Beachcomber Magazine 03

Carl de Souza THE CYCLONES OF HISTORY LES CYCLONES DE L’HISTOIRE In each of his novels, the writer plunges his everyday heroes into the whirlwinds of Mauritian history. De roman en roman, l’écrivain plonge ses héros ordinaires dans les tourbillons de l’histoire mauricienne. I ntense cyclone Carol, which devas- tated the island on 28 February 1960, was the worst in livingmemory in Mauritius. The country found it hard to recover, particularly because a less powerful storm had already hit one month earlier. This was the year – 1960 – that gave its name to the sixth novel by Carl de Souza: L’Année des Cy- clones (“The Year of Cyclones” ). Three different narrators tell the story of sugar plantation owners in the north of the island, near Piton. A family storm in the midst of a cyclone, a metaphor for individual people caught up in the whirlwinds of History. FASCINATED BY HISTORY Carl de Souza likes to interweave his plotlines with the history of his country. “ I’m fascinated by history ,” he says. Le Sang de l’Anglais (“The Blood of an Englishman”), his first novel published in 1993, recounts the fate of a German disguised as an En- glishman in Mauritius during the Se- cond World War. The next novel describes the difficulties of a long- standing family of Creoles living under the same roof as a family of recent Muslim immigrants. In Les Jours Kaya (“The Kaya Days”), de Souza uses the bloody riots in Mauritius after the death in 1999 of the Rasta singer Kaya, an emblematic figure of the Creole community. En Chute Libre (“In Free Fall”) retraces the rise and fall of a badminton player – Carl de Souza has been a fan of the sport since childhood – against the back- drop of the decolonisation years. FROM BIOLOGY TO LITERATURE Carl de Souza was born in Rose Hill in 1949. His father’s family came from the Indian town of Pondicherry, and his mother’s fromAngers, France. “ I am a typical example of Mauritians who come from all over the world and are often of mixed race. My father was a police officer andmy mother a primary school teacher. She symbolised sternness, he, for all his uniform, was a dreamer. They moved home fre- quently. I spent my youth surrounded by trunks and makeshift furniture. ” Like his parents, the young Carl devoured books, enjoying Charles Darwin as much as he did Graham Greene. He left for England to study biology, which he taught on his return to Mauritius. “ But I felt a dichotomy in my life between the rationality of science and the reverie of literature; I wanted to reconcile them both. So while still teaching, I began to write short stories. ” One of them was awarded the prix Pierre Renaud in 1986, which sparked his literary career. “DELIGHTFUL GHOSTS” Like many of his compatriots, he was tempted by exile, but now he says he is “ no longer bothered ”. “ When you live on an island, he admits, there’s a kind of shutting in, a lot of internalised conflicts and unspoken resentment. But writers are lucky in that they can make these oppressive silences speak. You have to get away from the clichés straight out of tourist brochures, you have to describe the reality of daily life in Mauritius. ” In his last novel, the writer speaks of the fate of those Mauritians who left the island when it became independent in 1968 for fear of seeing the country under the domination of the Indian population. Somemembers of his family left to set- tle in Australia: “ They have an outmo- ded vision of Mauritius and have kept the traditions frombefore the indepen- dence. If they had to come back here, BY ANTOINE DE GAUDEMAR PHOTOGRAPHS CLAUDE WEBER 