The “Portability” of a Homeland:
on the Deportation of Islanders and the Archipelagic Power of Literature
Fifty years ago, the Chagossians were deported by the British from their archipelago in the Indian ocean for the United States to establish one their most important military base in the world. After fierce legal and political battles, the United Nations has finally brought the British government, in this year 2023, to announce its decision to negotiate with the government of Mauritius over the sovereignty of the Chagos. Along the legal fight, literature, (and also music and films), has helped carry the voices of the Chagossians who have relentlessly put forward the utter distress of being dispossessed of one’s homeland. And if states discuss the “portability” of an island, perhaps in the wake of writer Edouard Glissant’s work, is it possible for literature to offer a renewed possibility of weaving an archipelagic conscience of the otherwise solitary experience of what being “unhomed” entails for the individual.
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there / They have to take you in.” This definition of home by the American poet Robert Frost in his poem “The Death of the Hired Man” clearly doesn’t apply to the Chagossians.
The Chagossians who were coldly told in their face that their home, meaning their country, the island where they were born and had always lived, was “closed”. That they’d never be allowed to return there. That the horizon would never open up for the blue of the sea or the sky to carry them back to their homeland.
How do you live that? How do you survive that?
How do you tell about that?
An incomplete decolonization to “protect the free world”
Fifty years ago, that population was deprived of its homeland in the middle of the Indian Ocean by Great Britain and the United States. Deprived of all that made their lives, because in the context of the Cold War and the East-West rivalry of the 1960s, the United States had decided that Diego Garcia, the main island of their archipelago, would become one of their most important military bases. A base which, according to the United States, is essential to guarantee “the security of the free world.” What the “free world” has ignored for long is that the price of its security has been paid by the Chagossian population, exiled, not to say deported, between 1967 and 1973. Since then, a long and painful fight has been going on.
The Chagos archipelago was formerly a part of the territory of the island of Mauritius. In 1744, France, which at that time occupies Mauritius, takes possession of these uninhabited islands, and a few free people of color and some 375 enslaved persons originating from Mozambique are taken there to produce coconut oil. When in 1810 the British gain Mauritius from the French, by virtue of the Traité de Paris, they also gain possession of the dependencies of Mauritius, the Chagos included. By the middle of the 20th century, the island had become home to a population of roughly 2 500.
In the 1960s, Mauritius begins negotiations with Britain for its independence. In the discussions in London in 1965, the British agree but with one condition: Mauritius will get its independence, but the UK will keep the Chagos. On November 8, 1965, the Chagos archipelago is officially detached from Mauritius, and registered under the newly created name BIOT (“British Indian Ocean Territory”).
Yet one may wonder why Great Britain was so determined to keep Chagos as a colonial territory even as it was in the process of decolonizing surrounding possessions. The answer lies in the United States’ interest in the archipelago. In 1962, during the Sino-Indian War, the Americans realized that they had no military bases between the Mediterranean and East Asia, which led to their interest in the Chagos. The archipelago is in fact more or less equidistant from the oriental coasts of Africa, the Middle East (where the Arab-Israeli conflict is ongoing), from South Asia (where the rivalry between India and Pakistan over Kashmir persists until today), from the great Indonesian archipelagos, as well as from Australia. It cuts nearly half the distance between the Mozambique canal off the east coast of Africa and the Strait of Hormuz between the Persian Gulf and the Oman (or Arabian) Sea, and as such is ideally situated on the maritime routes of hydrocarbon and most strategic raw material transports. Finally, with its horse-shoe shape, the archipelago’s main island Diego Garcia offers an internal lagoon well-protected and deep enough to accommodate nuclear submarines.
Silent deportation of a population
So discussions are entered around 1965 between the UK and the United States, the latter insisting on one point: they want “virgin” (their term, meaning here uninhabited) islands. The only «problem» is that people live on these islands. But that’s not to bother the British. In 1967, a plan is put into action to get rid of the Chagossian population.
That population, never informed of what was happening, is removed from their home in two waves. The first consists of encouraging people to go to Mauritius for holidays or healthcare. When they then want to take the boat back, they are told that there is no boat back, and that their islands are “closed.”
