Silence of the Chagos

by Shenaz Patel

  At the far end of the railing, at the corner where the wrought metal stopped and left an empty space, a woman was standing immobile. A headscarf knotted around her head. Practically a statue.

  She suddenly wobbled ever so slightly. Désiré was sure of it. She had moved forward just a little, nearly imperceptibly in fact, but she was so close to the edge. He got up, slowly walked up to her.

  She turned around. In her eyes was the same strange shakiness that he sometimes saw in his own mother’s gaze.

  Charlesia invited him to come see her in Pointe aux Sables. She often left the slum to go fish off the side of the jetty. In the middle of the day, the men were out at sea, and she could sit at her leisure beneath the shade of the pongam trees.

  She spent hours talking to Désiré as she prepared the small fish she had caught through sheer patience. It was hot. She was drinking some coconut water to quench her thirst. But that wasn’t easily found here. Back there, the coconut tree had been at the heart of their lifestyle. They had used every part of it, they had known how to make everything from it. Coconut-palm oil, brooms with palm-tree ribs, mattresses of coconut straw, mats woven from the leaves. Brushes with the dried husks that had a natural curve perfectly suited to the arch of their soles and which sang out on the waxed floors that the women left gleaming as they danced funny versions of the twist. In any case, they all worked for the Chagos-Agalega Company, a corporation that had leased these islands from the Mauritian government to make copra.

  “Back there, we didn’t need money to live,” Charlesia insisted. “But the others wanted money. They sold us.”

  “What do you mean, sold?” Désiré replied. “You didn’t belong to anyone. You weren’t slaves, were you?”

  The sharpness of his question took her aback.

  “Huh? No, no, not at all. Not us. But apparently our ancestors were slaves. Some say that in the eighteenth century, a French colonizer in Mauritius had gotten authorization from the governor to start a coconut plantation in Diego Garcia. They say that he brought a hundred Malagasy and Mozambican slaves over, and that others had followed suit after his business started to flourish. Our history goes back a long way. They tried to claim that we were just seasonal workers brought in from Mauritius to work on the Chagos for a few months or years. Seasonal! They erased everything, denied everything, even our cemeteries, even the tombs of our forebears. As if we had somehow brought our ancestors there with us! But it all happened the other way around. It was Mauritius, the British, and the Americans who rendered us undead.”

  A long silence settled. Désiré toyed with a few filao seeds in the sand.

  “We didn’t realize what had happened to us. It was only a long time after that we understood the trade that had been made on our backs. The British and the Americans had sealed their deal. And Mauritius didn’t do a thing to help us. Getting its independence was good enough.”

  Désiré remembered the independence celebrations at school. A happy day that as a child he had awaited excitedly. The prospect of a free half-day, with no papers or slate, no conjugations or calculations, with sparkling limeade and French treats covered in sugar and cream, after the flag-raising ceremony and the official speech the superintendent had read aloud with a solemn accent while sweltering beneath the noon sun in his black suit.

  The speech always bored them. They didn’t understand much of it, but they had to stay there, in tidy rows, while sweat snaked down their backs. Snickers would always make their way through the lines as the superintendent talked about discipline and obedience and about building something which they never heard the name of because they were being shushed loudly by their teacher.

  One year, his friend had pretended to faint in the middle of the speech. He had slumped all of a sudden, making sure to fall on his left side, onto the carefully tended soccer field. Two teachers had run over, one had picked him up by the shoulders, the other by the feet, and whisked him away before everyone else had been able to crowd around him and shriek in mock fear. It was a total failure, they hadn’t been able to make everyone else panic enough to put a stop to the ceremony. The superintendent had kept on reading his speech with renewed fervor, and they had to wait until it was time to sing before they could let off steam: “Glo-o-ory to theeee, Motherlaaand, oh Motherland of miiiiine.”

  He could still hear himself bellowing the national anthem with all the school’s other voices, after having dutifully practiced it in class for days on end, trying his best not to let himself be distracted by the squeaking of the flutes meant to accompany them. The superintendent directed them to sing it in French after the official version in English, “Gloire à toi Île Mauriiiiiiiiice, Île Mauriiice, ô ma mère patriiiie.” The man had then launched into “Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,” in memory of the era when Great Britain reigned over the seas of colonization. We never sing about our country enough, he thought.

  His country. Their independence.

  Désiré recalled the photo he had glimpsed in a paper, a man with a rounded belly in his dark suit, his thick, black-rimmed glasses beneath white hair, standing in front of a far larger man with a silly triangular hat wreathed in white feathers and a red-and-white uniform. Or was it blue and white? He wasn’t too sure anymore, but he retained the memory of that man dressed in gilded stripes as well as the authority he exuded. The whole scene seemed imposing, two men standing at attention in front of a pole. One flag was replacing another. 1968, the British Union Jack was being lowered, the Mauritian Quadricolor was being raised, beneath the eyes of the last British governor, Sir John Shaw Rennie, and the first Mauritian Prime Minister, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam. Independent. Proud.

