Posts featuring Carl de Souza

Return to the Prodigal Country: Gilbert Ahnee and Ariel Saramandi on the Mauritian Novel

As a writer, translator and most of all reader, I appreciate it tremendously when I see characters speaking in a way that feels true to themselves.

In 1989, Gilbert Ahnee, a then-rising figure of Mauritian journalism, ventured into the world of fiction with the release of Exils (Exiles), his first and only novel to date. Published by Éditions du Centre de Recherches Indianocéanique, Exils is an intimate inquiry into self-banishment and belonging, described by Charles Bonn and Xavier Garnier in Littérature francophone: Le roman (Éditions Hatier, 1997) as a largely autobiographical novel that was written upon Ahnee’s return to Mauritius after a period of study in France, illustrating the sense of exile that is felt even by those living in the very heart of the homeland—the novel being an explicit cri d’amour, or cry for love, for the French language.  

Thirty-five years later, in 2024, Exils was introduced to the Anglosphere when The White Review, a London literary magazine, included a translated excerpt in an anthology celebrating fiction and nonfiction prose from across the world. The translator, Ariel Saramandi, is a British-Mauritian essayist whose book Portrait of an Island on Fire (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions this June 2025) was described as ‘a searing account of Mauritius’. Her translation offers a delicate rendering of Ahnee’s prose, sustaining its emotional nuances while opening it up to a new audience. 

In this interview, I spoke with Ahnee and Saramandi, both in Mauritius, on the resonances of Exils in today’s world and the evolving legacy of exile in Francophone Mauritian novels.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The excerpt of Exils (Exiles) published in The White Review’s ‘Writing in Translation’ anthology (in Ariel Saramandi’s translation) bespeaks alienation—cultural, geolinguistic, spiritual—mixed up with indifference, boredom, and frustration. I love that we have the character Jean Louise, in his quarter-life crisis, who embodies how exile gnawingly takes on different shapes:  

But I felt that true apathy of not being able to share in their pleasures. I was indifferent to the sea. The sea and its transient vehemence, always the same.

Gilbert, could you take us back to the years leading up to the novel’s publication in 1989? Could you share insights into your creative process?

Gilbert Ahnee (GA): When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, I was 16. I felt, deeply, that my generation would make an unprecedented, but as yet undefined, contribution to our country’s evolution. As a matter of fact, the most groundbreaking changes of the time—political, societal, cultural—were brought about by those who came back from university.  My high school classmates were preparing to go abroad, but my family couldn’t afford to sponsor my university education and so I landed a secondary teaching job as an undergraduate physics teacher. In class I taught physics to young boys and adolescents, but in the staff room I benefited from senior colleagues’ advice as regards to literature. I first started by reading nineteenth-century authors: a few English writers, but many more French and Russian novelists such as Zola, Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. That was my first real exposure to the novel. Over the years, I kept on consolidating that interest for novels from around the world, from Truman Capote to William Boyd, Mark Behr to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mario Vargas Llosa to Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk to Pierre Lemaitre. My curiosity for novels is unquenchable. I’m happy that readers noticed, in Exils, allusions to the world of Camus and Proust.

AMMD: Ariel, what inspired you to translate Exils, a French novel published nearly four decades ago, into English? What significance does the novel hold for you as a British-Mauritian writer who grew up in Mauritius?

Ariel Saramandi (AS): This is such a wonderful, intricate question! So perhaps, to start: I’ve used ‘British-Mauritian’ a lot in describing myself abroad, not so much out of a sense of dual nationality—though I am indeed both British and Mauritian—but because all the essays I produced until November 2024 were written under an autocratic government regime. Saying I was ‘British’, even if I never really felt British, was a way for me to signal—hopefully!—that I couldn’t be charged with defamation or imprisoned without the British embassy knowing about it. Asserting my dual nationality in that way felt like a ‘word of warning’ to Mauritian authorities, a ‘technique’ that felt ridiculous—I’ve never been to the British embassy in my life or know anyone who works there. But I’ve also never been troubled, politically, for my work. READ MORE…

A Sublime Flame of a Text: Jeffrey Zuckerman and Laurel Taylor Discuss Kaya Days

It didn’t take long for me to realize what a brilliant, sublime flame of a text it was . . .

Kaya Days, our Book Club selection for the month of September, is Mauritian author Carl de Souza’s electrifying bildungsroman, set amidst the 1999 riots on the island nation. In getting de Souza’s world of revolutionaries, music, and fire, Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor spoke to translator Jeffrey Zuckerman on his work on Mauritian novels and his processes of translation, especially when working on texts as experimental as de Souza’s. Their conversation spanned the intricacies of handling the many cultures de Souza brings together in his work, and the ethics which face a translator handling such a text. Look out for our second instalment of Kaya Day‘s interviews next Monday, when Laurel Taylor will be speaking with the Carl de Souza. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Laurel Taylor LT: How did you first come to Carlo’s work? What was it that drew you in?