The second wave, in 1973, takes the form of a forced embarkation of those remaining. Given only half an hour by the British soldiers to pack whatever few things they can, they are escorted to the boat sent for the occasion, with few personal belongings and no money, without a clue as to what was happening to them. Some of the Chagossians were dumped in the Seychelles but mostly they were brought to in Mauritius. On Diego Garcia, they were replaced by American soldiers, who came not only to help out the Brits but also to establish one of their most important military bases, which came into operation on October 17, 1977.
At first devastated by what had befallen them, the Chagossians will try to react by organizing hunger strikes and demonstrations. Starting in 1998, a new generation led by Olivier Bancoult—whose parents had been expelled from the Chagos when he was a child—filed a series of lawsuits against the British government, demanding official acknowledgment of the harm done to them, monetary compensation, and the right to return and to live on their archipelago.
Over the last twenty years, the eight thousand or so Chagossians, organized in groups, have continued to pursue legal recourse in front of the British High Court and other international authorities. In November 2000, the High Court ruled that the Chagossians’ “displacement” was illegal. But after two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, Diego Garcia became the beachhead for the United States’ counterattack against Afghanistan, and for the 2003 US military invasion of Iraq to hunt down Saddam Hussein. In fact, the Queen of England personally issued an order that rendered the High Courts’ judgment in favor of the Chagossians null and void.
Meanwhile, another battle was being waged by the Mauritian state, which was arguing that its rights had been disregarded in this matter. Great Britain had flouted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which had been adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 14, 1960, as Resolution 1514 prohibits any attempt to alter a country’s territorial integrity at the moment of decolonization and independence. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in October 2016, the Mauritian Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth caused an uproar when he called yet again for recognition of Mauritius’s sovereignty over the archipelago and then formally requested a resolution be made on the matter. With the backing of the United States, Great Britain firmly opposed this proposition, reaffirming that the base at Diego Garcia contributed “in an essential manner” to regional and international stability and security, and that it played a “critical” role in the fight against the most complex and urgent challenges of the twenty-first century, such as terrorism, international crime, piracy, and any other form of instability.
Those arguments were not accepted. On May 22, 2019, the United Nations General Assembly went against intense British and American lobbying efforts and voted, with an overwhelming majority of 116 countries out of 193, on a resolution recognizing Mauritius's sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago, thus putting the United Kingdom under an obligation to cede the Chagos archipelago back to Mauritius within six months.
In December of 2022, Great Britain finally indicated that it will, in “early 2023,” engage in negotiations with Mauritius concerning the sovereignty of the Chagos. Yet even as the Mauritian side underscored the need to carry out this last step of African decolonization, both parties were clear: while regaining sovereignty over the Chagos, Mauritius would not insist that the Diego Garcia base be dismantled.
All of which goes to indicate the intensification of discussions and negotiations over the “portability” of an island. Or whether the Chagos will go from being British to being Mauritian again, with Diego Garcia remaining an American enclave, and the U.S. government paying a rent to Mauritius.
Meanwhile, amid geostrategic stakes, political negotiations, and legal imbroglios, the Chagos archipelago is still grappling with a past that is not yet past. And Chagossians still don’t know to what extent they will be part of any new equation.
“A few Tarzans and Men Friday”
It should be possible to deploy words even when they seem insufficient for describing just how interminable, how slow, how unresolved a wound, a fight, a war has been.
Words, in the history of the Chagossians, have been very important.
To convince the United Nations that there was no population on the archipelago in the 1960s, the British authorities designated them as “seasonal workers.”
Even more cynically, an official note sent in August 1966 by the London Colonial Bureau to the British mission at the United Nations will say:
"The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population, except seagulls, who have not yet got a Committee (the status of Women Committee does not cover the rights of birds). Unfortunately, along with the birds go some few Tarzans and men Fridays, whose origins are obscure, and who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius.”
Five decades later, in March 2017, in an attempt to assuage the Chagossians, the British government invited them to apply for a one-week visit to their archipelago. The offer was rejected by the Chagossians who insisted: “We are inhabitants of the Chagos, not visitors.”
In its attention to words, literature has a role to play when it faces history in the making.
