By Jim Henderson.
The Chagos Archipelago lies midway between Africa and Indonesia. It comprises sixty-five islands; the biggest one is named Diego Garcia. In 1865, they were incorporated into the British Empire, under which the archipelago formed part of Mauritius. A century later, amid the global wave of decolonization, Britain stipulated to Mauritius that it would be granted independence only if Britain retained Chagos. The American government wanted to build a military base on Diego Garcia to head off Russian and Chinese inroads in the Persian Gulf, though this motive was kept secret at the time. Soldiers forced the Chagossians off the island, which Britain then leased to the US. The Chagossians were put on ships to Seychelles and Mauritius; families were separated; some died or jumped overboard along the way. Now living in penury in unfamiliar surroundings, Chagossian exiles have called for the right to return for decades, but the American base on Diego Garcia is still there today.
This story is the focus of Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams’s novel, Diego Garcia. In the West, events like these have had a nebulous historical afterlife. No longer secret, they are still not well known. The story of the Chagossians doesn’t figure into the received idea of the Cold War that circulates in these countries, which holds that the Cold War was a heroic, but peaceful, triumph over faraway adversaries that the West clinched through the irresistible appeal of “freedom.” Over the past few years, there have been several attempts to challenge this account (see, for example, documentaries like The Act of Killing and Coup 53), and Diego Garcia could be included among them. But a question hangs over Soobramanien and Williams’s efforts to write the history of the Chagossian diaspora: “How to share a story that needs to be told, if it is not your story?” Diego Garcia tries to think through this problem. The result is a book that is ruthless in its self-questioning, with Soobramanien and Williams perpetually turning over and revising their approach to the story they are in the act of telling.
Diego Garcia opens with a paradox: “This is the story of a book we are still writing.” At first, it’s not clear whether “story of a book” means the book’s plot or an account of how it was written. It turns out that the two amount to the same thing. Diego Garcia is a novel that is preoccupied with the conditions of its own creation. The book includes quotidian details about trying to write alongside the authors’ attempts to work out a form that can encompass the history it’s concerned with. It often turns inward on itself and takes the process of its composition as its subject. The biographies of Soobramanien and Williams that appear in the back pages say that Soobramanien is British-Mauritian and Williams is Scottish, that each has published one previous novel, and that they once lived in Edinburgh. These facts apply to Damaris Caleemootoo and Oliver Pablo Herzberg, the protagonists of Diego Garcia.
The novel begins in 2014 when Damaris and Oliver move to Edinburgh. Before that, they were in London, where they lived in a squat with Oliver’s brother, Daniel, and worked haltingly on their first novels, which were ignored upon their release. Daniel commits suicide, and this psychic shock is what prompts their relocation to Scotland. Their lives in this new environment are aimless and full of weltschmerz. They trudge around the city and say things like “the world will always sustain the maximum of destruction possible; the worst possible thing happens always.” Neither has any money, and the two subsist on credit and occasional earnings from Oliver’s bitcoin trading. He is closed off and distractible; she’s impulsive and in some respects a cadger; they have a lot of fights that end in teary contrition. Every day they try to go write at the library; mostly they fail.
Relief from this unhappy state of affairs comes from chance meetings with strangers. The most important one is with a man who calls himself Diego. They have drinks with him one night and learn he’s Chagossian. Afterward, Diego vanishes, but this encounter sets them off on a program of scattered internet research about Diego Garcia. To them it is spectral, a place of disappearances (not just the Chagossians’: it’s been speculated that Diego Garcia was used as a black site during the War on Terror) that is claimed by the US and the UK but outside the laws of both nations (the book importantly points out that when the two countries sign treaties on human rights and the like, they usually add language ensuring that their terms won’t apply to Diego Garcia). Damaris gets the idea of writing a short story about Diego’s life that will “rewrite what Diego had said but as she imagined Diego’s sister Rose might have told it.” Titled “Garde and Other Journalworks: An Interview with Rose Antoine,” the story forms the middle section of the novel. It lifts details from Damaris’s life and Daniel’s and transposes them onto Diego’s. Reading it upsets Oliver, who tells her that Diego’s story is “not yours.” This exchange is what makes them part ways. But years later, when the pandemic hits, Damaris writes to Oliver to ask how he’s doing; the two reconcile and start corresponding. Their emails make up the final part of the novel. Oliver sends Damaris a story he wrote about their time in Edinburgh; she reads it and wants to “add her voice,” seemingly putting into motion the collaboration we just read.
Diego Garcia is willfully discordant. The novel is a conclamation of different voices. These are not absorbed into a unifying style; instead, the novel sets different types of writing against each other. The most obvious manifestation of this quality is the fact that the novel is a collaboration between two writers that superimposes their perspectives onto each other. This feature is most prominent in the chapters that take place in Edinburgh. As the point of view shifts from Damaris and Oliver together to each one alone, they telescope back and forth from the third-person singular to the first-person plural, sometimes within a single sentence. These sections are written in a garrulous style full of incidental detail. Beneath their apparent chattiness is a densely synchronic account of the early 2010s: the Scottish independence vote, early forays into cryptocurrency, and debt’s emergence as the foremost political question of the day all appear. They are described in a way that is faithful to the inattention that started to afflict everybody around that time. A scene in which Oliver and Damaris escort a stranger they meet to the hospital is a good example:
He was staring at the fast-flowing screen on the wall and listening to her. Movement in the corridor. Wheels on linoleum, boots, doors opening, flapping shut. How Scottish do you feel, Oliver Pablo? More Scottish than my English blood. Your blood is English but your time has mostly been Scottish. News. Rolling, non-stop: accidents and emergencies. We read: ‘Police Attempt to Crack Down on Protests in Hong Kong.’ Images of civilians defending themselves with… Look, umbrellas! ‘Scots independence battle reaches fever pitch on streets and screens.’ She sang, I don’t want the news I can’t use it.
