Based on the true, still-unfolding story of the expelled Chagossians’ fight for their homeland, Silence of the Chagos is a powerful exploration of cultural identity, the concept of home, and above all the neverending desire for justice.
Every afternoon a woman in a red headscarf walks to the end of the quay and looks out over the water, fixing her gaze “back there”―to Diego Garcia, one of the small islands forming the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean. With no explanation, no forewarning, and only an hour to pack their belongings, the entire population of Diego Garcia was forced on a boat headed to Mauritius. Government officials told Charlesia that the island was “closed;” there was no going back for any of them.
Charlesia longs for life on Diego Garcia, where she spent her days harvesting coconuts and her nights dancing to sega music. As she struggles to come to terms with the injustice of her new reality, Charlesia crosses paths with Désiré, a young man born on the one-way journey to Mauritius. Désiré has never set foot on Diego Garcia, but as Charlesia unfolds the dramatic story of their people, he learns of the home he never knew and of the life he might have had.
With the Chagos’ sovereignty currently being adjudicated by the United Nations Silence of the Chagos is an important and humanizing exploration of the rights of individuals and a reckoning with displacement on a global scale
Shenaz Patel is a journalist and writer from the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. As a journalist, she has been a Reuter fellow and worked as editor in chief of a political newspaper before setting up the arts, culture and society section of Week End, a leading Mauritian weekly newspaper.
Patel is the author of four novels, including Le silence des Chagos published in France by Editions de l’Olivier-Le Seuil and in English by Restless Books as The Silence of the Chagos (2019). She has written numerous short stories in French and Mauritian Creole as well as five graphic novels, two plays, and translations.
Patel was an International Writers Program (IWP) Honorary Fellow in the U.S. in 2016, a fellow at the Hutchins Centre-W.E.B du Bois Institute at Harvard University for the Spring semester 2018, and acted as mentor for the Young Women Writers Mentorship Programme of the IWP in 2019.
Patel staged a production of Niamain in 2019 (the story of an African princess enslaved in the 18th century). She is currently working on a novel based on the stories of women who have fought for freedom at different levels. She is also working on a documentary film related to the quest of identity through DNA testing.
Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of French, including books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza. A graduate of Yale University, he has been a finalist for the TA First Translation Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and he was awarded the French Voices Grand Prize for his translation of Pina. In 2020 he was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