In fact, the writing of literature surely contributes to the writing of history. This can be seen at the moment around the migrant question. In her striking novel Go Went Gone (Engl. translation 2017), the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck lends an extraordinary voice to the refugees and their supporters who occupied the Oranienplatz in Berlin and who had literally sewn their mouths shut to draw attention to their precarious situation. In The optician of Lampedusa, the award-winning BBC journalist Emma Jane Kirby, who has reported extensively on the reality of mass migration today, brings to life the moving testimony of an ordinary man whose late summer boat trip off a Sicilian island unexpectedly turns into a rescue mission. In the prologue, the narrator says: "Do you understand what I'm trying to say to you? Maybe it's not possible for you to understand because you weren't on that boat. But I was there, and I saw them. I still see them. Because it's still happening."
Art can for sure contribute to us giving an ear, an outlook, a consideration, to so many silenced tragedies. In 19th century Britain, to encourage their fellow citizens to look into the face of the enslaved and see fellow human beings, British abolitionists distributed autobiographies of people who had experienced slavery, such as works by Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince. If only the British public could hear the voices of black people through their writing, they could empathise with their oppression. It would then become possible to look into the eyes of the enslaved and see a person staring back.
In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot interrogates History, to ask how histories are, in fact, produced. He highlights the fact that the need for a different kind of credibility sets the historical narrative apart from fiction-- necessary, he says, inasmuch as, at some point, historically specific groups of humans must decide if a particular narrative belongs to history or to fiction. History is to a collectivity as remembrance is to an individual, says Trouillot. Yet. History seems so infinitely malleable in some societies that it loses its differential claim to truth. And there is the more serious task of determining not what history is, but how history works. For what history is changes with time and place—or, better said, history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the processes and conditions of production of such narratives. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.
And that's where artistic production is important.
Is art really up to the task?
In a talk in Boston, in April 2018, Angela Davis had these words:
"Art leads the way. It can allow us to feel what we don’t yet know how to put into words, that we don’t know yet how to conceptualise. It’s about feeling connected, building communities. And this is what we have to do in this period. Not only the world as it should be, but ourselves in a togetherness that will give us the strength and imagination necessary to move forward."
And in a lecture that same year, American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman talked about the cost to society of marginalizing those who cannot speak for themselves. But is art really up to that task?
Following the earthquake that ripped Haiti open on January 12, 2010, killing 316 000 and making 1.5 million homeless, Haitian writer Yannick Lahens asks in her book called Cracks:
"How to write without exoticising misery? This question haunts me. But writing. Writing to repatriate this desolation to its right place. At the center. I write to put everything at stake at every page and to ward off the threat of silence, line after line."
And perhaps, perhaps, it's with those doubts, in those cracks that we should try to dig, with the broken but stubborn nails of our words.
That’s what I tried to do in writing Le silence des Chagos (Silence of the Chagos) (2005).
My first contact with the Chagossians’ story was through a picture in a newspaper. Round the end of the 1970s, I fell one day upon that black and white picture across the first page of a Mauritian newspaper, showing a group of women, barefoot, empty handed, wearing tattered skirts, who were confronting a barrage of policemen and soldiers, booted, helmeted, armed with batons. There was at the same time a striking determination and desperation in that picture. Who were these women, and what were they fighting for?
The article said that they were Chagossians, demonstrating in front of the British High Commission in Port Louis (the capital city of Mauritius) against their deportation from their archipelago. Some time later, I started working as a journalist, and for one of my first articles, I decided to go meet the Chagossians, to write about their plight.
Over the years, I wrote a number of articles. But I always felt like it wasn’t enough. Then one day I was at the nearby Reunion Island, on a professional trip. We were in the airport lounge, waiting for our return flight. The boarding time came and went without any announcement. People around me started getting frustrated and nervous, looking for an explanation. Out of nowhere, the stories the Chagossian women had been telling came back to me. How they were enticed to come to Mauritius for medical care or a short vacation, and how, when they wanted to take the boat back to their island, they were told at the harbour: there is no boat, there’ll be no going back, your island is closed.
Sitting there in the airport lounge, with the little suitcase I had taken for a five-day trip, it suddenly fell on me. I asked myself: and what would you do if you were told, here and now, that there is no plane back to Mauritius, that there’s no going back, that your island is closed… What would you do if you suddenly learnt that you’d never again see your country, your house, your family, your friends, your room, your dog, that you’d never again see your home…I felt a chill. And I asked myself: how do you go through such a thing? How do you survive it?
