Abstract
This chapter explores how, as depicted in Patel’s 2005 novel, the notion of belonging, in both its politico-legal and its emotional senses, is central to all aspects of the Chagos islanders’ long-silenced story – to their original expulsion; to their on-going legal battles for the right to return; and to their continued exclusion from contemporary Mauritian society. Drawing on Jones’s study of the ambivalent judicial term ‘belonger’, I argue that the Chagossians’ affective sense of belonging to their annexed homeland is also depicted as constituting the grounds for their legal rights as ‘belongers’ not to be deported and hence to be allowed to return. Intricately bound up with the foundation of the Mauritian nation, the Chagossians’ real-life story demonstrates, in the most brutal form possible, the inextricable links between notions of ‘place-belongingness’ and the politics of belonging.
Highlights
In an interview given following the publication of her third novel, Le Silence des Chagos, in 2005,1 author-journalist Shenaz Patel made the following statement about the role of the writer – and of the novel – in relation to real-life ‘stories’
The long-occluded real-life story to which Patel is referring here, and which is the inspiration for her novel, is that of the forced deportation of 2,000 Chagossian islanders from their homes, between 1967 and 1973, in order to make way for the construction of a US military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos archipelago
Silence des Chagos recount the circumstances of the Chagossian people’s expulsion from their homeland, the terrible hardships they continue to suffer in their country of involuntary exile and their abiding yearning to return home
Summary
In an interview given following the publication of her third novel, Le Silence des Chagos, in 2005,1 author-journalist Shenaz Patel made the following statement about the role of the writer – and of the novel – in relation to real-life ‘stories’:2.
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