Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (29 page)

I ACCEPT MY MIZER

I’ve always had mizer,

I’ve always had mizer.

On the Earth, without end,

In the end, why am I on the Earth?

I’ve always had mizer,

I’ve always had mizer.

On the Earth, without end,

In the end, why will I be on the Earth?

I accept my own mizer, yes.

I accept my own mizer, here.

On the Earth, without end,

When it ends, why will I be on the Earth? . . . .

All my family had mizer, here.

All my friends had mizer, yes.

On the Earth, without end,

When it ends, why will we be in this life?

—Excerpts from “Mizer” (2004) by Jean-Roy Bancoult and Toombo Bancoult, two of Alex Bancoult’s five orphaned sons
²³

“Stress and depression trickle up and down the generations, affecting people almost irrespective of age or gender,” writes Nayak. “The children can narrate the expulsion and resettlement experience in minute detail as if they had themselves experienced the process.”
²⁴

Among Chagossians born in exile there is this kind of intimate, experiential, almost bodily awareness of and about life in Chagos and the expulsion. Many born after the final removals narrate stories of the islands and the
derasinman
just as one who was born there. Ivo Bancoult is the only one of Rita and Julien’s children to be born in Mauritius. He described for me how pained he is at not having been born in the islands and being unable to live there now. Often Ivo asks himself, and God, why he wasn’t born
laba
. And yet in many ways he spoke as if he’d been born there too: It’s a very different thing to come to Mauritius by force, he said about his life, compared to coming by choice. It’s much harder to adapt when you come by force.

“My father came by force!” Ivo said emphatically. “By force he came” (indicating how many properly understand the experience of having been barred from returning to Chagos to be equally a matter of “force” as the experience of deportation).

Sitting behind the Chagossian community center in Pointe aux Sables, I asked Ivo if he, like others, distinguishes himself as being a
zanfan Chagossien
—a second-generation child born in exile to a Chagossian born in Chagos—as opposed to being a Chagossian proper. “I, truly, I am
Chagossian
,” he replied. “I am Chagossian because my mother was born in Chagos. My father was born in Chagos. All my family was born in Chagos. I am a Chagossian. On paper perhaps” it says he was born in Mauritius, he continued, “but I am a Chagossian. Honestly. I am proud to be Chagossian.”

I asked Ivo, who works on and off, mostly in construction, about his hopes for the future. “I would like to dream that one day I will be able to have a life definitely able to change in one sense—in one sense,” he said, meaning the dream of returning to Chagos.

“It is difficult for me to forget my history, my origin. Because there is an enormous silence about it—a lot, a lot of silence. . . . All my family was born there—only I was born here. I would like to tell this story.”

SAGREN, LATRISTES, MIZER

Sandrine Alexis, now in her early 30s, came to Mauritius as a young child with her parents and six siblings on one of the last voyages of the M.V.
Nordvær
. Sandrine explained that her family had to leave everything in Chagos. When they first arrived, the family lived on the streets of Port Louis’s largest slum, Roche Bois. Often they had no food or water. When they came to Mauritius, her parents were healthy, she said. But once in Mauritius, her parents “
tombe malad
” with
sagren
and
latristes
—they fell ill with profound sorrow and sadness. They “
tombe dan mizer
,” she continued. They fell into miserable abject poverty. Over time, three of her siblings died in Mauritius.

When Joseph Vindasamy told me how his father died of
sagren
in 1970 after he was prevented from returning to Diego Garcia, I asked him to define
sagren
. Joseph replied,
sagren
is “not having work.” It’s “lacking” food, water, education for yourself and your children. It’s not becoming “
abitye
”—being unable to adjust—to life in Mauritius.

We notice here how Joseph made no mention of sorrow or sadness in his description of
sagren
. For Joseph and others, the sorrow connoted by
sagren
is so obvious it needs no mention. When Chagossians talk about
sagren
, we can see, they are talking about more than their deep sorrow. They are also talking about their experiences with what Sandrine and others call
mizer
—miserable abject poverty. Equally we can see, when people talk about
mizer
, they are referring to more than their experiences of deep impoverishment in exile. They are also talking about their feelings of
sagren
and
latristes
—their feelings of profound sorrow and sadness.

Sagren
,
latristes
, and
mizer
have become three intertwined ways for Chagossians to talk about their suffering. In using any one of these words, people immediately refer to their common experience of having been
derasine
—deracinated, forcibly uprooted and torn from their birthplace—and the myriad ways—physical, economic, social, cultural, psychological—that
they have suffered as individuals and as a community as a result of their
derasinman
—their forced uprooting.
Sagren
,
latristes
, and
mizer
have come to represent the inseparable combination of Chagossians’ profound sorrow over their expulsion and the profound material suffering the expulsion has caused.

ROOT SHOCK

I was thirteen years old,
When I was thirteen years old in Chagos,
I was thirteen years old, a worker’s kuto dekoke
**
was in my hand.

The English arrived, Mr. Englishman arrived in Chagos,
The English arrived, the English uprooted us, cut off our food supply.
I will not forget,
Never, I will not forget my family,
The whistle blew three times to board the Mauritius,
***
It dumped us in Mauritius.

I will not forget,
Never, I will not forget my mother,
I will not forget those we left there in the cemetery.

