An ambitious Mauritian novel that aims to encompass the totality of Mauritian culture, or whose ambitions transcend the typical perspective, is Marie‐Thérèse Humbert’s extraordinary A l’autre bout du moi (At the Edge of Myself).8 The very title explains that the author is going to the very limit of the self as it has been conceived, and Lionnet’s perspicacious work on self‐portraiture suggests that Humbert’s text is, beyond a work of self‐representation by the author, a much more legitimate portraiture of the island in literary history (1989a, 226) than Paul et Virginie, which she critiques elsewhere. Nadège and Anne, two children from the mixed‐race, though mostly white, populace who live out their lives from having lost position and privilege in society as their fortunes dwindled over generations, present two ways of being Creole in Mauritian society. Anne performs colonial culture, obligingly falls in love with the white neighbor, and adheres to the role of whites in that logic while Nadège embraces all that is not‐white and dies bearing the child of her lover, Aunauth Gopaul, the fiery Indian revolutionary. Their father’s brother, André Morin, is an aspiring white. He cleanses himself of contamination by marrying a white woman. Humbert presents a microcosm of Mauritius by following the perspectives of all Mauritians as they can be identified by race. The Indian maid Sassita and Mme. Lydie, who lives on the margins and heals with remedies outside of official medicine, also find sympathetic portrayals by Humbert. But the most fascinating relationship is that between Anne and her sister Nadège. It is characterized by love, desire, intense envy, and violence, all of which often seem to be directed against the self rather than the twin. The most emotionally violent scene occurs when Anne finds out that Nadège is carrying a half‐Indian (illegitimate) baby. She is outraged at the disgrace this will bring the family, and especially at her chances of snagging a white husband. This brutal reality, for Anne, of her nonwhite identity that rears its head no matter how she tries to camouflage it, signals the breaking up of her dreams of moving up through marriage. This ending of her quest for acceptance through years of preparation, when she consistently struggled to disentangle herself from her sister, is going to be executed by her sister’s half‐breed child. Anne slaps her sister and screams out to the baby, “Die!” (Humbert 1979, 426, 428). In a dramatic ending, after Nadège’s death and that of their father, Anne walks resolutely to the Indian lover’s home and takes her sister’s place. Humbert’s writing contains a brutality directed toward spaces of “purity” and forces the question of hybridity out of the theoretical and into the social sphere.
Ananda Devi’s rich and wide literary creation stands as a body of work through which to enter Mauritian culture and to think of the meaning of being “in relation.” Her oeuvre stands alongside the range that Glissant has provided, though Devi’s work stays mostly with fiction. Experimenting with narrative, theme, and language, this author has, from her early short stories to her poems and range of novels, explored her island culture beyond delving into simplistic forms of ethnicity, race, and class and plunged her characters into dark physical and mental worlds. Her ability to write desire, to seek to understand psychology as it is intersected by history, and to expose the most subtle forms of domination and submission make for an author whose reach is “universal.” The most delightful aspect of her writing is that its expansive relevance is achieved through an exquisitely delicate, attentive, and meticulous craftsmanship of sentence, texture, and detail in the language, description, and narrative procedure. Her Eve de ses décombres (2006, translated into English as Eve Out of Her Ruins) was made into a film, Enfants du Troumaron (Children of Troumaron), through a collaboration between the author and her filmmaker husband, Harrikrisna Anenden and their son, Shravan Anenden. The result is a breathtaking film, whose violence is felt viscerally and whose images are strikingly arrived at in the cinematic medium, not least because of the sheer brilliance of the novel’s prose. Set in Mauritius’ capital city of Port Louis, the novel is made up of voices or monologues through which the protagonists address the reader. We encounter Eve, who has been sexually abused and now revels in seeking out violent sexual partners in her prostitution; Savita, whose tenderness and love for Eve develop a completely different world with different rules, emotions, and exchanges; Sadiq, the romantic, taken with Rimbaud and obsessed with Eve; and Clélio, whose absent brother haunts him in the everyday and enters into his world when he is incarcerated on a false accusation. These and other characters expose their most sensitive nerves, open wounds, and precarious selves. An unlikely murder, violent rape, and physical abuse in the plot emerge as fascinating for the reader as they are repulsive. Another collaboration from this couple produced Cathedral, also based on Devi’s eponymous short story.9 This is a more ethereal presentation of a young Mauritian girl in Creole culture, although it is not without subtle social commentary as the naïve young girl negotiates the attention she receives from a Frenchman.
Ananda Devi’s substantial body of work is complemented by talented writers such as Natacha Appanah, Shenaz Patel, and the poets, Khal Torabully and Umar Timol, for example. Patel, a successful novelist with works such as Paradis Blues (Paradise Blues), uses Creole and French within her prose and poetry, thus drawing on Virahsawmy’s work and taking it in a different direction, with greater ease in the contiguity of, and flow between, the two languages. Appanah’s gripping Dernier Frère (2007; Last Brother, 2011) is an imaginative and subtle story of two boys, one a Mauritian called Raj and the other his friend from prison, who is a Jewish boy called David. Drawing on World War II history, Appanah imaginatively evokes those Jews who landed on Mauritius after fleeing Europe. The novel develops the friendship between these two broken children and tracks their lives into adulthood. Her more recent Tropique de la violence (2016), which was shortlisted for the Goncourt prize, is set in the French department of Mayotte and is now available in English as Tropic of Violence (2020). Exploring the question of undocumented immigrants here and earlier in En attendant demain (2015, published in English as Waiting for Tomorrow, 2015), Appanah establishes herself as a gifted writer with a sensitive and mature ability to write emotion without falling into melodrama. This explosion of Mauritian writing that hits the international scene is surprisingly not matched by Réunion, although publishing continues steadily.10
Focus on the cultural in understanding hybridity obscures the collusion between ethnic identities and European theories of race just as the reformulation of ethnicity in diasporic context through colonial categorizations and policies dislodges the realm of the political and the historical. As we have seen, eschewing this type of understanding also brings to light the impossibility of “ethnifying” for the Creole (to be understood as African) population by following how the same vehicles (primarily ancestral language) have never been available. Despite the island’s proximity to Africa, there has never been a substantive move in Mauritian history to revive, even imaginatively, any African language in Mauritius. This is because “Creoles” themselves do not identify with African languages nor do they do so with Africa in any political or overt way. They have historically allied with the French in the competitive machinery set in place during colonialism and which emerged as voting patterns with independence. This is a legacy that Mauritian literature has interrogated throughout its recent history. In Réunion, the question of ancestral languages never arose in quite the same way due to the intense assimilation, although authors such as Daniel Vaxelaire have done lifelong historical work on slavery.11 Others involved in such work, for example, Carpanin Marimoutou and Axel Gauvin, have brought consciousness of their ancestral language, Tamil, within Réunionese culture. Creole was locked in a one‐to‐one struggle with French, and even if spoken widely, it has been the singular language of the poor and the underprivileged. Both Mauritius, through its ethnification, and Réunion, through its assimilation, have an ambiguous relationship to their African past. Slavery disappears quickly (especially in Mauritius) and Frenchness (especially in Réunion) trips