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"Mauritius Fiction."
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Silence of the Chagos
\"Every afternoon a woman in a red headscarf walks to the end of the quay and looks out over the water, fixing her gaze \"back there\"--to Diego Garcia, one of the small islands forming the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean. With no explanation, no forewarning, and only an hour to pack their belongings, the entire population of Diego Garcia was forced on a boat headed to Mauritius. Government officials told Charlesia that the island was \"closed;\" there was no going back for any of them. Charlesia longs for life on Diego Garcia, where she spent her days harvesting coconuts and her nights dancing to sega music. As she struggles to come to terms with the injustice of her new reality, Charlesia crosses paths with Dâesirâe, a young man born on the one-way journey to Mauritius. Dâesirâe has never set foot on Diego Garcia, but as Charlesia unfolds the dramatic story of their people, he learns of the home he never knew and of the life he might have had\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
kreoling sisters: (un)intimate relationships, child marriages and women spirits
The non-fiction piece, ‘kreoling sisters’, explores the overlapped histories of slavery and indenture in the Indian Ocean context, Mauritius in particular. It merges memoir writing, indenture studies and Black study and theory to discuss antiblack/antikreol racism and unfreedom during the critical historical time between the beforelife of indenture (that is slavery) and the afterlife of slavery during indenture. ‘kreoling sisters’ unearths a personal story that touches on the (un)intimacy or unofficialised intimacy between Black mothers and men of Indian descent and their Black-Indo/Kreol children. The aim is to discuss the entanglement between freedom, intimacy, slavery, antiblackness and indenture and disrupt the official, institutional, colonial and patriarchal narratives. The question the piece finally asks is how intimacy and love can exist, with the thought of what freedom could have been in the colony and could be in contemporary times. ‘kreoling sisters’ wishes to envision how Indenture studies can engage with a Black philosophy of freedom and abolition, that is the abolition of the plantation police, prison and property, inherited from colonialism.
Journal Article
Coming to terms with the past? The controversial issue of slavery in contemporary Mauritian fiction
Among the innovative aesthetic, thematic and poetic perspectives that can be observed, since the early 1990s, in a young generation of Francophone writers on Mauritius, one can find investments in the multiple and conflicting pasts of the island. Yet a look at recent literary production reveals that the period of slavery and the figure of the slave are almost absent, apart from one text--Terre d'orages (2003) by Serge Ng Tat Chung. Clearly, the paradigm of slavery has less 'symbolic capital' in literary representation (and society as a whole) than other Mauritian pasts, notably indenture. Conferring on literature a crucial role in portraying and negotiating this issue, this article interrogates this absence/presence of slavery in recent Mauritian prose fiction. With regard to the island's complex constructions and performances of memory, it will discuss the veiled longue duree of this 'foundational violence' and lay particular emphasis on the merits and pitfalls of Tat Chung's novel. Keywords: competition of victims, Indian Ocean, Mauritian novel, memory, slavery
Journal Article
The Colonel and the Slave Girls: Life Writing and the Logic of History in 1830s Sydney
In revisiting an earlier essay, \"From Slavery to Servitude: The Australian Exile of Elizabeth, and Constance,\" I explore the complex interplay between history, life writing, and the fragments of the past, uncovering what it is that we discover when we attempt to write subaltern lives or recover the subaltern voice. Because of the fragmentary nature of historical sources, as well as the separation between the historian and historical events, historians must always forge links, the existence of which are not empirically or ontologically provable. The refashioning of the past in the present involves, then, an intertwining of fact and imagination, of logic and aesthetics. This essay is an exploration of how these different qualities were combined to create \"The Australian Exile of Elizabeth and Constance.\" But it is, as well, a reflection on power, sources, and the possibilities of writing subaltern lives against or, even, along the archival grain.
Journal Article
Banaras in the Indian ocean: Circulating, connecting and creolizing island stories
What links Bernardin de Saint Pierre's 1788 novel about Isle de France, 'Paul et Virginie', with V.S. Naipaul's 1972 piece, 'An overcrowded Barracoon?' What is common to Joseph Conrad's 1910 novella, 'A Smile of Fortune', and tourist brochures of La Grande Baie? What brings together the story of the ruins of Babylon and the Ghats of the Ganges? Actually, these seemingly disjointed narratives make up a vast library of inter-connecting Indian Ocean island stories. In this study I will use the image of 'Banaras' as the locus of an inter-textual reading exercise connecting the literary spaces of Mauritian writer and filmmaker Barlen Pyamootoo with other stories like those mentioned above. Pyamootoo's literary universe reveals to us the dynamic, multilayered and polyphonic nature of Indian Ocean island cultures.
Journal Article
Dharmalan Dana
A Yorta Yorta man’s seventy-three-year search for the story of his Aboriginal and Indian ancestors including his Indian Grampa who, as a real mystery man, came to Yorta Yorta country in Australia, from Mauritius, in 1881 and went on to leave an incredible legacy for Aboriginal Australia. This story is written through George Nelson’s eyes, life and experiences, from the time of his earliest memory, to his marriage to his sweetheart Brenda, through to his journey to Mauritius at the age of seventy-three, to the production of this wonderful story in the present.
eBook