN to include a reference to nullum nomen, that is, nameless. From its inception, the politics of disappearance thus operated with a double strategy: to erase the very existence and name of the disappeared person and to intimidate the population with a hitherto unknown form of invisible terror. Decades later, this Night-and-Fog-Decree became the model for the systematically implemented politics of disappearance in Latin American countries, predominately Guatemala, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, a politics that can be related back directly to the post-war immigration of former Nazis to the Americas. In Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War,Reference Simpson³ Christopher Simpson describes the CIA’s infamous use of Nazis for post-war intelligence and the sheltering of many officers of the German SS. It was the CIA that evacuated Nazi war criminals and collaborators through ‘rat lines’ in Southern Europe and relocated them in South America. Later, some of these former Nazis became involved in the design of disappearances in their host countries. Training torturers in Argentina and other Latin American countries, the School of the Americas was well known to have recruited former Nazis, including Klaus Barbie, the infamous ‘Butcher of Lyon’. In Chile, Paul Schäfer Schneider founded the Colonia Dignidad⁴ that was used by the Chilean secret police – the DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) – as a torture and detention centre. In 2005, Schäfer Schneider was officially charged in Chile with the disappearance of political activists.⁵ I mention these examples because they indicate the transference that I bring to the topic as someone born in Germany after the Second World War. The knowledge of the disappearances during the Nazi dictatorship inevitably belongs to the multidirectional memories and affects that colour my reactions to disappearances in other historical contexts.

One of the cruellest aspects of the politics of disappearing people is the haunting it induces in those who are left behind. ‘Where there is no grave, we must go on mourning,’ said Ruth Klüger in her Holocaust memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Weiter leben. Eine Jugend, 1992; English translation published in 2001). Yet, in the case of disappearances, even mourning is coloured by impossibility. How can one truly mourn without evidence of existence or death? And yet, people go on mourning and searching for signs of evidence, like the Chilean women in Patricio Guzman’s documentary, Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la Luz, 2010) who have continued for decades to search for the bones of their disappeared loved ones in the vicinity of one of the Pinochet regime’s concentration camps in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Disappearances in dictatorships are designed to prevent the formation of a concrete public memory with traceable evidence of state violence and terrorism. The very knowledge of disappearances instills a blank terror, operating as a tool of intimidation for the entire population. Yet, paradoxically, the politics of disappearance simultaneously relies on the formation of detailed memories attached to the precise hour, day or location of the disappearance, memories that can eventually be mobilised for a transnational memory of resistance.

I will approach the politics of disappearance by tracing its effects on the subjectivity of those affected by it. As subjects of disappearances I consider not only the disappeared themselves, but also those who search and grieve for them, as well as the populations most directly affected by the terror of disappearances. Finally, I will consider the impact of disappearances on those who become involved with them at a distance, mostly international human rights workers employed by the UN and the global networks of NGOs. It is mainly through these networks that we have come to understand the politics of disappearance as a phenomenon that marks our time and mode of being in the world.

Histories of violence, we know, create haunting memories that shape how one experiences the present. Rather than relating to violent histories in isolation, people bring to them a network of previous experiences and memories of such histories. In today’s global informational economies, the interweaving of collective and personal memories also includes mediated exposures to what Judith Butler calls ‘suffering at a distance’. Such second-hand experience of global sites of violence profoundly impacts everyday experience and knowledge. How one receives these narratives and images of violence is coloured by the transference of memories of other histories; some of them one’s own, others mediated. Complex entanglements and flows of affect merge the official mass-mediated politics of memory with the transference of personal memories. The latter are no less political, especially in cases where they are drawn from shared histories of violence. While transference is always individually inflected, certain of its aspects belong to the arsenal of collective memories. Today, for example, not only Germans link the infamous Nacht und Nebel disappearances in Nazi Germany to disappearances in other countries.

