Kwasi Hoffman and Jodi Lundgren argue that Ondaatje’s novel focuses on European migrants so as to demonstrate to the reader the exploitation and degradation they encountered despite their white skin and European ancestry. In the Skin of a Lion points towards a period when the notion of racial identity in Canada was born, highlighting the fact that racism was not solely concerned with people of colour and First Nations, but was, rather, a social construct that was executed within labour and social values. How does Ondaatje inform readers of the complexities and the multi-stranded discourses that underpin Canada’s multiculturalism today? Does the novel suffer from its focus on European immigrants? How does he symbolically tie notions of skin colour to his characters, and what impact does this connection between color, nationality, language, and race have?
