Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera

        Born in Sri Lanka in 1973, Nayomi Munaweera spent her childhood in Nigeria. She and her family moved to the USA when she was a teenager. Munaweera’s first novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors deals with some of the incidents that are often quoted as those that have soured the ethnic relations in Sri Lanka and paved way to a catastrophic war for all parties involved. Island uses the narrative points of view of Yashodara, a Sinhalese woman and Saraswathi, a Tamil woman. On the one hand, Yashodara’s class, youth, education, and the array of milieus she occupies places her at an ideal vantage point from which she could record some of the milepost events in post-Independence Sri Lankan history. Saraswathi’s narrative, on the other hand, is clouded by her traumatic personal experiences, her limited contact with her ethnic Other, and the limited and thereby limiting geopolitical location she occupies.

     As the novel depicts children of both ethnicities begin their lives at an Edenic state of innocence on the issue of ethnicity which is invariably shattered by the “ethno-nationalism” of the adults around them. Mala and Nishan, a brother and a sister from a middleclass family from Matara, are told by their elderly male servant Seeni Banda that the Tamils intend to drive the Sinhalese into the Indian Ocean. Only dire need compels Sylvia Sunethra Rajasinghe, a Colombo-7 Sinhalese matriarch, to rent the upstairs of her house to the Shivalingams from the north of the island; thereafter, she resents their alien presence in her home to the very end. In addition, she tries to impose her own “ethnocentrism” on her children (Ananda and Vishaka) and grandchildren (Yashodara and Lanka) as well. So, when Ravan Shivalingam proposes to Vishaka, she declines the offer. Consequently, the two become enemies. Later, their children become fast friends for a short while. Yet, they too fall from innocence and their bond sours for the first time with the news of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library: “When I (Yashodara) see him next, Shiva is brusque … When I ask him what is wrong his voice is cold. ‘They burnt 95,000 manuscripts,’ he says. ‘Your people burnt up our history.’ I stare at him, not knowing what to say but already he has turned from me and is running up the stairs” (76).

     For Yashodara the rise of the LTTE is an effect of the violence perpetrated on the Tamils by the Sinhalese in 1958:

At the age of four, the course of any life is uncharted; there are perhaps no fangs in this mouth, no incipient claws in evidence. He [Prabhakaran] is perhaps too young to remember these days of lootings, when houses were surrounded and set aflame with children crying inside them … In the decades to come The Leader with blood drenched claws and ripping fangs, a tiger-striped army ready to die at his command, these are the images he will offer when asked why. (30)

    It is the victims of Black July, states Yashodara, who will become “the most militant and determined separatists” (89). She also sees an orchestrated-ness in the 1983 violence:

They [the mob] committed the usual atrocities the usual ways, but here was something unexpected and incongruous. In their earth-encrusted, calloused fingers, they clutched clean white pages, neatly corner-stapled. Census accounts, voting registrations, pages detailing who lived where and most importantly, who was Tamil, Burgher, Muslim, or Sinhala. And in these lists was revealed precision and orchestration in the midst of smoky, charred flesh smelling chaos. (81)

Black July of 1983, according to the narrator, results in the birth of a vicious cycle of violence: “They [the LTTE] are willing to kill and die for the maternal comfort of this homeland, for the possibility of belonging. The government too is willing to send Sinhala soldiers to kill and die to protect this sliver of contested homeland” (117).

     The novel offers “Linga–Singhe wars” – the ongoing disputes between the Shivalingams and the Rajasinghes - as a metaphor for this ongoing war (38). However, a discerning reader would soon find out that the two families have more in common than the small differences they are fighting over. The missed opportunities for reconciliation are symbolized by the breakdown of the love affair between Ravan and Visaka as well as the deaths of Lanka and Saraswathi.  

     After the Black July, Yashodara and her family leave the island and settle in the USA; yet, even abroad she cannot elude the cycle of violence that grips her motherland. Upon seeing the blown off head of an LTTE suicide bomber on TV, she asks, “What could have led her to this singularly terrible end?” (118). It is to this query Saraswathi’s narrative provides an answer.

     Many children of Saraswathi’s age have been “whisked away in speeding white army vans or torn from the sides of dead fathers and bleeding mothers by Tigers. The other ‘lucky’ ones have run away to the IDP camps” (123). Those left “dress themselves in shreds of tiger strips or camouflage, don ripped flack jackets that reached their knees and helmets that covered their eyes,” and play war games as soldiers and rebels (137-8). War visits the classroom, too: “Tiger striped men and women flood the classroom … show us videos of what the Sinhala soldiers do in the villages” (139). Due to such propaganda as well as her own experiences Saraswathi’s mother “didn’t cry. She kept her back straight and her eyes glistened only with pride” when two of her sons joined the LTTE (124).

