In In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje explores mobile figures through the trope of nomadism. Linking a series of the novel's mobile figures together and suggesting their equivalence as nomadic migrants, Ondaatje dissolves the distinction between native and foreign workers. He thus attempts to resist the essentialist links between people and place that are prevalent in the arborescent metaphors of belonging that poststructuralists like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari critique. Instead of what Liisa Malkki calls "sedentarist metaphysics," the novel subscribes to what Tim Cresswell refers to as "nomadic metaphysics" - an interest in the routes of travel and a concomitant dismissal of the fixity of rooted identity. Ondaatje's strategy of "nomadic metaphysics" obscures the material history of, and important differences among, specific migrations, routes, and/or patterns of mobility that his novel identifies. The novel seems to assert a citizenship that exceeds the nation-state and challenges the class hierarchies of liberal conceptions of citizenship; however, because of Ondaatje's use of patterns of equivalence, the cosmopolitan citizenship he gestures to is not realized.
