Tag: Restless Books

Song for a stolen land: Silence of the Chagos by Shenaz Patel

The Chagos. An archipelago with a name silken as a caress, fervid as regret, brutal as death . . .

The prologue that opens Shenaz Patel’s Silence of the Chagos presents a sharp juxtaposition: A boy in war-torn Afghanistan looks up as a B-52 bomber soars in, dropping a bomb that will tear his mother’s body apart before returning to its base far to the south on the island of Diego Garcia in the Chagos archipelago that rises in the Indian Ocean. Further south again, off the east coast of Africa on the island nation of Mauritius, another boy, another mother. Her eyes are fixed on the vast blue horizon, and although she stands intact, she too has been torn apart on the inside. Two scenes, bound by emptiness, confusion and pain.

What follows is a spare, unflinching fictionalized account of a piece of recent history little known to many. In the late 1960s, when Mauritius negotiated their autonomy from Britain, they agreed to  relinquish control of the Chagos Islands unaware that the US wanted it for a military base. In strategic terms the location was  perfect save for one small fact—the islands were not uninhabited. The population, primarily descendants of slaves brought to work on coconut plantations some three hundred years earlier had, after slavery was abolished, enjoyed a simple but secure, comfortable existence with guaranteed employment, a rich culture and cuisine, and a strong community life. However, once a deal was made between the British and the Americans, they were suddenly expendable. Between 1968 and 1973, all of the residents were forcibly relocated, mostly to Mauritius.

Devastated and heartbroken by this abrupt upheaval, the Chagossians have long sought to right the injustice done to them, taking their claim up to the highest levels of the International Courts but after fifty years, and several rulings in their favour, they remain in exile. Silence of the Chagos, first published in French in 2005 and now available in English in a translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman, is an attempt to give these displaced people a voice, to tell their stories. Author Shenaz Patel, herself a native of Mauritius, found that the Chagossians she had come to know and care about were openly willing to trust their tales to her. In turn, her words honour their spirit while the retention of elements of Kreol in this translated text reinforces a sense of existential loss and longing.

Employing a third person narrative with an unadorned yet passionate energy, the account unfolds through the thoughts and experiences of three primary characters as they attempt to cope with and understand their circumstances. Along the way, several cameo appearances fill in some of the missing perspectives—even the boat that carried the final load of confused residents away is granted a personified dream sequence within which one of the most horrifying moments—the brutal destruction of the islander’s pet dogs—is recounted. The result is a tale that rides on a rolling wave of sorrow and bitter nostalgia, a persistent soul deep melancholia—“lasagrin”—that claimed the lives of many transplanted Chagos Islanders and has carried on into a generation denied any actual experience of their ancestral land.

The novel begins with the 1968 Independence Day celebrations on Mauritius. We meet Charlesia who, with her family, were brought to stay in a slum in Port Louis on the pretext that her husband would receive the medical care he needed there, but now, with his health restored she cannot understand why a boat has not come to carry them back to Diego. The place she has found herself in is strange, unnatural, alien.

Nothing was right here. Streets with tight curves, cul-de-sacs, stopping people in their tracks as they headed downhill. Walking here made no sense. Back there, she had glided down the natural slope of the sand with her eyes shut, the sea before her, the sea behind her, calm and beautiful, caressing and stroking their land like a languid body held close by its lover.

Her memories will fuel her stubbornness and ultimately her activism. In the following chapter we learn why. It takes us back a few years, to 1963 on Diego Garcia, when life was normal and Charlesia was where she belonged. Her life sounds a little odd on first encounter—every morning, the adults of the community would rise and head down to be assigned their tasks for the day, either in the administrator’s quarters or on the coconut plantation. But the workday ends early; Charlesia is able to go home, spend the afternoon fishing while the children are still at school, and lovingly prepare a coconut curry for supper. On Saturday evenings community groups would gather to sing and dance and celebrate well into the night before hurrying church on Sunday morning. All of that is lost, when she lands on Mauritius.

