‘Les années de braise’¹

1 This phrase, roughly translated as ‘the smouldering years’ is from Sewtohul's novel, Made in Mauritius (2012, 197), and is frequently used to describe the tense, highly-charged atmosphere of the independence period, when a resurgence of inter-ethnic violence was a constant threat. The idiomatic phrase encompasses connotations of latent heat (braise, embers) and of tension (on tenterhooks, walking on eggshells). All translations in this article are my own.

reconsidered: literary representations of Mauritian independence, fifty years on

ABSTRACT

On 12 March 1968, Mauritius celebrated independence from Great Britain. This article explores how the independence period is represented, fifty years later, in a selection of recent Mauritian novels. Focusing upon long-silenced inter-ethnic tensions, inequalities and exclusions, these twenty-first-century fictional works deconstruct dominant celebratory narratives of Mauritius's multicultural ‘rainbow nation.’ By retrospectively revealing cracks in the nation's harmonious façade, the article argues, the novels’ counter-discursive narratives of the nation's foundation play an important part in an ongoing, forward-looking project of nation-building that envisages more inclusive, non-ethnic forms of ‘unity in diversity.’

KEYWORDS:

• Mauritian literature
• independence
• inter-ethnic violence
• nation-building

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Julia Waters is Associate Professor of French at the University of Reading, Great Britain. She has published extensively on modern French and Francophone literature, especially Marguerite Duras and Indian Ocean literatures. Her main publications include: The Francophone Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging (Liverpool University Press, 2018); Duras and Indochina: Postcolonial Perspectives (SFPS Critical Studies, 2006); and Intersexual Rivalry: A ‘Reading in Pairs’ of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet (Peter Lang, 2000). She is also editor of ‘“L’ici et l’ailleurs”: postcolonial literatures of the Francophone Indian Ocean’, e-france: an online journal of French Studies, vol. 2 (2008); and, with Adalgisa Giorgio, Women's Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).

ORCID

Julia Waters http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6545-2532

Notes

1 This phrase, roughly translated as ‘the smouldering years’ is from Sewtohul's novel, Made in Mauritius (2012, 197), and is frequently used to describe the tense, highly-charged atmosphere of the independence period, when a resurgence of inter-ethnic violence was a constant threat. The idiomatic phrase encompasses connotations of latent heat (braise, embers) and of tension (on tenterhooks, walking on eggshells). All translations in this article are my own.

2 Most famously, Naipaul ([1972] 1984, 257 and 270) described Mauritius soon after independence as an ‘island of disaster’ whose ‘problems defy solution.’

3 With no original, in-dwelling inhabitants, Mauritian society is made up entirely of the descendants of immigrants – mainly from France, Africa, Madagascar, different parts of India, and China – who were brought to the island, over the past three centuries, by the brutal transnational flows of slavery, indenture, imperialism, global capitalism and economic migration. The Mauritian constitution recognises four ethnic or religious ‘communities’: Hindus (48%), Muslims (17%), Sino-Mauritians (2%) and the ‘General Population’. The last category includes ‘every person who does not appear, from his way of life, to belong to one or other of those three categories’ and hence includes both Franco-Mauritians (2%) and Creoles (27%). There is great diversity within these classifications. The proportions are based on dated census data and hence likely to be inaccurate.

4 As Eriksen (1999) observes, the term ‘Creole’ is generally used in Mauritius to refer ‘not only to slave ancestry and cultural impurity, but to low class’. Consequently, when a Creole moves upwards, he or she has traditionally been re-defined as a ‘coloured’ (gens de couleur), in other words as someone aspiring to European or Franco-Mauritian values’. No page numbers in original.

5 As Allen's terminology here reflects, in the Mauritian context, the largely discredited term ‘race’ is widely used interchangeably with those of religion, ethnicity or even class, to distinguish different ‘communities’ from each other. ‘Hindu’ thus connotes ‘Indo-Mauritian’; ‘Catholic’ connotes ‘Creole’ or, less often, ‘Afro-Mauritian’, and so forth. Throughout this article, I maintain the terminology used in the original texts, despite the problematic inconsistencies that sometimes arise.

6 Collen (2009). No page numbers in original.

7 As Eriksen (1998, 145) notes, ‘the concept “unity in diversity” represents a contradiction in terms for many Mauritians.’

8 As a direct response to inter-ethnic unrest, mechanisms to defend minority interests, including communal parliamentary representation (by means, for instance, of the much-debated ‘best loser’ system) and a civil rights ombudsman, were written into the independence constitution.

9 For instance, Lionnet (1993, 106) lauds Mauritius as ‘a superb example of successful mediations of the uncertain relationship between nationhood and ethnic or cultural identity’, contrasting its harmonious, post-colonial, multicultural stability with the turbulent inter-ethnic rioting that had recently racked nearby Île de la Réunion. Eriksen (1998, 10 and 169) stresses that ‘there has been no public, violent ethnic unrest since 1969’, an absence of violence which he interprets as a positive indication that ‘Mauritians can be a people tomorrow if they decide to’. Dinan, Nababsing, and Mathur (1999, 101) praise the Mauritian government for its successful accommodation of cultural diversity, dismissing various ‘minor incidents’ of religious and communal fundamentalism on the grounds that they ‘could in no way be compared to the more serious outbreaks of racial violence which occurred in the few years preceding independence’.

10 For a study of contemporary Mauritian fiction's response to the Kaya unrest and the alternative, non-ethnic forms of belonging that it imagines, see: Waters (2018).

11 Horace is the fictional illegitimate offspring of the famous French poet Charles Baudelaire's brief romance with a ‘dame Créole’ during his visit to Île de France.

12 In reality, the last British governor of Mauritius, 1962–1968, was John Shaw Rennie.

13 Gordon-Gentil's novel explicitly underlines the racism that motivated the anti-independence sentiments of those who preferred to emigrate than live in ‘Little India’, by stressing the symbolism of their preferred countries of destination, South Africa and Australia, both known for their state-sanctioned oppression of the indigenous, black populations. A similar point is implicitly made, in Made in Mauritius, when Laval is reunited with Faisal, a Mauritian Muslim, in the Australian outback where he lives amongst impoverished Aborigines and other non-white social outcasts.

14 In this regard, Devi's novel reflects Philip Allen's observation of the ‘frequent phenomenon’ whereby local ‘purely Mauritian communal fever’ (1966, 20) tended to echo and replicate broader international political disputes, notably between India and Pakistan.

15 This threat is highlighted in Devi's Le Sari vert, when the narrator comments that, ‘La guerre civile semblait imminente (Civil war seemed imminent.).’ (128)

16 Saint François, like the larger quartiers of Roche Bois and Plaine Verte, was previously an ethnically mixed area that became suddenly and enduringly segregated as a result of Muslim-Creole violence. For recent eye-witness testimony of the real-life unrest in these districts, see ‘An eye witness account of the 1968 riots’, Mauritius Mag (6 October 2011).

17 Collen (2009). No page numbers in original.

18 For a powerful account of this particularly shameful episode of Cold War politics, see Vine (2009).

19 For studies of racist attitudes towards Chagossians in Mauritius, see: Boswell (2006) and Jeffery (2011).

20 Charlesia's words here echo Vine's assertion that the ‘Chagossians […] gave up their homeland so the rest of Mauritius could have its independence’ (2009, 143).

21 In interview (Sultan 2001), Devi describes slavery and indenture in these terms. No page numbers in original.