A comparative review and reading of Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
By Dhanuka Bandara
It is becoming increasingly clear to the more astute observers that the historical process has entered a paradigm shift. The “black swan” event of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine —the latter, not all that unanticipated, but still surprising enough for some — have done much to facilitate an emerging new world order.
Irrespective of one’s ideological persuasion, what by now has become indisputable is that a multipolar word order is emerging, to replace the unipolar world order spearheaded by the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The close alliance between the Russians and the Chinese — “the limitless partnership” — and the push for “dedollarization” with at least some support from the Saudi and the BRICS nations on board, seem to signal that the era of unipolar Western hegemony is coming to a (perhaps) much welcome end. In this new geopolitical configuration, it is interesting to re/assess expat writing in English, which often reflects the broader historical moment.
Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors is in many ways a quintessential postcolonial or expatriate novel. It is the sort of novel that almost makes one think of postcolonial writing as “genre fiction.” First, one encounters idyllic descriptions of the still politically unblemished oriental paradise, which is then marred by much racial violence, prompting the protagonists to seek greener pastures elsewhere. In the case of this novel, it is the United States.
It must be said at the beginning itself, though, that despite being rigidly formulaic, Island of a Thousand Mirrors is an extremely well written work and at times a compelling read, albeit Munaweera’s lush writing often lacks much depth. It is precisely because it is a strong novel, at least in terms of technique, that it ought to be critiqued.
The novel opens with the last British ship leaving Sri Lanka with colonial plunder with an Englishman on board telling his wife, “Such a nice little place.” Then the narrative immediately shifts to a description of the new nation’s national flag, which forebodes the onset of ethnic violence.
That Sri Lanka was an idyll before the race riots and the subsequent civil war amounts to a trope in Sri Lankan writing in English: to give one example, the Booker Prize shortlisted Reef by Romesh Gunasekera. This is the image of a paradise spoilt by political violence and the implacable racism of its people: “Blissfully unaware of the departing Englishman, my seventeen year-old father-to-be, Nissan, cavorts on beaches he does not know are pristine.”
Munaweera, like Shehan Karunathilaka, the author of the Booker Prize winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, who has endorsed her book, has taken the convenient “blame both sides” view on this issue. Often in novels such as Island, instead of a nuanced reading of Sri Lanka’s ethic woes, what one finds is self-righteous and self-justifying moral outrage.
After the riots break out in 1983, the protagonist’s family — bourgeois Sinhala family, it is relevant to note here — decide to leave Sri Lanka, as they cannot bear to live in a country capable of such unspeakable atrocities—and move to the United States.
In Munaweera’s novel, the United States figures as the substitute for the lost utopia, a refuge and a haven for the likes of Yashodara — the protagonist — and her family. Yashodara and her sibling are thrilled to become American citizens: “We have become the most privileged and God-blessed persons on the planet, Americans, thank you very much, not Ameri-can’ts.”
If at all these lines are ironic, the seeming irony is nullified by the fact that throughout, the narrative returns to stress the prerogatives of being American citizens without any attempt to expose America’s culpability in racially motivated violence in the US itself and elsewhere.
After many years in the US, the narrator returns to a now war-torn Sri Lanka to be part of a charity organization. Upon her arrival, her party is stopped at a checkpoint. They flash their American passports at seemingly awed Sri Lankan soldiers and Yashodara is told, “Don’t look so shocked, Akka. We have these magic things after all. They keep us protected from all this madness.” The ironic potential in these lines is defused by the overall point of the narrative, that the US ultimately remains as refuge for those who become victims of political violence (“all this madness”) in Sri Lanka.
Having returned to Sri Lanka, Yashodara, along with her sister, start teaching at a school for children who have been affected by the civil war. The children have questions for her: “They ask me questions about America, is it true that everyone has a car there? Also and does everyone really have a gun to shoot everyone else on the street? One little girl sits on my lap, she says, ‘I wouldn’t go there.’ But then looking down at the curved stump of her left knee, she says, ‘But maybe they could send me a leg?’”
