Remembering Disaster and Ecologies of Affect in Nina Bouraoui’s Le jour du séisme (1999) and Nathacha Appanah’s Le dernier frère (2007)

ABSTRACT

This article explores ‘ecologies of affect’ in literary representations of disaster—earthquakes, flash floods and cyclones—with reference to Nina Bouraoui’s Le jour du séisme (1999) and Nathacha Appanah’s Le dernier frère (2007). These narratives of so-called ‘natural’ disaster privilege affective modes of remembrance linked to violent regimes. In Le jour du séisme, the El Asnam earthquake of 1980 is an opportunity to explore living on the fault line between French and Algerian histories. In Le dernier frère, a devastating flash flood facilitates the unlikely encounter between Raj, a Mauritian boy, and David, a young Jewish refugee detained by British colonial authorities during the Second World War. Through a comparative analysis, this article shows how representations of natural hazards frame an unsettling confrontation between past and present that influences different approaches to affective, embodied and gendered forms of historical remembrance.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article examine l’affect écologiste et la représentation des catastrophes—tremblements de terre, crues subites et cyclones—qui figurent dans Le jour du séisme (1999) de Nina Bouraoui et Le dernier frère (2007) de Nathacha Appanah. En représentant des catastrophes dites ‘naturelles’, ces œuvres privilégient des modes de commémoration affectifs liés aux régimes violentes. Dans Le jour du séisme, le tremblement de terre à El Asnam en 1980 ouvre une faille par rapport à l’identité française et algérienne de la narratrice. Dans Le dernier frère, un cyclone dévastateur sur l’île Maurice permet une rencontre improbable entre Raj, garçon mauricien, et un jeune réfugié juif, David, détenu par les autorités coloniales britanniques pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale. Notre analyse examine l’affect écologiste dans chaque texte pour révéler leurs perspectives différentes sur les représentations incarnées et genrées de ces catastrophes qui évoquent une rencontre troublante entre passé et présent.

This article explores the relationship between literary representations of so-called ‘natural’ disasters and memories of historical violence. Nina Bouraoui’s Le jour du séisme (Bouraoui 1999) and Nathacha Appanah’s Le dernier frère (Appanah 2007) use earthquakes, flooding, and cyclones as metaphors for the ‘ruination’ of violent legacies linked to colonialism (Stoler 2013), as well as Nazism in the case of Le dernier frère. The pages below are based on the principle that there is nothing socially or politically neutral about so-called ‘natural’ disaster. As summarized by Razmig Keucheyan, ‘la nature n’échappe pas aux rapports de force sociaux: elle est la plus politique des entités’ (Keucheyan 2018, 11).

Scholars working in postcolonial ecocriticism have highlighted longstanding connections between global ecologies and the disastrous trajectories of colonialism and capitalism (DeLoughrey, Didur, and Carrigan 2015). Kasia Mika draws on the work of Ben Wisner, Susan E. Jeffrey, and others to demonstrate how vulnerability is key to understanding this connection between colonialism and disaster—disasters do not occur because of natural hazards, but emerge where populations and landscapes are made more vulnerable to them: ‘unnatural processes, such as economic and political exploitation, directly [determine] whether a natural hazard will become a disaster’ (Mika 2019, 8). Being attentive to these vulnerabilities helps us to identify the unequal distribution of material and symbolic value between the so-called Global North and Global South, crafted by centuries of colonialism. Both Carrigan and Mika draw from the words of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, who, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, explicitly connected the catastrophe of slavery and other disasters: ‘I’m so conscious of the enormity of slavery and the Middle Passage and I see that as an ongoing catastrophe’ (McSweeney and Brathwaite 2005). Similarly, Achille Mbembe’s concept of death-worlds addresses continuities between colonial pasts and ‘new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe 2003, 40). In exploring the literary representations of disaster in colonial and postcolonial contexts, this article argues that representations of natural hazards play an important role in how authors engage with memories of violence.

Nina Bouraoui and Nathacha Appanah are writers who have investigated the relationship between natural hazards and legacies of historical violence. As will be seen below, their texts explore affective modes of remembrance by depicting embodied forms of mourning and identification in response to disasters that shape the landscapes in which they live. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley suggest that ‘to speak of postcolonial ecology is to foreground the historical processes of nature’s mobility, transplantation and consumption’ (2011, 13). This article’s objective is to consider affective engagement with landscapes as a means of remembering historical violence. We can refer to this in terms of ‘ecologies of affect’.

