Summary
#is article shows that fixed national identities in Ondaatje’s !e English Patient are not only 
questioned but relinquished in favour of a flux of multiple, incessant becomings, while the 
specificity of a woman’s identity, far from being decentred and evacuated of its discursively 
produced socio-symbolic meanings, continues to be addressed in terms of supposedly 
homogeneous female body and its institutionally sanctified appearances. Imbued with socially 
marked distinctiveness, such female body consequently gives forth a particular embodiment of 
feminine which comes to operate as its unproblematic facticity, thus simultaneously narrowing 
down the scope of identity options from which the feminine is compelled to derive the make-
up of its very much truncated existence. #e paper then seeks to apply the argument developed 
here to a classroom situation and students’ creative approach towards redressing the problem of 
gendering the text at the expense of women characters by lending them their own voice.
 Povzetek
Prispevek izhaja iz teze, da Ondaatjejev Angleški pacient gradi  na prediranju in razkrajanju 
nacionalnih identitet, ki so končno tudi opuščene v prid vzpostavljanja pomnoženih, 
neprestano porajajočih in prelivajočih se subjektivitet. Kljub razdiranju in razsrediščevanju 
iluzorne stavbe nacionalnih identitet, Angleški pacient zanemarja preizpraševanje spremljajoče 
identitetske politike ženskosti, ki jo, nasprotno od pričakovanj, poglablja na način naslavljanja 
skozi problematične leče kartografsko poustvarjenega ženskega telesa. Le-to tako ostaja prežeto 
z  odtisi orientalističnega diskurza, iz katerega se lahko izvije šele s prehodom v smrt. T ezo, ki 
jo prispevek razvija na tem mestu, avtorica preizkusi tudi v literarno-pedagoškem procesu, da 
bi študentkam in študentom postkolonialnih literatur približala nekaj osnovnih teoretičnih 
nastavkov, na podlagi katerih bi študentke in študenti sami nadalje razvijali kritične vpoglede v 
način besedilnega vzpostavljanja spola. Zadnji del članka natančneje dokumentira enega izmed 
tovrstnih načinov opazovanja besedila med študentkami in študenti ter njihovega poskusa 
komunikacije s takšnim besedilom na način deaktivizacije njegovega, skozi orientalistično 
dogmo zakoličenega, vzpostavljanja institucije ženskosti.
DOI: 10.4312/elope.1.1-2.105-114

Michael Ondaatje’s !e English Patient questions the idea of fixed identity for nations and by 
analogy for men but not so for women. It relinquishes fixed national identities in favour of 
a flux of multiple, incessant becomings. In contrast, far from similarly decentring woman’s 
identity by undermining and emptying its discursively produced socio-symbolic meanings, the 
novel continues to accept identity addressed in terms of the female body, that is its culturally 
reinforced materiality, and its institutionally sanctified appearances. Imbued with socially 
marked distinctiveness, this female body consequently gives forth a particular embodiment of 
the feminine that operates as its unproblematic facticity, thus simultaneously narrowing down 
the scope of identity options from which the feminine is compelled to derive the make-up of 
its very much truncated existence.
Ondaatje’s preoccupation with issues of identity permeates his postcolonial texts, which 
present identity as a matter of multiple cultural origins and dispersed (geographical) locations. 
Such spatial dispersions in turn render it not only heterogeneous, fluid, and fragmented but 
also strikingly indeterminable. Identity, for Ondaatje, resists all closure and fixity. Perhaps 
surprisingly, he does not deploy this notion of identity as multiple (and therefore beyond 
definition) to question the identity of women. Indeed, he accepts the socially induced 
particularities of woman’s discursively entrenched identity. Although the identity of culturally 
posited woman could easily feature as another site of ideological contentions and examination 
of imposed meanings, it remains instead entangled in traditional networks of prescribed, 
seemingly monolithic and indisputable, bodily figurations. Veiled by the cloak of unassailable 
neutrality, these, however, bear the imprint of invading, alien connotations as imparted by a 
male gaze, which turns the female body into a self-divorced, socially shaped and historically 
colonised territory. At the same time these culturally generated manifestations of a female 
body also carry the echoes of social practices aimed at containing and controlling women’s 
bodies, which in the course of history have ranged from ‘foot-binding and corseting to rape 
and battering, to compulsory heterosexuality, forced sterilisation, unwanted pregnancy and [lately] 
explicit commodification’ (Bordo 1993, 188-9). 
1