O ye li le, O li le, O li le la la la. . . .

—
“I Was Thirteen Years Old,” excerpt, composed and sung by
Mimose Bancoult Furcy (2004)
²⁵

If you’re anything like me, it may be difficult to fully grasp the pain of having been
derasine
, of having been uprooted. Like me, you may live a far more transient life than Chagossians once did. Like me, you may be someone who expects to move several, perhaps many times in a lifetime, choosing to move from place to place following employment opportunities, education, family members, even romance. Still we can and must try to imagine what being forcibly uprooted and torn from Chagos felt like for the Chagossians who had been living there for generations, some never leaving the islands.

“Imagine the victim of an earthquake, a hurricane, a flood, or a terrorist attack,” suggests Mindy Fullilove in her discussion of root shock. “He suffers from root shock as he looks at the twisted remains of the known universe, searching for the road to the supermarket, which used to be there, but is now a pile of rubble. Imagining such a person—and knowing that these tragedies can happen to any of us—we open our hearts and our wallets to the Red Cross and other relief organizations that show up immediately to be . . . the transfusion of an environment to those who are naked to the elements.” However, she adds, “The experience of root shock . . . does not end with emergency treatment, but will stay with the individual for a lifetime,” potentially affecting “generations and generations.”
²⁶

This experience of root shock and the way it affects not just individuals but whole communities across generations is an example of what medical anthropologists mean by “social suffering.”
²⁷
The concept is useful for the way the word
social
helps identify a distinct kind of suffering where causation resides in the social world rather than within individuals. “Social suffering,” three prominent medical anthropologists explain, “results from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people.” The phenomenon is also social because it affects specific populations as a result of their (vulnerable) positioning in the world—for example, Jews and other minorities in the Holocaust, Native Americans growing up on impoverished reservations, African Americans and Latinos consigned to urban poverty in the United States, Iraqi refugees fleeing their homes. Further, the phenomenon is social because it is a kind of suffering that is fundamentally experienced not just as an individual but socially, among a group or community of sufferers. This kind of suffering is so “profoundly social,” they say, “that it helps constitute the social world.”
²⁸

Yet unlike nervos, which is a form of social suffering that tends to obscure its own social, political, and economic sources, in Chagossians’ use of the words
sagren
,
latristes
, and
mizer
, the islanders are continually, implicitly identifying the source of their suffering. They are placing the blame for their afflictions squarely on their expulsion and the actions of the governments responsible for their having been
derasine
. As Mimose’s sega says, “The English arrived, Mr. Englishman arrived in Chagos. The English arrived, the English uprooted us, cut off our food supply.”

And so “social suffering” captures important elements of the Chagossian experience: Their suffering was and is caused by the force and power of the U.S. and U.K. governments and by individuals within those governments who targeted the Chagossians as a vulnerable group. Likewise, as indicated by their common use of the words
sagren
,
latristes
, and
mizer
to
describe their lives, their suffering has been experienced not just individually but socially. With their lives utterly transformed by exile, they have suffered as a community, sharing common experiences that have shaped a common social world.
²⁹
Sagren
,
latristes
, and
mizer
reflect this shared social reality; together they have come to serve as a kind of shorthand, among Chagossians and with outsiders, for the totality of their suffering and for the shared experience of having been
derasine
.
³⁰

“THE SAME AS WHEN I LOST ALETTE . . .”

“Enormous anguish. Enormous problems for me,” replied Rita when I asked what she felt that day when she heard she couldn’t return to her islands.

“How can I explain it—you know, there was a child that I breastfed. She grew all the way up to seventeen months. And despite it all, she died. It left me with enormous grief. The same grief. The same as when I lost Alette, when I lost . . . Eddy. The same suffering, David.”

“The same suffering,” I repeated.

“The same suffering. And how can I say it? When I have that suffering—there’s a time when I remember, there’s a time when I forget. But that moment, I turn it over. I turn it over in my mind. Because I‘ve had so many problems, David. If my children and grandchildren were born there, it would be something different. They would have had a different house. They would have had a different everything. The same as I had.”

“We have great difficulty grasping the full horror of the situation in which the Crow found themselves,” Charles Taylor has commented about Native American lives radically overturned by displacement, death, and the destruction of their way of life.
³¹

I agree. Yet we must try—we must struggle, really—with the lives of the Chagossians, the Crow, and too many others, to stretch ourselves empathically to understand, to begin to fully comprehend the horror. And then, with this knowledge, we must begin to act.

For now, let us turn to see how Chagossians have mobilized themselves to act.

*
Remember that Chagossians need only say
laba
, meaning “out there,” to tell each other they are talking about Chagos.

**
Chagossians’ coconut knife.

***
The M.V.
Mauritius
, a cargo ship, which, with the
Nordvær
, carried out parts of the expulsion.

In May 1973, the last boatload of haggard and hungry Chagossians deported from Chagos refused to disembark in Mauritius. The group of about 125 demanded that they be returned to Chagos or else receive compensation and housing in this “foreign country” where they had “no housing, no money, no work.” For five days, the people resisted all entreaties to get off the boat, living and sleeping on a deck designed for less than half their number and in the ship’s dark hold, in what a local newspaper called “deplorable conditions.”
¹