Is it cake?

Le jour des caméléons (The Day of Chameleons) is the francophone Mauritian author Ananda Devi’s fifteenth novel. Set on the island of Mauritius, it charts the unfolding of a tragedy – the build-up to an explosion of violence in a shopping centre – through the interconnecting trajectories of four characters: the washed-up René and his luminous young niece, Sara; Nandini, a woman on the run from her unhappy marriage; and the tormented petty criminal Zigzig.

In interview, Devi – who in October won both the Neustadt prize and the Prix de la langue française for her body of work – has traced the origin of this novel to her experience of a “very cinematic nightmare”. Her dream included the main storyline and the event that features in the book’s short prelude: the arrival of a group of immigrants to Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius, after their voyage from Madagascar as stowaways on a fishing boat. But the “immigrants” aren’t people: they are chameleons, looking for a place to live alongside local lizards and geckos.

The enigmatic chameleons, with their skin that “adapts to ambient colours, to the unfurled tints of light”, provide a resonant metaphor for the successive waves of human arrivals to Mauritius, an island without any pre-sixteenth-century population, whose inhabitants are all descendants of immigrants from France, China, Africa, India and Madagascar. And indeed the first-person narrator – who turns out to be the all-seeing, all-knowing voice of the island – is less interested in the chameleon newcomers than in humans per se, however transient and destructive they are: “Because, without expecting it, I have become attached to this species, so terrible, so beautiful[my translation]”.

The novel starts as a thriller with social and historical undertones. There are allusions to post-independence disillusionment and inter-ethnic tensions, especially Mauritius’s “creole malaise”: the poorer socioeconomic conditions faced by many Creoles (the descendants of African slaves) compared to those enjoyed by the descendants of French colonizers and of traders from the Indian subcontinent. At the same time nostalgia for a bittersweet past looms large in the memories of older Mauritians who yearn for “Manilal roti, the five-sous bottle of rhum, Matelot cigarettes in their metal box, Plume Rouge pain maison with butter and kari
disan (blood curry)”.

The best parts of Le Jour des caméléons rely on subtle reversals of focus: discreet animals gaze on posturing humans; the island reflects on its centuries of human occupation. Devi, who is also a poet, is at her most persuasive when conjuring up the mystery and menace of nature and landscape. She depicts a damaged island at odds with the edenic visions of travel brochures. Zigzig stands on a beach covered with seaweed, broken bottles, syringes, beer cans and used condoms. The sound of the sea is “sour” and “the postcard is stained with soot. The sand of the beaches is made up of ashes”. It is as though the apocalypse has already happened, even as the island’s volcano seems to promise more desecration. When violence eventually erupts, however, it is the result of a series of interlocking bad decisions and coincidences that bring together René, Sara, Nandini and Zigzig.

Devi’s world is shaped by misogyny, domestic violence and patriarchal oppression. As in her novel Le Sari Vert (2009; The Green Sari), which concerns an abusive husband who murders his wife, items of clothing are imbued with portentous symbolism. As a sign of regained independence from her marriage Nandini puts on an embroidered salwar kameez, constellated with what turn out to be prophetic “blood flowers”. Young Sara’s choice of a white dress is also ill fated: it will end up stained with blood.

As the novel becomes increasingly sententious the narrative tension slackens and the poetry drains away. An early image of the island’s gradual erosion, “like a cake eaten from the outside in by a monstrous child”, which gestures towards the mythic and archetypal, is later heavy-handedly recast as a vision of the rich sharing out the “moist colonial cake over the backs of kneeling slaves”. Elsewhere it is explained at length that “social media have replaced traditional media” and that, because of this, “our world is shrinking, just like our real-life interactions and our capacity for concentration”. The writing slips into platitudes: “It’s the fear of all mothers. And the mother of all fears”. After its sensuous, limber early pages the book ends up being a flatter, more prosaic thing, its final, central tragedy an opportunity to offer a moral lesson on the ills of consumerism.

Muriel Zagha is a freelance writer and broadcaster on the visual arts

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