Human connections to landscapes clearly go beyond the binary of material and abstract concerns: concepts of place are imaginative, emerging from encounters between people, environments, and objects. Place is felt through the body, but experiences are messy and not easily categorized: ‘always there are ambiguous or “mixed” encounters that impinge and extrude for worse and for better, but (most usually) in-between’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 2). Ondine Park, Tonya Davidson, and Rob Shields examine the messiness of affective encounters in terms of ‘ecologies of affect,’ emphasizing that connections between people and place are neither linear nor unilateral, but fuse the body with imagination ‘into an ethical synthesis:’ ‘infused with power, grounded in place and located bodies, affect is viscerally political’ (2011, 5). Thinking about affective attachments to landscapes can help unpack how concepts of place are not inherent or straightforward, but in a ‘flux’ of everyday ‘ethical synthesis’ between mind and body. An approach to the ‘viscerally political’ ecologies of affect must recognize that landscapes do not exist outside time—affective relationships to place are historically situated. In this sense, affective relationships with landscapes are closely connected to questions of remembrance.

Both Le jour du séisme and Le dernier frère are narratives of memory that recount childhoods shaped by affective relationships with lands transformed by disaster. When these places are subjected to dramatic transformation, bonds of affective attachment are dramatically revealed, raising questions concerning the connections between so-called ‘natural’ disasters and systemic forces of oppression like Nazism. The two narratives interrogate how colonialism shapes an affective attachment to ‘natural’ landscapes constructed in part by the exploitation of peoples and resources. Recalling earthquakes and cyclones becomes a means of excavating pasts touched by regimes of oppression.

Reading the novels comparatively highlights the differentiated specificities of each disaster. Describing Bouraoui’s representation of the antagonistic histories of France and Algeria in Garçon manqué (2000), Fiona Barclay argues that the author portrays the ‘violence of living on the fault line between these molar forces which collide with the force of tectonic plates’ (2006, 146). Barclay borrows this geological metaphor from Bouraoui’s Le jour du séisme, in which the metaphorical value of living on the fault line between France and Algeria is allegorized in the account of the El Asnam earthquake. Le jour du séisme focuses on the ramifications of 10 October 1980 for the narrator’s individual, national, gendered, and historical identity. In contrast, Le dernier frère is about two intersecting histories: the legacies of indentured labour in Mauritius and the Holocaust. Appanah is preoccupied with the interplay of fiction and the historical fact of the detainment of 1581 Jewish refugees in Beau-Bassin’s Central Prison by British authorities during the Second World War (Pitot 2000; Lionnet 2010). The novel is narrated from the perspective of the ageing Raj who, as a young boy in the 1940s, lived with his family on a sugar plantation in Mapou, Mauritius. Monocultures such as sugar plantations are notorious for environmental degradation, including soil erosion leading to flash flooding (McKinney et al. 2019, 355). In this respect, the plantation is a site of human and environmental degradation. Raj can only stand powerless as he witnesses his two brothers, Anil and Vinod, being swept away by a flash flood. The surviving family members move to Beau-Bassin, where the father guards a British-run prison, detaining Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe. From a hiding place behind the prison’s perimeter, Raj finds a new brother in David Stein, a sick Czech boy whom he tries to save by helping him flee in 1945. After a particularly brutal cyclone, David perishes during his fugue with Raj into the forest.

Bringing Bouraoui and Appanah’s texts together in relation to ecologies of affect does not mean that there are direct parallels in their representations of natural hazards and human vulnerabilities. The respective disasters differ in terms of their temporality. On the one hand, the earthquake is an unpredictable transformational event that triggers a temporal rupture in Bouraoui’s narrative, concerning both the time of postcolonial Algerian history and the time of childhood. In suggesting that the shock of the earthquake is the stimulation for an ‘affective engagement’ with the past, my argument expands on Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘affective engagement’—moments where ‘one’s body is touched, moved, provoked’ into remembrance (2015, 3). In these cases, historical knowledge does not result from an intentional ‘act’ of thinking historically, but is an outcome of mediated and affective engagements with the past. By reimagining Algeria at a moment of rupture and destruction, Bouraoui transforms the landscape into an affective object. Bouraoui’s vivid descriptions of her childhood landscape stage how the body ‘remembers’ the moment of the earthquake, which serves as an allegory for the narrator’s alienation from Algeria in the same year as the event at El Asnam. Returning to the earthquake’s waves of physical and symbolic aftershock is a way for the narrator to engage with her French-Algerian identity. On the other hand, the cyclone and subsequent flash foods described by Appanah are cyclical and repetitive. Appanah engages with the return of the cyclone as a way of introducing the traumatic legacies of personal loss for the characters and enacting the transnational memory of the Holocaust in the multi-layered colonial history of Mauritius. As we shall see, a series of destructive cyclones accumulates in 1945 as a metaphor for the multidirectionality of memory (Rothberg 2009), with the historical trajectories of the Holocaust in Europe and colonialism in Mauritius cross-pollinating one another (Lionnet 2010).