The denser our global connections, the denser the network of accumulated memories and related transferences will become. These multidirectional transferences raise questions concerning the ethics of relating to global sites of violence, particularly of places that routinely experience mass killings and disappearances. These ‘postcolonial killing fields’ (Victoria Burrows) or ‘death-worlds’ (Achille Mbembe) generate traumatised subjectivities that are both intimately personal and eminently political. There is also a global interpellation to respond to this distant suffering. The ethics of relating to these death-worlds and the emergent subjectivities of those who inhabit them does not only pertain to the forms and media of representation, the positioning of a global reader, or spectator, and his or her involvement in works of art or journalism that depict death-worlds. It also pertains to the increasingly large role of international organizations and human rights workers around the globe and their profound impact on local economies and life. In many cases, we witness a symbiotic ecology of sorts that is deeply rooted in the manufactured dependency of death-worlds.

The question of how one can responsibly relate to the mediated exposure to today’s death-worlds belongs to a larger concern of our time. Ever-expanding zones of human disenfranchisement, abandonment, disposability and death exhibit the dark side of our planetary human ecologies. What are the new forms of life and subjectivity that emerge in these zones? What happens to the subjectivity of those who become engaged with such suffering? What affective labour is involved, and how is responsibility transferred along with the knowledge of such suffering? What roles do international Human Rights movements play? And how does global activism impact local inhabitants of those death-worlds, those who are the actual victims? These questions inform Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, a novel that deals with disappearances in Sri Lanka from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. Its main character is Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist who investigates disappearances for the United Nations. Her characterisation provides a paradigmatic illustration of new forms of subjectivity and transnational memory that emerge in response to the global politics of disappearance.

Politically motivated disappearances belong to a larger politics of disappearance that is a hallmark of our time. Its roots reach back to colonialism and the genocides perpetrated in its wake. In each instance we can trace the connections to the changing capitalist economies that generate political upheavals. The politics of disappearance, whether practised as genocide or politicide, can be directly linked to the increasingly violent enforcement of neoliberal global capitalism across the world.Reference Klein⁶ Sri Lanka is no exception. In Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Ackbar Abbas argues that, in the era of globalism, colonialism as an evolving paradigm takes on a more paradoxical form.Reference Abbas⁷

In Sri Lanka, for example, the Tamil Youth resistance in the 1970s was tied to a ‘devolution of powers from the central government to provincial/regional councils’.Reference Jeharaja Tambiah⁸ The ensuing vast peasant resettlement increased ethnic tensions. A new language politics adopted Sinhalese as the official language, thus feeding into the imposition of quotas and discrimination policies that worked against the educated youth of Colombo. This economically-driven deepening of the ethnic divide between Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims eventually prepared the ground for the EELAM separatist claim. The violent Tamil insurgency in 1981 and the riots in the early 1980s that pitted Buddhist Sinhala nationalism against Tamil nationalism escalated in the Colombo riots in 1983 before it spread to other cities (Ref. Reference Jeharaja Tambiah8, p. 14f). Between 1984 and 1987, the government tried to crush the Tamil militant movement with army and security forces. When the Sinhalese army killed Tamil civilians, the Tamil retaliated by targeting Sinhalese civilians.

These events led to the disappearances described in Anil’s Ghost. Rather than providing a thick description of historical data, Ondaatje focuses on personal stories of imagined people who lived through this violent history. As a result, the novel becomes emblematic beyond its more specific temporal and local frame, opening up a horizon to reflect upon the politics of disappearance more generally. Critics gave Anil’s Ghost a highly controversial response, faulting Ondaatje for his alleged lack of political engagement, failure to present a political solution, and Westernised approach to Sri Lanka’s disappearances. I rather see Ondaatje’s novel as presenting a particular form of ‘working through’, first by approaching disappearances through the embedded lives and subjectivities of targeted populations, and second by using the specific historical and local setting in Sri Lanka to explore the politics of disappearances as a global phenomenon. What critics labelled a ‘Westernised approach’ relates to Ondaatje’s choice of a human rights worker as a main character. By contrast, I argue that this choice enables Ondaatje not only to criticise the specific intervention of the UN in Sri Lanka, but also to critically explore the role of international intervention in the global politics of disappearance. Assembling an array of characters from diverse backgrounds, Ondaatje highlights not only how the largely invisible terror of disappearances affects the subjectivity of those involved, but also how subjectivity itself becomes a prime battleground in the politics of disappearance. Since disappearances deploy an insidious attack on psychic life, the novel’s portrayal of subjectivity is, in fact, inseparable from the political.

