Chronicle of a War Foretold : Island Of A Thousand Mirrors (Nayomi Munaweera)

It is always hard for me to read a book that talks about immigration. Living in a world of literature where the subject of immi-emi and every sort of integration has been talked about so much, I am always a little weary of picking up a book which yet again comes back to the same American-South Asian dichotomy. Moreover, when a writer who has never really been to the home country chooses to write "authentically" about it, it usually ends up in being a parade of exoticized and over-used situations of nostalgia (read Jhumpa Lahiri's latest to know what I am talking about). So, I had met Island of a Thousand Mirrors a number of times at various bookstores, somehow or the other the book snaking its way into my hands but I consciously had kept it back telling myself "I have read similar books".

However, it must be like those love stories where the hero and the beloved keep meeting till they realize the universe is conspiring to get them together. In my case the universe was the people I work for who forced me into the same room with this book which refused to let go of me. Thus, began my slow acquaintance with Island of a Thousand Mirrors.

Nayomi Munaweera and her novel Island of A Thousand Mirrors begins with the same noises that all novels of exile/return begin at. She wills to trace the history of two families, one Sinhala and one Tamil beginning at the moment of inception, quite akin to a Rushdie in Midnight's Children or a Marquez in A Hundred Years of Solitude. However, unlike both these stalwarts, she quickly subsumes her narrative within the more narrow space of the contradictory consciousness of two young girls, seeming to be the schizoid parts of a fragmented psyche. Set against the war torn backdrop of picturesque Sri Lanka, Yasodhara and Saraswathi represent the two sides of the looking glass. Just as in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass where everything has an inverted double, Yasodhara and Saraswathi's stories are the lateral inversions of each other. Both of them are stranded into roles that they are forced to fulfill, one through exile and the other through war. Caught within the grand rhetoric of Nationalism and belonging, home and exile (the most beautiful lines in the novel encapsulate this as "Arteries, streams, and then rivers of Tamils flow out of the city. Behind them they leave...Belonging and Nationalism. It is a list that stays bitter on the tongue, giving birth to fantasies of Retribution, Partition, Secession" )both the protagonists struggle to find a semblance of clarity within the spectral clear charts of their personal histories that had been drawn for them by others. Both are fighting a war that was never hers, just like the thousands in the island who are sacrificed in the name of the greater cause, the Greater war.

Munaweera represents the War in both its absence (through the eyes of the American exiled Yasodhara and her family who listen to the news with bated breath and consume themselves in impotent rage) and its presence (through the breakdown of Saraswathi and her re-creating herself, not quite wholly so, as a rebel fighter). However, unlike other works on the War, there is no machismo, no grand truths, no clarion call of justice, honour or the most illusive of them, glory. And most importantly it is not a masculine war. Every turn of phrase or of event in the novel is guided by a female figure, let it be the matriarch Sylvia Sunethra who heroically saves her Tamil tenants when the mob comes to claim them or Mala who moulds her own story, ironically freed from the constraints of respectability because of her dark colour. Even though both Yasodhara and Saraswathi are hued as the protagonists, it is these litany of women characters, from the hunchbacked Alice to the rebellious and beautiful Lanka to the shy Luxmi who create the myriad images on the silver-backed landscape of these two main characters giving them both the depth and the reflective surfaces of their selves.

It is an unapologetically female novel and there is a marked absence of (refreshingly so) prominent male characters, overturning the very common assumption of War novels being intrinsically male and women in these just play the part of spectators or worse as reduced to the roles of waiting in the proverbial interim room of reflected glory of their male counterparts. The finale does leave you wanting for more in its predictability and staccato nature, but then again life does have an uncanny way of ending with a whimper right?

When I met Nayomi during a seminar at my workplace and was talking to her about her book, she told me how difficult it was to get it published as most of the American publishers dished it saying a woman shouldn't write war novels (well not in these exact words but in similar attitude at least). I didn't understand the comment then. But after reading her novel, I think I do. Nayomi's novel doesn't talk of war as a moment etched in history, viewed through the comfortable lens of the "common good". It doesn't try and justify war as the means to an end or criticize it in a noble, scholastic sort of way. Instead it tell you a story of recklessness, horror, misguided truths and hypocritical stances, it narrates to you the stories that everyone knows but nobody talks about, much like the spoiling of Saraswathi's friend. It creeps into you in the dead of the night and takes you by force and while you writhe and try and free yourself of its sweat and grime, it opens you up, thrusts itself into you and breaks you, leaving the stink of its existence deep within you much longer after it had gone.

till the next time
keep it bookish

the bookbug