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The Réunionese writer Monique Boyer’s autobiographical novel Métisse fearlessly probes questions of class and race as they constituted her own family. Boyer gives us a brutal moment in her narrative, which occurs when her mother, on the verge of divorcing her father, calls him a bloody nigger (espèce de nègre) (Boyer 1992, 128). While the mother came from a family of poor whites, the father had a Chinese grandfather and a black grandmother. Boyer is able to extricate herself from the more obvious ways of thinking about this insult. Instead, she understands that these: “[…] n’étaient pas les siens: ils étaient ceux des femmes, des hommes, de tout ce que notre terre avait porté” [“these were not her [mother’s] words: they were those of the women and men, of all that our land had borne”] (Boyer 1992, 28). The narrator’s mother achieves middle‐class status from being a poor white woman through her marriage to the upwardly mobile black fonctionnaire (government servant). The bitter white woman sees her ex‐husband as a “nigger”; she thus endorses colonial hierarchy in which the black man is monstrous. The narrator understands that her mother, Marcelle, had to resort to marrying a black man for her ascent in society: she would not be able to marry above her station in the white community. But although her father Lucien is presented as a victim in the horrific insult her mother throws at him, the narrator shows that her father too was equally restricted by the very same colonial mentality that allowed his wife to insult him. They are seen as participating, and even supporting, colonial culture in their mutual disgust by blackness. When Lucien comes to visit his daughter, he avoids going into the house when there are guests so his daughter need not introduce him: “Je ne voulais pas te faire honte! …. Personne ne saura que ton père est un cafre!” [“I did not want to humiliate you …. Nobody will know that your father is a nigger”] (Boyer 1992, 30). The divorcing parents in the novel show how the different usages of “cafre” by each of the parents disrupt the possibility to separate what the postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha, terms “the general conditions of language” from “the specific implication” of an utterance (Bhabha 1994, 36). The institutional and performative strategy of Bhabha's hybrid Third Space is collapsed. “The only implication, [the term’s] only coherence, for both the white mother and the black father was the general colonial signification of the uncivilized negro, slave in history, who is culturally and developmentally inferior to the French settler” (Prabhu 2007, 44). The brutality of the moment when the term “nigger” is uttered chases away ambiguity and crashes backward into history to reinstate the concept as the product of colonial domination. This is a reminder that it is not possible to quickly transpose hybridity (or any concept) as it was born as a concept of coloniality into a liberated, utopian hybridity “after” colonialism. While of course the term is not magical and will not recreate the circumstances of colonialism by its simple pronouncement, its coherence, indeed its intelligibility, assures that the discursive structure in which Lucien can be a nègre envelops the speakers through their common understanding of it. Experiencing the effects of the same colonial ordering in the Caribbean, Edouard Glissant refused to name the terms between which “Relation” is forged for precisely these reasons as he sought transformation of the mentality of colonialism that Martinique urgently needed through an engagement with infinite difference as the space for transformations that can lead to true newness.

Réunion eschewed nationhood in 1946 and is part of France, while Mauritius became independent from the British in 1968. But despite such political resolutions, if we can consider them thus, tensions and contradictions in the French “status” of France’s overseas departments and their people are very much part of twenty‐first‐century notions of Frenchness. When a French beauty queen was discovered, soon after her crowning as Miss France in 2007, to have posed in what the pageant deemed a compromising position (a playfully sexual picture of her licking yoghurt, and another of her in a swimming pool lying on a floating crucifix), the pageant’s authorities immediately pointed to her Réunionese belonging, to her not being French, and, therefore, to her being morally inferior. Old and enduring ideas about hierarchies linked to race and of European culture’s superiority to the contaminated version of it in the colonies – particularly because of racial mixing, read contamination – exploded out into the open. Wanting to shame the islander into subservience, the pageant’s president, Geneviève de Fontenay, said in an interview that the young woman, Valérie Bègue, could have proven her moral worthiness by saying, “I’m resigning because I am not worthy to carry on as Miss France!” But she did not. Wanting to revoke her award, de Fontenay alluded to her distance from the French ideal, saying she should “stay there,” in Réunion, and remarking also that she would not want to be touring around with a girl “like that” (see Prabhu and Murdoch 2008, 403). Bègue’s supposedly depraved morals were thus linked “to the ambiguity of her already denigrated Creole origins and, by inference and extension, their basis and location in distant Réunion” (Prabhu and Murdoch 2008, 411). Along with the strong support for Bègue, the Communist Party of Réunion reminded the Réunionese people in the debates in the press and in the streets that the underlying reasons for which autonomy from France was sought by more radical Réunionese are still up for consideration.