In some respects, the seismic shock and the repetitive cyclone convey the different material realities of colonialism in Algeria and Mauritius. Algeria, as a settler colony from 1830 to 1962, was transformed by colonial agriculture and characterized by the unpredictable mass displacement, dispossession, and detention of Algerian peoples (Thénault 2012). The landscape of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean with no prior indigenous community, was transformed by waves of occupation. Following the initial colonization by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the French colonized Mauritius in the eighteenth century and trafficked enslaved people. During nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonization by the British, people were brought as indentured workers from India and beyond. Mauritius was transformed by the implementation of new rhythms for sugar production which have left their marks (Haines 2018, 154). While the colonial contexts of the two texts are different, both authors examine the affective and sensory experiences of memory that are intimately tied to landscapes. In this light, ecologies of affect refer to the entanglement of memory, embodiment, and landscape. The sections below explore how literary representations of disaster—earthquakes in Algeria; flash floods and cyclones in Mauritius—bring up ecologies of affect that pertain to regimes of violence in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Encountering self and other

In Le jour du séisme, Nina Bouraoui intertwines the narrator’s subjectivity, as a child of French and Algerian parents, with Algerian land during the El Asnam earthquake of 1980. Bouraoui has consistently returned to an autofictional form of storytelling—like the novel’s narrator, she has an Algerian father and French mother, and left Algeria suddenly around the time of the event in El Asnam. Her story opens with the only description in the book of the earthquake as a specific historical occurrence: ‘ma terre tremble le 10 octobre 1980. Sa démission est de soixante secondes. Son onde longe en cercles croissants et détruit cent kilomètres de rayon, une distance de feu et de tranchées. L’épicentre des ruptures loge sous ma ville, Alger’ (1999, 9). Instead of a prolonged depiction of the earthquake as a fact, the reader is exposed to the earthquake at the level of the narrative’s style and form. Visceral violence is conveyed via truncated sentence structures throughout the narrative: ‘ma terre se transforme. Elle est en éclats. Elle s’ouvre et se referme sur les corps. Elle prend, l’équilibre. Elle trahit. Sa violence achève les beaux jours’ (9). The anonymous narrator privileges the anaphoric technique of short sentences beginning with the pronoun ‘elle.’ The fractured sentences echo physical rupture, with a sense of shock and anger at the earth’s sudden destruction: ‘Elle trahit.’ As Adrienne Angelo puts it, this fragmented style and ‘langage tronqué’ (2011, 76) link ‘le travail-mémoire à une énergie tectonique’ (77). The third-person subject and the caesuric effect of the comma between verb and object exemplified by ‘Elle prend, l’équilibre’ occur with increasing intensity, reinforcing a conflation between the narrator’s experience and the destruction of the land—as the land fragments, so does she. The repetition of ‘elle’ also personifies the ‘terre’ as the agent of violence. It is the land that rises up violently to betray those on its surface. But the narrator is the curator of this violence in the narrative, insisting on her possession of the land, ‘ma terre,’ further destabilizing the fault lines between the ‘self’ of the narrator and the ‘other’ of the land. Bouraoui’s fractured narration results in the detachment of the violence of the earthquake from the specificity of the El Asnam disaster. Instead, the focus is on the act of working through the violence in memory.

Within the affective ecology of Le jour du séisme, the violence done by ‘ma terre’ is folded into the violence done to the body. Sometimes, this is an explicit affirmation: ‘la terre est un vrai corps’ (Bouraoui 1999, 47). At other times, the narrator implicitly suggests that the land ravaged by disaster is her own body:

Ma terre tremble en réalité. Sa violence est permanente. Elle crépite, dévaste et pénètre ma chair. Elle atteint. Elle existe. Elle est vivante et dressée contre l’humain. Elle monte et s’éventre. Elle prend, et se referme. […] Elle blesse. Elle est armée. Je sais son tracé, une topographie. Elle va de la mer aux montagnes, de la ville à Mitidja, des plaines à l’Assekrem, la limite précise du désert. (12)