In most cases, it is the testimonials of victims that provide retrospective stories of mass killings. More rarely, authors choose an experimental form to draw out aspects of a conflicted psycho-historical complexity that require more than a first-person narrative. Ondaatje’s kaleidoscopic polytemporal network of fragmented storylines generates a layered historical narrative about Sri Lanka’s civil war. The novel begins with an Author’s Note:

The stories that follow are told in an impersonal narrative voice, interspersed with dialogues that dramatise the interaction of characters. Supplementary vignettes in cursive print tell traumatic stories that happened in the past. The narrator invokes the shifting internal focalisation of protagonists whose life and work are connected through disappearances.

At the same time, Ondaatje uses the focalising perspective of Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist who works in the human rights networks of the United Nations, to open the stories up to sites of disappearance in other parts of the world. Anil Tissera is cast as an expatriate Sri Lankan who is sent back to her home country by the UN to help identify the bodies of the disappeared using forensic evidence. Having worked for many years with disappearances in countries such as Guatemala and the Congo, Anil is the prototype of an increasing network of activist human rights workers who engage with suffering at a distance by moving to local sites.

Anil’s subjectivity enfolds within a dense web of transnational memories, all coloured by transferences that reach back to her childhood in Sri Lanka. Over time, the trauma of disappearance has turned into something like a black hole at the centre of Anil’s personhood, threatening to swallow every other aspect of her life, including her personal relationships. The unspoken driving force behind her work is a stubborn political commitment to uncover an always-elusive ‘truth’, to expose killings and thus break cultures of impunity. When she and her local collaborator, Sarath Disayena, find an incontrovertible piece of evidence – a recently buried skeleton left among ancient graves on a government protected site – she becomes obsessed with the idea that, once identified, this story would speak for all of the country’s anonymous disappeared.

As the novel’s central character, Anil exemplifies the centrality of the UN in the global politics of human rights and the management of selected zones of crisis, abandonment and death. By evoking a larger web of transnational memories woven together by networks and informational economies, Ondaatje’s novel mobilises the vast ramifications of the politics of disappearance. Through Anil’s perspective, readers receive the individual stories of Sri Lankan protagonists in the context of expanding transnational histories and memories of disappearances worldwide.

The novel opens with Anil’s memory of a scene in Guatemala, the country that allegedly had more disappearances than any other (according to a 1999 UN study, Sri Lanka is ranked second). Anil remembers working with a Human Rights team at a Guatemalan mass gravesite, surrounded by families looking for the body of their disappeared son or husband. If the body is identified as that of a stranger, the families move on to another excavation. ‘The possibility of their lost son was everywhere’ (Ref. Reference Ondaatje1, p. 5). This sentence’s allegorical resonance extends in space and time to the larger politics of disappearing people. Anil’s Ghost thus opens its local setting to a relatively new form of transnational collective memory, generated not only by the mass-media’s dissemination of knowledge about global sites of disappearance and terror, but also by the increasing number of human rights workers that become involved with these sites. Local politics is thus shown in its systemic connections to global economics, and local subjectivities and collectivities become entangled with the subjectivities of international humanitarian aid workers and the complex transferences that emerge between the two populations.

Haunted by colonial legacies and economic imperatives, these highly complex transferences are not always benign. Ondaatje uses a double strategy to foreground a fundamental ambivalence, if not paradox, at the core of this international aid work. Compounding Anil’s own doubts about the efficacy of her mission, her frequently flawed reactions betray a dangerous lack of attunement to local conditions. Blinded by her mission, she often fails to hear the critique of local interlocutors. As a Sri Lankan-born global citizen in possession of a British passport ‘with the light blue UN bar’, Anil occupies the boundary between insider and outsider, having lived abroad long enough ‘to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze’ (Ref. Reference Ondaatje1, p. 11). Yet, the long-distance gaze comes with a dense network of memories, creating a psychological transference to the object of her work that eventually spins out of control. What unsettles Anil is not just the knowledge that her home country is haunted by a politics of disappearance in which three warring parties are involved; it is also that the disappearances themselves are ‘disappeared’, so to speak, in the structures of everyday life: the surface of appearances – the continuance of civic life in the animated streets with its shoppers and laughing people – is deceptive, covering a hidden reality of heads on stakes, skeletons dug out of pits, and kidnappings in all sectors of the population. Stories of the latter circulate behind closed doors in whispered rumours. People assemble isolated fragments of information in order to construct plausible narrative scenarios.

