Portrait of an Island on Fire

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‘These overlapping essays form a coruscating portrait of a place and make for a searing indictment of our times. Portrait of an Island on Fire is written with a formidable intelligence and a precisely targeted rage, and comes from a place of passion and of deep love. Ariel Saramandi is a writer of Mauritius and for our whole twenty-first century world; these essays are cris de coeur, they are wake-up calls – they are essays everyone should read.’

— Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days

‘Ariel Saramandi is a courageous and mesmerizing new voice, a chronicler of contemporary Mauritius whose writing refracts the influences of her Mauritian compatriots, Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah and Shenaz Patel in French, Lindsey Collen in English, in a voice which is wholly her own. Portrait of an Island on Fire unpicks the knots of Mauritius’s entangled histories – of plantation slavery, of indentured labour, of colonization, of communalism and patriarchy – laying out the threads which make up her own history of ancestral oppression and structure her lived experience of privilege and pain; which form the fabric of contemporary capitalist Mauritius, and its particular intersections of race, class, gender and language – its politics – and its particular forms of the white supremacy, anti-Blackness and toxic masculinity acted out on the bodies of those without power the world over. Saramandi is laser-focused in her rage, joyful in both her refusal to look away, and in her insistence on what sustains her: writing, motherhood, her marriage, friendships, community – and the beauty of her island.’

— Natasha Soobramanien, co-author of Diego Garcia

‘With an unflinching, searing clarity, Ariel Saramandi opens the festering wounds that have been sewn shut by silence in Mauritius since the time of colonialism and slavery. This legacy of racism sheds light on new forms of economic enslavement, the consequences of climate 4warming, abortion rights, old and new misogyny, the utter irresponsibility of successive governments. This important book is both heartbreaking and a wake-up call.’

— Ananda Devi, author of Eve Out of Her Ruins

‘Portrait of an Island on Fire is a fascinating look at Mauritius, a personal account of a homeland told with rage, rigour and love. Saramandi brilliantly, subtly teases out the threads of Mauritian history, politics and culture, honouring both the particularities of this unique place and showing the troubled connections – rapacious capitalism, racism, creeping authoritarianism, right-wing paranoia – that seem to stretch across the whole of our fragile planet. This is a beautifully written book of deep knowledge, righteous anger and fierce hope.’

— Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility5

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PORTRAIT OF

AN ISLAND ON FIRE

ARIEL SARAMANDI

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

EPIGRAPH

MAURITIUS: A CHRONOLOGY

ALL MY LANGUAGES

AN EDUCATION

AN EDUCATION: ÉCRIRE EN C(H)OEUR

THE INHERITORS

BANN-LA

SNAPSHOTS OF AN ISLAND ON THE FRONT LINE10

THERE IS TOO MUCH FEMINISM

GETTING RID OF IT

PANDEMIC IN NINE ACTS

DEATH TAKES THE LAGOON

REAL ESTATE

TEN YEARS IN POWER

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

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‘I’ve got a cunt plastered over my mouth.’

— Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, tr. Frank Wynne14

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MAURITIUS: A CHRONOLOGY

Around 10 million years ago: Mauritius was formed after a series of underwater volcanic eruptions. Volcanic activity continued until the near Holocene period. Mauritius is still considered an active volcanic region, even if the chances of an explosion in the near future are low.

The Late Middle Ages: Arab sailors crossed the Indian Ocean. They named Mauritius Dina Arobi, but didn’t settle. Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, reportedly heard about Dina Arobi from a Gujarati pilot named Abdul Majid, who may also have shown da Gama how to travel to India. Portuguese colonists then devastated east Africa in the sixteenth century, but spared Mauritius from their activities.

1598–1710: The Dutch, interested in the Indian Ocean and the promises of the spice trade, crossed the perilous seas of the Cape of Good Hope and reached Vieux Grand Port on the south-east coast. The Dutch frequently used the island as a stopping point on their way to India, and settled in 1638. They called the island T’Eylandt Mauritius Van Nassau, after the Prince of Orange. Famously, in their time here, they killed off the dodo bird.

By the time they left in 1710, they’d massacred our ebony forests for trade; wiped out the lowland palm community; killed off the population of land tortoises and large birds; introduced rats and pigs to the island, which helped in the killing.

They enslaved people from around the Indian Ocean, mainly from Madagascar, Bengal, the Malabar coast and south-east Asia. Many enslaved Africans and Asians rebelled, despite facing almost certain torture and death. 16The most famous rebellion involved Aaron of Ambon, Anna of Bengal, Ésperance of Bengal, Antoni of Malabar and Paul of Ceylon, who burned Fort Frederik Hendrik in 1695. The maroons who survived the island’s colonization lived on in the mountains and valleys of the island well after the Dutch had left.

