Diego Garcia Read online

  ‘As affecting as it is intellectually agile, Diego Garcia achieves what few novels even aim at—it opens up fresh ways of reading both history and fiction.’

  — Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide

  ‘In reading Diego Garcia, we transcend the ‘I’ of the singular, towards the ‘we’ of the collective: of nation, homeland and of a people displaced. Through the intricately woven histories and the corresponding fictions within fictions, the compassion expressed in Diego Garcia highlights the absence of it in those who, forsaking their obligations towards other human beings, exiled the Chagossians from their home, and in doing so impressed upon themselves a kind of exile of the spirit, a penetrating sadness witnessed through the melancholy characters of this story and the society that looms as their backdrop. Written in a language at once distant and interior, dazzling, we see that until the Chagossian people are home, nobody is home.’

  — Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood

  ‘Focusing on the ongoing atrocity of the Anglo-American occupation of the Chagos Islands and displacement of their native people, Diego Garcia is a subtle contemplation of the uses of fiction and narrative (for good and bad) and how, where and why individual and collective narratives meet. Taking in artists from Kader Attia to Sophie Podolski, as well as depictions of the Chagossians in poetry, documentaries and essay films, it is a moving study of friendship, allyship and creative forms of political struggle.’

  — Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir

  ‘Diego Garcia is an important and highly original work, incredibly well-researched and thought-through.’

  — Philippe Sands, author of The Last Colony

  ‘Listless and urgent, dulled by sadness and yet dancing with anger, moments of unexpected beauty and strange, bright comedy—in Diego Garcia, these tensions are held together by the energy of a singular collaboration, where the interplay between fundamental separation and common cause is staged even at the level of page layout, the writing of the sentences themselves. It is a novel of shared and unshared experience that is wholly unapologetic about not knowing how such a thing is to be written, but risking it nevertheless. The result is compelling, challenging, unprecedented, essential.’

  — Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art

  ‘Diego Garcia is a beautiful, poignant, anarchic experiment in collaboration and collectivity. This novel does wonderful, innovative things to form and to politics—to style, to voice, to creolisation, to propaganda and power and archipelic thinking—and especially to the denials inbuilt to British novels and British politics. Somehow it finds a way of exposing Britain's ongoing shameful occupation of the Chagos Islands while also being a document of literary resistance and originality. It offers models for future thinking.’

  — Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid & Cute: A Novel

  ‘This thought-provoking, brilliant book sends a hypersensitive probe into the subduction zone between solidarity and exploitation.’

  — Nell Zink, author of Avalon

  © 2022 Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

  Published by Semiotext(e)

  PO BOX 629, South Pasadena, CA 91031

  www.semiotexte.com

  Cover design: Lauren Mackler

  Design: Hedi El Kholti

  ISBN: 978-1-63590-162-7

  Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England

  d_r0

  Natasha Soobramanien

  and

  Luke Williams

  Diego Garcia

  a novel

  semiotext(e)

  Contents

  Cover

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  DANIEL & DIEGO I. DEBT

  II. INDIVIDUALISM

  III. EMERGENCY

  IV. GHOST

  GARDE AND OTHER JOURNALWORKS AN INTERVIEW WITH ROSE ANTOINE

  V. OUTSIDE

  DAMARIS & OLIVER PABLO Mail: Wandering lines

  [NOTES FOR ‘GARDE’, OR HOW WE BECAME A WRITER]

  Mail: Judge Gaja’s question

  Mail: Re: Judge Gaja’s question

  Mail: Il était une île, Diego Garcia / AUKUS

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  At the heart of this novel are two real events. One is a personal tragedy. The other is historical, though its impact continues to devastate people's lives today: the expulsion of the Chagossian people from their homeland, the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, by the British government between 1968-1973, so that the largest of the islands, Diego Garcia, could be leased to the US government for the construction of a military base.

  It is this event we wish to highlight here: the facts of it, and their foundation on a fiction.

  The facts are these: in 1965, at the behest of the US government who had expressed an interest in the island of Diego Garcia as a site for a strategic military base, Britain coerced Mauritius, then a British colony, into ceding part of its territory, the Chagos Archipelago, as a condition for independence. Not only was this strategy of partial decolonization a breach of international law but the British government created from the ceded territory a new colony, British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), at a time when the international community had committed to a global process of decolonization.

  In 1968, the year of Mauritian independence, the forced exile of the Chagossian people to Seychelles and Mauritius began. They were coerced into abandoning their homes, communities and stable employment for a hostile environment, and lives of extreme precarity and misery, with families broken up across two countries lying over 1,000 miles apart. Those who did not survive are deemed by their community and those who support their struggle to have died from a condition called sagren.

  At the time of writing, the Chagossians continue to fight for reparations and the right to return to their homeland. Meanwhile the base at Diego Garcia is still operational, and remains one of the US government's largest bases on foreign soil. The Chagos Archipelago is now recognized by the United Nations as Mauritian sovereign territory. Britain's continuing control of the territory allows it to pursue geopolitical ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region, namely inclusion in AUKUS, the strategic military pact with the governments of Australia and the US announced in 2021.