Once again, the repetition of ‘elle’ dislocates this violence from the land and reimagines it as ‘vivante’ and ‘dressée contre l’humain.’ The violence done to the earth is experienced and lived through ‘ma chair,’ with the visceral and violent language of ‘crépite, dévaste et pénètre.’ The land-body also traces the topography of the Algerian landscape, defined by the limits of its borders—Mitidja in the north and Assekrem in the south. On the one hand, ‘de la ville à Mitidja’ evokes late colonial slogans such as Charles de Gaulle’s ‘de Dunkerque à Tamanrasset’ in 1958, linking the knowledge of violence to the invasion, mapping, and occupation of Algerian land by France: ‘elle blesse. Elle est armée.’ On the other hand, the first-person subject intervenes in the midst of the repetition of ‘elle’ to stake a claim to this landscape on an intimate level: ‘je sais son tracé, une topographie.’ Recalling the destruction of the earthquake is a means of affirming the narrator’s connection to and knowledge of the Algerian landscape in a way that is differentiated from the militarized knowledge economy of mapping and invasion. This is a bodily knowledge in which the violence of the earthquake is remembered as a corporeal wounding, recounted through a repetitive emphasis in the present tense. Throughout Bouraoui’s narrative, knowledge of the Algerian land is conditioned by a bodily experience that cannot be detached from the act of remembrance.

Whereas Bouraoui’s text autofictionally tackles the narrator’s dual heritage through metaphors surrounding the earthquake, Nathacha Appanah explores Mauritius’s vulnerability to flash flooding and cyclones as the setting for an unexpected encounter between self and Other. Appanah expands the historical facts of Jewish refugees being imprisoned in Mauritius in order to imagine the meeting of David, a Jewish refugee, and Raj, a descendant of indentured labourers.¹ In the fictional account of Le dernier frère, they are brought into contact through a series of cataclysmic events at personal and historical levels: David loses his family to the Holocaust, and Raj loses his brothers to a flash flood. For Raj, the flood that takes the lives of his brothers Anil and Vinod physically and symbolically takes away his voice and his ability to connect with others: ‘je hurlais de toutes mes forces, mais le vent, la pluie, la tonnerre, les éclairs, le grondement de la coulée de boue qu’était devenue notre rivière adorée couvraient ma voix et en me laissaient aucune chance’ (Appanah 2007, 34). Paradoxically, the flash flood entailing Raj’s grief and mourning creates the circumstances through which he encounters David, his last ‘brother.’ Raj’s adoptive embrace of David symbolizes a rejection of his colonial education, in which Raj was explicitly taught at school to fear the Other in the form of ‘les dAngErEux, les mArrOns, les vOlEurs et les mÉchAnts’ (Appanah 2007, 49). Here, Raj’s free indirect speech caricatures the teacher’s dramatized over-pronunciation in an attempt to terrify the pupils. In contrast, Raj’s encounter with the real-life prisoner David fosters an imagined brotherhood between the grieving children. Their bond—based on shared but differentiated trauma and grief—emerges from the destroyed landscape of his childhood on the sugar plantation.

Against the violence of colonial bordering that stands in their way, Appanah imagines David and Raj’s brotherhood as taking place in the context of Mauritian multiculturalism. In Rainbow Colours, Srilata Ravi notes the fundamental ‘cultural hybridity’ in Mauritian literature—the ‘ethnotopographies of Mauritius’ are reflected in the ‘intersecting space of ethno-cultural realities, national and transnational identities and a poetics of alterity’ (2007, 9). Characteristic ‘metaphors of multi-layering and hybridity’ in Mauritian literary practice (Damlé 2011, 151) are reflected in Appanah’s poetics of alterity in Le dernier frère. The elective brotherhood at the heart of the narrative transgresses lines of language, religion, and race in a way that contributes to cross-cultural and non-competitive modes of remembrance (Khamo 2019, 149). Each child grieves loss through the other.

The circumstances that make this encounter possible are underpinned by extreme violence: David’s presence as an incarcerated child in Beau-Bassin is due to his victimization under Nazism. As Françoise Lionnet’s analysis of the novel puts it, ‘is it fair, then, to ask whether [Appanah’s] narrative instrumentalizes the experience of the Czech boy in order to solve the problems specific to the postcolonial nation and its ethnic issues?’ (2010, 120). She suggests that the novel tackles this question through its ‘“minor transnational” or “multidirectional” approach to the surprising mémoires croisées of two seemingly unconnected ethnic groups’ (121; Lionnet and Shih 2005; Rothberg 2009). David and Raj’s encounter does not simply reflect the multicultural mix of Mauritian society; it engenders the multidirectionality of memory as a ‘productive’ entanglement rather than a ‘privative’ contest between diverse historical trajectories (Rothberg 2009, 3). This invented encounter between the two children—representing divergent histories of violence from Czechoslovakia to Mauritius—stages the possibility of an ethical encounter despite the profoundly violent circumstances that brought them there.

