An Impossible Return by Caroline Laurent, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Amazon Crossing, 2022
“Courage is the weapon of those who have no choice. We will all, in our poor lives, have to be courageous at one moment or another. Just you wait.”
In 1967, the local population of the Chagos Archipelago was forcibly expelled from their homes. A cluster of over sixty islands in the Indian Ocean, the Chagos Archipelago is a British colony, once home to over 1,500 inhabitants, most descended from indentured and enslaved laborers from Senegal, Madagascar, Mozambique, and India. When Diego Garcia, the largest island of the archipelago, was identified as a desired location for a United States military base, the government of the United Kingdom ripped the Chagossian people from the land of their birth, threw them into cargo holds, and deposited them in Mauritius with only what they were able to carry.
This real life human rights tragedy is the setting of Caroline Laurent’s novel An Impossible Return, translated from the French by Asymptote contributor Jeffrey Zuckerman. More than a backdrop, the political maneuvering that led to exile for the Chagossian people is the machinery that fuels Laurent’s plot, and our two main characters, Marie Ladouceur and Gabriel Neymorin, are wrenched apart by the gears of history.
Marie belongs to Diego Garcia, an island of frangipani and turquoise beaches. She spends her days catching octopus for her family dinner table, gathering seashells for her mother’s grave, and harvesting coconuts for copra. When Gabriel moves to the island to be an administrator for the copra plantation, he and Marie fall deeply in love, despite their difference in social status.
However, on the day that peace is shattered by armed men herding people from their homes, Marie and her newborn leave, and Gabriel stays. Marie and Gabriel have always been on different sides of a social divide; as an administrator, Gabriel is roped into protecting the interests of the British government, which include the forced deportation of the population of the island. As a Chagossian, Marie is a victim; she is severed from the land of her birth, the land that houses the bones of her mother and other ancestors. Now, betrayal and a vast ocean separate the lovers.
From the very beginning, the voice of a mysterious third narrator threads throughout Marie and Gabriel’s story. The identity of this narrator unfolds gradually, but we know that he is our contemporary. As he flies to The Hague to participate in a court case, his reflections become our emotional guide through the story, as well as a constant reminder that the conflict of the past isn’t over.
The structure of the novel becomes increasingly intricate after Marie’s exile. Before the expulsion, the story unfolds chronologically. After, the core narrative zigs and zags through time, stitching together events in fragments that mirror the fractured lives of the characters. We see a character’s grave before we experience the harrowing scene of her death, and memories of the mysterious modern day narrator become entangled and superimposed on those of the past.
At times, the distressing events of An Impossible Return are difficult to read—one scene in particular, when a lawyer representing the Chagossians takes advantage of Marie and her family’s illiteracy to coax them into renouncing their right to ever return to Diego Garcia. All the hope that had been building behind the dream of justice tumbles down in an instant, and it is only rebuilt through the slow, painstaking efforts of hunger strikes and protests.
Laurent’s use of historical artifacts and documents within her narrative is particularly moving. During a “heritage visit” to the island that the British organized in 2006, Marie finds her mother’s grave cracked and overgrown, cigarette butts and beer cans littering the ground. At the same time, the graves of three army dogs are pristinely kept, their names and existences clearly carved into stone. Laurent includes a picture of these three dog graves at the end of the novel, visual proof of the extreme devaluation of Chagossian lives.
When the British were brokering the deal to lease the island of Diego Garcia to the United States, U.S. officials required that the island be uninhabited. A British Diplomat wrote in a letter in reference to the Chagossians:
“Unfortunately, along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.”
Both the real life court case against the British government and the plot of the novel incorporate these repulsive words as proof of the injustice and indignity suffered by the Chagossians.
Throughout the novel, one word comes and goes like a pulsing vein: sagren. It is defined as the Kreol word for sorrow, while simultaneously qualified as something “so much worse than plain old sorrow.” The depth of the word comes into sharper focus with each repeated use. There is sagren when Marie is torn from Diego Garcia. Sagren permeates the Charrette slum in Mauritius that houses the Chagossian exiles. Sagren lives within Joséphin—Marie and Gabriel’s young son—as he cries himself to sleep night after night. Violent despair, shame, and hopelessness are all part of sagren.
Despite this, the final message of An Impossible Return is hopeful. All seems to be lost, until the Chagossians find a way to challenge their circumstances by bringing suit against the British government. The sagren doesn’t go away—rather, through tenacity and love, sagren alchemizes into anger, passion, and purpose. The characters transform from people to whom horrible things happen into people who are fighting to make things happen. They become warriors, just like our narrator guide.
Today, the British government continues to lease the island of Diego Garcia to the United States military. The Chagossians are still exiled from their ancestral home. For the Chagossians, colonialism isn’t just a nightmare from the past that must be processed and understood; it is the very concrete force barring them from their home still today.
Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation, for the most part, deftly renders Laurent’s prose. He preserves the intimacy inherent in the close third person perspectives of Marie and Gabriel and the evocative poignancy of the imagery of a Diego Garcia that no longer exists. However, the translated title of the novel does raise questions. An Impossible Return was published in the original French as Rivage de la colère, which literally translates as Shores of Anger. Where the original title grounds the story in place and emotion, Zuckerman’s new title shifts the initial focus to the narrative. When the plot of the novel is over, the Chagossians are still battling for the right to return to the Chagos. Is the claim “impossible” trying to indicate that the Chagossians will never return? Or is it hinting that Diego Garcia has been fundamentally and irrevocably changed in such a way that even a physical return won’t give the Chagossians what they desire—their home? Or is the title reaching for the concept that if or when the Chagossians go back home, they will have accomplished a feat subjectively labeled impossible by many onlookers, us included? Considering the message of the novel—that a return to Diego Garcia is not only possible, but also inevitable if there is any true justice in the world—the title An Impossible Return seems to undercut the emotional power of the characters and belie its final note of hope.
An Impossible Return earned a slew of French literary awards, including the Prix Maison de la Presse 2020 and Prix Louis-Guilloux 2020. There’s a lot to love—the vulnerability and temerity of the characters, the bittersweet love story, the skillfully braided narrative—but more than anything, the novel is a vehicle for social change. All of Caroline Laurent’s substantive artistry of story and language is in service to a faith that literature can change the world. The fate of the Chagossians is personal for Laurent, whose mother is Mauritian, and the novel ends with the results of a 2018 International Court of Justice case that Caroline Laurent herself attended with the Chagossian delegation. The sagren of the novel blurs between fiction and reality, characters and author; it reflects Laurent’s own sagren.
An Impossible Return is dedicated to Caroline Laurent’s mother, and to “all the Chagossians in exile.” In the Afterword, Laurent explains how her mother first told the story of the Chagossians when Laurent was a little girl, how the story burrowed into her, how her family was one of the last free visitors to the Chagos. To realize how much of Laurent’s life and identity intersects with the historical events and current politics of the story is to understand the extent of her craft. She transmuted her facts into fiction in such a way that she universalizes it. The Chagossian struggle for justice becomes ours.
“Believe me. Our fate affects you all, and certainly far beyond anything you’ve imagined, or could.”
Annilee Newton lives and writes in Austin, Texas. Her essays appear in the Sierra Nevada Review, the anthology Family Stories from the Attic published by Hidden Timber Books, and on Dirty Spoon and PenDust Radio podcasts. She has an MFA in Writing from Lesley University.
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