That’s when I felt, deep inside, that I had to write a novel about the Chagossians’ story. Because literature, fiction, is the best way to make things real. Above all the historical, geo-political, economical, strategical aspects of the Chagos story, what I wanted was to give flesh and voice to the human aspect of that story. That aspect which had been so overlooked, so downplayed. I wanted to tell the story from the inside. Or at least from what I reconstructed and imagined to be the inside from what I’d gathered from the Chagossians’ accounts. I wanted to have people feel with them.
When I told them I wanted to write a novel, they were eager to talk about their past life. But
I often felt like they didn’t have words to tell what had happened to them. As much as their
vocabulary was extensive when it came to talking about fish or birds, words like “exile”
didn’t exist in their vocabulary. Very often, when asked about their displacement, they would say « it was hard, so hard », and then go silent, and you felt like they were sinking inside themselves, retreating to a dark and unknown place.
They had confided their stories in me. And as a writer, dealing with words, I felt it was my
responsibility not to let those stories die. At the same time, that responsibility felt a bit
overwhelming. How do you write the stories of people who are still alive, a story still in
process, a story you yourself haven’t lived?
It took years to go through a thorough documentation related to a dossier that was only declassified in part a few years ago, and which was still on the table of international stakes and dispute. And it took years to gather all the human testimonies and experiences. Then, I had to sit down and try to find the voice of the novel. Because i wasn’t writing a documentary piece.
How to find or perhaps create words to tell about being “unhomed”?
How can literary creation and fictionalization help to tell about the intimate reality of being deprived of one’s home in the face of political and geo-strategical overbearing interests and discourse?
Today, a number of books, novels, films are coming out about the Chagos issue. And this clearly helps a lot in getting the issue exposed and known worldwide. Here we can cite:
The Chagos betrayal: How Britain Robbed an Island And Made Its People Disappear by Florian Grosset (2021), Rivage de la colère by Caroline Laurent (2020), recently adapted into a graphic novel (Phileas, 2022) and awarded by the Prix BD Fnac-France Inter; Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams (2022) which has just received the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize and Out Of Place, Pit of Language, Out of Homeby poet Saradha Soobrayen (in Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 2019).
The concept of the “archipelago” and the reality of academic censorship
Perhaps, to make the reality of being unhomed emerge and have it considered by the world at large, we could look towards the concept of the “archipelago.”
In August 2022, an international conference took place in Mauritius under the theme Archipelagic Memory: Intersecting Geographies, Histories and Disciplines. Organised jointly by the University of Mauritius, King’s College London and the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg and co-funded by the European Union, this conference highlighted that
[…] “the concept of the “archipelago” has been increasingly discussed and deployed by historians, social scientists, literary and cultural studies scholars since the second half of the 20th century. The term originated in classical Greece to designate the Aegean waters binding the heart of European civilisation, but since the beginning of the overseas exploration and colonial expansion by European powers from the early 15th century onwards, and following a process of metonymy and metaphor, it came to identify any set of islands forming a coherent topographical unit. It is indeed from the decolonising seas of the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific oceans that new meanings and theorisations of the archipelago began to emerge from the 1950s. While the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia developed an “archipelagic doctrine” as the integral principle of their claim to postcolonial nation-statehood, a number of Caribbean intellectuals mobilised the archipelago as an analytical framework for disrupting the notion of insularity and for thinking beyond linear narratives of historical, national, and cultural development.”
The organizers go on to say that
“…for Kamau Brathwaite, the shared histories, languages and structures of feeling of the Caribbean islands formed the fabric of a submarine unity premised on creolisation and cultural diversity. Also insisting on interconnectedness and rejecting a vision of islandness as being defined by isolation and uniformity, Édouard Glissant formulated the concept of “archipelagic thinking” as a trembling and vibrant epistemological alternative pivoted on the concept of relation, and not necessarily contingent on the material geographies of island groupings, for continents too, indeed the whole world, can be archipelagised and creolised. Moving from, as well as beyond, the Antillean sea, Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s “meta-archipelago” similarly resisted the taxonomy of centre and periphery and revealed the palimpsestic imaginaries connecting the many oceans of human experience.”
