1 - Belonging to the Moment: Carl de Souza's Les Jours Kaya

Summary

Belonging – or, more precisely, the problem of belonging – is central to Carl de Souza's 2000 novel Les Jours Kaya. As its title suggests, the novel was written as an immediate response to the sudden outbreak of violent unrest which swept across Mauritius in February 1999, following the suspicious death in police custody of the popular Creole singer 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. He also wrote it as a more personal response to the death of a close colleague who was killed when the roof of a shop he was looting collapsed, and who, Souza supposes, sought in the riots ‘un moyen de se distraire à l’ordinaire’. From its very conception, therefore, Les Jours Kaya sought to understand both the destructive and the more creative, ludic dimensions of the violence. Souza's novel grapples with the urgent, interrelated issues of belonging and exclusion, stasis and movement, separation and encounter, simultaneously expressed through this exceptional outpouring of civic violence. The first instance of significant unrest since independence, the Kaya riots are widely viewed as marking a watershed moment in recent Mauritian history, revealing in devastating fashion previously occluded cracks in the young nation's façade of harmonious multicultural coexistence, ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘miraculous’ economic prosperity, and so destabilising confidence in the country's previously lauded peaceful transition from colony to postcolonial nation state.

In highly metaphorical fashion, Souza's novel traces the causes of the Kaya unrest back to the divisive ‘politics of belonging’ that underpin Mauritius's dominant community system, based on ethnic allegiances and diasporic origins, and tentatively ponders the kinds of more just and inclusive society that might be imagined to emerge from the ashes of the Kaya fires. The novel tells the story of Santee, a 16-year-old girl from a small rural Hindu village who is sent to town to collect her younger brother, Ram, when his school is closed early because of the riots.