Carl de Souza’s Kaya Days is a labyrinthine, densely packed novel, exploring the lives of everyday Mauritians amidst the chaotic days following the death of seggae singer Kaya in police custody. A lush landscape of wealth and poverty, ethnicity and language emerge under de Souza’s hands, guiding the reader through a moment of intense transformation and rupture. Kaya Days was our Book Club selection for the month of September, and Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor spoke live to author Carl de Souza about his response to the novel twenty years after publication, as well as his feelings about how literature can illustrate the fault lines of race and culture. The interview with the translator of Kaya Days, Jeffrey Zuckerman, can be read here.
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Laurel Taylor (LT): In the twenty years since Kaya Days first came out, and during the process of translating the novel, working with Jeffrey—have you discovered anything new about the novel?
Carl de Souza (CD): The novel has served as a good reminder for me, which can be taken in several ways. The first is that such public displays of resistance are persistent in our societies—how overlooked communities tend to go to the streets and set towns on fire because they are not being given their proper share of participation in life. I was reminded of this recently, when I was editing some writing about the local Creole community. The Creole community, as you probably know, is rooted in the slave trade, and this trauma has been self-perpetuating, transmitted unconsciously generation after generation. To this day, this community does not have proper access to the reestablishment of their rights, reestablishment of their education, or full participation in public society. This looks very much like what has led up to the Black Lives Matter movement, for example.
This is quite similar to the idea that people who seem very tame—the term seems pejorative, but it’s really that they have been taught to be tame—suddenly take to the streets because they can’t withstand any longer. And what happened in Mauritius twenty years back is a reminder for us in these difficult days—with the pandemic and the loss of jobs.
And it’s also a reminder of a sort of Proust transition in the way I was writing; in the sense that my previous novels were more figurative, were more plain descriptions of what I had in mind, whereas this novel was something that really burst out of me. At that time, I realized there was no real frontier between prose and poetry in its transmission of emotions.
LT: Mauritius is a really interesting island nation of an incredibly diverse population. Could you talk a little bit about where the novel was coming from, and how those different cultures met each other within the text?
CD: The first thing is to situate the story—and my other stories as well—in the island context. When you’re living on a small island, and there is input from, let’s say, the European colonizers who came for business—sugar, mainly; slavery from Africa being brought in by force; slavery being replaced by Indian indentured labor; and then Chinese people coming in for business, living quite peacefully with everybody else. . . That had been maintained throughout the centuries, in a very peaceful coexistence.
But that peaceful coexistence resembles tectonic plates; you’ve got different communities neighboring each other, and from time to time, the plates move a bit, and there is restlessness. It happened during the war, on one of the sugar factories, with a very fierce riot taking place. Then again twenty years after on the eve of independence, and later, the Kaya events. So it happens very seldom, but it sheds light on a very hypocritical system in which people do not talk, speak, or claim their rights—that keeps the whole thing boiling, and when it bursts, it can be violent.
Kaya was an outburst and very quickly hushed and extinguished, as if the whole population wanted to forget. And this is very symptomatic of what happens in such societies—problems are not resolved. It was during the riots that I actually learned of Kaya. I had known there was a singer, but a few weeks prior, one of the music teachers at my school had said, “Seggae, that’s a blind alley. It’s not going to lead anywhere.” But with the death of Kaya, the whole thing took on another dimension; Kaya became almost sanctified for what he was, for the way he was killed while in custody. That’s the story of the book.
I had another book that was being prepared by my publisher in Paris at the time, who had then requested a separate writing sample for a workshop in Mauritius. I sent the thirty or so pages of Kaya Days, and when she came, she didn’t say anything about either book. Finally, at the end of a long day, she said: “We are all aghast by the sample you sent. I am publishing this before the other book.” I was quite surprised because of course it wasn’t meant to be published, but then I continued writing a hundred or so pages, and found that the way I wrote—spontaneously, almost poetically, without any punctuation—was more real, corresponded more to my way of living.
LT: Does the spontaneous flowing of words relate to music? Did you feel like that was part of the creation of the poetry?
CD: Music is omnipresent. When I’m asked from time to time of the books that accompany me, or what my writing setup is, I say: “I shut myself in a dark room and I listen to jazz music.” Certainly this influences me a lot—the rhythm, the spirit. Reggae from time to time, but mostly jazz music.
LT: Santee, the young Hindu protagonist, feels in some ways at the beginning like a blank slate. She hasn’t had any education, and she’s been very protected at home. Then she’s just kind of tossed out into this incredibly violent environment, upon which she goes through all these transformations. Can you talk a bit about that?
CD: The whole idea was, actually, presented to me after the fact by a fellow writer. This young woman coming into town from a very protected environment, looking for her brother who has disappeared—it’s revealed so much of the setup in Mauritius and elsewhere.
The boy is a God child. A sociologist friend told me that she was amazed by how mothers here ride the buses holding their young sons—treating them like gods while the sisters follow on foot. That establishes the adoration there is for the growing boy, and even the sister goes and looks for this God-boy lost in town; they’ve lost everything at his disappearance. This is who she is: the woman who’s penetrating the town on fire.