The conference said that it sought to
“…address what it means to remember the past in the present and how to consider future trajectories in individual, collective, as well as national identity in archipelagic spaces and cultures. How, indeed, does the sea enable an archipelagic relationship with the homeland left behind? What, in effect, is the archipelagic memory project and how does it contribute to memory studies? If the past is memorialised as archipelagic, a series of fragmentary spaces, cultures and histories converging in a fluid space that can act as a symbol for other, larger connections, how can archipelagic memory enhance continental practices of articulating the past, de-centre or contribute to Euro-centric approaches to memory? Can memory as “innumerable but shared” (in Glissant’s terms) allow us to take heed of “the memory of the other” as well as partake in it? How can this “remembering together” create the conditions for solidarity, or are these conditions resisted and if so, why? How can archipelagic mnemonic projects be multidirectional, reparative and committed to justice, instead of competitive, suppressive or destructive?”
A very interesting endeavor.
Except that in a circular letter dated 24 July 2022 and addressed to all participants, the organizers stated:
“We had to face some major complications recently, as we were directed by government authorities that no presentations or conversations about Chagos, Diego Garcia, or British sovereignty in the Indian Ocean shall take place
at the conference, seeing that the dispute over the Chagos Islands remains
a highly sensitive and controversial issue in Mauritius. We have already
been in touch with the delegates whose presentations is more directly
related to the Chagos question, but we must also ask everybody to avoid any
reference to these issues during the panel sessions. Please rest assured
that academic freedom and research integrity remain central concerns for
us. We are committed to our conference as a space for sharing multiple
dimensions of our work and our explorations into ‘archipelagic memory’,
whether formally or informally, and are deeply apologetic about this
delicate situation.”
One American professor who had worked on Silence of the Chagos was specifically asked not to talk about the novel.
The silencing never ends…
Yet, the possibility of a human mapping remains
In an article entitled “Geography is (Almost) Everything” published in the Financial Times on January 28, 2023, British columnist Janan Ganesh holds the idea that “physical realities do more to shape the world events than ideas.”.
If the events of recent years show us anything, it is how much of life comes down not to human-generated ideas but to immutable facts of nature”, he writes. “Some countries have accessible deposits of fossil fuels. Some have the metals that go into chips. Some have long borders to be paranoid about. Some have more than others to lose from a heating globe. Some lack and crave warm water ports. Some vote for detachment from their continent but find the geographic logic of trade hard to buck. Geography is, if not everything, then almost everything. (…) Rice is more calorific than wheat per hectare. How much of world history — the vast populations that Asia has sustained, for instance — turns on just that? Why didn’t China do transoceanic conquest when it had the power to? A lack of Christian zeal or all that bounteous land of its own?
Ganesh goes on provocatively to say:
Even where ideas themselves seem paramount, there might be an element of geographic accident involved. Would Germany have been less conflicted over the Enlightenment, more like Britain and the Netherlands, if more of it were coastal? Did the relative lack of maritime contact with other countries slow its absorption of ideas?
And what if, on top of the geography of maps, there was a geography of humans? In his internationally acclaimed book The Last Colony, British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, who represented the interests of the Mauritian state and the Chagossians in the international court of justice in The Hague in September 2018, tells how he came to take a very personal interest in the Chagos case. It all comes down to the encounter he had with a Chagossian woman, Liseby Elysé, who told him how she had been deported from her home in the archipelago. It suddenly came in direct echo to the story of his own grandmother, who, during the Holocaust, had been deported from her home in Vienna to be sent to Treblinka’s concentration camp, only allowed, like Liseby, to take one suitcase…
Underneath the cloak of the skin, the density of the flesh, the hardness of the bones, our bodies are made of 70% of water. Liquid, shifting, flowing, ever-moving molecules, experiences, identities. Literature tells us a lot about this. Perhaps that’s where we could find a common sense of our not so solitary experiences, of the possibility of gathering the islands we are in the solidarity of archipelagos able to create a new, more humane world….
Shenaz PATEL is a journalist, novelist, playwright, and children’s author from Mauritius. A recipient of the 2007 Grand Literary Prize of the Indian and Pacific Ocean (Paris) for her novel Le silence des Chagos (Silence of the Chagos, 2019) covering the plight of the Chagossian people, expelled from their archipelago to enable the United States to build a military base in the Indian Ocean. In 2016, she was a fellow at City of Asylum (Pittsburgh) and, in 2018, at Harvard’s Hutchins Center / W.E.B du Bois Institute. In 2021, she received the Prix Saint Exupéry for Rêve d’oiseau/ A Dream of Birds. She lectures at the Mauritius branch of ENSA (Nantes).