In an essay entitled “Reflections on Exile”, Edward Said offers one of the most pungent definitions of exile. Exile, he asserts, “is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience,” (Said, 2001: 173) and, he continues, “it is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted” (Said, 2001: 173). Exile is thus apprehended as an existential malaise that impinges sorely on the lives of those who are deracinated and literally left without a home. This is indeed the tragedy enveloping the Chagossian experience, a tragedy that is persistently nurtured by fragmentation and loss and which, to our mind, should be inscribed within the literature of trauma studies.
The trauma of exiles is, at least in the modern era, conspicuously entrenched in the trauma of colonization and, in this respect, once again, the case of the Chagos Islands is an excruciatingly painful illustration of the ruthless machinations of power forces and, at the same time, it also provides us with a unique insight into the ironies and ambivalences of the colonial/imperialistic enterprise: amid the imminent independence of former colonies, a new “colony”, the BIOT (British Indian Ocean Territory), is created so as to preserve British and American interests in the area. In a cynical twist, a discourse of environmental protection is generated to justify their purely colonialist bias. As postcolonial scholars, it was in their stature as colonial victims that we were drawn towards the Chagos Islanders and, it is from our position as what we like to term “literature practitioners”, rather than literary critics, that we have approached an examination of the tragedy of the Chagossians via a creative writing methodology. The outcome is the creative writing workshop entitled “Myth and Memory. Fighting Cultural Injustice” we conducted at the premises of the University of Mauritius, from August 6 to August 8 with members of the Chagos Refugee Group, based at Port Louis.
The ultimate aim of this creative writing workshop was to grant visibility to the Chagossian fight for identity and recognition. And yet, as is often the case, ultimate aims are forged within a pungent desire to express that which lies beyond expression because, as Jisele, one of the participants in the workshop revealed in a terrifyingly genuine declaration of emotional incapacity, “It hurts”. In this simple albeit not simplistic “It hurts” resided the essence of a successful creative writing methodology: to create a space wherein participants whose existence is enveloped by the persistent and overwhelming shadow of trauma can find a way to articulate their frustrations, their desires, their longings and, above all, their stubbornly human claim to existence.
Chagossians’ lives are determined by a horrendously precise historical episode, namely, their expulsion from their homeland, which was orchestrated by forces lodged in an arithmetic of power that sabotaged any claim to human rights. But powerlessness does not inhibit consciousness, in other words, Chagossians are perfectly aware of the intricacies of the injustice they are facing. The magnitude of their tragedy is thus perceptively enclosed in a sentence that was repeated, unceremoniously but adamantly,  throughout the workshop, “when the island was sold”. “When the Island Was Sold” captures the crude capitalist motion of Imperialism, the preposterous presumption to land ownership that manipulates discourses on justice to possess that which resists possession, human dignity. And that is exactly what Chagossians possess: before their ruthless dispossession, they have naturally engineered a resilience paradigm whereby their survival is guaranteed and their human dignity restored through memory.
This natural resilience paradigm harmonized the diverse sessions that configured the creative writing workshop, punctuating the narration of deeply distressing episodes with the transparent outburst of sheer joie de vivre. Suffering has become an unrelenting component of the Chagossian existence and yet, this suffering has been transformed into a defiant source of survival, as Mimose exemplified when she explained to us the origins of a song she performed. The lyrics of her séga song were inspired by the sound of departure of a boat which she immediately linked to her memory of forced departure and which she infused with a vibrancy of resilience and a spirit of survival that engraved a permanent affirmation of perseverance and continuation.
Remembering and writing their experiences worked as a great therapy for building-up their self-esteem as a people and for demanding a space in the Indian Ocean imaginary. By communicating their own individual stories, by processing individually the collective memory that shapes their communal selves, in short, by owning and expressing their traumatic experiences, the Chagossian participants of our creative writing workshop have disclosed and interrogated those silences that are imbricated in narrations of loss and that perilously plunges them into the territory of a transcendental homelessness. In an act of exceptional generosity, Monette thanked us for helping them verbalize emotions that were kept inside themselves because they were too harrowing to be let out and shared with others. As far as we are concerned, and in what attempts to be an act of profound admiration, we would like to finish this introduction by overtly thanking all the participants in the workshop and, above all, for giving us an invaluable lesson in human dignity.