By drawing on Jacques Derrida's conceptions of witnessing, writing, and mourning, this paper argues that we can regard literature/fiction as testimony to convey "real and virtual, or real as virtual" truth. The task that literature undertakes includes rendering any unexperienced experiences, allowing the immemorial death of the witness/character to encounter his/her imminent death, and passionately mourning for those unidentified deaths in history. Reading Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost in this way, we discover that Palipana's "gesture" is controversial not due to the fact that he forges any historical material but because he uses his own perspective to interpret it. Palipana's literary fiction/creation as testimony which is parallel to history reminds us of the textual politics and ethical task that literature has to undertake, and it becomes an important prefatory to Ananda's reconstruction of Sailor's face. This reconstruction is a fiction, but it becomes not only Ananda's testimony, testifying to the massacre prevalent on this island, but also his work of mourning, mourning passionately for the dead.