Midway through the novel, the narrative shifts away from Charlesia’s story. When we meet Désiré, a young man completely unaware of his origins; Mauritius is the only home he has known. But there is something odd. Something missing. Confused by a strange nickname he is often given, Nordver, or Nord, he finally confronts his mother, Raymonde. After having long protected her youngest child from the truth of his origins, she confesses that the name refers to the Nordvaer, the boat on which he was born. But who was she protecting? Him or herself? She hardly knows where to start:

His birth, the boat, the land, the other land. The real one. The one that spreads outward in her mind and her heart, in her belly and her guts, every night. The land before.

Before fear, incomprehension.

Before loneliness and the sea’s wild anguish.

Before the thieving boat that had turned what ought to have been great pleasure into pain.

Before this land of high, indifferent mountains, of sneering, distant inhabitants.

With her family, Raymonde had been among the last boatload of Chagossians to be removed from Diego Garcia in 1973—they were given no explanation and no more than an hour’s warning to gather all they could carry. Heavily pregnant with her fourth child she is not fit to travel but clearance is given after a cursory exam. Out on the high seas, she frets about her shack back home, wondering if she turned the stove off, regretting that she hadn’t had time to tidy up. Unable to imagine she’d never return. And then her water breaks and she goes into labour.

Raymonde’s vivid account, and the agonizing details of her son’s unconventional birth hold the narrative connection—the metaphorical umbilical cord—between the Chagossian’s homeland and their exile. Yet, for Désiré, life on Mauritius is not easy, even for his (almost) having been born there. His heritage makes it very difficult for him to secure work. It is used against him at every turn.  And the peculiar circumstances of his birth and the homeland he has never known haunt him. He truly feels like he belongs nowhere. Getting to know Charlesia years later will begin to bring the cycle of longing full circle. But to what end?

As a novel, Silence of the Chagos raises more questions than it is able to answer. The story is, as yet, unfinished, even now fifteen years after it was originally published. The historical course of events is not directly dissected in the text, at least not until the end, in the final chapter, and in the author’s afterword. Rather, the narrative form which allows hints to arise both in conversation and in the agony of the main characters, effectively captures the lack of understanding, the absence of words, and the inability to express  loss—a loss that displaced peoples continue to face in a postcolonial reality that fails to take them into account.

Silence of the Chagos by Shenaz Patel is translated by Jeffery Zuckerman and published by Restless Books.

A methodical madness: Colonel Lágrimas by Carlos Fonseca

On a cold winter day, in a remote location high in the Pyrenees, an old man is bent over his desk intent on completing an ambitious, eccentric project. Time is against him. He is an enigma—reclusive and unknowable. And the goal of Carlos Fonseca (Suarez)’s infectious debut novel, Colonel Lágrimas, is to attempt to unravel and piece together the true identity of this strange man and the circumstances that led him to this place. But it’s no ordinary investigation and the colonel at the centre of attention is a military man only in his own imagination. He is, or rather was, a brilliant mathematician, a cryptic solver of abstract puzzles, who at the height of his fame, suddenly retreated from academia, embarking on a strange journey toward isolation and obscurity.

Our guide in this inquiry is a playful voyeur who follows the aged recluse through the course of a single day, spinning a fragmented, nonlinear narrative of anecdotes, historical asides, interruptions, and discursions. At times we are invited to observe our subject as if through a lens, sometimes zooming in to a level of pixelated hyper-reality. At other times we watch as an invisible (or unnoticed) presence, slipping into the frame to rustle around in his photographs and letters when the colonel is asleep or otherwise occupied. As readers we are complicit. Curiosity is mixed with a sense that we are invading the secret world of a man lost to the caprices of a second, doomed childhood:

Where is the border of the private? Where is the sentry to tell us when we should stop, draw a line, move no closer, and have a little respect? We imagine that at some point, when we’re getting too close, we’ll no longer see him and only the pixels of the background will be left, atmosphere with no storyline.