In the novel woman is embodied in the figure of Katherine - the lover of the English patient 
(or rather Almasy). Ondaatje defines Katherine solely in terms of her body which, since she 
is denied a voice of her own and can therefore spring into life only through the narration of 
her observer, consequently becomes her only reality in the world of the text. T raversed by the 
investigating, possessive and recasting gaze of her lover (himself a dedicated desert explorer 
and map-drawer) Katherine’s body is criss-crossed by male inscriptions of significance. #ese 
form an imprisoning network of artificially imposed relations that speak for her and instead 
of her. By virtue of being enmeshed into this constricting, defining structure, the body of 
the woman becomes a repository of other people’s projected desires. She cannot escape the 
straitjacket of being tampered with, mapped and designated according to the culturally 
implanted expectations and desires of gazing man. His perception and his language trap her 
in a fixed position that reduces her to selected bodily manifestations alone.
2
 
Woman’s entrapment within narrowly schematised identity is further compounded by the novel’s 
metaphors that question artificially erected national boundaries and the attendant phenomenon 
of crumbling national affiliations. #e image of the desert captures such displaced and eroded 
national identities that defy any precise definition, for desert ‘could not be claimed or owned [for] 
it [is] a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting 
names ’ (Ondaatje 1993, 138-9). Caught in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of its disappearances 
and self-fashioned appearances, the desert’s specificity is put under question for, paradoxically 
enough, it can be defined only in terms of its indefinability. Folding and unfolding itself every 
single time as an eclectic collection of permutations, the desert refuses to be mapped. It denies 
the validity of any single pattern of understanding imposed by outside observers, by those who 
create maps of the desert. #e activity of charting desert maps therefore translates itself into 
the imposition of artificial boundaries and fabricated identities pieced together from scraps of 
self-contradictory legends. Out of such an effectively uncharted territory, in which one becomes 
her/his own invention, emerges a ‘citizen of nowhere or somewhere in one’s mind’, enjoying 
a multiple and multi-layered view that fans out and spills across state boundaries. Poised at 
the same multicultural intersection, from where he can simultaneously embrace a diversity of 
unobstructed views, exploding into a myriad of directions, is the English patient, or Count de 
Almasy, who is both English and Hungarian, and yet neither of the two.
2


Unlike Katherine’s body, which reduces her to her sex, his body oozes with universally invested 
meanings. Retrieved from the wreckage of a burning plane, his body is later carried across the 
North African desert strewn with the wreckage of WWII battles and finally ends up splayed 
out on a sickbed in an Italian villa. #e blackness of its charred skin might, as some have 
suggested, possibly connote the demise of the white male civilisation ravaged by WWII and 
the onslaught of the nuclear war. However, it also raises the question of what an Englishman 
really is after all these centuries of colonisation – centuries when blackness and whiteness 
unavoidably crossed rigorously maintained socio-political boundaries in an unconscious 
attempt at cross-pollination. And it is precisely this permeability of borders that is enacted 
between the English patient and a Sikh British army sapper.
Kip, the sapper, is depicted as enamoured of the white culture that invaded his Indian being 
and ousted its constitutive core. Accordingly, when Kip is sent out on his first training mission 
to defuse a bomb, he finds himself literally cradled in the bosom of white civilisation, and the 
very act of his descending, ‘down into the giant white chalk horse of Westbury, into the whiteness 
of the horse, carved into the hill so that now he was a black figure (ibid., 181) [coming to the rescue 
of his master’s civilisation]’’ indicates his immersion into the bowels of white culture. In this 
respect Western civilisation does not only swallow Kip by cocooning him into its modes of 
perception but literally ingests him in order to gain a new creative potential. White supremacy 
has posited the ‘other’ so as to be able to barricade itself behind the moat of imaginary security 
of an unproblematic, clear-cut and easily recognisable identity. In fact, it turns out to have 
no separable or fully independent existence from any absolute outside, since the culturally 
designated inside and outside turn out to swap places constantly, producing intricately 
intertwined, mutually informing relationships.
#e charred blackness of the English patient’s skin then signifies the permeability of borders, 
an unconscious absorption or gradual conversion of the dying empire to the elements of 
‘beastly otherness’ it had fervently sought to expel but failed in its anguished attempts to 
do so. An Englishman turns out not to be so English after all. Rather he is an amalgam of 
inverted or decentred identities devoid of the meanings with which he originally started. 
#e notion of an Englishman as an origin source of self-explanatory ideations turns out 
to be a deep-seated illusion. In other words, the English as a ‘species’ are extinct – they are 
merely a compulsive citation of long ago disaggregated, vibrantly discordant meanings and 
equally faded connotations. 
Outlined against the constellation of bodies gushing forth with a preponderance of loosened, 
dismantled and obliterated national borders, Katherine’s body, an exemplary enshrinement of 
female specificity, appears anachronistically trapped in a fixed position. T ransfixed by ‘the cold 
blue thumbtacks’ of Almasy’s eyes (Atwood in Staels 1996, 5), she becomes ‘her sweating knee 
beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps’ (Ondaatje 1993, 150); 
a cluster of ‘awkward limbs (and ‘thin lines of her ankles’ (ibid., 218)) climbing out of a plane, 
bending down in [the desert researchers’] midst to prod a fire, her elbow up and pointed towards 

