Mauritius is a vacationer’s dream: white beaches, mountains, palm trees, the sea. But in Riambel, a town on the south coast of the island state in the south-west of the Indian Ocean, this dream ends at a road. And who lives across this street, in the slum, here cité means learning early on that life in Mauritius also has less dreamy sides. “Drugs, alcohol, violence,” says Priya Hein, 45, in the video call, the wind of the island in her hair. The author from Garching, who was involved in the city’s integration advisory board until recently, was born and grew up in Mauritius. She is currently spending “a break” there.
The mother of two teenage children has written several children’s books, short stories and features for a British newspaper. For her first novel “Riambel” she has now been awarded the “Prix Jean Fanchette” literary prize, named after the Mauritian publisher, poet and psychoanalyst Jean Fanchette. The jury was chaired by the French-Mauritian writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, who Hein considers a great author. She thought: “If I do this, he will read my manuscript.” It never occurred to her that she could win the prize with her book, which was written in English and translated into French.
Even 150 years after the end of slavery, the exploitative system continues to have an effect
But the jury was won over by Hein’s unembellished view of the aftermath of an exploitative system and the predicament of many women in Mauritius. The story, written in vignette form, counts 140 pages, it is a modern and idiosyncratic text from which the realization speaks from the first line that the present cannot be told without the past, that slavery can just as little be erased from memory of the island like the European colonial rulers who seized the people and raw materials. First the Dutch, from 1715 on for almost 100 years the French, then the English. Mauritius gained independence in 1968 and today the country is a parliamentary democracy. But like many bad habits, classism is hard to break. Hein’s young protagonist should also feel this.
Her name is Noemi and she is the “great granddaughter” of a Creole slave who toiled on the sugar cane plantations during the day and was raped by her landlord at night. Hein has set the events surrounding the 15-year-old first-person narrator in a present that dates back a few years. In between, she repeatedly changes perspective and turns to other members of the family. The reader learns that Naemi’s single mother is not doing much better than the women of previous generations, even more than 150 years after the abolition of slavery. She works for the posh De Grandbourgs, descendants of French landlords, the white minority on the island, and when the gentlemen intend to give a soirée at the weekend, that means overtime for the servants, which she has to put up with without complaint. Even the gifted Noemi is ultimately unable to escape the milieu into which she was born: she gets involved with Alexandre, the son of rich Franco-Mauritians. Gets pregnant, the illegal abortion goes wrong, and she ends up holding a dead child in her arms. Life isn’t fair, never has been.
And yet there are also moments of light in this book, which is rich in smells, sounds and feelings. Hein has endowed her protagonist with a concise, sometimes naively mellow voice, it is the voice of a girl who is good at observation and knows the dark secrets of bygone days. As Noemi drifts through the water, you can feel the salty warmth of the ocean, breathe in the dust raised by a stick drawn through the earth, smell the curry that fills Noemi’s primitive dwelling in the Cité. It’s hard to believe that Hein wrote the first draft of her book in Garching during the Pentecost holidays of 2020, she was intoxicated for five days. The trigger was the debates about #blacklivesmatter, which she followed with interest at the time.
Her family comes from India, she studies in England and France
“There was always something missing,” she says. You also have to look back. This is the only way to create depth. And balance in perspective. The fact that Hein has a sure instinct for relationships and contexts is probably due to her own history: Hein’s ancestors came to Mauritius from India, later the family moved to England, the father would like to give his daughter a European education. Priya Hein studies law in Manchester and politics in Strasbourg. There she met her husband, with whom she moved to Garching in 2002. India, Mauritius, England, France, Germany – there are quite a few influences and experiences coming together. Nevertheless, Hein doesn’t see herself as an ambassador between cultures, please don’t, she doesn’t want to assume that. “I’m someone who writes about issues that are important to me,” she says.
Even as a child, the Garching native loved to read, and because the selection in the Mauritius library was poor, at some point she began to write her own stories. The story of “Dodo” was written for her daughter in 2009, and her children’s book “Blaubär” was included in the intercultural book box in 2014, a project of the Pill Mayer Foundation for intercultural dialogue.
In “Riambel” she integrated her grandmother’s curry dish and a Mauritian children’s song, but the story has few points of contact with her own life. So Hein went into the slums, scraping the scabs off the wounds that slavery once tore with her questions. Riambel is an ominous place, she should leave it, go away, the ancestors whisper to the young protagonist in the book. But Naomi stays. Happy end? Au contraire. For Hein, on the other hand, things are going well: “Riambel” will be published in French in 2022, and a year later by an English publisher. So far, German houses have said that her book is too short. But Priya Hein does not yet know whether she would like to extend it.