The Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging - Chapter 1 - Belonging to the Moment: Carl de Souza’s Les Jours Kaya

Julia Waters

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.257

Abstract

This chapter examines Carl de Souza’s fictional depiction of the 1999 Kaya riots in relation to Frantz Fanon’s theory of anti-colonial violence, as the novel attempts to give fictional form to both the destructive and creative dimensions of the violence. The chapter explores the kinds of collective belonging that might emerge in place of the divisive, ethnic identities that the violence sought to destroy. Offering no easy answers to the problem of belonging that the riots so violently raise, there emerges in Souza’s novel a strong but fleeting sense of ‘belonging to the moment’. Yet, Mauritius’s future is ultimately portrayed as uncertain and its post-independence project of nation-building unfinished. As the chapter argues, Les Jours Kaya warns of the dangers of squandering the unique opportunity for positive social change that the riots offer, and of failing to harness their cathartic and unifying, nation-building potential.

Highlights

Belonging – or, more precisely, the problem of belonging – is central to Carl de Souza’s 2000 novel Les Jours Kaya
As Souza reveals in an interview, he wrote the novel as an attempt to convey and to comprehend the profound bouleversement that the Kaya riots represented to Mauritians’ sense of attachment to their island.[1]
The first instance of significant unrest since independence, the Kaya riots are widely viewed as marking a watershed moment in recent Mauritian history, 1 In interview with Suzanne Chazan-Gillig, Souza claimed that his inspiration for Les Jours Kaya came from a conviction that ‘au-delà des différences, le Mauricien connaît le prix symbolique et réel de son attachement à son île’. Chazan-Gillig, ‘Les fondements du pluriculturalisme mauricien’, p. 146