In literature and beyond it, those who are attached to Réunionese autonomy have most often anchored that identity alongside the importance of Creole language as a vector. Literature in French creatively incorporates Creole language through allusions to certain conversations taking place in Creole, the use of Creole vocabulary, and other ways of creolizing the French language text.⁶ Beyond that, in the move to acknowledge poorer sections of society, many of whom would be considered illiterate by measuring literacy in French, inventing a written form for Creole was central to that project in Réunion as it was in Mauritius but also in the Caribbean islands. Axel Gauvin’s Du créole opprimé au créole libéré (From oppressed Creole to liberated Creole) is a manifesto that shares much with its counterpart from the Caribbean, Chamoiseau, Bernabé, and Confiant’s Eloge de la créolité (translated as In Praise of Creoleness), which grew out of the authors’ work with Creole education for school‐age students.

In Mauritius, no African language makes its way into the educational system in the way Indian languages have been promoted. This move to infuse the educational system with the ancestral languages of the majority population “was one that acknowledged a particular history and provided a vehicle for the development of an ‘ethnic’ identity, which, by virtue of appearing in the idiom of the ‘cultural,’ escaped being a racial nomination derived so directly through colonial purpose” (Prabhu 2005, 186). Thus, while Indians engaged in a process of ethnification (as Tamils, Bhojpuris, or Telugus) and reinforced it through language learning in the schools and language identification in the census, “Africans” (and métis who could not pass for white) were identified, rather, through the notion of race. Creole language never performed the function of comparable ethnification for descendants of African slaves. And, while no group claims Creole as their “mascot,” it remains the lingua franca. Thus, ethnicity allows Mauritian Indians to transcend the brutal colonial either/or divisions by race through the nuances accorded by ethnicity (and religion). What they gain is also a diasporic identity beyond their history of indenture and alongside their economic movement and cultural aspirations. On the other hand, lack of ethnification has left nonwhites of African descent less room for evolution in the imaginary even as they overcame and transcended their colonial function as slaves. Amongst others, Paul Gilroy reflects on the way the idea of diaspora, which builds on the desire to transcend “the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity,” has had to, historically, “sit uneasily alongside the uneasy choices forced on black movements and individuals embedded in national political cultures and national states” (1993, 19). Mauritians of African descent have less often expressed belonging to such a black diaspora.

Edouard Glissant’s refusal to allow his version of hybridity to lapse into an idea of a utopian mixture where all kinds of different cultures mingle and create a melting pot is discussed in detail elsewhere (Prabhu and Quayson 2004, 226–228). For Glissant, the violence between the self and the other and the persistence of difference beyond the initial encounter ensure that a level of tension continues through the evolution of hybrid locations. This is done theoretically by refusing to focus on the “two” entities in a relationship that causes hybridity (such as black and white, colonizer and colonized) and, rather, to insist on the absoluteness of “Relation.” The tension is not suggestive of violence, but rather of a productive uneasiness that constantly generates movement in thought and in action.

Indian coolie labor is well documented by the author Marcel Cabon in his Namasté (1965), an early thorough engagement with Indians in Mauritius. Cabon’s inheritor, Deepchand Beeharry, one of the few Mauritians to write in English, probes this Indian history with That Others Might Live (1976) which is set in Mauritius but begins in India and covers the capture and journey to Mauritius of three Indians, Manish, Thomas, and Dhiren, who come from different parts of India. Beeharry carefully represents different religious and ethnic Indian groups in Mauritius while the late Abhimanyu Unnuth, who was once a lone writer in Hindi, left behind a vibrant literary culture in Hindi with writers such as Mohanlall Brijmohun and Soomatee Boodhun contributing to it.