She meets three men: one in a brothel who tries to rape her; a taxi man who brings her around the town like a queen; and then the Creole guy , Ronaldo Milanac, who is in fact Ronaldo of Milan AC—she having misread his tattoo. They begin a relationship which is certainly more adult than anything else she’s encountered, so she’s on equal terms—at one point of the novel—with a man. That presented a shift in the whole book; she decides to follow her little brother and go wherever to be on equal terms with him, but at the end, he somewhat recognizes her authority, and she takes the lead. She gets there. That’s the transformation of a woman.
This is what the fellow writer told me, that it’s a metaphor—I was speaking of this young girl as the whole country, looking at the riots, not understanding what was taking place. The whole country was asking what was happening to us, why these people were so wild, why the whole country, seemingly flourishing, was now under menace. It’s very metaphorical, but it’s also very subconscious in the sense that everything in my mind oozed out, and afterwards I thought: “Okay, you’ve written a hundred pages, but you could have written four.” I’m not yet finished with this idea.
LT: I was curious about what Kaya Days does for Santee that it doesn’t seem to do for Ramesh, her brother. Why he might be kind of stuck where she is suddenly leading a protest.
CD: I think that also pertains to what happens to all of us, perhaps at the difficult stage of adolescence in which one doesn’t quite know where one stands. The boy himself has not yet confronted his adolescence, so I was much more interested by what happened in the girl’s mind, on the turning edge of maturity.
I tried to put myself in the head of a woman. Of course, I could have made lots of mistakes, but I was trying to find the feminine part in myself—to accept that in myself, the part which is more sensitive, more emotional, and different from the life I led before.
LT: You had received criticism when this book first came out, because there were people who said you were painting a terrible picture of Mauritius, a purported paradise. I think it’s interesting that the characters you depict in this book are not comfortable in that island paradise. They’re most comfortable, strangely, in this moment of rupture.
CD: In fact, the criticism started much earlier, my previous book—La maison qui marchait vers le large—was staged in Mauritius, and it was a rather violent book about two families: a Muslim family in Port Louis and an old Creole guy who owned a house on the flanks of the mountains around Port Louis. My book underlined the tension between the two communities, and I remember the Mauritian ambassador in Paris saying that the work was a shame, because it gives the wrong image to eventual tourists of our country, that it would have immeasurable consequences.
When I wrote Kaya Days, people expected a biography, but that was not my endeavor. It was not my project. My project was about my own feeling of being absolutely disturbed after the events and how I had lived the days. When I started writing, it wasn’t at all to be published—it was more to note things down before I grew mad.
But in general, people didn’t understand. Firstly, they didn’t want to see things from this point of view. And secondly, writing in Mauritius had been extremely traditional, plain, and even up until now it has not changed, except from a few writers. Kaya Days was something halfway between poetry and prose, so I can understand the misunderstanding behind the whole project.
At the same time, I can’t accept it. We must move forward. That is, we have more than beaches and an apparently peaceful setup to sell. We’ve got the richness of the different communities, their interactions, and the human will to look at things. When everything is going astray elsewhere, in Paris or Washington, Mauritius has another model. There is a lot to be said about the way people intersect here, as long as one is willing to see things with different eyes.
LT: One of the things I felt as I was reading this novel was very much that question of “How do we live together?” Virtually every country that has been touched by colonialism—which is to say virtually every country—has to ask itself these questions over and over again. I was wondering if you could talk about your thoughts on how literature can facilitate this conversation.
CS: I was described first as somebody who’s always looking for his own identity—Indian, Creole, African, French, I’m a mix of all this. How one situates the self in that painting, in the background of Mauritius, is quite difficult for all of us. But I just took that as a big question until I no longer asked it. After four or five novels, I just wrote and found it quite normal to speak on equal terms, finding that I could get good answers as long as I could be certain of my interrogations. To say, for example, in front of a Franco Mauritian of white background: “As long as we are ignorant of our ex-slave community, this country is not going to be at peace.” I think we should be interested in what people believe in.
In the responses I get, though, there is something missing. In French we call this la parole—the word: saying things, being able to say things. We have several very marked traditions here. One is the British understatement; we are all a bit hypocritical in the sense that no one says very loudly what they believe, leaving it in subtleties. If you don’t have the clues, if you don’t have the keys, you don’t know what I’m thinking about. The second is the French tradition, which is more from the French media, all the time babbling about politics and such. It’s very interesting, and it’s very intellectual, but it’s another culture—a culture we are half-in. Then of course, there’s the Indian part of us, which is more accepting of things like the Will of God. So how do we, with those keys in hand, formulate something that can tell the people listening not only what we think intellectually, but what we have deep in our hearts and in our minds, and then to listen in return—which is not really something that we do very much these days. It is through the process of this sharing of ideas and of beliefs that we can progress.
Carl de Souza is a Mauritian writer most of whose novels are published in Paris, the last ones by Editions de l’Olivier. Kaya Days, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, was published in the United States by Two Lines Press in September 2021. He also authors plays, short stories, and essays, in French, English, and Mauritian Creole in his home country as well as internationally.
Laurel Taylor is a PhD candidate in Japanese and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation focuses on the formation of online literary communities and online literary production, and to that end she has received a Fulbright to conduct research in Japan for the next year. Her translations and writings have appeared in The Offing, the Asia Literary Review, EnglishPEN Presents, Transference, and Mentor & Muse.
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