Shenaz Patel THE EXPLORER L’EXPLORATRICE From tales to plays and novels, from the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, and from French to Creole, Shenaz Patel probes the faces and landscapes of her native country. Far from the exotic, she loves to “funambulate” in this fascinating “breeding ground of otherness”. Du conte au théâtre en passant par le roman, de l’archipel des Chagos à l’île Maurice, du français au créole, Shenaz Patel sonde les visages et les paysages de son pays natal. Loin de tout exotisme, elle aime « funambuler » dans ce passionnant « terreau d’altérité ». BY ANTOINE DE GAUDEMAR PHOTOGRAPHS LAURENCE GUENOUN I was nearly called Scheherazade, like the heroine of the Thousand and One Nights,” says Shenaz Patel. Like the title of a symphonic suite by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a favourite of her parents, with whom she shared a love of music. In fact, the name was changed to Shenaz, but the author sees it as a presage of what she has become: a raconteur like Scheherazade. But unlike the princess, who drew her inspiration from tales and legends the world over, Shenaz Patel has created her writer’s universe in the country of her birth, Mauritius. “You can only write well about what you know well,” she says. The island’s influence is felt in the light, colours, smells and even the sounds that inhabit her books. READING WRITING “Mauritius is in my blood,” she says, “because it’s the land of my childhood and everything that comes from childhood is indelible.” Born in Rose Hill in the 1960s into a mixed marriage – at the time infrequent, and often deemed scandalous – between a Muslim engineer of Indian origin and a Catholic Creole secretary, Shenaz Patel was a fairly shy, solitary child, immersed like her parents in books and music: “I have always been a passionate reader, I thrive on books, and they have helped me to withstand the chaos of life.” Shenaz Patel started writing as a child, but she was too modest to show anyone her texts. After studying French at university in Réunion, she returned to Mauritius. Her love for her country and what she calls her “explorer’s” attitude led her to journalism. “I was interested in the real world, and my parents were very committed union members. Injustice affected me deeply. I had a romantic, almost utopic, belief that writing, and particularly journalism, could change things. I still think so.” But while her work as a committed journalist is fulfilling, her desire to write goes far beyond. At the age of 30, Shenaz Patel finally dared to publish short stories, then two novels, Le Portrait Chamarel and Sensitive. She also tried her hand at plays, tales, and graphic novels for children: “I’m fascinated by the many ways you can tell a story; I still wonder what that secret alchemy is that creates in stories other lives than the one we live.” LAND OF BIRTH AND EXILE In her works, Shenaz Patel alternates her “two mother tongues”, French and Creole. She believes you should not differentiate the two, as “Creole, which is often used in everyday life, can quite easily express the complexity of people and feelings. It reflects a world-view just as subtle as French. For example, Creole distinguishes between maternal and paternal aunt, and to say cousin, it says ‘my mother-her sister-her son’.” In 2005, Shenaz Patel wrote the novel Le Silence des Chagos in French, “because I wanted to speak to the whole world,” but the dialogues are in Creole: “I couldn’t hear them in French, they sounded artificial.” Le Silence des Chagos was inspired by the tragedy of the Chagossians, forcibly expelled from the Chagos Archipelago when Mauritius became independent in 1968, and the British government decided to keep the territory to use as an American military base. Disgusted by this forced exile, Shenaz Patel wrote a novel so well documented that twenty years later, it encouraged the great international lawyer Philippe Sands to successfully defend the cause of the Chagossians in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. “
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