BOOK REVIEW | INSURGENCY HISTORY | COMMENT
Memory of a Broken Paradise
Dream of a Shared Past
Rebels, insurgents, minorities, authority, government, majority.
Can all these coexist in a history narrative? Can they share history and have a truth and reconciliation moment? Can they avoid being morally superior in all their wrongdoings? It’s nearly impossible. History can either be nationalistic, erasing all that fail to comply. Or it can be all that fail to comply that is discarded as propaganda.
So how can we create a space where these opposing thoughts, factions, and forces can coexist? The answer lies in storytelling. A story can make up for all the gaps which a history narrative forgets to fill deliberately.
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One such story, Island of a Thousand Mirrors exemplifies this approach. By recounting Sri Lanka’s post-independence history, Nayomi Munaweera’s novel formulates a sense of shared past, where majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil communities can be reproached for the loss of eighty-thousand lives. A conscious reading of the novel reveals how years of marginalization can escalate into unrelenting hostility.
Again the fires can be shot questioning that how much of it is distorted facts. But it is hard to overlook the disciplinary crossings of a literary narrative that blatantly admits, “we are always interlopers into history, dropped into a story that has been going on far before we are born…”.
Munaweera’s account of insurgency challenges the common historiographical disinclination towards it. Her use of animal metaphors portrays insurgency as “a war … waged between related beasts”: the “rifle toting tiger” of Tamils versus the Sinhalese “sword-gripping lion”. Her view on Tamil insurgency as a war between equal contenders remains persistent throughout the text. The epilogue complements the earlier conviction: “There are no martyrs here. It is a war between equally corrupt forces”.
This poised narrative of insurgency affirms the possibility of retrieving minority narratives with distinct impartiality. The Sinhalese narrator, Yasodhara Rajasinghe, asserts her version as “one possible narrative of my island”, referring to the prospect of creating an alternate history of Sri Lanka — an attentive discourse on Tamil minority experience.
The first part of the novel details scenes of Sinhalese violence, while the second part introduces the Tamil narrator, Saraswathi, who recounts her past as a LTTE suicide bomber. While growing up inside the devastating conflict, her history of everyday life is confined to gory imagery. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to live outside [the war] … What would it mean to live without the soldiers in their sandbagged checkpoints? Without the barbed wire? Without the giant photographs of martyred Tigers?”.
What options is one left with while living in a conflict zone?
Munaweera’s insistence on breaking the silence on Sri Lankan war mirrors the larger plea to recuperate history for the subdued voices. The fear that ignorance of the past distorts the present contends with the state’s fear that knowledge of the past can lead to more questions about state power.
Here we have a reformulation of the link between history and state; instead of the state, insurgency is selected as the vantage point for narration of history. The state, like the insurgent, becomes a character, a subject, and not the chief narrator.
In this shattered island, there are no winners. History telling can pick a few clues from here. There are indeed no real winners but only losses in numbers, headlines, facts, figures, mass graves, partisan narratives. History will become history only if it presents a panoramic picture of the past and let readers judge the follies. Can we ever achieve this open-endedness in history? Perhaps we need more stories to heal our wounds.
Island of a Thousand Mirrors
By Nayomi Munaweera
242 pp. St. Martin’s
© 2024 Maria Khalid
