'Such a Nice Little Place’: Rhizomatic Partnership in Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Abstract

This article provides a rhizomatic partnership reading of diasporic Sri Lankan author Nayomi Munaweera’s novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors. The novel is analyzed in the light of the bio-cultural partnership-domination lens developed by Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry and underscores the fact that the rhizomatic quality of Indoceanic cultures can be traced even when it appears to be severely in jeopardy. Carrying out an analysis of different forms of domination and partnership models in the narrative thread, this article defends that the novel resolves that it is only outside of Sri Lanka, in diasporic territory, that the devastating dominator ascendancy rife on the island during the times of the civil conflict, when the story is set, can be rectified. The possibility of a rhizomatic partnership between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities is envisioned beyond the island shores, with the birth of a child of mixed ancestry in America. The child enacts the embodied possibility of a common future that, against the odds, may remain faithful to the rhizomatic quality of Sri Lankan and, more broadly, of Indoceanic cultures.