  Back there, at the far end of the sea, a long way from the trumpets and cannon salvos, there had been his mother, his father, it had been a day like all the others of their tranquil life, a day that would be a ruinous one in their history. Their fate would be sealed, behind their backs, without a word, without even a single thought for them.

  Glo-o-ory to theeee… Whom ought he to sing glory to today? Oh Indian Ooocean, oh mothersea of miiiiine?

  “That doesn’t even rhyme!” he said.

  “Yes, my child, there’s no rhyme to it. No reason, either. There hasn’t been any ever since we were dumped on Mauritius without a thing. Without any money, without even the right to eat whatever we wanted. Here they claim that tortoise meat gives you tuberculosis! Tuberculosis! You know what that means? We should have been dead and buried eons ago! It would have done them some good just to try. We had tortoise oil and our children were hale and hearty. None of them got sick.”

  Désiré had never tasted tortoise meat. He couldn’t say he was particularly tempted.

  “But we fought to get our rights back anyway,” Charlesia went on. “We had so many protests and hunger strikes. One time I got beaten up by the police and locked up. But that didn’t stop us.”

  Yes, Désiré had heard about this battle led by women like Charlesia. He had read about it in the paper, a barefoot woman on the road, struggling against three uniformed policemen trying to pull her into their jeep.

  “Oh, yes, we fought well! We laughed right in their faces!”

  Charlesia had decided, along with a group of Chagossian women, to go and protest in front of the British High Commission. They knew the officials would have never let them in. They’d borrowed sophisticated clothing from their friends, and presented themselves at the door, wearing makeup, perfume, and coiffed hair as if they were requesting visas. They were let in without any trouble. Inside, they had rushed to the windows to unfurl the protest banners reading “rann nu diego!” and “anglais assassins!” that they had hidden in their purses all while they shouted “Ramgoolam sold Diego!”

  Charlesia chuckled. “You should have seen their faces! And I can tell you they didn’t have an easy time getting us back down! They dragged us to the elevator, and once we were inside, we just sat right down and refused to move. When the police came to try to get rid of
us, we gave them a few kicks and a few umbrella jabs they wouldn’t forget anytime soon!”

  “But in the end did you get anything?”

  “Nothing at all. Or that little. Just a small payment to Mauritius from Great Britain in the eighties. Barely enough to cover the interest on everything we’d had to borrow just to survive.”

  In exchange, they had been forced to sign a document that they hadn’t been able to read.

  “It was only much later that we found out that this paper said we were giving up our right to return. As if that could be bought or sold. As if they could just dig our umbilical cords up from where they were buried!”

  “But they don’t have any right… we need to keep fighting! Why can’t we go back home?”

  “Because of the war, in fact. The weapons. Diego Garcia has become one of the United States’ most important military bases. Which allows them to keep the Middle East in check. They have huge planes, back there, powerful ones. They call them B-52s. Bomber planes. They killed us. They keep on killing other people elsewhere. That’s what our paradise is used for.”

  Whistling bombs. Children crying over inert bodies. Fields of gray ruins.

  “Yes, we need to keep fighting.”

  “I’m getting a bit old,” Charlesia sighed. “Other people are starting to take up the cause now.”

  Désiré looked at her. At her arms and hands where a few fish scales were gleaming, a latticework of dark green veins beneath her skin, like the paths of rivers over the brown earth of a planisphere.

  He paused for a moment, then said: “Meemaw, you can tell me the truth. Was life really as good back there? Really?”

  She tilted her head slightly to the side, as if she were thinking over his question. Then she replied, quietly: “That’s the memory we have. And memories are all we have now.”

  A silence. Then, in a deeper voice:

  “Memory is a hook digging into your skin. The harder you pull, the more it tears your flesh, the deeper it digs. There is no way to get it out without ripping your skin apart. And the scar that grows over it will always be there to remind you of the rawness of this pain. But you will never stop coming back to that scar. Never ever. Because that’s where your whole life throbs. You see, my child, it is even more alive than memory. We call it souvenance.”

  As they sat, facing the sea, in the sunset’s peaceful haze, Charlesia and Désiré watched the light fading away in the distance. Far beyond, they knew, lay those sprinkles of islands that a greedy hand had wrested from their memories.

  Far from the din of the city bustling behind them, their gazes traced this boat that would bring them, bear them, back there, to the other side of the horizon, where the sun rose on a string of islands strewn across the sea like a prayer. Their home. Back there, in the Chagos.

  ‌Afterword

  Chagos: Fifty Years of Fighting

  by Shenaz Patel

  Île

  Exil

  Armée

  Déporté

  Pressions

  Déception

  Saisonniers

  Bombardiers

  Antiréglementaire

  Cacophonie judiciaire

  Pot de terre contre pot de fer

  Y a-til seulement une justice sur la terre?

  Isle

  Exile

  Copra

  Trauma

  Bitter limbo

  Rann nu Diego

  Bombard and strafe

  “To keep the free world safe”

  The roar of the courts erase silence

  What chance do ants have against giants?

  Sagren sums up the sadness of exile and loss

  How was this done to the people of the Chagos?