In light of the work of Lionnet and Khamo on the multidirectionality of Le dernier frère, we can add that the fraternal bond is inseparable from descriptions of land and water. Appanah paints a picture of a liminal world where the boundaries between physical and human geographies are hard to define. Whether it is as a result of the flash flood that washes away Raj’s brothers, or the cyclone that inundates the land, borders between bodies and territories become porous. Indeed, the opening of the novel sees the elderly Raj encountering David’s ghost inhabiting an otherworldly waterland:

Je m’étonnais toujours que son corps maigre, ses jambes et ses bras longs et fins comme les roseaux qui poussent au bord des rivières, son visage perdu dans ses cheveux doux et aériens telle l’écume des vagues, je m’étonnais toujours que tout ça, cet ensemble de choses petites et douces et inoffensives, fasse autant de bruit sur le sol quand David marchait. (2007, 7)

David’s body comes to Raj like a reed on a riverbank, rooted in the island as a boundary between land and water. The reed-like ghost reminds him of the porous and intersubjective relationality with David from the moment of their initial encounter.

When seeing David for the first time from his hiding spot behind the barbed wire of the prison’s perimeter, Raj recognizes himself in the figure of the crying child:

Soudain, les boucles de David ont commencé à trembler, ses épaules aussi et il a caché la tête dans ses genoux qu’il avait ramenés sur sa poitrine en s’asseyant. Puis j’ai entendu ses sanglots. Je les connaissais très bien ces pleurs qui font hoqueter, qui font dire doucement aaahh, comme si quelqu’un vous enfonçait lentement, très lentement, un couteau dans le cœur, je connaissais très bien ces pleurs qui sortent comme de nulle part, soudain, alors qu’on est pourtant tranquillement assis sur une pelouse grasse et verte et que le soleil chauffe les épaules. Je me suis redressé, une envie terrible de l’appeler, de le réconforter, lui dire, comme Anil me disait, ça va aller, arrête de pleurer, ton nez coule et beurk tu avales la morve, ça nous faisait toujours rire de dire cela, tu avales la morve, et il rajoute c’est salé non? et l’instant après, j’avais oublié les larmes. (58)

Raj recalls the scene with a joyful childish affection for David’s leaky sick body, secreting tears and snot. His remembrance embraces the body of the Other, as the boundaries between him and David become porous. Raj’s empathy for David emerges from his own loss—the ghost becomes the ethical impetus for memory work in the present. As in Bouraoui’s Le jour du séisme, physical destabilization by way of earthquake, cyclone or flash flood spurs allegorical engagements with the porosity of the self. The liminal aesthetics of the flash flood and the inundating cyclone in Le dernier frère underpin an ethics of remembrance which emphasizes shared memories across lines of difference.

Gendering memory

Just as affective ecologies emphasize the relationality between human bodies, land, and water, it is also important to consider the role of gender. In the context of Bouraoui’s writing, the gendering of Algerian territory as feminine is a common trope of both colonial and anticolonial narratives from the late colonial period, either as a means to promote Algeria as a fertile virgin landscape for colonization, or to condemn colonization as rape. Frantz Fanon famously envisaged anti-colonial struggle as the fight to regain control over the bodies of Algerian women:

Dans le programme colonialiste, c’est à la femme que revient la mission historique de bousculer l’homme algérien. Convertir la femme, la gagner aux valeurs étrangères, l’arracher à son statut, c’est à la fois conquérir un pouvoir réel sur l’homme et posséder les moyens pratiques, efficaces, de déstructurer la culture algérienne. (1972[2011], 21)

Whereas Fanon may seem to convey the impressive power and agency of Algerian women, the ‘woman as nation’ metaphor is a familiar foundational trope of the European nation-state (Sharpley-Whiting 1998). Bouraoui’s gender play in Le jour du séisme does not evoke this kind of vehiculation of women’s bodies as national territory; rather, her reimagining of Algerian territory through the earthquake disturbs these tropes.

The fractured cadence of Bouraoui’s writing importantly evokes a sensual gendered knowledge of the land: ‘je sais ma terre, initiale. Ma connaissance est sensuelle’ (1999, 87). The narrator insists that knowledge of her environment and—by extension—her childhood is made possible through a ‘connaissance […] sensuelle’ which reinforces the bodily and affective encounter with the earthquake’s violence. Staccato sentences puncture the narrative, with the memory of destruction conveyed through the rhythm of aftershocks that appear like fleeting snap shots: ‘il endommage. Il nuit. Il sinistre. Il ajoute’ (97). Anaphoric sentences oscillating between ‘elle’ and ‘il’ not only evoke the earthquake’s waves and aftershocks, but also reinforce a gendered opposition between the earthquake represented as a destructive phenomenon (il, le séisme) and the narrator’s sensual knowledge of the land (elle, la terre): ‘elle devient éternelle. […] Il fige sous les pierres’ (87). Bouraoui associates the memory of the earthquake with performative self-gendering. Indeed, the narrator frequently alludes to different modes of gendered becoming in the wake of the earthquake: ‘je deviens une femme, hantée par la vie’ (13); ‘je deviens un homme’ (34); ‘je renverse la terre. Je deviens sa fille et son ennemie’ (36); ‘je deviens la mère de mon enfance’ (54); ‘je deviens incomplète’ (81); ‘j’apprends à être une femme’ (83); ‘je deviens abandonnée’ (93). The destructive force of the earthquake disturbs imaginaries that would fix the narrator in terms of a singular, gendered identity. Amaleena Damlé has analysed Bouraoui’s repetitive use of gender pronouns in Le jour du séisme as emphasizing ‘the presence of postcolonial tensions in her evocation of the quake, in its appropriation of the feminisation of Algeria’ (2014, 161–62). While the repetition of ‘elle’ instead of ‘ma terre’ links the narrator’s body to that of the Algerian territory, the oscillation between feminine and masculine pronouns works to disturb the explicit feminization of Algerian territory inherent in colonial logics of place.