1715–1810: The French believed Mauritius was of strategic importance to their imperial ambitions. They called the island Isle de France and attempted to settle in the only way these Europeans knew how: through extraction of resources and chattel slavery. And slavery was cherished by the whites; it was upheld even after the French Revolution, in defiance of the First Republic.

There were a number of famous governors, but the enslaved men and women who built the country’s infrastructure mostly go unnamed. They were taken mainly from Madagascar, but also from the south, west and east coasts of Africa, and some from India. Despite public torture and the decapitated heads affixed to poles, many enslaved people rebelled, marooned. Some of the most famous were Diamamouve and Madame Françoise. The latter was the leader of a maroon guerilla organization.

1810–1835: The British ‘conquered’ the island in 1810 and called it Mauritius. Though some French colonists left the island around this time, a good number of them stayed. They kept their language, their customs, their slavery. There was little improvement in the condition of enslaved people. Upon the abolition of slavery in 1835, colonists were paid a significant amount of money by the state as ‘compensation’, but the 66,000 or so enslaved people weren’t granted anything, and had to work as meagrely paid apprentices in estates that they’d laboured in 17all their lives. In the years following abolition they were pushed out of the plantations en masse, denied fair wages, their assets and land stolen from them.

At around the same period, the Colonial Office decided to expand sugar production and replace enslaved labour. There’d been a small population of South Indians in Mauritius from the time of Isle de France, people who’d come to work here as artisans and traders, but the Office required people in their hundreds of thousands. This is how the first indentured labourers from India arrived in Mauritius. The first great migration of Chinese immigrants to Mauritius came a while later.

1835–1968: About half a million Indian indentured labourers were brought to the island from 1835 to 1870. Sugar mills and their columns towered across all districts. Health and sanitation facilities were poor, and the island faced many epidemics. Slowly, despite crushing racial and class inequality, Mauritians of African, then of Indian descent began carving out a space for themselves in politics, trade unions and in media. That carving was often met with violence. Take Anjalay Coopen, thirty-two years old and pregnant, who was part of the 1943 workers’ strike at the Belle Vue Harel sugar estate to demand better wages. After a few days of growing hostility, the owners of the estate asked police officers to intervene. The officers shot some of the labourers. Anjalay was killed, along with Marday Panapen, Kistnasamy Mooneesamy and Moonsamy Moonien, who was fourteen years old.

1968: Ebullience and bloodshed ripped through the island: there was talk of independence, and while this was negotiated, a months-long ‘Bagarre Raciale’ devastated the country, the capital in particular. The racial riots were 18arguably the most traumatic event of the twentieth century in Mauritius. They engendered a thorough cultural and ethnic remapping of the island, as Creoles left the capital en masse for towns in the Plaines Wilhems, abandoning their homes and entire livelihoods. A significant amount of those who fled would also leave Mauritius for Australia.

Still, on 12 March 1968, we gained our independence. In 1992 we became a Republic, with an Exclusive Economic Zone of 2.3 million km2. Our islands comprise Mauritius, Rodrigues, Agaléga and St Brandon. The Chagossian Archipelago, before Independence, was under Mauritius’ jurisdiction.

1968–1999: In 1967, the Independence Party – a coalition made up of Labour, the Independent Forward Bloc and Comité d’Action Musulman – won the majority of seats in the election. Once in power, though, the coalition effectively established an authoritarian state until 1976. The island was marked by multiple states of emergency and press censorship. By the late seventies there was hope for better days: economically, and despite international pessimism, Mauritius blossomed. The quality of life grew better with every decade; more and more Mauritians were able to study abroad and return to improve their island. A Marxist-socialist party was born in 1969, ushering in a new wave of trade unionism and activism. Anti-Black racism and discrimination were still rife, however, and the island took a markedly centre-right turn by the 1980s.

21 February 1999: Joseph Réginald Topize, known by his stage name, Kaya, died in police custody after being arrested for smoking marijuana during one of his 19concerts. An autopsy report from Réunion stated that Kaya had been beaten to death.

Kaya was the island’s most beloved artist, a pioneer of seggae music, and a campaigner for Black rights. After his murder there were protests across the country, and those protests were met with extreme violence. Berger Agathe, a singer of Rodriguan origin, was gunned down in public the day after Kaya’s death. Sixty-two lead balls were extracted from Agathe’s body during his autopsy.