The little fragments of the characters’ reading in this paragraph are typical of the novel. On top of blending contributions from two different writers, Diego Garcia contains many quotations from other sources. Sometimes these come out of Damaris and Oliver’s research—there are, for instance, many excerpts from earlier interviews with Chagossians conducted by documentarians and anthropologists—or books they happen to be reading. At other points, the story is interrupted by free-standing, unattributed passages from writers like Walter Benjamin and Silvia Federici. But all that changes in “Garde,” the story in the middle of the book. Diego’s sister, Rose, is imagined as terse and elliptical. The long paragraphs that go on for pages are replaced by epigrammatic utterances like “you can make whole nations disappear, or invent them with words,” which appear alone, surrounded by blank space. The emails that close out the novel are even more fragmentary and rove from thoughts on “writing as solidarity” to everyday stuff about what the two have been doing (Damaris is teaching writing the Netherlands; Oliver is doing a storytelling group for refugees in London) and notes on the literature about the Chagossian diaspora.
Diego Garcia is relentlessly ironic, in the fullest sense of that term: every statement means more than its speaker realizes or wants. No sooner does a character say something than it is checked by a countervailing voice that shows it in a different light. One example is a quotation from James Baldwin that’s repeated throughout the book: “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety . . . it is only when a person is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free.” On the face of it, what he says is an admonition that reminds us of the stakes of political commitment; it’s daunting but something to aspire to. It even parallels some of Damaris and Oliver’s ideas about art, which tend toward a kind of self-renunciation: Damaris asks, “What if there was a way to write a way outside yourself?” But Baldwin’s exhortation comes off as glib when looked at next to the Chagossians’ experiences. His words are grimly echoed by one of the survivors of the expulsion whose testimony is quoted. She asks, “Do you know how it feels to be snatched from one’s homeland and dumped in the wild? You are treated worse than an animal. You have no dignity. But worst of all, you have no identity.” The Chagossians abandoned their identity too, but they never had a choice, and doing so didn’t “set them free.”
Recent debates about the point where avowals of solidarity shade into appropriation loom over the novel. Damaris and Oliver try to stay on the right side of this line by acknowledging that neither Diego’s story nor the Chagossians’ belongs to them, but they often appear to cross it. Parallels are implied between their lives and the Chagossians’; these seem at odds with the inviolability they attribute to what happened on the island. In Edinburgh they too are adrift in a place where they feel “unwelcome,” and they are weighed down by a malaise they call “the sadness.” Its analogue in the novel seems to be what the Chagossians call “sagren,” a Kreol word that refers to the psychic pain of forced exile (the Chagossians often talk about deaths from sagren)—but is living in a strange city and having no money really comparable to what was inflicted on the Chagossians? Or was their displacement just one outcome of a global system of interests and calculations that Damaris and Oliver are caught up in, too? You could ask similar questions about their use of material pulled from other sources. In keeping with the zeitgeist of the post-Occupy years, Damaris and Oliver aspire to live in a state of multitudinousness. Following Fred Moten and Edouard Glissant, they want to exist “without consent to being single beings.” Their free use of other people’s words could be interpreted in this way—or is splicing in these texts the kind of arrogation of others’ experiences they are usually against?
These tensions are constant, and they prompt a lot of doubling back. Damaris has high hopes for her “Garde” story: she gets a residency and excitedly fantasizes about turning the piece into a book that will trace out the economic networks that bear down on Diego’s life. “The blow my book will deal to the military-industrial complex!” she proclaims. But she never writes the book, the big-name magazine she sends the story to ignores it, and Oliver reacts coldly to it. By the end of the novel, she has renounced “Garde,” and says that “I don’t want to write like that now.” The whole blind alley of the story, which is put forward as a literary breakthrough only to be discarded, is typical of how Diego Garcia continually revises itself. It mulls over various possibilities for how to write in a way that honors the Chagossians, without ever settling on one. One of the writers quoted in the novel, the poet Saradha Soobrayen, proclaims that “there needs to be self-doubt, writing with a sense of failure.” It’s an idea that recalls Oliver and Damaris’s writing, which is always treated as provisional, so much so that as Diego Garcia nears its end, they seem to be wondering about the necessity of writing at all—at least, writing as “self-expression.” In one of her emails, Damaris says that “I’m more interested in other people’s writing than in my own. It doesn’t make me any less a writer, more that I want to be a different sort of writer now.” They become drawn to depersonalized forms of writing that act as a medium for other voices to pass through: translation is one example, or acting as an “écrivain publique,” a French term that refers to someone who writes to bureaucracies on behalf of immigrants who lack officialese.
Amid the novel’s constant reversals, Damaris and Oliver often return to this idea of relinquishing yourself. It persists as Diego Garcia’s hope or aspiration. The question Damaris and Oliver put to themselves—how to tell someone else’s story—is endlessly involved. They don’t answer it, but their multiperspectival approach establishes the conditions under which the question can be addressed. Such a problem can’t be resolved individually—not only because of the distortions of our own standpoints but because events like the ones on Diego Garcia are not as localized as they might seem. They implicate many, and the grip of the militarism that uprooted the Chagossians extends over the world and touches the West too (Damaris’s residency is located right next to a naval base). To be blown out of your solipsistic frame of reference, like a pilot in an ejector seat, is a necessary precondition to telling this suppressed history—or, as Damaris puts it, “Solidarity requires us to get over ourselves. Outside ourselves.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Henderson lives in Minneapolis.
