“Sagren, that’s to say, it’s sagren for his country. Where he came from, he didn’t experience mizer like we were experiencing here. He was seeing it in his eyes, laba.* His children were going without, were going without food. They didn’t have anything,” Rita said of Julien’s death. “And so he got so, so many worries, do you understand? That’s sagren. Many people have died like that. You know, David?”
“Died from—” I started to ask, wanting to understand more about how people could die from sagren.
“Sagren! Yes! When one has sagren in your heart, it eats at you. No doctor, no one will be able to heal you! If you have a sagren, if you, even—you can’t get it out. That’s to say, David—Ayo! What can you do? Let it go—something that came on like that. There are many people that can’t bear it.”
“Mmm,” I uttered, trying to take in what she was saying.
“Yes. Do you understand? Then, it goes, it goes, until at the end, you don’t want to eat, you don’t want anything. Nothing. You don’t want it. . . . There’s nothing that you do, that you have that’s good. You’ve withdrawn from the world completely and entered into a state of sagren.”
“Have you experienced sagren?” I asked.
“Yes. Sagren. Yes,” Rita replied slowly.
“It’s very hard,” I said.
“Do you understand? You have sagren when in your country you haven’t experienced things like this. Here you’re finding food in the trashcan.”
How do we understand Julien’s dying of sagren, of profound sorrow? How do we understand the deaths of others that Chagossians likewise attribute to sagren? And how do we understand the islanders’ comparisons of an almost disease-free, healthy life in Chagos to one filled with sickness and death in Mauritius and the Seychelles? And how are we to make sense of the comparisons people make between an idyllic life in Chagos and what Rita and others call the “hell” of exile?
To start, we must return to neighborhoods like Cassis and Pointe aux Sables where Chagossians have lived since the time when Rita and Julien arrived in Mauritius. Rita now lives in the Cité Ilois, the Ilois Plot, in Pointe aux Sables, where she received her small concrete block house and some land from the compensation provided in the 1980s. Her yard there is hedged in by a wall nailed together out of corrugated iron and wood. Three dogs patrol the inside, chained to a line allowing them to roam back and forth, barking at passersby. On one side of the house stand several trees: three mango, a bred murum, and two coconut—only one produces nuts. On the other side, Rita has allowed her youngest son Ivo to build a smaller three-room metal-sheeted home for his wife and two sons; they couldn’t afford to buy a place of their own. Hanging on the wall inside her house, Rita proudly displays a sun-bleached poster of a fruit and vegetable still life—pineapple, broccoli, melons, grapes, green-hued oranges. Another print of a dew-spotted rose hangs nearby, alongside a poster of a coconut tree on a beach in the Seychelles. Rita told me it reminds her of beaches in Peros.
Housing conditions have improved to some extent for those like Rita who received and kept their compensation homes. For most who didn’t get a home or had to sell theirs, however, conditions remain poor. A 1997 WHO-funded report described how housing varies “between the decent”—that is, compensation housing—“and the flimsy”—homes like those occupied since the earliest days in exile, usually built with a metal roof and walls of metal sheeting or perhaps some combination of wood and concrete block, with kitchen and sanitary facilities located outside the home and generally lacking running water and electricity.1
Even with the improvements some enjoyed when they obtained a concrete-block house, most still live in conditions that are among the worst in Mauritius and the Seychelles. Overcrowding remains a serious problem. Most are still concentrated in the poorest, least desirable, most disadvantaged, and most unhealthy neighborhoods. Many live with dangerous structural deficiencies and limited access to basic services: 40 percent are without indoor plumbing and more than one-quarter lack running water.2 Generally housing problems are more critical for those in Mauritius than for those in the Seychelles, in line with wider national differences. In Mauritius, the islanders’ housing conditions are broadly comparable to those found in the poor townships of South Africa.
Compounding their housing difficulties, most Chagossians still struggle to find work. At the time of my 2002–3 survey, just over a third (38.8 percent) of the able-bodied first generation and less than two-thirds (60.6 percent) of the second generation were working.3 In many households, only a single adult had a job. Other households relied on multiple income earners, from teens working in factories to elderly women doing laundry for neighbors, to support a family.4 Median monthly income was less than $2 a day: far below the median incomes for their Mauritian and Seychellois neighbors.5
Of those who are employed, many still have jobs at the bottom of the Mauritian pay scale, characterized by high job insecurity, temporary duration, and informal employment commitments. Chagossians are still primarily employed in manual labor: as dockers and stevedores in the shipping industry; as janitorial, domestic, and child care workers; as informal construction workers and bricklayers; as factory workers. Some find various piecework employment, often to supplement other jobs, including stitching shoes, assembling decorative furnishings, and weaving brooms from coconut palms.