Mauritius was signaled early on, well before Baudelaire’s 1841 visit (or Darwin’s in 1836), by Bernardin de Saint‐Pierre’s 1788 novel Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia, 2005), a classic of eighteenth‐century Enlightenment literature, and which gives Mauritius a false start in the literary canon by diverting attention to the small group of privileged French people from the island’s other populations, as Lionnet argues (2012a, 32). As is well known, Virginie is sent away to France when the youngsters, who grew up together on this idyllic island, become sexual. The protagonists are not reunited because when Virginie is making her way back from France to Mauritius, her ship sinks before it can reach the coast. She dies before Paul’s eyes because she prefers to preserve her modesty and will not abandon her clothing! Saint‐Pierre published his impressions in a lesser‐known nonfictional account, entitled Voyage à l’Île de France (Travel to Mauritius), in 1773. This is the most elaborate published account of slavery on the island. Saint‐Pierre describes the terrible situation of the slaves and the punishments he witnessed. This sparked a debate with a local plantation owner whose fear of the abolition of slavery was made real by the Frenchman’s critique. The planter Thomi Pitot’s refutation is almost comical in that he contests the number of lashes cited by Saint‐Pierre or other details in the degree or extent rather than the actual fact of the type of punishments slaves received. A counter‐refutation appeared subsequently by a Catholic bishop, Ducroq (Prabhu 2007, 77–79). Despite these documentary pieces of slavery in the written account, blackness (Africanness) in Mauritius, though associated with sega dance and music, has effectively been obscured and ignored.⁷

An ambitious Mauritian novel that aims to encompass the totality of Mauritian culture, or whose ambitions transcend the typical perspective, is Marie‐Thérèse Humbert’s extraordinary A l’autre bout du moi (At the Edge of Myself).⁸ The very title explains that the author is going to the very limit of the self as it has been conceived, and Lionnet’s perspicacious work on self‐portraiture suggests that Humbert’s text is, beyond a work of self‐representation by the author, a much more legitimate portraiture of the island in literary history (1989a, 226) than Paul et Virginie, which she critiques elsewhere. Nadège and Anne, two children from the mixed‐race, though mostly white, populace who live out their lives from having lost position and privilege in society as their fortunes dwindled over generations, present two ways of being Creole in Mauritian society. Anne performs colonial culture, obligingly falls in love with the white neighbor, and adheres to the role of whites in that logic while Nadège embraces all that is not‐white and dies bearing the child of her lover, Aunauth Gopaul, the fiery Indian revolutionary. Their father’s brother, André Morin, is an aspiring white. He cleanses himself of contamination by marrying a white woman. Humbert presents a microcosm of Mauritius by following the perspectives of all Mauritians as they can be identified by race. The Indian maid Sassita and Mme. Lydie, who lives on the margins and heals with remedies outside of official medicine, also find sympathetic portrayals by Humbert. But the most fascinating relationship is that between Anne and her sister Nadège. It is characterized by love, desire, intense envy, and violence, all of which often seem to be directed against the self rather than the twin. The most emotionally violent scene occurs when Anne finds out that Nadège is carrying a half‐Indian (illegitimate) baby. She is outraged at the disgrace this will bring the family, and especially at her chances of snagging a white husband. This brutal reality, for Anne, of her nonwhite identity that rears its head no matter how she tries to camouflage it, signals the breaking up of her dreams of moving up through marriage. This ending of her quest for acceptance through years of preparation, when she consistently struggled to disentangle herself from her sister, is going to be executed by her sister’s half‐breed child. Anne slaps her sister and screams out to the baby, “Die!” (Humbert 1979, 426, 428). In a dramatic ending, after Nadège’s death and that of their father, Anne walks resolutely to the Indian lover’s home and takes her sister’s place. Humbert’s writing contains a brutality directed toward spaces of “purity” and forces the question of hybridity out of the theoretical and into the social sphere.