  In our novel we have referenced, through the testimony and research of others, the facts of these events, identifying some of the Chagossian people who suffered as a result, but who nevertheless resist the injustices that continue to be perpetrated against them and their descendants by the British government. For example, in echoes of the ongoing Windrush scandal, the continued breaking up of families through systematic deportations of younger members of the Chagossian community who do not share the status of British citizenship granted to their elders under the current law.

  In highlighting the facts of this event we must also highlight its foundational fiction: the one collaboratively authored by the British and US governments in 1965 In making the false claim to the United Nations assembly that the Chagos Islands had no settled population, we ask readers to note that the UK and US governments claimed by implication that the Chagossians’ status as a people was a fiction.

  — Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams

  November 2021

  In memory of Saul Daniel Williams

  and for all those who have died of sagren

  “Rann Nu Diego!”

  — Chagos protest chant

  “The coalition emerges out of your recogniti
on that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that we've already recognized that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”

  — Fred Moten

  DANIEL & DIEGO

  I. DEBT

  This is the story of a book we are still writing.

  * * *

  Edinburgh, July 2014. The sluggishness of early afternoon. The sky clouding over, a slight chill in the air. The same uninterrupted sadness, a kind of listlessness that went with everything we did. We'd made it to the Meadows. It had taken us a while to get out of the flat, him offering to buy us a coffee from the Swedish café and one of those cardamom buns we liked so much if she would come to the library. We noticed how people passing noticed us. She noticed how much thinner he was than in London, joggers slipping down on his hips, constantly tugging at the waistband. We slowed our pace. We were still talking about the morning as if something out of the ordinary had happened, when really we'd spent it the way we spent every morning, him coming to her room with coffee, her accusing him of switching the heating off, him denying this. He'd told her, We really must get up earlier. It won't help to stay in bed. This because we sometimes spent entire days in bed. In the kitchen she lit a tube, picked the raisins out of his cereal, milk still unpoured, put them with the other raisins extracted from other breakfasts. Currency she said, They'll see us through The Emergency. He ate. We stared at his opened screen. We argued about whether to cycle to the library. But the sky seemed unsettled and unusually close from up here, on the sixth floor. We decided to walk. The billboard above ScotMid still read ‘Straight Talking Money. Wonga’.

  In the Meadows, some kind of fair. Tabletop stalls and food tents. Let's mill she said. He began to look for something—a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911—he was always looking for a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911. By the time we met again the rain was falling. She took him to a stall and said, I'm buying this dress. Is that a dress? Yes she said. She paid then disappeared with the dress, made of material with some kind of special effect, like oil on water. When she came back she had it on over her jeans and rain-coat. Just imagine there are whole loads of famous people who were never photographed she said. He thought about this. She thought: He looks like a young Nosferatu. Max Schreck. He would not know which screen star to liken me to because he's ignorant about these things.

  A fine rain. Dim light through the cherry trees. We walked away from the fair not speaking and when we reached the part of the Meadows that opens onto the tennis courts, just before the university library, we turned up onto Middle Meadow Walk. Ignoring the unbroken row of posters—comedy acts appearing next month at the Festival—not ready to stop—not ready for a coffee or a bun or the library—we took flight at the traffic lights and cut through Bristo Square, after that letting ourselves be carried by chance. And the sadness opened out.

  * * *

  The city is built on several hills. There are valleys and there are bridges and there are stairwells that connect the two. In those days we would stop on one or another of the bridges and lean over to observe the streets. Sometimes we watched the gardens but never the rail tracks. It was frightening and thrilling to come upon these sudden and dramatic views, which made us think of the postcards sold everywhere on the Royal Mile and all over the city for that matter. ‘The Old Town and the Grassmarket’, ‘Cowgate at Night’, ‘Princess Street Gardens’, ‘Princess Street Looking West’. We would stand there looking down but she didn't say what she would have said before: We're too fuckin scared to jump.

  Because, when we walked, we failed to take in our surroundings, and because when we stopped walking we usually stopped on one of the bridges and looked down, we always had the sense of living above the city, of looking down—dizzy—on its many faces. We watched people flowing past as though caught in a flood. Knowing the city this way, from above, having arrived only recently, we didn't feel part of it, though it had once been part of him, the city of his student years. We were nervous and irritable. This seemed to increase our togetherness. It gave us—only us together, not individually, never alone—a place in the world that we had not had before. We wandered the streets, unwelcome, leaning miserably into the wind or drinking ourselves stupid in a pub. All of this under the ugly haar-obscured sky that we didn't realize we'd invented ourselves.