[Almasy] as she drinks from a canteen’ (ibid., 145); a sensuous mouth gulping ‘the chlorinated 
water [with] some coming down her chin and falling to her stomach’ (ibid.,149). #e gaze of 
Almasy’s tracking eyes coils itself around Katherine’s highlighted body parts, supposedly 
pervaded with the marks of her sex, which congeal into an artifice of unity and univocity 
projected onto her. His gaze thus not only delimits but literally sculpts the body it then claims 
to find. Weighed under this burden, the carved up and remoulded body of the woman becomes 
and is understood as her essence. Furrowed with the imprints of the observer’s culturally 
conditioned perceptions and linguistic coinages, it yields a particular embodiment of female 
that in fact displaces it at the moment it purports to represent it. Instead of functioning as a 
feasible site of individual self-determination, the specularly constructed body of the woman 
resonates with the evocations of a voice that cannot speak itself. It is a muffled voice – a voice 
that must always attest the identity and values of its male designer.
Why is it that other identity trajectories free of nation-bound inhibitions can easily embrace 
their bearers’ dividedness, rendering them at once plural and partial, while a woman’s specific 
identity remains body-bound – that is singular and univocal, precluding the possibility of 
widening her frame of reference or acquiring a sense of gravity independent of the male gaze? 
In her exposition of the way a female body, under specular and exteriorising conditions, gains 
its materiality that over time stabilises to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface, 
Butler (1993, 48-9) takes issue with Plato’s postulation of male and female embodiments 
respectively, whereby she observes that men’s intelligibility
depends on the exclusion of women, slaves, children and animals, where slaves are 
characterised as those who do not speak his language, and who in not speaking his 
language, are considered diminished in their capacity for reason. !is domain of the 
less than rational human bounds the figure of human reason, producing the man as one 
who is without a childhood; is not a primate and so is relieved of the necessity of eating, 
defecating, living and dying; one who is not a slave, but always a property holder, one 
whose language remains originary and untranslatable. !is is a figure of disembodiment, 
but one which is nevertheless a figure of a body, a bodying forth of a masculinized 
rationality – the figure of a male body which is not a [corporeal, immanent] body. !e 
body that is reason … is itself a phantasmatic dematerialization of masculinity, one 
which requires that women, slaves, children and animals be the body, perform the bodily 
functions it will not perform.
In the process of being divested of any kind of corporeal specificity, which is grafted onto the 
female body, the bearer of the male body is assigned the qualities of a body-transcendent and 
therefore universal personhood. As males within the system of gender specific embodiments 
appear to participate in the form of a universal and not a sexed person, it is the female body that 
shoulders the burden of corporeal immanence. Contemplated in terms of their corporeality 
only, women become ‘ontologically suffused with the projected marks of their “sex’’ ’ (Butler 1990) 
which qualifies one as particular and relative, especially when subjected to the surveillance of 