Jeffrey Zuckerman (JZ): Oh, this goes back to the beginning of my career in translation. The first book I saw to publication was that of another Mauritian author—Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins. It was as I was reading more of her œuvre and learning more about her compatriots that I started drawing connections. I was put in touch with Nathacha Appanah—whose The Last Brother is absolutely stunning, incidentally— and I asked if she had recommendations for books from Mauritius that hadn’t been translated. This was her answer:

My mind has a list ‘longue comme la semaine’, as we say in Creole, of books that haven’t been translated but then you’ll think I’m pestering you. So just one title which has been snubbed and I don’t understand why. It’s Ceux qu’on jette à la mer by Carl de Souza, published at L’Olivier in 2001. It is a story about Chinese people stranded at sea.

She didn’t add any further info. At the time, I had heard Carlo’s name, but not delved into his work. I managed to lay hands on Ceux qu’on jette à la mer (literally “Those Thrown to the Sea” but which Carl loves the idea of being condensed to “Jettisoned”) about a boat full of Chinese workers from Guangzhou that ends up stranded in Mauritius, and the lives of the men both on and off the boat. I also picked up that short, intense novella of his, Les Jours Kaya, and was blown away by the way in which it wove in and out of the experiences of people across the island, some in the rioting, some at a remove, some forced to make their way through the chaos. It didn’t take long for me to realize what a brilliant, sublime flame of a text it was, or to appreciate the way it was held together by a rhythm akin to Kaya’s songs, and I fell in love with it straightaway.

LT: Carlo himself is multilingual and has recently started writing in English. To what extent did you collaborate on the process of translation? What was your working process with him like?

JZ: I got to visit the island of Mauritius for the first time ever after having translated three novels from there—two by Ananda Devi and one by Shenaz Patel—in late 2018. A few months before that, I got in touch properly with Carl, and in the intervening months, I did sample translations of these two major novels of his, of which he was clearly happy with. Then I came to the island and spent two days at his house, overlooking the island’s sugarcane fields, and over the course of our conversations and drives around the island, it became so clear to me how his books and his personality are a perfect expression of this island and its unique position between an insular space and a teeming nexus of multiculturality. In terms of our process, Carlo has been the best sort of author for a translator to work with; he’s been very clear that he trusts me and wants me to feel free to make the choices that I make—and also very, very willing to answer all sorts of questions, no matter how trivial they may seem! READ MORE…

Omnipresent Music: Carl de Souza and Laurel Taylor Discuss Kaya Days

My project was about my own feeling of being absolutely disturbed after the events and how I had lived the days.

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.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

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. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Kaya Days by Carl de Souza

De Souza’s densely packed novel is a disorienting one, purposefully so.

Carl de Souza began writing Kaya Days in the tumultuous throes of the very event it depicts—the 1999 riots in the East African island of Mauritius, following the death of popular singer Kaya. From the description of those frenzied days comes a work that renders the electric immediacy of sensation with vividness, kinetics, and a musician’s aptness for rhythm. We are proud to announce this singular work as our Book Club selection for the month of September—a formidable voice in Mauritian literature and an unforgettable novel of revolution, poetry, and becoming.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

Kaya Days by Carl de Souza, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Two Lines Press, 2021

If war is a matter of hurry up and wait, then the rest of life is often the opposite. As Hemingway says, “Gradually, then suddenly.” So it is with Santee Bissoonlall and her mystical journey in Carl de Souza’s Kaya Days, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman—“. . . all this had happened gradually, with the quiet of a new beginning.” For many years, Santee is a child. Then suddenly, over the course of a violent and chaotic few days, she is a woman, a queen, a figure receding. De Souza’s intricate novel propels her on the journey of becoming, as she traverses the tumultuous 1999 Mauritian riots.

The riots were an uprising of Mauritian Creoles following the death of Joseph Réginald Topize—better known by his stage name, Kaya—in police custody under suspect circumstances. The word kaya is a reference to Bob Marley’s 1978 album of the same name, and Kaya, as a musician, was a pivotal figure in the blending of Mauritian sega and reggae into a genre that would come to be known as seggae. He was also an activist for Creole rights and the decriminalization of marijuana, among other things. Yet this political-historical thread is not the primary melody of de Souza’s novel; rather, it serves as the thrumming pedal note to Santee’s journey through the burning streets.

We follow her as she quests for her lost brother, Ramesh—younger than her yet seemingly so much worldlier, as he has been permitted to attend school and traverse the outside world, while Santee has been kept at home, condemned to household drudgery by her sex and her family’s poverty. For Santee, the confusion of the riots is a distant rumble; it is the more immediate problem of a missing sibling which drives her on through the ruined streets.

It was getting dark under the mango trees. She had no hope of understanding, but that wasn’t what she needed to do, that wasn’t her job, she was just here because Ma couldn’t be. What she needed to do was find Ram; one of these alleys would lead to him, but which one?

READ MORE…