Book Around the Corner

Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah (2016) Original French title: Tropique de la violence.

We, French from mainland France, tend to ignore what happens in the overseas territories. Away from the voters’ sight, away from the politicians’ preoccupations. There’s a huge scandal about a pesticide in used banana plantations in Martinique and Guadeloupe that’s barely spoken about. The pollution is widespread, it’ll stay for a long time and will heavily affect the health of the inhabitants of these islands. In Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah, we are in another overseas French territory, Mayotte.

It’s an archipelago near in the Mozambique Channel, near the Comoros Islands and Madagascar. It has 256 000 inhabitants and in 2009, a referendum was organized and Mayotte became a French overseas département. It means that, from a legal and administrative point of view, living in Mayotte is like living in any département of mainland France. Mayotte became part of the EU. One of the consequences is that it faces a huge influx of illegal migrants from Madagascar and the nearby Comoros Islands. It creates tensions between the local population and the newcomers. They are too numerous for the island to absorb and integrate these additional inhabitants.

Tropic of Violence opens with Marie’s story. She’s a nurse in France and falls in love with a fellow nurse, Chamsidine. He’s from Mayotte and they both move to Mamoudzou, the prefecture of Mayotte. Their marriage falls apart and Marie tells us how her adoptive son Moïse came to live with her. Moïse’s mother, an illegal migrant who arrived on a boat in Mayotte one night, abandoned him to Marie. Moïse has wall eyes, one green and one black and in the local popular belief, it means that he has jinn eyes. He has something to do with jinns and he brings bad luck. Marie trades divorce papers with Chamsidine against a recognition of paternity and she gets to keep Moïse and raise him as her son.

He’s a preteen when he starts asking questions about his identity and hanging out with the wrong crowd in school. He’s already rebelling when Marie suddenly dies of a stroke. He finds her in their kitchen and instead of asking for help, he leaves the house and joins a gang led by Bruce, the king of Gaza, a shantytown in Mayotte. He reigns over a people of homeless kids and organizes band thefts and drug trafficking.

We follow Moïse’s fate as he becomes Mo and lives under Bruce’s commandment. He obeys like a well-trained pet. He quickly looses his humanity and Appanah shows the degradation of body and mind under harsh living conditions. Not enough food. No place to sleep. No place to feel safe and relax. No place to shower. No clean clothes. The dehumanization process is implacable.

Moïse becomes Mo and this new and shorter version of his name is symbolic. He becomes a shorter version of himself as poverty and violence strike. He’s no longer Marie’s little boy, the one who used to live in a loving household.

Tropic of Violence is a powerful book. Appanah switches of point of view between Marie, Moïse, Bruce and the representative of France. (Educators, police forces, politicians) They all live on the same territory but their daily lives are so different that they could be living on different planets. The ending is bleak and moving.

The shantytowns really exist in Mayotte. As I said before, there’s a major problem of violence on the archipelago. The locals are exasperated. There aren’t enough public services to cope with the incoming illegal immigration. People die trying to reach Mayotte in makeshift boats. It’s Lampedusa in the Indian ocean.

Out of sight, out of mind. French people never hear of the overseas territory unless there’s a riot, a strike and a blockage. That’s how I knew about this issue, there was a general strike in Mayotte in 2018. Nathacha Appanah transforms a faceless problem heard on the radio into a personalized one with Mo. And that’s one answer to the timeless question “What’s the use of literature?” Well, it gives a face to human dramas and forces us to look them in the eyes.

Tropic of Violence is a political novel but also a symbolic one. Moïse is the French for Moises and it is not a common name for a French child. Like Enée in J’ai pris mon père sur les épaules, it’s a meaningful choice. There must be a parallel between Moïse and Moises.

In the Bible, Moises is a clandestine baby as Pharaon had commanded that all male Hebrew children born would be drowned in the river Nile and his mother placed in an ark on the river. He is rescued from the Nile by Pharaon’s daughter and raised as an Egyptian.

In Tropic of Violence, Marie adopts him when his birth mother arrives in Mayotte after a shipwreck. Rescued from the water. His birth mother is an illegal migrant, from a people not welcome in France and tracked by the police. Marie—another biblical name—is like royalty on the island. She’s white and comes from mainland France. She’s a nurse at the local hospital and has a comfortable life. Moïse is adopted in a privileged home and raised like a French little boy. Marie’s death throws him back to his people and its suffering.

So far so good, I can see the link between Moïse and Moises. But then I’m blocked. After Moïse leaves his house and joins Gaza, I don’t see the reference between Moïse and Moises anymore. So, if anyone has a clue about that, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

I didn’t include any quote in my billet but I could have. Appanah’s style is haunting, like her story. I think Moïse will stay with me, probably because the fate of children is more striking like in Small Country by Gaël Faye. The different points of views give a lot of power to the scenes she describes and they engage the reader in the story. It’s not surprising that Tropic of Violence won the Prix Femina des Lycéens in 2016 just like Small Country won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. Highschool students recognized something important in these two political novellas who involve preteens.