Place: Diego Garcia

Anger as Purpose: On Caroline Laurent’s An Impossible Return

All of Caroline Laurent’s substantive artistry of story and language is in service to a faith that literature can change the world.

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.

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