Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Among the innovative aesthetic, thematic and poetic perspectives that can be observed, since the early 1990s, in a young generation of Francophone writers on Mauritius, one can find investments in the multiple and conflicting pasts of the island. Yet a look at recent literary production reveals that the period of slavery and the figure of the slave are almost absent, apart from one text - Terre d'orages (2003) by Serge Ng Tat Chung. Clearly, the paradigm of slavery has less 'symbolic capital' in literary representation (and society as a whole) than other Mauritian pasts, notably indenture. Conferring on literature a crucial role in portraying and negotiating this issue, this article interrogates this absence/presence of slavery in recent Mauritian prose fiction. With regard to the island's complex constructions and performances of memory, it will discuss the veiled longue durée of this 'foundational violence' and lay particular emphasis on the merits and pitfalls of Tat Chung's novel.
Keywords: competition of victims, Indian Ocean, Mauritian novel, memory, slavery
Le 'passé' possède de multiples couleurs, il est disponible pour de multiples usages.
(Detienne 2000: 76)
Over the last twenty years, and especially since 2000, one can observe in Mauritian literature a certain aesthetic, thematic and poetic innovation. Novelists such as Ananda Devi, Carl de Souza, Barlen Pyamootoo, Nathacha Appanah, Shenaz Patel and Amal Sewtohul, who have recently gained critical attention, can be characterized by their complex and innovative ways of interrogating issues of identity, by their subversive and often violent writing as well as by their demystifying and anti-exoticizing stances (Arnold 2014).
These Francophone writers occupy the major part of the otherwise very heterogeneous Mauritian literary field - one can also find texts written in English, Creole, Hindi or Chinese, and the divergence between works being published and mostly read abroad and those published on the island for a local readership. In this diverse and conflicting literary space, many writers creatively negotiate the island's multiple topographies and temporalities. They reflect on the intricate interconnectedness of ethnicity, class and gender and give an insight into the complexities of this young, multicultural and creolized nation.
One of the most original and significant traits of recent novel production in Mauritius is the consideration of divisive issues in current society -...