Belonging nowhere: Shenaz Patel’s Le Silence des Chagos

This chapter explores how, as depicted in Patel’s 2005 novel, the notion of belonging, in both its politico-legal and its emotional senses, is central to all aspects of the Chagos islanders’ long-silenced story – to their original expulsion; to their on-going legal battles for the right to return; and to their continued exclusion from contemporary Mauritian society. Drawing on Jones’s study of the ambivalent judicial term ‘belonger’, I argue that the Chagossians’ affective sense of belonging to their annexed homeland is also depicted as constituting the grounds for their legal rights as ‘belongers’ not to be deported and hence to be allowed to return. Intricately bound up with the foundation of the Mauritian nation, the Chagossians’ real-life story demonstrates, in the most brutal form possible, the inextricable links between notions of ‘place-belongingness’ and the politics of belonging