Remembering the Island: insularity and memory in the contemporary Mauritian novel in French

Since 1979 there has been a marked increase in literary production from Mauritius, primarily in French, and Mauritian authors have been gaining in popularity amongst a French-speaking readership. Yet, within the context of postcolonial literatures or francophone studies, little attention has been paid to fiction from the islands of the Indian Ocean until very recently. This thesis therefore presents a valuable study of novelists writing in the French language from the culturally and linguistically diverse island of Mauritius. It considers the impact representations of insularity and memory have had on contemporary Mauritian writing in French and the role of recent fiction in creating a sense of heterogeneous Mauritian island identity in literature. The chosen corpus is deliberately broad, comprising work by eight authors (Appanah, Berthelot, De Souza, Devi, Humbert, Le Clézio, Patel, Pyamootoo) thereby allowing for a comprehensive and holistic overview of contemporary fiction from Mauritius. Interviews were conducted with four of the novelists. The contemporary authors studied draw on the island, and memory of the island, as narrative strategies and themes and draw together the different strands of Mauritian society in order to facilitate the reconstruction and validation of a multifarious Mauritian identity in literature. Experimenting with portrayals of islandness in eschewing clichés or subverting island metaphors, they employ figurative and literal representations of the island that challenge the reader’s perception of Mauritius. Furthermore, how Mauritian novelists negotiate personal and collective memory in their writing is instrumental in the process of accepting but breaking with the past and taking on board a heterogeneous creolised Mauritian island identity. The thesis ultimately demonstrates that rather than endorsing any notion of pure cultures of origin, today’s generation of Mauritian writers acknowledge the creolisation that is integral to contemporary Mauritian island identity and this is reflected in the richness and complexity of their writing.