  It should be possible to draw on words even when they seem insufficient for describing just how interminable, how slow, how unresolved a wound, a fight, a war has been.

  For the Chagos, the year 2019 marks half a century since an entire population was uprooted and deported from an archipelago which, by dint of its position in the middle of the Indian Ocean, caught the attention of the United States. Taking advantage of the instability of the decolonizing process, the United States hardly had to convince the British to sever this archipelago from the territory of Mauritius just as its independence was being negotiated. The main island of the archipelago, Diego Garcia, was transformed into what would become one of the most important American military bases, its location allowing the Americans to maintain control over the Middle East and the global oil trade. A base that was established during the Cold War, born out of the global rivalries of the 1960s, and in the Americans’ words, is still essential “to keep the free world safe.”

  What the “free world” fails to realize, however, is that its freedom has come at a price: that of the Chagossian population’s deportation and forced exile to the Seychelles and to Mauritius between 1967 and 1973. Ever since, there has been an unending, twofold battle, which ultimately came to a head this year, 2019.

  The Twists and Turns of Decolonization

  The Chagos are a group of fifty-six islands clustered in seven atolls across the Indian Ocean, just below the Indian subcontinent. Some sources date the discovery of the archipelago back to Pedro de Mascarenhas’s voyage in 1512, but the Portuguese did not establish a settlement there. In fact, it was in 1744 that France, which had occupied Mauritius from 1721, claimed ownership of these inhabited islands some 1,350 miles northeast of Mauritius.

  At the start of the 1780s, Pierre-Marie Le Normand, a Mauritian plantation owner whose business included sugar and coconut production, asked Governor Souillac to give him a plot of land to produce coconut oil on Diego Garcia, one of the main islands of the Chagos. Having been granted this land, he arrived on November 17, 1783 with an estimated twenty-two to seventy-nine free men of color and slaves from Mozambique and Madagascar. He opened the way for other plantation owners and their slaves brought in to expand the island’s oil production, followed by a French settler interested in fishing opportunities. In 1826, records show the population of the Chagos at three hundred and seventy-five slaves, nine whites, twenty-two free men of color, and forty-two lepers who were sent there in hopes that the meat of the turtles endemic to the archipelago might heal them.

  In 1810, the British took Mauritius from France, and under the 1814 Treaty of Paris they were granted control of Mauritius’ dependencies, including the Chagos. Following the abolition of slavery in 1835, the former slaves were hired to work in the coconut groves, and they were joined by a number of indentured laborers from India. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Chagos had a population of approximately two thousand.

  In the 1960s, Mauritius began to negotiate with Great Britain for its independence. During the discussions that took place in 1965 at Lancaster House in London, the British were open to this proposition. However, they had one non-negotiable condition: in order for Mauritius to gain independence, Great Britain would have to retain control over the Chagos.

  After some minor resistance, the Mauritian delegation resolved to accept those terms. On November 8, 1965, the Chagos Archipelago was officially separated from Mauritius and registered as a British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).

  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 territories—the succinct answer is that this was due to 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.

  Despite its small surface area (the three main islands barely covered twenty square miles), the archipelago offers remarkable geostrategic advantages. It is more or less equidistant from the eastern coast of Africa, the Middle East where the Arab–Israeli conflict is playing out, the portions of South Asia where India and Pakistan fought over Kashmir in the 1960s and 1990s, the far-flung Indonesian archipelagos,
and the continent of Australia. Almost halfway between the Mozambique Channel off the eastern African coast and the Strait of Hormuz between the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, the Chagos are ideally situated on the sea routes used for shipping oil and strategic raw materials. Moreover, the horseshoe shape of Diego Garcia, its main island, provides a deep, well-protected interior lagoon that is ideal for holding nuclear submarines.

  The British weren’t opposed to the idea of sharing the burden of the Western camp’s defenses in this part of the world, especially since the Americans were offering them a fourteen-million-dollar discount on the Polaris missiles that they were planning to buy for their atomic submarines.

  Discussions began between Great Britain and the United States, who made it clear that they wanted uninhabited islands—which Great Britain would go to great lengths to give them. With extraordinary cynicism, a British official stated in a report that on these islands there were only “some few Tarzans or Men Fridays… who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius etc.”; these islanders would come to be called “seasonal workers,” implying that they did not constitute an actual, permanent population.

  And so, in 1967, a campaign began to get rid of the Chagossian population.

  The procedure was incremental. At first the inhabitants were “encouraged” to go to Mauritius to seek medical treatment or to visit friends and family. When they were ready to leave, they were told that there were no more boats returning to the islands and that they would have to stay on Mauritius.

  The Americans grew impatient with this gradual relocation. In 1973, the British sent one of their supply ships, the Nordvaer, to carry off the last inhabitants in a single hour. Some of them were offloaded in the Seychelles, but most of them were sent to Mauritius, without any warning and without a cent to their name.

  The United States then rushed to build one of their most essential military bases on Diego Garcia. It started operating on October 1, 1977, and its shores harbored the B-52 long-range bombers that were deployed against Iraq in 1991 and Afghanistan in 2001.