The Holocaust, Memory, and Race in Natacha Appanah’s Le Dernier Frère

On August 13, 2016, I visited The Beau Bassin Jewish Detainees Memorial and Information Centre in Mauritius for the first time. Standing in front of the rows of even, grey gravestones at the Jewish section of Saint-Martin Cemetery, I asked a museum guide if there was a tombstone that marked the death of a little Jewish boy named David. She laughed indulgently and explained that the David in question, from Natacha Appanah’s 2007 novel Le Dernier Frère, is a fictional character. Appanah’s text is so rich, she went on, that one has the impression that David will actually be at the cemetery, which is why I was not the first person to ask her that question. Of course, Appanah borrowed from reality, the guide conceded, raising the question of where the lines between reality and fiction, history and literature, begin and end.

Appanah participates in a growing conversation with other writers from Mauritius with regard to national memory and history. Srilata Ravi explains: “Since the 1990s Mauritius has seen the emergence of a new generation of writers who questions the validity of the nationalist narrative of multiculturalism and seek to ‘re-image’ Mauritian society” (Ravi 29). By retelling histories of colonial Mauritius within the realm of fiction, Appanah destabilizes conceptions of competitive memory through the creation of dialogues among different groups of people, an important and significant gesture in the multilingual, multicultural nation-state of Mauritius.

In Le Dernier Frère, Appanah brings together two unexpected groups in conversation to consider questions of traumatic experience and memory. In the novel, the protagonist Raj remembers his childhood friend, David Stein, brought to Mauritius with other Central European Jews during World War II by the British Colonial Office. The 1,581 Jews were detained in an old colonial prison in Beau Bassin, where Raj meets David after being taken to the hospital by Raj’s abusive father. His father relocates Raj and his mother from their small town to take a job as a low-grade prison guard, after suffering from a double tragedy. In the same day, Raj loses both of his brothers in a flash flood in the village of Mapou, creating a traumatic wound from which he has trouble recovering throughout the novel. In many ways, as Raj meets David and forges a close relationship, his friendship with David promises to recreate a brotherly bond. Yet David’s untimely death, following the two boys’ desperate flight into the woods to escape their respective entrapments, reopens Raj’s wounds as David’s ghost haunts him throughout the rest of his life.

The adult Raj recounts this childhood story with an anxious earnestness to express the truth of past events. His anxiety haunts his narrative as he frequently expresses the inability to recall the exact details, as well as his ignorance as a child, of both history as it was unfolding (notably in Europe) and Jewish religion and culture, which he connects to “white” culture in general. Appanah moves beyond Eurocentric perspectives to examine the repercussions of the Holocaust along with other forms of violence in Mauritius. I argue that Raj’s inherent loss is an allegory of the loss experienced by both the slave and indentured servant populations of their homelands, families and other such irreplaceable aspects of life. The loss of David too is a way to mourn the six million who perished during the Holocaust. For even if David did not die in a gas chamber, his displacement from Central Europe and subsequent death by tropical disease are direct results of policies implemented by the Third Reich.

This particular episode of Holocaust history might have continued to remain in relative obscurity had Genevieve Pitot not published in 1998 her seminal text The Mauritian Shekel: The Story of Jewish Detainees in Mauritius, 1940–1945, which explains the history of Jewish detention in Mauritius. At times, Appanah’s narrative resembles that of Pitot’s text through its attention to historical detail. The link between history and literature is clear when Appanah begins with a description of the cemetery...