     Saraswathi, in contrast, is horrified by the war: “Sometimes I get this breathless feeling that the war is a living creature something huge, with a pointed tongue and wicked claws … I’ve grown up inside this war, so now I can’t imagine what it would be like to live outside it” (124). According to Saraswathi, the relationship between Tamils like her and the soldiers who stood for their ethnic Other is governed by hate and fear: “They [soldiers] look at us from under their round helmets with eyes filled with hate, but also with fear. They think any of us, man, woman, child may be bomb strapped, jiggling with flesh-tearing ballbearings secreted under skirts and shirts” (135-6). Young women are depicted as being victimized by the enemy as well as their own community due to their gender : “It [“spoiling”] happened to my friend Parvathi … People stopped talking to her as soon as it happened, but they never stopped talking about her … One day … she jumped into a well” (136). When Saraswathi is raped her mother forces her to join the LTTE to avoid a similar stigma: “If you don’t go, you will ruin us all …You must go” (152).

     Members of the LTTE are depicted as having clay feet. They are “well fed” while the ordinary Tamils suffer food scarcities (142). As an LTTE cadre, Saraswathi feels superior to the Tamil civilians she comes into contact with: “But they are stupid people, civilians. They do not know what it means to fight and kill and maybe die” (180). They also conscript child soldiers, raid villages, massacre defenseless civilians, and kill captives. This is how Saraswathi’s first kill is described:  

The officers have been questioning a Sinhala soldier. He is tied to a chair, blood everywhere on his face and small, concave chest … I straddle him, my boot on either side of his face. When his pleading eyes meet mine, I put the mouth of the rifle against his lips … The back of the head explodes, blood, bone, grey stuff splatters across my boots, splashing along my pant legs, even onto my hands. The girls around me are laughing. Patting me on the back. (175)

Still, despite her tough exterior, Saraswathi experiences a Lady Macbeth moment after this: “I keep my fluttering hands folded under my head; even here, even now, despite washing over and over I feel the thick slipperiness of gore on them” (175). She is willing to die for her cause; nevertheless, she confesses to the reader that “it [the Movement] is a tree fed upon blood at its roots” and wonders about “the taste of its fruit” (183). Ultimately Saraswathi becomes a “tiyaki” in an attempt to cleanse her body and mind abused by both sides at war.

       Both Saraswathi and Lanka die when the former, as a suicide bomber, blows herself up. Upon recognizing her sister’s body Yashodara’s cry joins those of others which she hopes would make “the war-makers quake and flee like the ancient demons, taking with them their weapons, their landmines, their silver tongued rhetoric, their nationalism, their martyrs and sacred Buddhist doctrine, the whole pile of stinking bullshit” (212). Once again, both Shiva and Yashodara flee “the shattered country like tongue-tied, gaunt and broken ghosts” (214). Talking about the war to her US friends, Yashodara says, “There are no martyrs here. It is a war between equally corrupt forces” (222). Still, Yashodara welcomes the end of the war and looks forward to celebrating peace after a suitable period of mourning for the collective dead.

     The possibility of reconciliation is embodied by Samudra, Yashodara’s daughter by Shiva, who is a composite of the three women, Yasodhara, Lanka, and Saraswathi. This is how Yashodara visualizes her daughter on a beach in a peaceful Sri Lanka one day in the future: “She is the child of the peace, the many desperate parts of her experience knit together in jumbled but peaceable unity. The waves lick away her footsteps, the sand retaining no record of what came before her. (225)

     In conclusion, through Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Munaweera attempts to present a critical point of view that covers major dichotomies - the Sinhalese and the Tamils, the North and the South, and the LTTE and the Army - of the Sri Lankan society at present. The character of the rapist soldier is given a human dimension through the bond between Kasun and his mother Alice and the warm friendship that exists between him and the children: Lanka, Yashodhara, and Shiva. Here, the idea of patriotism of the soldier is contested, for it is clearly poverty that compels Kasun to join the Army. Similarly Saraswathi learns to practice extreme violence; however she, too, suffers. Munaweera’s metaphor, the Linga-Singha wars, challenges the dichotomization of the Tamils as the oppressed and the Sinhalese as the oppressors. Yet, the use of terms such as burning of “the Tamil library” (the Jaffna Public Library) and “a sliver of contested homeland” (roughly one third of the island) points to an ambivalence in Yashodara for the Other’s cause (76,117). In the end, Yashodara seems to anticipate a complete blurring of ethnic identities as the desirable resolution.