The archaeological dig serves as the novel’s most potent metaphor: Anil’s collaboration with local archaeologist Sarath Disayena becomes entangled with an archaeology of the soul in the form of an excavation of silenced stories about disappearances of loved ones and the impossible grief that follows. These encounters gradually lay Anil’s own soul bare, rubbing it raw in her solitary forensic work on disappeared bodies. That Sarath is a government-selected collaborator triggers a lingering suspicion in Anil, despite her awareness that paranoia is a familiar symptom in people who live in a country where disappearances are the order of the day.

Proclaiming quasi-neutrality toward his country’s opposing political forces, Sarath becomes Anil’s native informant, supplementing her long-distance gaze with an insider’s perspective:

Sarath also challenges what he perceives as Anil’s moralistic and naïve Western perspective or, as he calls it, ‘that false empathy and blame’ (Ref. Reference Ondaatje1, p. 44). ‘You talk like a visiting journalist’, he admonishes her, ‘you can’t just slip in, make a discovery and leave’ (Ref. Reference Ondaatje1, pp. 27, 44).

Sarath’s brother Gamini opens yet another perspective on Sri Lanka’s politics of disappearance. He works under the traumatic conditions of an understaffed hospital where tortured and mutilated bodies appear on a daily basis. A ghostlike figure, he lives at the hospital in a state of reverse hallucination, drugging himself with speed in order not to see what he cannot bear to see. Ackbar Abbas analyses reverse hallucination or, as he calls it, the ‘art of not seeing’ (Ref. Reference Abbas7, p. 6) as a symptom of cultures of disappearance. Reverse hallucinations function like a tacit collusion with the very system of disappearances. While the perpetrators are trying to erase any trace of their crimes, the victims pretend not to see those traces that nonetheless emerge. It is like a secret contract that allows life to go on. The prize, however, is a numbing of emotions, an eclipse of the self: ‘You were without self in those times’, says Gamini, ‘lost among the screaming’ (Ref. Reference Ondaatje1, p. 119).

It is as if the people Anil encounters had taken in the dead and encrypted them inside their own selves. Mrinalini Chakravorty speaks of ‘postcolonial crypts’ formed by ‘an imperfect balance between singular and collective experiences of trauma in the postcolony’.Reference Chacravorty⁹ Disappearances put those left behind at the mercy of imagination. Relatives simultaneously know and do not know, but are condemned to imagine the worst. The terror has left no material traces. Their own lives are placed in limbo. Even the most minimal and unrealistic hope for a return of the loved ones can become a source of prolonged agony. Can one truly mourn, if mourning would mean putting the last hope to rest? A peculiar inability to mourn afflicts the relatives of the disappeared. Some transform their grief into activism and political practice, some find more tacit ways of resistance, others turn their own bodies into mute testimonies of unspeakable trauma. Searching for evidence in unearthed bodies, fighting for the return of the disappeared and the end of impunity, or tending to tortured bodies that arrive at local hospitals, become desperate ways of holding on to lost loved ones, keeping their memories alive, and providing, as one of the characters says, indirect ‘evidence of his existence or his death’ (Ref. Reference Ondaatje1, p. 184).

The somatic semiotics of the bodies of relatives who express the mute grief of the walking dead become themselves a corporeal transnational memory. It is a memory encrypted in bodies that carry the disappeared loved ones inside, as if they themselves had become their tomb. Bodies as tombs that encrypt the disappeared become monuments of resistance, memorialising the disappeared relatives and through them the entire community of disappeared peoples. We find these bodies everywhere: they are among the mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, among the families that Anil saw at the Guatemalan gravesite, among the activist women who protest the disappearance of their husbands and sons in Kashmir, or among the Chilean women who have been digging for 20 years for the bones of their disappeared sons in the Atacama Desert in Chile.Reference Guzman’s¹⁰

These women use their bodies not only to bear testimony to the murder of the disappeared but also to the soul murder of those left behind. They become monuments to the suffering caused by the politics of disappearance, public figures for the world to see. Their resistance assumes a performative dimension. Giving interviews and speaking publicly, many actively join global movements of resistance. They become the nation’s counter-memory, while also simultaneously partaking in a transnational collective memory of global cultures of disappearance. They refuse to relinquish hope, even as decades go by and they grow old, many of them encapsulated in catastrophic loneliness.