In general, those born in Mauritius and the Seychelles or who left Chagos at a very young age seem to have been more successful in securing employment and better remunerated jobs than their elders. These groups have little if any memory of Chagos and experienced less disruption in their lives as a result of the expulsion (although I stress that this is a relative distinction). And in contrast to most of the first generation, which received little if any formal education in Mauritius or the Seychelles, this group has had at least some chance to benefit from the Mauritian and Seychellois education systems (however discriminatory they are).
In part because the group in the Seychelles is composed disproportionately of islanders who arrived in the first years of their lives, islanders in the Seychelles are, economically speaking, generally better off than their counterparts in Mauritius. While some are living in the most impoverished conditions in the Seychelles, significant numbers enjoy secure public sector employment as bureaucrats, teachers, and police officers. By contrast, the rare few that have government jobs or similarly stable employment in Mauritius are notable for having escaped the impoverishment facing the vast majority there.
The different economic outcomes in the two nations is a complicated matter that can only be understood with extensive comparative study. Some of the difference is surely attributable to higher standards of living enjoyed in the Seychelles (per capita GDP is roughly $7,500 higher), a better and more equitable education system, and lower levels of discrimination. At the same time, just as the relative economic success of some World War II–era Japanese-American internees has done little to negate their experiences of internment, any (relative) material comfort that some may have found in the Seychelles in no way negates other ways in which they have suffered and continue to face pain and discrimination.
Among many in both countries, in fact, there remains deep pessimism about their economic and employment prospects. The French aphorism, “Ceux qui sont riches seront toujours riches, ceux qui sont pauvres restent toujours pauvres”—the rich will always be rich; the poor will always be poor—is a kind of chorus in Mauritius among some young adult Chagossians.
I asked Jacques Victor, who was then working weekends as an informal clothing vendor, if he thought it would be possible to find a better paying job. “In Mauritius, no. In Mauritius, no,” Mr. Victor responded in English—one of a very few islanders to speak at least some of the official national language, which is generally a marker of middle- or upper-class status. “Ilois have the qualifications,” he explained, but Mauritian employers say, “‘How can they have this kind of qualification?’ They much prefer [us] lower than low. It’s like that.”
As we ended our conversation, I asked Mr. Victor if there was anything else he wanted to tell me. “I want to return to our land. Be there now—get our lives that we were living, yesterday,” he said. “Maybe my children will get jobs.”
“It gave me such suffering, David, and to this day, I still have this suffering. In my heart, it’s not at all gone. Not at all gone,” Rita told me from her house in Pointe aux Sables. “Look at how many of my children have died. How can I explain it to you? If we were laba, Alex would be here, Eddy would be here, Rénault would be here. . . . Eddy died from drugs but laba, we didn’t have them.”
Rita continued, “They pulled us from there to come take us to hell. Drugs are ravaging people. The children aren’t working, they’re following friends to the side of having, to the side of having problems, understand? It’s always the same, it’s not easy.”
“It’s a very sad story,” was all I could muster in response.
“There, in St. George’s cemetery, I have three boys—three boys, two girls,” she said. To the deaths of her own four children, Rita added the death of Alex’s wife, who committed suicide in 2001, dousing herself with gasoline and setting herself afire. Their five boys—five of Rita’s grand-children—were left orphaned.
We return now to the deaths of Julien and others from sagren and the comparison of a disease-free, healthy life in Chagos to one of illness, drugs, and death in exile. Examining first the contrast between lives of health and lives of illness, we see that the islanders’ diagnosis is an accurate one: The contrast they describe represents an accurate portrayal of changing health conditions before and after the expulsion. While Chagossian health was once better than that in Mauritius, it is now comparable to the low levels of health characterizing the poorest sectors of Mauritian society, a nation with one of the highest incidences of chronic disease in the world.6
The WHO-funded study found that Chagossians suffer from elevated levels of chronic colds, fevers, respiratory diseases, anemia, and transmissible diseases like tuberculosis, as well as problems with cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, hypertension, work accidents, and youth alcohol and tobacco abuse. The report found children and the elderly particularly vulnerable to disease, including water-borne diseases tied to poor hygiene and contaminated water supplies like infant diarrhea, hepatitis A, and intestinal parasites. The people also exhibited a large number of work accidents, most likely related to the physical labor and limited work protections many face.7
At the same time, the study found that Chagossians don’t enjoy the same access to health care services as others in Mauritius because of their poverty, their limited knowledge of the health care system, and their limited confidence in both health care providers and the efficacy and quality of treatment.8 Around 85 percent of the Chagossians that I surveyed reported needing more health care—more than any other reported social service need.9
Sandra Cheri is a Chagossian nurse and one of few people qualified to comment professionally on the state of Chagossian health (she is also one of the few islanders in Mauritius with a government or semiprofessional job). I asked Sandra about common health problems experienced by the islanders. She listed diarrhea and vomiting, gastroenteritis, fevers, and influenza—illnesses they share with people throughout Mauritius. But Sandra said Chagossians also suffer from a high incidence of diabetes and hypertension because of dietary changes experienced since arriving in Mauritius. In Chagos, she said, there was no stress and the food was different (fish even tasted better, she and others said). Nor was there hard alcohol, only wine and homemade brews like baka and calou.
