Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Citizenship, here, is the paperwork; belonging is the ache. When Michael Ondaatje says he is a Canadian citizen but wants to feel at home in Sri Lanka, he draws a clean line between the state and the self, then immediately blurs it. The sentence performs what it describes: a tidy declaration ("I'm a Canadian citizen") followed by a destabilizing desire ("always want to feel at home") that refuses closure. "Always" matters. It suggests that home is not a settled fact but a recurring task, something to be re-entered, renegotiated, maybe even re-earned.

The subtext is both tender and politically sharp. "I'm a member of both countries" borrows the language of clubs and affiliations, not passports and borders. It's a quiet rebuke to the idea that identity must be singular, consistent, and legible to institutions. Ondaatje is not asking permission to be hybrid; he's asserting that hybridity is the lived reality, and that the emotional right to "home" can persist even when the legal category changes.

Context deepens the stakes. Ondaatje's work often circles memory, displacement, and the half-lit terrain between history and personal myth, especially in relation to Sri Lanka. This line reads like a manifesto for diaspora consciousness: gratitude and rootedness in Canada, coupled with a refusal to let migration become amnesia. It works because it doesn't romanticize exile or treat origins as a museum. It frames belonging as plural, ongoing, and slightly defiant - a way of insisting that geography can't fully dictate the map of a life.