Ananda Devi’s rich and wide literary creation stands as a body of work through which to enter Mauritian culture and to think of the meaning of being “in relation.” Her oeuvre stands alongside the range that Glissant has provided, though Devi’s work stays mostly with fiction. Experimenting with narrative, theme, and language, this author has, from her early short stories to her poems and range of novels, explored her island culture beyond delving into simplistic forms of ethnicity, race, and class and plunged her characters into dark physical and mental worlds. Her ability to write desire, to seek to understand psychology as it is intersected by history, and to expose the most subtle forms of domination and submission make for an author whose reach is “universal.” The most delightful aspect of her writing is that its expansive relevance is achieved through an exquisitely delicate, attentive, and meticulous craftsmanship of sentence, texture, and detail in the language, description, and narrative procedure. Her Eve de ses décombres (2006, translated into English as Eve Out of Her Ruins) was made into a film, Enfants du Troumaron (Children of Troumaron), through a collaboration between the author and her filmmaker husband, Harrikrisna Anenden and their son, Shravan Anenden. The result is a breathtaking film, whose violence is felt viscerally and whose images are strikingly arrived at in the cinematic medium, not least because of the sheer brilliance of the novel’s prose. Set in Mauritius’ capital city of Port Louis, the novel is made up of voices or monologues through which the protagonists address the reader. We encounter Eve, who has been sexually abused and now revels in seeking out violent sexual partners in her prostitution; Savita, whose tenderness and love for Eve develop a completely different world with different rules, emotions, and exchanges; Sadiq, the romantic, taken with Rimbaud and obsessed with Eve; and Clélio, whose absent brother haunts him in the everyday and enters into his world when he is incarcerated on a false accusation. These and other characters expose their most sensitive nerves, open wounds, and precarious selves. An unlikely murder, violent rape, and physical abuse in the plot emerge as fascinating for the reader as they are repulsive. Another collaboration from this couple produced Cathedral, also based on Devi’s eponymous short story.⁹ This is a more ethereal presentation of a young Mauritian girl in Creole culture, although it is not without subtle social commentary as the naïve young girl negotiates the attention she receives from a Frenchman.

Ananda Devi’s substantial body of work is complemented by talented writers such as Natacha Appanah, Shenaz Patel, and the poets, Khal Torabully and Umar Timol, for example. Patel, a successful novelist with works such as Paradis Blues (Paradise Blues), uses Creole and French within her prose and poetry, thus drawing on Virahsawmy’s work and taking it in a different direction, with greater ease in the contiguity of, and flow between, the two languages. Appanah’s gripping Dernier Frère (2007; Last Brother, 2011) is an imaginative and subtle story of two boys, one a Mauritian called Raj and the other his friend from prison, who is a Jewish boy called David. Drawing on World War II history, Appanah imaginatively evokes those Jews who landed on Mauritius after fleeing Europe. The novel develops the friendship between these two broken children and tracks their lives into adulthood. Her more recent Tropique de la violence (2016), which was shortlisted for the Goncourt prize, is set in the French department of Mayotte and is now available in English as Tropic of Violence (2020). Exploring the question of undocumented immigrants here and earlier in En attendant demain (2015, published in English as Waiting for Tomorrow, 2015), Appanah establishes herself as a gifted writer with a sensitive and mature ability to write emotion without falling into melodrama. This explosion of Mauritian writing that hits the international scene is surprisingly not matched by Réunion, although publishing continues steadily.¹⁰

Focus on the cultural in understanding hybridity obscures the collusion between ethnic identities and European theories of race just as the reformulation of ethnicity in diasporic context through colonial categorizations and policies dislodges the realm of the political and the historical. As we have seen, eschewing this type of understanding also brings to light the impossibility of “ethnifying” for the Creole (to be understood as African) population by following how the same vehicles (primarily ancestral language) have never been available. Despite the island’s proximity to Africa, there has never been a substantive move in Mauritian history to revive, even imaginatively, any African language in Mauritius. This is because “Creoles” themselves do not identify with African languages nor do they do so with Africa in any political or overt way. They have historically allied with the French in the competitive machinery set in place during colonialism and which emerged as voting patterns with independence. This is a legacy that Mauritian literature has interrogated throughout its recent history. In Réunion, the question of ancestral languages never arose in quite the same way due to the intense assimilation, although authors such as Daniel Vaxelaire have done lifelong historical work on slavery.¹¹ Others involved in such work, for example, Carpanin Marimoutou and Axel Gauvin, have brought consciousness of their ancestral language, Tamil, within Réunionese culture. Creole was locked in a one‐to‐one struggle with French, and even if spoken widely, it has been the singular language of the poor and the underprivileged. Both Mauritius, through its ethnification, and Réunion, through its assimilation, have an ambiguous relationship to their African past. Slavery disappears quickly (especially in Mauritius) and Frenchness (especially in Réunion) trips up ancestral connection to Africa; a connection that is not facilitated through language, as we have seen.¹² On the one hand, this difficulty of articulating Africanness is a silence that obscures a wound and camouflages a historical reality, and, on the other, it leaves the door wide open for newer forms of connection to the continent and of presence in the world.