  * * *

  The first time she saw him was in a photograph on a website for a magazine. She thought he looked odd and his story sounded odd. She couldn't find the story anywhere but found his email address. He could not send her his story because he had bought all the remaining copies he could find of that particular issue of the magazine and had shredded them at the vulgar, pseudo-political, faux-Dada readings he had given for a while at various art schools and gonzo bookshops—though he didn't tell her any of this. The first time we met she said, I hope you've brought money and he said, I have. She showed him a photo of V. S. Naipaul and said, This is my dad, we don't speak. He pointed out a figure in the audience and said, That's my brother, he rarely speaks. Or else he never stops. Later when we went for a meal, Daniel came too and he and Daniel ate like rats let loose in a grain-store, even finishing the leftovers on a nearby plate, and it was sad but in the end it didn't matter all that much. The second time we met it was at a party in a library. The party was honouring a famous English writer—one of those realists who writes like a politician—whom she approached saying, Do you want my autograph? The second party we went to together was a few months after that. We happened to be in Edinburgh at the same time. We found ourselves in a basement bar. We talked beautifully about Can Xue, Dambudzo Marechera, Elfriede Jelinek, all the while drinking ourselves stupid. At one point he came back from the bar with two shots of vodka spiced with hot chillies, we chimed the glasses and she said, To the Mauritian Greats, Devi, Pyamootoo, Appanah, Patel. I am indebted! We drank the vodka down and he said, Hang on! He ran downstairs to the toilet and boaked into the bowl. Meanwhile she'd gone and got talking to a dangerous-looking character who could not look or step or speak without a sparking flow of words conveying his stupid thoughts spilling into the smoky room. By the time he returned from the toilet she and the character were on their way out. She said, Come on come on, we're going to a party. We left the bar and hailed a taxi. We drove through town. We looked out the windows at the passers-by, many were dressed as police, or perhaps they were police dressed in uniform, and many others were dressed in kilts, and we burst out laughing because we remembered it was New Year. The party was at Restalrig then it wasn't so we drove on further out of town.

  Our character was subterranean, his style of conversation mineral, the way the headlights of the passing cars slanted across her face seemed to dazzle him. London she said when the character asked. He handed round the tubes. She said, Can we? and the character said, This is Scotland and opened his mouth wide to catch the tube and lit it while his sparking words continued to flow. Can I have some of your water she said. Without stemming the sparking he reached into his jacket pocket. With his left hand he passed her the water, with his right an Apple Mac, she drank it down, eyes expanding like cameras chasing mirages in a desert. Would you mind not talking so much he said to the character. Jesus, OK. But the sparking…

  We heard the party before we saw it. Felt the speakers in our chests. It was in a field somewhere up the coast, on a small promontory. Red 2 playing as we got out the cab. The character threw his head back and yelled, grabbed her hand, pulled her to the stage. He found them pressed up against the wall of speakers. The character reached out to encircle her with his arms (she didn't move away) while the sparking flowed into her ear. She stood still, shivering slightly. Then the sparking was in his ear and he moved away, back through the crowd, he saw one of Daniel's friends who told him Daniel was here, he went to look for him then needed to boak, and then there was Daniel, dancing & she started to dance thinking: Where is he I want to tal
k to him. She took another Apple Mac and the sparking.

  When we came together again it was among a group sitting on the edge of the promontory. From there we could see the black and white sea, the moon, the character gone. Two women were building up the fire. A guy was pissing off the promontory. There were seagulls we heard above the noise of the music and the sound of the waves. Where is she I want to talk to her? Then we were next to each other and Daniel was there and Daniel was trying to tell us something. What? Do you know. What? we said. Do you know the German word for. What? we said. The German for. What? The German for promontory is half-island.

  * * *

  Standing on North Bridge, the station roof like a hothouse roof. The rain gone, the afternoon swelling with warmth. She took off her raincoat. The sadness—amplified by something with an edge that felt like hunger. Some kids were throwing bottles onto the mess of broken panes. Now is a dumb lie. Her screen flashed, ‘Unknown number’. She didn't answer. Since coming to Scotland she almost always kept her screen powered down. She was afraid that RBS, with their clever moves to try to recover the substantial sum she owed them, would find out she was in Edinburgh, right under their noses. She was also afraid but defiant of the nefarious tactics of DCA Mappots, the debt collection agency EDF had sold her less onerous but not insignificant debt on to after two years of failing to recover it themselves. He said, Why don't you just answer? She said, Why don't you stop giving advice? He had given his screen away a few months previously, straight off the train from London, numb and crazed, to a teenager who'd asked us for change. Now he didn't have a screen of his own. He wasn't on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. for the same reason: The Emergency. She respected his viewpoint and listened with grave concern to his theories concerning asset bubbles, derivatives, guns and whisky and hollowed-out Bibles, total surveillance, teotwawki, the precariat, Charles Ponzi, the distribution of pornographic images and images of abuse, the totally administered society, the Pharmacopornographic era, structural adjustment, Bitcoin, gold, hunger, debt—personal, civic, regional, national, federal, continental, intercontinental, transnational, global, universal, dark pools of—but she could not rouse herself to respond in any particular focussed way. Even so, she did not want them watching him. He did not want them watching her. He did not want them watching us. We did not want them watching us. She did not mind them watching her because she didn't believe in them, not really, not when it came down to it.