In Mauritius, she said, there’s rum and whiskey and “many, many Chagossians are alcoholics.” She sees many at her hospital and in Cassis, where she finds them stumbling and drunk, shoeless and dirty along the road. Mauritians exploit many of them, Sandra added, knowing that they will work for a few rupees just to buy a Rs60 (around $2) bottle of rum.
Visibly intoxicated men are a common sight in Mauritius and the Seychelles, and most Chagossians attest to substance abuse as a serious problem in the community. In 2002 and 2003, we asked survey respondents if they needed help or treatment for an alcohol or drug problem, well aware that survey questions asking about substance abuse are renowned for underreporting actual use. The response was striking: One in every five volunteered having a problem. Less than two percent said they were receiving such treatment.10
“There wasn’t sickness” like strokes or sagren, we remember Rita saying. “There wasn’t that sickness. Nor diabetes, nor any such illness. What drugs?” she asked me rhetorically, having lost Alex and Eddy to drug and alcohol abuse. At worst, she said, “If by chance you got drunk” and fell asleep “and you went to get your money—your cash—you would find it untouched when you awoke. No one would take it. No one would steal anything from another Chagossian. This is what my husband remembered and pictured in his mind. Me too, I remember these things that I’ve said about us, David. My heart grows heavy when I say these things, understand?”
As Rita’s words and the prevalence of substance abuse suggest, when people contrast a life filled with illnesses and drugs with a nearly disease-free life in Chagos, the comparison represents more than an accurate depiction of rising morbidity and declining health. The contrast also represents a commentary on and implicit critique of the expulsion. It represents a sign and recognition of the emotional and psychological damage the expulsion has caused.
“What must be heard” at the “emotional core” of stories of displacement, says psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove in the context of displacement caused by urban renewal in the United States, “is the howl of amputations, the anguish at calamity unassuaged, the fear of spiraling downward without cessation, and the rage at poverty imposed through repeated dispossession.”11
For many Chagossians, the illnesses that they and their relatives and friends have experienced have come to represent all the difficulties of life in exile and the pain of being separated from their homeland. Illness, disease, and substance abuse have become metaphors, synecdoches—with one part representing the whole—for all the suffering of the expulsion.
“So many troubles. My head went, went to a mental hospital. I already went before to a mental hospital, where I had shocks.”
“Shocks?” I asked, fearing that Rita meant electroshock therapy.
“I had too many troubles.”
“You got shocks?” I asked again.
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“The same, the same deal like before. I got the treatment. My children didn’t have food in the house, and one by one they were dying like dead coconuts falling from the tree. So they gave me shocks.”
When Chagossians like Rita describe people dying of sagren, they are not just speaking metaphorically. The Chagos Refugees Group, which represents the vast majority of the community in Mauritius, has an “Index of Deceased Chagossians” listing the names of Chagossians who have died in exile. For 396 of the deceased individuals, as of 2001, a cause of death was indicated. In 60 of these cases, the cause of death was listed as wholly or in part due to “sadness” or “homesickness.”12
“The notion of sagren has an important place in the explanative system for illness,” the WHO-funded study reports: Sagren “explains illness and even the deaths of members of the community.” Sagren is “nostalgia for the Chagos islands. It is the profound sadness of facing the impossibility of being able to return to one’s home in the archipelago.” The WHO report cites the case of one elderly man who died after suffering from diabetes, hypertension, and paralysis for many years. Before his death he only left his home once every three months when an ambulance drove him to get treatment. After his death, one of his friends said he had died of sagren. “Knowing that he would never again return to the island of his birth, he had preferred to let himself die.”13
Sagren is an example of what Fullilove has called the “root shock” of forced displacement.
Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem. It has important parallels to the physiological shock experienced by a person who, as a result of injury, suddenly loses massive amounts of fluids. Such a blow threatens the whole body’s ability to function. The nervous system attempts to compensate for the imbalance by cutting off circulation to the arms and legs. Suddenly the hands and feet will seem cold and damp, the face pale, and the brow sweaty. This is an emergency state that can preserve the brain, the heart, and the other essential organs for only a brief period of time. If the fluids are not restored, the person will die. Shock is the fight for survival after a life-threatening blow to the body’s internal balance.14
With other symptoms that include wasting and weakness, confusion and disorientation, sadness and depression, shaking and paralysis, often ultimately resulting in death, sagren also resembles the affliction of nervos found among many in the world, but especially among the poor and marginalized in the Mediterranean and Latin America. Medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has shown through work with the poor in northeast Brazil how nervos is far from a matter of somatization or malingering, at least as they are typically understood by medical professionals. Nervos is instead “a collective and embodied response” to poverty and hunger and to a corrupt, violent political system that colludes to entrap the poor in these conditions—what she calls everyday forms of violence.15 The roots of such afflictions are not psychological, as those who administered Rita’s electroshock therapy likely thought. The roots of such afflictions are social, political, and economic, with forms of violence like displacement becoming embodied by victims.
As the sometimes fatal illnesses of root shock and nervos indicate, Chagossians are not alone in finding that forms of grief and sadness can cause death. “There is little doubt,” Theodore Scudder and Elizabeth Colson explain, “that relocatees often believe that the elderly in particular are apt to die ‘of a broken heart’ following removal.” Importantly, this belief appears to have medical support: “The evidence is highly suggestive” that sadness can cause death “for Egyptian and Sudanese Nubians . . . and the Yavapai. . . . Elderly persons forced into nursing homes or forcibly removed from one nursing home to another are reported to have high mortality rates in the period immediately succeeding the move.”16 Other research has shown that acute stress can bring on fatal heart spasms in people with otherwise healthy cardiac systems.17 Among Hmong refugees in the United States who fled Laos in the 1970s, Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome was the leading cause of death for years after their arrival. The syndrome is “triggered by cardiac failure, often during or after a bad dream. No one has been able to explain what produces the cardiac irregularity, although theories over the years have included potassium deficiency, thiamine deficiency, sleep apnea, depression, culture shock, and survivor guilt.”18
In my own family, my grandmother, Tea Stiefel, reminded me recently how her mother, Elly Eichengruen, died of a broken heart. A German Jew who fled to the United States in 1941, just before the outbreak of World War II, Elly never recovered from the guilt she felt for sending her 13-year-old son, Erwin, to Amsterdam a year earlier, where he was ultimately deported to Auschwitz and murdered. After learning of his fate, Elly never talked about her son. In 1947 she had a major heart attack and spent six weeks in a hospital unable to move. For the next ten years she lived as an invalid under my grandmother’s care until her death in 1957. When she died, her doctor said that she had died of a broken heart. “The guilt she carried with her ultimately just broke her heart,” my grandmother said. “Yes. It’s possible.”
Ranjit Nayak’s work with the Kisan of eastern India provides more evidence of the connections between the grief of exile and health outcomes, between mental and physical health. “The severance of the Kisan bonds from their traditional lands and environment is a fundamental factor in their acute depression and possibly in increased mortality rates, including infant mortality,” Nayak writes. Like Chagossians grieving for their lost origins in Chagos, for the Kisan, “a continuous pining for lost land characterizes the elderly. Anxiety, grieving, various neuropsychiatric illness and post-traumatic stress disorders feature among the Kisan. In essence, they suffer from profound cultural and landscape bereavement for their lost origins.”19 This is what Scudder refers to among displacees as the “grieving for a lost home” syndrome.20
For many, the intimacy of their connection to Chagos is closely related to the fact that their ancestors are buried on the islands. Repeatedly since the expulsion, Chagossians have requested permission to visit the islands to clean and tend to the graves of their ancestors. In 1975, hundreds petitioned the British and U.S. governments for aid and the right to go back to their islands. If they were to be barred from returning they asked the governments to at least “allow two or three persons from among us to go clean the cemetery at Diego Garcia where our forefathers, brother, sisters, mothers and fathers are buried, and to enable us to take care of the Diego Church where we were baptised.”21
Janette Alexis, who was forced to leave Diego Garcia for the Seychelles as an adolescent, said she can see in her elders the pain of not going to the graves of their ancestors. Being barred from visiting their graves and bringing them flowers, she said, being separated from one’s ancestors is yet another blow to their entire way of life. As Nayak writes of the Kisan, “In essence, they suffer from profound cultural and landscape bereavement for their lost origins.”22
Figure 10.1 Flowers on a Table, drawing, Baie du Tombeau, Mauritius, 2002. Photo by author.
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, 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 sons23
“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.”
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.
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
“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.