Anil’s approach to disappearances is marked by her professional ethos of scientific control. Looking for incontrovertible proof of culpability during obsessive broodings over evidence, she finds the core of herself in the solitude of her connection with the world of the dead. For her, political truth is incontrovertible, reducible to forensic evidence. ‘You’re an archaeologist’, she says to Sarath, ‘[t]ruth comes finally into the light. It’s in the bones and sediment’. Sarath, however, counters: ‘It’s in character and nuance and mood’ (Ref. Reference Ondaatje1, p. 259).

Anil’s inability to read the latter leads her to make a series of fateful mistakes that betray her failure of attunement to the local and expose the professional obsession of human rights workers who come to investigate disaster zones only to leave again or, as Gamini says in a bitter outburst, ‘those armchair rebels living abroad with their idea of justice’ (Ref. Reference Ondaatje1, p. 134). A sequence of disappearances, beginning with what Anil misreads as Sarath’s willful disappearance from their work, propels the novel’s end. Convinced of his betrayal, Anil returns to Colombo without the skeleton they found and gives her report without evidence, thus putting both herself and Sarath in danger. In order to protect them, Sarath smuggles the skeleton out with hidden instructions for Anil to leave the country and take the evidence with her.

We never hear anything about Anil’s return. The novel literally ‘disappears’ her at the end, leaving readers to guess what might have happened. Instead, the focus shifts to local events. Gamini finds his brother Sarath’s tortured body at the local hospital, ultimately a victim of Anil’s impulsivity and lack of trust. However, Sarath also actively chooses self-sacrifice to save her mission, an act that indicates he eventually embraced it as his own. Ondaatje leaves readers with this ambiguity.

Significantly, the novel’s last chapter is dedicated to Ananda, a famous eye painter. Ananda’s sacred ceremonies of restoring eyes to broken statues perform a work of mourning, a corporeal transference of sorts, in which he infuses dead material with life. His work also provides a suggestive metaphor for the act of rendering visible again what had been disappeared from sight. His artifice resembles practices of healing in which a shaman performs a transfer between the sufferer’s ailment and his own life energies. During his last ceremony, Ananda inadvertently recreates the eyes of his disappeared wife Sirissa, thus testifying to the unconscious transference that turns his work into a ritual of mourning. Invoking this subtle form of resistance against the work of death, the novel ends with an assertion of resilience and a glimmer of hope.

This concluding demonstration of a healing affective transference with the victims of disappearances sends a powerful signal to Ondaatje’s readers. A crucial function of literature consists, I think, in putting readers in touch with suffering at a distance in more intimate and personal ways than the informational media. Moreover, narratives about the disappeared strike a particular chord in today’s world, as it increasingly becomes filled with disappearances of different kinds, including the absence of peoples who are marginalised and excluded from the social contract, made disposable and disappeared from the centre of social and civic life. Their absence begins to fill a world haunted by those pushed into oblivion. The disappeared incorporate the most radical form of a global trend to make ever-larger populations of the world disposable. Their destiny as well as the destiny of those who insist on remembering and engaging with them thus becomes emblematic of a global politics of disappearance on a much larger scale. Readers are compelled to relate to a muted suffering that is invoked indirectly as a form of encrypted pain. It is as if, reading Anil’s Ghost, one cannot but respond to what has disappeared from a particular story’s surface into the deepest recesses of a character’s deadened psychic life. Disappearances and the silences they create become a fertile ground for projections; not only for those directly involved, but also for readers who establish a transference of their own to the stories of the disappeared.

As I am about to conclude this essay, the world news reports a new wave of disappearances in Sri Lanka over the past five to eight years. On 18 February 2013, Al Jazeera broadcast the news of the discovery of a Sri Lankan mass grave holding the skeletons of 154 people. While officials declare the need for a thorough investigation and request the bones be sent abroad to collect forensic evidence, relatives of the disappeared have already gathered at the gravesite. The possibility of their lost kin is everywhere. The story of the disappeared does not end here.