How I Witnessed Priya Hein: Riambel - Part I

I have been eyeing this book for a week now. It sat on my bed, then on my desk. In between days, I was reading Funambuler by Shenaz Patel. The days ricocheted between chapters until it was time to turn to Riambel. 

As I turned the cover and saw this note: “Je suis l'arrière-petite-fille issue d’un viol de plantation. Mon noir d'ébène légèrement plus clair présente une nuance. Je suis la fille d’esclaves créoles et de quelque chose de bien plus sinistre. Une lignée de domestiques et de maîtres blancs qui maltraitent leurs travailleurs.” I sensed this book was a mirror ball - one reflecting our island’s wounds and painful heritage.

What Paradise are we talking about?

                   “Tout ce que vous avez à faire, c’est de traverser la route, et vous verrez alors la vraie île Maurice. À quelques mètres de là seulement. L’envers des cartes postales et des brochures de papier glacé utilisées pour appâter et attirer les touristes sur notre île paradisiaque, où ils écouleront les liasses d’euros bourrant leurs portefeuilles - non que nous ayons jamais l’occasion de voir ça.” 

When people ask me where I come from, I always respond: “I’m from Mauritius, a small Island in the Indian Ocean.” But there was a time when I used the word paradise. I was turning a blind eye to our reality: injustice and discrimination.

I couldn’t help but draw a parallel with Shenaz Patel’s book: Funambuler. 

                       “Je crois ce pays profondément représentatif du paradoxe humain, entre ce qui est donné à voir et ce qui existe réellement, à l’intérieur. Maurice projette une jolie façade. Mais ce qui l’habite et qui l’agite, en profondeur, est très différent de l’image qui est cultivée.”

                      “Un jour, dans une séance de dédicace à Maurice, une femme m’a demandé, agressivement, quel besoin j’avais eu « d’aller raconter des choses comme ça sur nous en France » …” “Dans Sensitive, la petite fille pose un regard cru sur une île Maurice des paradoxes et du paraître, qui broie ses hommes et encore plus ses femmes autant que la canne à sucre qui l’enrichit. Et ce roman est d’ici, de chez moi, profondément nourri de cette terre fertile et de son ciel au bleu écrasant. ”

There is an umbilical cord connecting Sensitive and Riambel. We usually assume that children know nothing. But both books portray two young girls as their North Star. They narrate an uncorrupted view of how their world looks. Reading Riambel through the eyes of a child felt so intimate and fragile. A quiet but real crack runs between people of colour and Franco-Mauritians. I’ve always felt like we were from the same Island but living different realities.

My mirror ball

I held Noémie’s mirror ball for a while, and I saw some of her reflections on mine. 

                  “Regardez-vous, toutes les deux! Comme si vos cheveux n'étaient déjà pas assez secs et crépus comme ça. L’eau salée et la brise marine ne vont faire qu’empirer les choses. On dirait des fibres de noix de coco.”

I am Mary-Grace, not Noémie or Marie. They are characters in this fiction, yet we shared the same experience. I heard the same disdainful words about my crown. I was born this way - a mix of my mom’s Mauritian heritage and my dad’s Jamaican roots. Hearing children say “Cheveux Mazambique” stayed with me.  These words held me hostage for years. I was around 18 when I learned how to love my “fibres de noix de coco.”

Unlike me, Noémie and Marie: “nous fichions totalement de l'état de nos cheveux, qui auraient cassé les dents du peigne si nous avions essayé de les discipliner.”

              “Vilin tifi creole. To seve krepi santi pi. Vilin tifi kreol. To seve krepi santi pi.”

Noémie’s world of chaos and order

All of the themes in Riambel played chess in my mind. Noémie navigated chaos and order at the level of her capacity. Her painful heritage, loss and social fracture were her chaos, while family, love and the ocean created order around her. Both chaos and order played hide-and-seek throughout the pages. It got me thinking, what was my chaos and order?

Noémie waltzing in the Ocean

My eyes were compelled by the numerous instances in which the word ocean was mentioned.

I remember hearing the story of the Little Mermaid. Ariel’s underwater world symbolised her unconscious mind. She gave up her voice to go towards a world of real meaning and significance - the surface. Unlike Ariel, Noémie finds peace when she is waltzing in the ocean. It’s her womb, a place she can call home.

                     “Nous nagions dans la mer tous les jours et quand nous ne le faisions pas, nous étions comme des poissons hors de l’eau. ”

                     “Chaque fois que je me tiens face au vaste océan, je me sens un peu moins seule.”

Her heritage is so heavy that her ship is sinking and it’s sinking page after page. After reflection, it’s clear that the ocean is her getaway - a place where she can rest in her unconscious mind. 

                      “Même le mauvais temps ne pouvait nous empêcher de plonger dans le lagon et de nous laisser emporter par les vagues”

                       “ Soudain, je m'arrête de rire et je me mets à pleurer. Abondamment. Un flot de larmes salées roulent sur mon visage. Et puis je lâche prise. Mes mains sont détendues, grandes ouvertes sous l’eau, paumes vers le haut. Une mer délivrance”

Looking closer, the ocean feels like their collective unconscious. A refuge from their harsh reality that is boundless in time, where they could dream about anything.

Reality dressed in fiction

I thought fictional books were just a glimpse of a writer’s imagination. Some made up stories and characters. That’s why I read self-help books. It showed me how to navigate life through prompts. Do this and don’t do that. There were black and white actions you could just follow. But I’m grateful I changed my mind. 

Fictional books are a blend of an author’s truth and consciousness disguised as fiction. So much is hidden yet exposed through the characters, events and storytelling. 

Through Riambel, Priya Hein was connecting the dots of history. I tell you, my bloodline felt it. These two figures hidden in the sugarcane field echoed the voiceless young girls who faced injustice. Their pains and struggles were too loud. I wish I could add glitter around their wounds to sprinkle fantasy into their daily lives. 

This quote from Shenaz Patel's book Funambuler came to me like a beautiful awakening. 

                    “ L’Histoire de nos îles est couturée de silences. Dans nos pays soumis à diverses formes de domination coloniale et d’exploitation (esclavage, engagisme), se pose le problème des sources. Ce sont les puissants qui écrivent l’Histoire. Et c’est justement là que la fiction, quel que soit le genre, se révèle comme le lieu privilégié d’expression des voix tues, auxquelles on n’accorde que peu d’existence pour n’avoir pas été écrites.”  

Toni Morrison also stretches the idea with grace in her book Playing in the Dark:

                       “ As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this.” 

If the subject of a dream is the dreamer, then the theme of a book is the author’s consciousness. So, my writing is here to expose me.