ABSTRACT
Sri Lankan writing in English emerges from a geopolitical terrain plagued with civil war, pogrom and state brutality. Originating in a context when the very tenets of nation and nationalism were marked by violent vicissitudes, Sri Lankan fiction is shaped by concerns regarding language, ethnicity, transnationalism and identity. My chapter will analyse the novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012) by Nayomi Munaweera for its portrayal of women survivors on both sides of the civil war. The author delineates the gendered nature of violence and reveals the civil war as doubly oppressive for women. How does the novel navigate the public space and the private sphere, both marked by an intensifying hypermasculine discourse of conflict? As political tensions escalate, the women characters find their agency constricted through endogamous arranged marriages, and hardening notions of “purity” around women's sexuality that legitimate honour killings and normalize rape during the ethnonational war. The chapter will probe questions regarding the various forms of resistance that women from the relatively privileged Sinhalese majority and the peripheralized Tamil women utilize in the novels. I will also argue that the heteroglossia of narrative voices is a significant mode of engagement with the gendered nature of the Sri Lankan civil war wherein some are survivors of sexual violence whilee others face more covert oppressions.