Gendered tropes have also long represented Mauritius as an exotic feminized space (O’Flaherty 2011; Waters 2018). However, Le dernier frère is invested in themes of brotherhood, as Appanah explores Raj’s memories of Vinod and Anil, then David. Raj’s sense of brotherhood is also affectively rooted in sensorial memories of place: Vinod and Anil are intimately connected to the affective ecology of the Mapou sugar plantation and the river that swept them away. Indeed, Raj’s memories of this landscape evolve according to different emotional states. At the start of his fugue with David, the insecure Raj finds comfort in thinking about his brothers within a romanticized Mapou as a landscape of floating clouds, green fields, and sweet-smelling air:

Et je pensais à mes frères et à notre rivière et à Mapou et non pas à leur mort pour une fois, non je pensais à eux tout simplement, à leur présence affectueuse […]. Je pensais au nuage de vapeur au-dessus du champ vert ondulant, à ce parfum liquoreux qui se dégageait des cannes coupées quand venait la récolte et que dans l’air flottaient les pollens des fleurs. (2007, 115)

Following the disastrous flash flood, which is a consequence of the sugarcane monoculture, Vinod and Anil’s memories are inseparable from the plantation. Despite the horror of their deaths, Raj associates their ‘présence affectueuse’ with pleasant sensorial experiences of the landscape. In contrast, cyclones puncture the rhythm of the narrative and trigger the violence of Raj’s grief and rage:

À l’instant même où le tonnerre a crevé, nous avions eu l’impression qu’une main géante et malfaisante venait nous enlever Vinod et Anil et que la maison de Beau-Bassin, la forêt, la prison, la nouvelle école, les longs mois depuis ce jour à Mapou, que tout cela s’était volatilisé d’un coup, et notre cœur et notre douleur étaient de nouveau à vif. (105)

The cyclone takes on an anthropomorphic yet supernatural quality as Raj’s grief, akin to a force of nature, risks unrooting him and his family from their new home. Appanah crafts an affective ecology where Raj’s memories of his lost brothers and his mourning are integral to representations of the plantation and the cyclone.

As already discussed, David and Raj bond through their shared but differentiated grief. Their elective brotherhood resembles a form of solidarity which emerges from the recognition of vulnerability in each other. This does not emerge from an intellectual understanding of the geopolitical forces that brought their disparate trajectories together; rather, their brotherhood is enriched by their playful interaction with each other and their immediate environments. While they are not entirely without a shared language—they communicate through school-French—Raj notes that ‘les jeux étaient notre langue fraternelle’ (84). Before the fugue, their games take place in the hidden spaces and border zones of the prison where they encounter greenery: ‘écouter nos pas soudain étouffer par l’herbe qui annonçait le mur de séparation, […] entendre s’approcher le vent qui faisait frétiller les feuilles sèches de l’eucalyptus à notre gauche près du camp des femmes, attraper avec nos mouchoirs les insectes qui tournaient autour des lampes à pétrole près de l’hôpital’ (84). Their games point to the precarity of each of their situations between detention and wilderness, light and dark, life and death.