1999–2014: Marxist-socialist hopes for the country waned in the 1980s; the nineties saw the rise and concretization of neoliberal monetary policies, of Offshore, the emergence of ‘schemes’ that allowed foreigners to buy luxury properties in Mauritius. The political climate changed, but never fundamentally: an almost comfortable sense of dynasty prevailed. Since Independence, Prime Ministership was conferred from Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam to Anerood Jugnauth; from Jugnauth to Ramgoolam’s son, Navin; from Navin back to Aneerood Jugnauth and Paul Berenger; from Navin Ramgoolam back to Anerood Jugnauth; from Anerood Jugnauth to his son, Pravind.

By 2019, Pravind Jugnauth’s broad vision for the economy was marked by infrastructure projects, an explosive vision for real estate through the ‘smart cities’ programme, incredibly strong ties with India – to the detriment of other nations – and a rise in Hindu nationalism. Despite growing concerns about corruption, Mauritians chose to give Jugnauth and the MSM a second mandate in 2019.

March 2020: The government imposed a nationwide lockdown during the first few months of the pandemic. 20Small businesses shuttered, while conglomerates operating in tourism received considerable assistance. This time also saw a staggering increase in police brutality, particularly towards Creole men.

July–August 2020: The MV Wakashio wrecked off the reefs of Pointe d’Esny, and its oil spilled all around the south-east coast. The crisis could have been avoided, but no one in government resigned in its wake. Instead, the party in power attempted to stifle citizen-led clean-up operations and protests. A nationwide sense of outrage emboldened the population. Out of this anger emerged the figure of Bruneau Laurette, an activist turned politician, determined to radically change the island.

October–December 2020: A series of strange deaths made Mauritians fearful. The most talked-about murder was that of Soopramanien Kistnen, nicknamed Kaya, who was found tortured and burned to death in a sugarcane field. Kistnen was close to the party in power. The spectre of his murder would loom over the MSM’s entire second mandate.

2020–2024: International concern, but also consensus, that the Mauritian government was rapidly autocratizing grew. A number of deeply troubling bills were passed in parliament, restricting freedom of speech and the powers of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Speaker turned the House of Parliament into a grotesque carnival, ejecting and insulting members of the opposition. The political landscape beyond the MSM was fraught with conflict and unstable. The government promised ever greater increases in pensions and allowances, to quell rising discontent over the cost-of-living crisis. The 21Mauritian rupee plunged.

We all knew that the 2024 general election woud be a watershed moment in our country’s history. 22

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¶ I am back in the place I started.

I’d seen my future as a straight line to progress, to getting out of here. A line that turned out to be a loop. I thought I had climbed the rungs of a driven and purposeful life. The best grades, one of the best universities, the best chance at a better life – though what that life would consist of I didn’t know quite yet, only that I’d sacrificed so much to be on track for a semblance of personal and professional fulfilment. Ideally I would be studying and reading and perhaps even writing books in a place where I would be paid to do so, like a university. I wanted access to a decently stocked library. A city where I could walk around at night, alone. My dreams were banal, grandiose, formidably naïve.

I wonder if there are teenagers today who still believe in the pure attainability of their ambitions. Perhaps not in this world, this climate. I’d written step-by-step action plans in my diaries. I thought that I’d get somewhere by just following the plan, no matter the cost, the physical burnout. Those diaries are in the Mare Chicose landfill now, probably burnt given the repeated trash fires we’ve had over the years.

Still, sometimes dreams work out. Almost all of my close friends have left the country. I see them thrive, the joy and the pleasure they take in speaking freely across Europe and America, emboldened and safe in the mostly academic spaces they inhabit.

I left for university in England in 2012; I returned to Mauritius in 2016 with a BA and an MA in English Literature, unsure of what to do next. I started writing and 24publishing essays a year later. My work has not brought me any popularity. If this book is ever sold in shops back home, it’ll ripen existing furore.

‘How can you write this?’ I am asked over and over again. ‘Are you not ashamed?’

‘You already know about this anyway,’ is what I say now. They didn’t have to read my essays to know about my life.

Mauritius is small, compact. Two degrees of separation between each of the island’s 1,262,523 people. No one is allowed any privacy. Take the events in my essay ‘An Education’: my orthodontist knew all the details before I’d even written them down. Take a major row I had with my parents in 2021, an estrangement that lasted nine months: family acquaintances – who’d never spoken to me before besides saying hello – would ring me, asking me to ‘stop with this’, to ‘listen’, even ‘obey’. ‘Alors, toujours en bisbille avec la famille?’ asked a client of mine when I came over to appraise her house. She had, naturally, been informed of all the details. ‘It’s a terrible shame to see a family break apart like this,’ said my husband’s boss over coffee. He’d been informed of the situation by his secretary.