the male gaze. However, the social practice of tinkering with the body as a locus of culturally 
configured meanings extends beyond the mere discrepancy between disembodied male and 
fully invested corporeal female bodies to encompass a reinterpretation of physical features 
whose regrouping and remodulation under the category of sexual markings remain obscured 
under the protective layer of seemingly neutral linguistic operations.
As pointed out by Witting (in Butler 1990, 114), it is not only the accumulation of attributes 
under the category of one’s distinctive sex that qualifies as highly suspect, it is the very 
discrimination of the features themselves for they gain social meaning and unification only 
through their articulation within the category of sex. #e very fact that ‘vagina, breasts, and 
so forth, are named sexual parts is both a restriction of the erogenous body to those parts and a 
fragmentation of the body as a whole’ (ibid.). Witting goes on to argue that the unity of the 
female body, whose features could have been named in a way that would not reproduce 
the reductive operations of the category of the sex, is in fact a disunity, a fragmentation 
and compartmentalisation as well as a reduction of erotogeneity. #e installed integrity and 
unity of the body, which are hardly ever thought of as having been first dismantled and then 
reassembled to suit the currently entertained notions of what goes into the construction of a 
socially accepted gendered subject, in fact serve the purposes of fragmentation, restriction, and 
domination of the body, which in turn not only produce its materiality but also streamline its 
forces, energies, sensations and pleasures. In Katherine’s case, these are supposed to proliferate 
precisely at the level of her bodily contours as fractured, regrouped and remoulded by the 
English patient’s gaze, from which the facticity of Katherine’s body also derives its only form 
of sustenance.
 Obviously within the system of representing the universal then, as Braidotti (1994) observes, 
the cost men have to pay is disembodiment, or elision of gendered specificity into the 
abstraction of phallic masculinity. And the price women are compelled to pay so as to 
secure at least some semblance of social visibility, even though it spells their reduction to the 
immanence of the body that is both exploited and reduced to silence, is loss of subjectivity 
through over-embodiment and confinement to their gendered identity. In order to disrupt 
and counterbalance the socially enacted distribution of asymmetrical modes of coerced male 
and female embodiment, Braidotti further notes that 
‘men need to repossess their abstracted bodily self by shedding some exclusive rights to 
transcendental consciousness. !ey need to get embodied, to get real, to suffer through 
the pain of re-embodiment, that is to say, incarnation, whereas women need to repossess 
subjectivity by reducing their confinement to the body’ (1997, 527-8). 
Only in death can Katherine, whose contingent body is tattooed with the inscriptions of the 
map-charter’s gaze, extricate herself from this kind of embodiment; in death that the shell 

of her specularly constructed embodiment is cracked open to reveal a corpse whose stiffened 
features can no longer be construed along the lines of gender. For in death these dissolve to be 
replaced with the projections of a transcendental entity. #e body of a woman is now finally 
attended to as transcendental, so that Katherine dies
containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes [one has] swallowed, bodies [one has] 
plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters [one has] climbed up into as 
if trees, fears [one has] hidden in as if caves. [And just like Almasy she, too, can ] wish for 
all this to be marked on [ her] body when [ she is] dead. [ Just like Almasy she can now] 
believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map 
like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are not owned or monogamous 
in our taste or experience. [Finally, she too can] walk on such earth that [has] no maps 
(Ondaatje 1993, 264).
 Against the backdrop of some of the points elucidated above, students were asked to 
contemplate Ondaatje’s poem !e Cinnamon Peeler and elaborate on the way the woman’s 
body is streaked with the inscriptional marks as purveyed by the male lover. #e students 
could relate, or were at least in agreement with their schoolmates, that a woman’s identity is 
established in relation to that of a man (e.g. the lime burner’s daughter, the grass cutter’s wife 
and the cinnamon peeler’s wife) and when coaxed into the open as her own, it is mediated 
through the fragmentation of her body as induced and orchestrated by the lover’s searching 
gaze as well as his burning touch. It is only after these fragmented parts have been soaked in 
the smell or fragrance of the cinnamon peeler (which of course bespeaks of his identity only) 
that a woman can be galvanised into social existence and recognised as being in possession 
of internal, but in fact very much distorted, coherence, when weaving her way round the 
bastions of homosocial fabric (e.g. when walking through the market among the vendors, in 
whose eyes she would be acknowledged as a viable social entity providing she can be claimed as 
somebody’s proprietorial extension).
#e students were then invited to lend the woman a voice and possibly unearth and pursue 
the convoluted maze of the woman’s thoughts that would either reflect her ruminations on 
having been subjected to this kind of treatment or lead to an articulation of a liberated retort. 
#e students were not expected to merely evoke and reiterate the already dissected pattern of 
the way a woman’s body is colonised and mapped so as to be able to cast her in a rebellious 
posture (although this kind of approach had yielded some interesting results – see Section 
A). Instead they were supposed to embark on the search for the way in which the woman’s 
emerging sense of her reclaimed identity could be at least glimpsed at or even retrieved by 
delving into her realisations about the way her self-awareness has been affected and shaped 

