The three sessions were structured around the following themes: (1) Names and Homes, (2) Land, Sea, Borders, Travels, Exile and, finally, (3) Remembrances, History Box. As can be elucidated from the titles of each session, the themes touched upon crucial aspects of the Chagossians’ traumatic experiences. Each session was carefully crafted to motivate them to work through their traumas so as to reflect on their suffering and thus enable them to act upon these traumatic events productively. We usually started with a seemingly innocent questionnaire to gradually motion them towards the core of the traumatic event via a literary text that exposed some issues concurrent with the Chagossian experience of displacement.
The very simple question “What is your name?” functions as a stepping stone to reach more intimate information about oneself when this question is placed alongside two related questions: “Who gave you your name and why” and “Where and when were you born?” Thus, in this first session, we managed to unite “names” with “home” since behind each name there is surely a family story about genealogical continuation or discontinuation tightly linked with a sense of “home.” This was illustrated through a passage from the novel Love Marriage by the Canadian-Sri-Lankan author, V.V. Ganeshananthan in which the narrator, Yalini, reflects upon her name. Born in Canada of Sri Lankan parents, her name is an attempt on the part of their parents to assuage the disturbing pain of displacement they must endure in Toronto. Their daughter’s name becomes their permanent attachment to their homeland.
My parents named me Yalini, after the part of their home that they loved the most. It is a Tamil name, with a Tamil home: a name that means, in part, Jaffna, Sri Lanka, the place from which they came (Ganeshananthan 21)
The idea behind posing “names” and “home” as our first topics was clearly to question to what extent the Chagossians could regard Mauritius as their home bearing in mind the initial – and perhaps continued – rejection of the exiles as undesirable migrants. To enhance the fragmented identity they had to face in Mauritius, they were confronted with a passage from Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street in which the protagonist, Esperanza, must wrestle between the Spanish she speaks at home with her family – the parents are from Mexico – and the English she speaks at school since she lives in the US. The protagonist of Cisneros’ novel must negotiate her hybrid identity, her cultural roots spreading across the US and Mexico, her untranslatable Spanish name a constant reminder of her Mexican ancestry. Via the fictional character of Esperanza, our participants pondered on their own hybridity and what they envisioned as their true home. Whereas the older participants did not recognize Mauritius as “home,” the younger participants deployed a closer Mauritian affiliation. To finish the session with an optimistic note, we resorted to a section from Grace Nichols’ poem “Wherever I hang” in which she unabashedly affirms that
“Wherever I hang me knickers – that’s my home” (3)
thus exhibiting “home” as a fluctuating and adjustable concept whose stability is contingent upon geopolitical sensibilities.