Archipelagic Modernity and Errant Memory in Bertrand d’Espaignet’s La République des Bâtards

This article analyses the memorialization of the ‘coloured’ and maroon, sharing a history of slavery and divested of their humanity, in La République des Bâtards (‘The Republic of Bastards’) (2011) by Mauritian writer Bertrand d’Espaignet. The novel is set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when France imported the modernity unfolding in Europe to its Indian Ocean colony, Mauritius. Ideological proximity founded upon structural injustice traces the contours of what I read as an imaginative archipelago between France and Mauritius that begins transforming modernity and its contentious promise of progress. Three generations of white Frenchmen married to non-white women stand for a progressive creolization which nevertheless affords their families problematic protection against colonial trauma. Their bourgeois success story compromises Blackness; progress is transactional, the families implicated subjects (Rothberg). Alongside this narrative courses that of Macondé, a maroon etching Mozambican cultural memory onto Mauritian topography while on the run from plantation violence. Adapting Edouard Glissant’s theory, I qualify this memory as ‘errant’. Errant memory forges an archipelagic colony-colony, Africa-Indian Ocean affective alliance. It provides trans-human philia with the lost homeland to the isolated maroon who rejects colonialism and its attendant creolization to achieve progress on his terms. This Afro-centric errant memory transcends materiality and time to demand recognition; it births an economy of compassion redeeming the privileged coloured’s implication, restituting its dignity to black ancestry and reconciling two strands of Mauritian Creole collective memory. It reaches d’Espaignet’s readers in the post-colonial present, widening the scope of archipelagic modernity to become its determining feature of progress.