Micropolitics of the ordinary: Tactical resistance and subaltern agency in Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Contemporary Sri Lankan fiction in English frequently explores the intersections of war, memory, and identity, and it usually presents resistance through grand narratives of nationalism and trauma. This study, however, focuses on the micropolitics of everyday life in Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors . Drawing upon Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics, the study argues that the novel’s most radical interventions do not appear through overt political opposition but through subtle, embodied, and transient acts that are part of daily life, such as cooking, dressing, storytelling, silence, and spatial improvisation. By emphasizing these ordinary practices, the novel creates a complex landscape of subaltern agency that disrupts hierarchies of nation, caste, gender, and militarism. The characters — Yasodhara, Saraswathi, Beatrice, Alice, and Mala — use tactics to reinterpret dominant codes and to reclaim both material and symbolic spaces. The transformation of Saraswathi from a violated subject into a tactical actor shows the ethical and emotional complexity of resistance and questions binary understandings of victimhood and agency. Through close textual analysis, this study challenges macropolitical readings of Sri Lankan Anglophone fiction and shows that everyday life functions as a vital site of political possibility and endurance within structures of domination.