While it is highly unlikely that war-affected Sri Lankan children would be familiar with liberal narratives of gun violence, this passage clearly establishes the US in its self-declared role as the savior of humanity, a defender of democracy and freedom. Thus, Munaweera’s novel is a classic tale of local elites migrating to the US, where they are absorbed into the liberal middle-class, and then returning to Sri Lanka as emissaries of a well-meaning and benevolent empire to save us all. Thanks, I guess.
After Yashodara’s sister dies in a bomb explosion in Sri Lanka — another generic requirement — the traumatized narrator returns to the United States (San Francisco), now in love with the dead sister’s lover, Shiva: “When the fog lifts, San Francisco sparkles. In this most European of American cities, exile, forgetting, escape seemed possible even common. We sought solace here, found work, bought a small house. We put down crude roots.”
Thus, in the Unites States of Promised Land, they find middle class serene joy or realize a version of the American Dream. They get married and have a kid, and even occasionally invite their diverse friends over to taste a Sri Lankan meal: “Around our table Americans, South Americans, Europeans and Africans gather to lament the lack of a Sri Lanka restaurant in the Bay Area and cajole us once again to start one because as they say, ‘This is incredible. So good!’” So, yes, Sri Lanka sucks, but our food is great. Even the Bay Area cosmopolitans think so!
While the protagonist of Munaweera’s novel, after her harrowing experience in the hellhole of Sri Lanka, finds solace in lifestyle liberalism in California, thus not so implicitly representing the United States as a refuge from postcolonial/Third World violence, the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist leaves the United States and returns to his homeland, Pakistan, as he refuses to be a “janissary” of the Empire.
The novel is set up as a conversation between the novel’s Pakistani protagonist, Changez, and an American he seemingly accidentally meets in a Lahore restaurant. Here, America is represented back to an American by a Pakistani, the inverse of what one typically finds in expatriate writing.
Much like Munaweera’s Yashodara, Changez also comes from an elite family in his home country, although his family fortunes have diminished over generations. The Princeton educated Changez embraces the American Dream and starts working for a ruthless valuation firm in New York, and falls in love with an evasive White American woman. However, as the narrative progresses, the protagonist becomes disillusioned and makes a decisive moral and political decision of returning to Pakistan.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is one of the few postcolonial or expatriate texts that, in my view, gets America right. The protagonist gradually realizes that, despite having a lucrative career in New York, his racial, religious, and national identity still operates against him. The woman he is in love with, Erica, is still in love with her dead lover, Chris. Changez’s romantic rival, therefore, is literally a dead white male who exerts his sexual agency well beyond the grave.
After a drawn-out courtship, Changez’s relationship with Erica is finally consummated when he pretends to be Chris, Erica’s dead lover, out of sheer desperation. After this Erica is driven mad and is committed to an institution, whence she disappears. The doomed relationship between Changez and Erica could be understood allegorically as a powerful commentary on interracial romantic relationships in the US, which, despite the pretensions to the contrary, are very much under an implicit taboo.
However, it is after his encounter with Juan Batista — the chief of a Chilean publishing house that he is sent to evaluate — that Changez conclusively decides to return to Pakistan. Batista tells Changez that he is a “janissary.” He explains that janissaries were Christian soldiers in the Ottoman Army trained to fight against their own people. This forces Changez to conclude, “I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war.” After this epiphany, Changez returns to Pakistan and starts teaching at a university – or so it would seem.
As I have stated in the opening paragraph of this piece, historically we are going through a paradigm shift. The US and its vassal-like allies in Europe are in gradual but certain decline. While Munaweera’s novel serves to establish the moral righteousness of the United States — which in turn justifies its global hegemony — Hamid’s novel correctly understands the US’s complicity in countless wars that have inflicted so much misery around the world. In the age of imperial decline, these two novels offer us a choice. Are we to turn into janissaries, or are we to become reluctant fundamentalists? The time has come for us — a peripheral state in the Global South — to rethink our allegiances.
Dhanuka Bandara is a freelance writer based in Kandy, Sri Lanka. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Miami University, USA. Formerly he has taught English at Miami University and University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. He can be reached at bandard@miamioh.edu.
Factum is an Asia-Pacific focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.