The pleasure of the intruder.

Much more than an exercise in intellectual and linguistic experimentation, the hero of Colonel Lágrimas is loosely based on the strange life of Alexander Grothendieck, the enigmatic German-born mathematician who played a major role in the development of modern algebraic geometry before suddenly abandoning his career in mid-stride, ultimately spending his later years in seclusion. Fonseca, who was born in Costa Rica and raised in Puerto Rico, grants his colonel a Mexican birth, a Russian Jewish mother given to painting the same volcano day after day, and anarchist father who fatally throws his lot in with the Spanish Republicans. There are crossovers and echoes with Grothendieck’s life which held its own share of mystery. But here we have a character on whom the spotlight can be dialed in much closer, even if we can never get inside his head, so to speak. In an interview published in Numéro Cinq, Fonseca describes his novel as the product of an intersection of his obsessions with the elusive German mathematician, with archives and archival novels, and with Chuck Close’s large portraits often composed of “pixels” created out of mini-paintings. Stylistically he says he sees his writing as, in some sense, a product of his origins, that is, as “the strange offspring of the Puerto Rican baroque writing, on the one hand, and Costa Rican minimalism and experimentation, on the other.”

Thus, by playing the voyeuristic detective narrator’s close observations of the colonel’s daily routine and his current effort to record the lives of three imagined alchemical divas against a collection of historical anecdotes we begin to build an image of an old man racing against time to contain an essence of a history he is trying to forget. Woven into the narrative are descriptions of faded photographs, aphorisms from his father’s notebook, and postcards from a long correspondence with Maximiliano, a Mexican who gets inextricably bound in his former hero’s eccentric archival efforts. Themes repeat, patterns form. And binding it all is the regular appearance of a doodled spiral of barbed wire and a complex algebraic equation that are assumed to be connected. Gradually, layer by layer, a picture starts to take shape.  The fragments are the pixels needed to construct a fuller portrait of the life of our solitary subject.

His is a life that crosses many of the major events of the twentieth century—the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, Vietnam—albeit a step out of time or logic, forever anachronistic. We learn that our “young colonel” rejected his past and began a lifelong pattern of slipping behind masks at an early age. He headed off, on his own, to occupied Paris, when he was ten. Within a few years he had adopted the role of an orphan. Later, having earned respect as a mathematical genius, he suddenly tosses it all to teach math in Vietnam during the war. At present, on the day we spend watching him in his absent-minded pursuits, he is engaged in writing the “autobiographies of other people,” his trio of historical divas. Or are they a means of assuaging a guilt that has driven his odd behaviour? That is not an easy question to answer.

There are two ways of approaching the colonel. You can see him from a distance, his romantic profile like a tired genius who finally surrendered to the madness of endless projects. Easy to see him in this genius-like aspect, prisoner of dementia, a captive of the memory of his traumatic childhood. More difficult though to approach him to the point of belief, to where we believe in his projects. To see him up close in his more criminal profile: no longer a genius, no longer mad, but rather a man who waited, patiently, until the day came that would strip him of his talent so he could sit down to write what he always wanted.

As a portrait of our stateless colonel is fleshed out in what is more a process of questioning, refining, and focusing possibilities—attempting to solve an individual life as an algebraic equation—it is impossible not to feel pity for this man who struggles with writer’s block, has an unknown audience waiting outside his bathroom door as he sings in the bath, is observed as he dresses up in his finest regalia, and critiqued as he performs a drunken oratory in what he can only assume is the guarded privacy of his own home. Examined as a collection of data, analyzed and psychoanalyzed in his waning days, he will not be allowed to slip quietly into obscurity.

And whether that would secretly please him or not, we will never know.

Colonel Lágrimas is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell and published by Restless Books.