I had conformed to island-wide expectations: I was married with two children, I was mostly a stay-at-home mother trying to work odd jobs. But I didn’t respect society’s demands. I got angry in public: in schools, on the street, at dinner parties. I couldn’t shut up. I opened my mouth wider and wider.

Housewife as wolf. 2526

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ALL MY LANGUAGES

I used to think that it could have gone either way. If choosing a language to write and think in was primarily a matter of exposure – so that, in the end, we picked the tongue in which we were comfortable, the language with which we were surrounded – then I would have chosen French. Or, at the very least, I would also have written in French.

I was born in 1992, brought up in English, French and Kreol. I spoke English with my English father; French and English with my mother; French with my aunt, who took care of me and my sister while my mother worked; French, Kreol and a smattering of Bhojpuri with the women and men who cared for me alongside my aunt; French and Kreol outside of our home.

All the leading newspapers and media outlets are in French, a postcolonial particularity. It stems from the British administration’s decision not to impose English on the island’s (mostly Francophone) residents when they colonized the country in 1810. As a child, I’d read the papers after watching cartoons early in the morning on national TV: Babar, Petit Potam, Cat’s Eye and Sailor Moon were all either in French or French-dubbed. When I was around seven, our island was introduced to satellite television; to my knowledge no provider offered a mix of both English and French channels. My father made sure we alternated between English and French satellites every year, to balance out our tongues.

I spoke English at my international primary school. Later, when I joined a Catholic secondary school run by the Diocese, our textbook education was in English, but 28everyone spoke French. It was there that I learned the intricate ways in which language is linked to ethnicity in Mauritius.

The school was in the same town as the private French lycées, whose fees most of my classmates’ families wouldn’t have been able to afford. It was considered a better institution than the other public schools in the area. Within the school there was a separate building dedicated to prevocational education. The students attending these classes were often darker-skinned with unstraightened hair. They spoke Kreol outside of the classroom.

This was untenable to many of the schoolgirls I knew who would only speak French: Kreol was used sparingly, in jest, never spoken earnestly. These girls spent hours polishing their accents by watching French satellite television; lusted over the white boys of the lycée and the light-skinned boys at the school next door; straightened their hair, wore green contact lenses. When I was 15 I won a place at a prestigious state school, and the languages around me changed again: French was rarely heard, English, Kreol and Bhojpuri were dominant. Like the Catholic school, many of the girls were middle and lower-middle class; unlike my previous school, my classmates were now mostly Indo-Mauritian. The obsession with whiteness didn’t change: some of the girls would buy bleaching creams advertised by Bollywood stars.

But I would hesitate to delineate a precise order of things. In Mauritius there’s a tendency among people to equate light skin and wealth with languages of former European empires; darker skin and lower incomes with Kreol. People often assume I can’t speak Kreol, for 29instance. When I do speak Kreol, people tend to react in three main ways: some will converse with me without commenting on my accent; some will giggle at my accent and try to place it (the main theory is that my time in England has forever altered my tongue – ‘li anglez li!’); some will look at me in a kind of awe, as if I were a woman of lofty heights seeking to be ‘of the people’. It is the last reaction that hurts. There was a marked fourth way, too, more apparent when I was at secondary school: other children would ask me if I knew any Kreol swear words, as if, through the swears, through a performance of some crude idea of Kreol authenticity, I would show that I too belonged to this country.

And besides and beyond Kreol, locals across cultures generally assume that Indo-Mauritians prefer to speak English, whereas Creoles and Franco-Mauritians choose French. These linguistic schemata are blasted apart every day. None of them hold. A wealthy Indo-Mauritian child attending one of the lycées would probably speak French at home. And Kreol is spoken by over 90 per cent of us, across all spectrums of wealth and ethnicity.

I say 90 per cent, but the statistics are somewhat misleadingly presented. The 2022 census by Statistics Mauritius, for instance, seems to assume that Mauritians choose to speak in one language at home. ‘90% of people [are] reported to speak only Creole at home’; ‘5.1% speak Bhojpuri only’; ‘4.4% speak French only’ (my italics). Only, or, instead of and.