Once Raj has led David into the forest in an effort to save him, his memory associates the environment devastated by the storm with death:

Je repense à notre longue marche du lendemain, au […] chemin de terre sale, la boue épaisse à la surface craquelée qui s’était formée de chaque côté, les branches, les feuilles, les oiseaux morts, comme si une partie de la forêt était venue expirer ici, son dernier souffle désormais étalé sous nos pas. (163)

The gloomy depiction of the devastated forest which was supposed to provide the children with shelter is a way for Raj to acknowledge that he could not prevent David’s death. As an old man, Raj recognizes that his mourning for Vinod and Anil motivated the fugue with David: ‘c’était mon frère que j’allais retrouver, c’était cette urgence-là qui comptait et non plus le fait que David s’était échappé de la prison’ (163). Raj’s recollection of the fugue demonstrates that his fraternity may have been an act of solidarity, but with ethical limitations. In the context of Mauritius as a former French colony, the supposedly universal republican value of fraternité is complicated. Françoise Vergès’s Monsters and Revolutionaries shows that, in the French colony, ‘fraternity was neither a given nor an effect of reciprocity but the sign of inequality between a dominating and a dominated nation’ (1999, 71). David and Raj’s relationship stages the possibility of imagining brotherhood beyond the ‘sign of inequality’ embedded in colonial history—as a model of radical solidarity across lines of difference. The young Raj failed to save David, but the elderly Raj mobilizes his memory of their fugue to bear witness as a last act of brotherhood. In this respect, ecologies of affect in the narratives of both Bouraoui and Appanah have gendered consequences. On the one hand, Bouraoui’s repetitive staccato cadence represents the destabilization of Algerian lands during the earthquake, as well as troubling tropes used by colonialist and anti-colonialist alike to produce knowledge about the environment. On the other hand, Appanah’s narrative about Raj’s re-telling of his elective brotherhood with David suggests that the memory of these disasters forms a site for fraternal solidarity.

Historical memory

Ecologies of affect in Le jour du séisme and Le dernier frère allow their protagonists to bear witness to the legacies of violent histories. In Le jour du séisme, as we have seen, knowledge of the narrator’s dual French and Algerian heritage is produced through an imagined engagement with the land at the moment of its destruction during an earthquake. Affective engagement with landscapes, objects and photographs is a theme to which Bouraoui often returns, privileging embodied remembrances in her encounters with the past (Ivey 2018). By focussing on the embodied memory of the earthquake, Bouraoui is demonstrating her place within Algerian postcolonial history. As a child, Bouraoui experienced the earthquake in her home in Algiers, shortly before leaving Algeria for good, signifying an important biographical rupture to which she returns in her autofictional works. In her literary account, the earthquake is not only a geological rupture of the land; the transformational event triggers a rupture that applies to both Algerian history (concerning decolonization and the décennie noire during which the novel was published) and childhood (concerning the memory of life between Algerian and French homes and histories). Tensions between body and violence, between destruction and recollection, allegorize historical knowledge as a process of destruction and recreation: ‘ma terre n’existe que par ma mémoire. Le séisme est une disparition. Il détruit. Il défait. Il ensevelit. Il façonne par la violence. Il forme un autre lieu, renversé’ (1999, 87). Here, historical knowledge refers less to intellectual understanding of the past than to the acquisition of an affective engagement with the narratives, tropes, and constructions that formulate the past in everyday life.

As the child of French and Algerian parents, the narrator seems to carry the legacy of colonialism and decolonization, evoking this connection by stating that ‘le séisme est une guerre’ (46). The earthquake is a transformative experience that situates the narrator as a witness to history: ‘le séisme devient un acte. Il m’oblige au passé. Il me condamne à l’enfance’ (80). The narrator is called to bear witness, to pass on her testimony: ‘je porte ma famille. Je transmets les voix. Je rapporte les images’ (80). The verb ‘porter’ is important in the works of Bouraoui, repeatedly used to refer to the autofictional narrator’s sense of embodying the history of French and Algerian antagonism. The aftershocks of the earthquake mark the narrator as an embodiment of historical rupture: ‘il me condamne;’ ‘je reste.’ Her belated testimony is ideal for allowing a transfer of voices and images from the past: ‘je porte;’ ‘je transmets;’ ‘je rapporte.’ The earthquake, in triggering a ruptured temporality, disturbs historically situated systems of knowledge in favour of an affective everyday understanding of the self in relation to history.

In contrast to the focus of Le jour du séisme on El Asnam in 1980 as an allegory for the narrator’s relationship with Algeria, Le dernier frère deals with multidirectional memory of the Holocaust in Europe and colonialism in Mauritius. David and Raj’s fraternal solidarity emerging out of an accidental convergence of disparate trajectories relates to a process of ‘negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing’ of memory, grief, and a shared but differentiated experience of loss (Rothberg 2009, 3). This is reflected in Appanah’s depiction of the Mauritian landscape in terms of an affective ecology. It is only following the destructive cyclone that the two boys manage to flee to the forest, a dark tumbled landscape of broken trees and saturated earth:

Tout était dans tout, les stipes rejoignaient les racines, des coulées de ciel apparaissaient là où il y avait, avant le cyclone, une ombre rafraîchissante, parfois la terre s’était effondrée sur elle-même, à l’image de nous, les hommes tombant à genoux devant la force d’un malheur, et des milliers de vers grouillaient, se nourrissaient du désastre dans la cuvette ainsi créée. (2007, 107)

