Oltre i confini, oltre le nazioni: La «lezione del deserto» in The English Patient di Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) intertwines the setting in the Tuscan villa, where the English patient lies, with the Libyan desert that resurfaces from his memories. The novel revisits the tradition of the representation of the desert from a postcolonial and transnational perspective. During the expeditions of the 1930s in North Africa promoted by the Royal Geographical Society, the European explorers traverse the Gilf Kebir plateau in search of the legendary oasis of Zerzura. Among them is the Hungarian adventurer László Almásy, with whom the nameless patient is identified: they all become “nationless”. Amid the dunes, geography, history, and imagination fuse and dissolve; the desert emerges as an emblem of contamination: within it, identity is continually renegotiated and hybridised, the sand provides refuge, even if, or perhaps because, it has no boundaries, but is potentially lethal.