A conversation with my friend Marek Ahnee, a researcher at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, complicates this assumption 30of linguistic correlative order and single-language dominance. Both of us – and our families and friends in our Creole milieu – speak in a mix of French-English-Kreol every day without thinking about it. I’ve just said ‘allume l’aircon s’il te plait mo pe mor’, for instance.

I’ve seen our parents and our friends questioned for their supposed ‘allegiance’ to French, when they speak and write in English and Kreol just as perfectly. Marek tells me that when Creoles speak French, it’s often interpreted as French colonial mimicry. English, incongruously, is sometimes seen as a somewhat ‘liberated’ language. This whole line of thinking is another example of how colonial empires exist in relation to other colonial empires, and are experienced by social groups in different ways, ways which aren’t necessarily grounded in historical fact. English is perhaps felt to be ‘freer’ since, as is oft repeated, ‘the English abolished slavery’ – but it should be mandatory to follow the phrase up with ‘upon abolition in 1835 and until 1839, enslaved people were made to work as apprentices for seven and a half hours every day, without pay, remunerated in rations and land for cultivation, for the same people that had enslaved them. And, after 1839, the British government decided they would be properly free, but wouldn’t give them any financial compensation.’ Marek adds that French, which has been used (and is still used, in certain settings) as a tool of colonial power, is also a refuge for many Mauritian Creoles and marginalized Indo-Mauritian communities; it even serves as an instrument of social mobility for these people.

31These supposedly neat equations between skin tone and language will hopefully go rancid in my lifetime. But the tough, complex systems of caste and white supremacy will take the efforts of a nation to dismantle. And besides race, there is money. A mother tongue, the product of an intersection of race and history and class. If it weren’t for my father – his excellent position, his English nationality that I inherited, my private primary school, the English bookshops to which I travelled, the English books I amassed – I would probably be writing in French. Perhaps I wouldn’t be a writer at all.

Mauritius in the mid-1990s: you could count the number of bookstores on one hand. They sold an excessive number of self-help books, as well as copies of classics in strange fonts, reprinted by local publishers with or without permission. The municipal libraries were (and still are) pathetically stocked. The British Council’s library existed back then – it closed in 2016; English officials didn’t think there’d be much interest in keeping it open – but I don’t remember my parents taking me there. The Institut Français de Maurice’s gorgeous mediatheque only opened in 2010. I don’t know where their first library was, and definitely wasn’t taken there. As for Kreol, the only book I had in Kreol was a poetry pamphlet. There were no Kreol books for children back then.

I had books in French: picture books of Disney movies, the Martine series, Hector le Castor and friends. These French books, bought in Mauritius, couldn’t rival the number of books I had in English from abroad. There was a catalogue that my primary school sent out once or twice a year: I’d circle the ones I wanted most to read, the school would order them, and they’d arrive a few months 32later. My father also travelled several times a year, and there was often a book or magazine packed inside his suitcase for me when he returned. Once a year we’d all go to England. My parents would leave me alone in one of the bookshops in Canterbury and I’d emerge with ten to fifteen books. I depended on those bookshops well into my teenage years, when it seemed that people all over the world were able to buy books online except for me: Mauritius didn’t exist in the ‘choose your country’ dropdown menu at most checkouts.

I was cushioned in English children’s literature, and then PG classics like Little Women.

When I’d finished rereading my books, I’d search for others around the house. My father mostly read tomes on the World Wars and biographies of athletes. My mother, however, had a proper, literary, adult collection of novels.

I was 9 when I stumbled on the first volume of Henri Troyat’s Les Eygletière. The volumes were furrowed under piles of Cosmopolitan and Anaïs Nin, stored away in a broken cream drawer in a spare bedroom. They weren’t especially well hidden. As I started reading the novel – I didn’t know there were two more books in the trilogy, and in any case, I never sought them out – I felt, acutely and for the first time, very young and stupid and scared. The Eygletière family live in Paris in the 1960s. Philippe, the patriarch, has married his second, much younger wife, Carole, whom he cheats on. Carole, in turn, begins to have an affair with Philippe’s son Jean-Marc. Daniel, the youngest son, sets upon discovering himself in ‘pure’ 33Africa (of course!).

I don’t remember finishing the book, but I do remember putting it back in the exact place I found it and never telling my mother. I was cautious around her other books in French – and French literature in general – after that. I didn’t want to relive the moral horror Les Eygletière had brought up for me. Given that I didn’t have access to that many French books anyway, it wasn’t difficult to read exclusively in English.

As I grew up, I turned to French literature again, but always with a certain apprehension. I prepared myself