under the impact of specularly imposed meanings (Section B). In the long run, a hope was 
entertained that the woman in the students’ written responses might not only return the 
glance, revert the gaze and question the authority of the male gaze as the expression goes, 
but probe into the possibilities of refashioning the existing framework of social relations by 
taking on the image of male body/identity, emptying it out of its purported originary and 
incontestable meanings and investing it with her own projections that would point to either 
ironical or serious attempts at staging a true counter-colonisation. No such approach had 
been taken for obviously it would have been a rather hard nut to crack.
 a.
W(oman): Who are you talking about?
CP(eeler): Well, I’m talking about you.
W: And who am I?
CP: What do you mean?
W: Well, who am I? What is my name?
CP: I don’t know your name.
W: !en how can you talk about me if you don’t know me, if you even don’t know my name? Don’t 
bother answering, I’ll answer instead of you. You don’t know my name, because inside, in your 
mind, you are still one of us. You are no better than other Indian men even though you camouflaged 
your hands over smoking tar. Women are for you, and will always be, just someone’s wives. Even in 
your Western world you see women in the same way our men do, without their own feelings and 
brain – the grass cutter’s wife or the lime burner’s daughter, they don’t have a name either. And a 
name is not really important, isn’t that so? Why bother with names if all you want is a wife and a 
dancer. All you need and want is a nice body dancing for you, and even then you don’t notice the 
face or the eyes of your dancer, but just her ankles, thighs, a belly, breasts and shoulders and hands. 
What is a woman to you?… And you are right, I will never be able to walk through the markets 
without being noticed. As you said, the blind would stumble certain of whom they approached 
though I might bathe under rain gutters. For them I will always be the cinnamon peeler’s wife. !ey 
also don’t care whether I am Maya, Sarita, Indira or Vandana.
         (Maja)
b.
If I were a cinnamon peeler’s wife,
I would join my hands with water
in repulsion against the yellow bark dust.
Ah, all the efforts I would make 
to clear my mind of who I am,
3

to put myself on top
and get rid of you instead.
For I may be your wife,
but my intelligence
breaks the boundaries of your yellow bark dust.
!e act of love,
sending shivers down my spine,
not giving pleasure even to the bed,
sends me off to softer arms.
So you see, my poor and little cinnamon peeler,
your days are over.
I am my own ruler.
Clear?
         (Iris)
 a.
Here I am. You made me yours, you possess me, with my life I depend on you. You had cut me 
into pieces and thus I lost my own personality. I lost the control over my body. I am known among 
strangers only because of you, everyone knows me because of you. Where is me in this mess? You 
marked my breasts and shoulders, the upper thigh, my hair, my back, your smell is all over me, I 
am scared and my words were lost in the act of love. You pretended and foolishly thought that bodies 
are free? Why? Did you do this only for your pleasure, because of your egocentric nature, to show me 
that without you I am worth nothing? And what am I supposed to do now; how will I find my lost 
identity? I am not grateful to you for what you have done, for my dependence on you. I will leave 
you, I will wash your cinnamon smell off me, I will cut my hair, hide my breasts and shoulders. I 
will go back to my family who are people like me and not strangers like you. I will listen to the songs 
and voices of my country, of my youth. I will look at the faces of people who have the same history 
as I do and who do not want to possess me. I will look at familiar mountains, rivers and trees. You 
will no longer smell or touch me. For you I am lost.
However, this is not the only result of my liberation. I will not be satisfied with a mere escape to the 
other parts of my body, I will not be satisfied with returning to the relics of your devastation and 
with what you forgot to mark or what you simply considered not worthy of your attention. !is is 
only the first step. I will fight back. I want to get everything back that you have taken although the 
things will never be the same as before.
         (Mojca)
I slept. As I was dreaming, wrapped up in a green illusion, my nose was poisoned with the smell 
of cinnamon. Its fragrance stupefied me, the dust of the yellow bark stuck to my moistened lips. I 

licked my lips and swallowed the dust. It was sweet. It tickled and seared my throat. I changed. 
I knew your desire, I wished your fingers to touch my ankle. I wanted you to breathe my new 
cinnamon breath. My supple skin yearned for your glance. You touched my thigh in water and 
looked at me impassively. I didn’t shiver with excitement. My body stiffened. It was then I knew 
you were my master.
I touched my belly to your hands and said I was the cinnamon peeler’s wife. I am naked. You have 
peeled off my skin. All that is left over is muscles, bones and blood. My eyes are blind with the smell 
when I look at you … I buried my heart in cinnamon and it stopped beating. You [became] my 
mind, my soul, my life. Without you, the cinnamon peeler, I was nobody … I followed the yellow 
path and got lost in the yellow forest.
        (Petra)
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Landow of Rutgers University for his comments 
on earlier drafts of this paper.
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