The excavating, collapsing, and churning power of the cyclone reflects the circulating movements of memory in the novel that unexpectedly collide. This is also relevant to the temporality of the flash flood and cyclone in Mauritius as cyclical occurrences. As the physical and symbolic aftershocks in Bouraoui’s Le jour du séisme exemplify, disasters are not singular events. Their impact is affected by pre-existing vulnerabilities, conditioned by the material inequalities of colonialism, and their aftermaths progress in conditions of vulnerability. In Le dernier frère, the cycles claiming Raj’s brothers and David build up layers of loss and mourning that inform each other.

Raj and David’s escape attempt during the cyclone ends up serving as proof of the imprisonment of Jewish refugees. Five years beyond the event, the adolescent Raj’s history teacher denies any such thing: ‘tu penses qu’ils sont venus d’Europe à la nage ou quoi?’ (Appanah 2007, 205). Raj is faced with the task of recovering his memory of David as more than just a terrifying episode in his childhood—he is an eyewitness to British complicity in the displacement and genocide of European Jews. In seeking out details about the cyclone, Raj historicizes his memory of David as more than a phantom of childhood: ‘c’est là que j’avais lu l’histoire du cyclone, décrit comme ‘dévastateur’ dans le journal et que j’en avais déduit donc la date de notre fugue: 5 février 1945ʹ (147). The cyclone signals more than a fact of natural history: it is a trace of the underexamined interconnection between the British Empire and the Holocaust. The cyclone is evidence of the ‘ruination’ of empire, part of ‘ecologies of remains’ that can open up social topographies beyond a static monument (Stoler 2013, 22). For Françoise Lionnet, the reference to the 1945 cyclone points to Appanah’s fluid approach to fact and fiction in general (2010, 131). Appanah draws on archival sources to craft David and Raj’s story around a multidirectional encounter, even if her treatment of the cyclone points to the fallibility of memory. Raj’s guilt about failing to prevent David’s death is a source of repressed memory which only emerges as he reaches old age. The ecology of affect in Appanah’s representation of a landscape ravaged by flooding and the cyclone is thus a way to contextualize Raj’s imperfect remembrance. This emphasis on sensual memory and engagement with the land, notwithstanding its partiality, fills gaps regarding colonial repression:

Le dernier frère suggests that memory, however flawed, is a function of interconnected sensory experiences (the smell of blood, the sound of Yiddish songs, the touch of healing hands, the blue of the sky and the green of the forest, etc.), of the conflicting accounts of these experiences, and of the moments of entanglement that give both surface and depth to a given field of perception. (2010, 134)

Appanah includes the historical fact of the cyclone to stage the ethical possibilities of an encounter in the deeply problematic circumstances of colonial oppression and Nazism. Like the affirmation of embodied knowledge in Le jour du séisme, an ecology of affect brings to the fore the multidirectionality of Raj’s sensory memory of the Mauritian landscape, ravaged by cyclone. As a witness of the Jewish refugees of Beau-Bassin, he can include David’s story in the multi-layered historical memory of Mauritius.

Conclusion

This article has used the framework of ecologies of affect to examine how Nina Bouraoui and Nathacha Appanah address disaster in ways that are affective, embodied, and gendered. The different contexts of Bouraoui’s and Appanah’s texts reflect their specific relationship to histories of violence: Bouraoui explores dual heritage and legacies of the Algerian War of Independence; Appanah examines the multidirectional memory of colonial Mauritius and the Holocaust. A point of commonality between the two authors is the representation of a natural hazard as a frame for an unsettling confrontation between past and present. The ecologies of affect in their accounts of disasters emphasize embodied and gendered encounters with place. In Le jour du séisme, the earthquake provokes a sensual interaction between body and landscape, present and past, which opens up realms of knowledge. The earthquake also spurs a process of working through legacies of the Algerian War as they pertain to the narrator’s family history. In a similar fashion, liminality is important in Le dernier frère. Appanah’s ecologies of affect underpin the multidirectionality of memory, blurring the physical and conceptual borders between land and water, as well as different historical narratives. Raj’s quasi-fraternal memories of David are inseparable from his dealings with place and landscape, as well as his mourning. Overall, these novels highlight the importance of affective modes of remembrance in relation to bearing witness to violent pasts in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Using the neologism ‘coolitude,’ Khal Torabully examines the role of Indian indentured labourers in the construction of a multicultural Indian Ocean and Caribbean via poetry collections—Cale d’étoiles: Coolitude (1992); Chair corail, fragments coolies (1999)—and a collaboration with Marina Carter that produced Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (2002).