Waiting for Diego Garcia
Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams | Diego Garcia: A Novel | Semiotext(e) / Native Agents | June 2022 | 264 Pages
ESTRAGON: Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!
VLADIMIR: Did I ever leave you?
ESTRAGON: You let me go.
—Waiting for Godot, Act II
When I first picked up the co-written novel Diego Garcia, its jocular yellow cover and sans-serif title reminded me of a YA book narrated from two different perspectives—each spiraling from opposite ends of the novel—that converge as the characters’ lives become entangled. I remember reading a book like this as a teenager and feeling intellectually satisfied by the masterful use of formal structure as a vessel for different narrative arcs. Other novels that use structural interventions to siphon and/or conjoin characters, like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, construct labyrinths within the text to engage the reader in a kind of game, one in which we are responsible for navigating through, for acing the jumps 1-2-3. Diego Garcia adopts this tradition—which readers might identify as distinctly postmodern—to implicate its audience. The authors Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, winners of the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize, point this structure towards a critical aim: to prove “the beauty of the story is in the listener.” In the act of reading, we become responsible for authoring a narrative from the composite realities they present to us. As if we’ve been chosen to play on their team.
Describing this novel’s form as playful belies the truth of the story the authors attempt to tell. Indeed, “attempt” is how Soobramanien and Williams might define their use of formal games to tell a story so grim and full of heartbreak. They set themselves at odds with aligning form and content in this story, which is a story in search of a story, a story about a story. At the heart of Diego Garcia is Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos Archipelago, broken into shards like a glass bowl crashed to the ground. In fragments, we have the history of the Archipelago set against the personal tale of the island’s metonymic lost son, Diego, and we have the novel itself, which recounts the protagonists Demaris and Oliver Pablo as they discover the aforementioned narratives. It’s up to us to piece together the refractions of glass the authors hold to the light.
Diego—named after his mother’s disappeared island home—is Chagossian, a community exiled to Mauritius and Seychelles by the British government between 1967 and 1973. The sixty-five islands that comprise the Chagos Archipelago, which sits midway between Africa and Indonesia, were incorporated into the British Empire in 1865. A century later, amid a global shuddering of colonized territories, Mauritius was offered independence under one condition: that Britain retain Chagos. Following the agreement, the UK offered Diego Garcia to the U.S. as a military base for monitoring Russian and Chinese movements in the Persian Gulf. Soldiers violently forced the Chagossians off the island and into exile, separating families, and gassing domesticated dogs. Some natives preferred jumping overboard the departing ship to being taken to a foreign land. The surviving exiles disappeared into hopeless poverty. Through listlessness, loneliness, or their own sagren (a Chagossian concept that captures the post-exile emotional devastation, described as “a deep, wasting sorrow”), Demaris and Oliver Pablo take up this history as if it were their own. In their search for meaning, they research this event as widely and deeply as possible, soon uncovering the utter lack of legal paperwork referencing the tragedy that occurred. They find that this history was effectively erased by the British government: “You can make whole nations disappear, or invent them with words.”
Diego Garcia is written out of this profound understanding of the danger of words—the potential harm of fiction. The authors reflect: “What is this ambition to write, what I used to feel so compelled to act out? Isn’t the best kind of writing, for me, no-writing, not-writing, writing nothing?” The tension that exists in questioning writing while writing shows up in the text as a near-cancellation of any novelistic quality. Characters exist in doubles as if to negate one another; stagnant days spent wandering through the city recur week after week. There’s something algebraic in the way forces are conjured and remain unresolved. Writing and writer’s block; eating and hunger; money and debt; friendship and loss.
The novel opens with a contradiction: “This is the story of a book we are still writing.” “Story” and “book” exist in such close proximity, so tightly bound in a sentence that refuses closure, that it is unclear whether “story of a book” refers to the plot or a narrative of how it was written. Within the first section, it becomes clear that the plot is a chronicle of how the book was written. In the end, we are circled back to the beginning through an email exchange that discloses the conception of the idea of co-writing the exact text in our hands. Demaris and Oliver Pablo share the biographies of the two authors. Demaris is British-Mauritian (as Soobramanien is), Oliver is Scottish (as Williams is), and they spend their days jaunting around Edinburgh in 2014. When the two characters are together, the narration flows seamlessly between a witnessed third-person (“her/his shoulder/neck felt warm against his/her neck shoulder”) and a universal “we.” When they are apart, the text splits into two columns as if to demonstrate that the singularity of this narrative is not in fact a singularity, but a composite.
Often “hangry” and always bickering, smoking tubes and trading blocks at shabby bookstores, Demaris and Oliver seek to live in a state of multitudinousness with “consent not to be single beings.” Chasing these theoreticals reminiscent of Fred Moten and Edouard Glissant, they’re in search of “The blur . . . as the field from which differences spring.” Instrumental to the novel’s tone is the tongue-in-cheek nature of the characters’ erudition. Indeed, they do not remember this quote from analyzing the text themselves, but as a reference to Oliver’s late brother, Daniel. Demaris and Oliver are anemic scholars, drawing freely and often misremembering lines from the Velvet Underground and Silvia Federici, only as they relate to their pallid moment-to-moment reality. Every day they go to the library, desperate to write; every day, they fail to write. The fug in their brains—their failure—seems to be mostly a product of “the sadness” which occurred after “the emergency” (Daniel’s suicide in London), which spawned their mutual decision to move cities. The effects of Daniel’s suicide on Demaris and Oliver are radically different:
She: drinking herself stupid, over-social, spending whole days in bed, spiraling; he: ranting, not eating, researching emergency supplies, going over Daniel’s final days, trying to work out what he could have done differently, looking quietly critically stupidly at the ground—that we forgot that our feelings resulted from the same phenomena. At such times, the only correspondence in the sadness was that s/he seemed bound to suffer it on her/his own.
The bleakly humorous friendship between Demaris and Oliver is more than reminiscent of Waiting for Godot’s Estragon and Vladimir. She is wrapped up in mundane matters like hunger and throwing her phone across the park to avoid debtor’s calls; he is distracted in obsessive heady matters like Bitcoin and Minima Moralia. As the dreary absurdity of life mapped only through cycling conversations and the differences of character starts to feel onerous to read, the mysterious traveler/poet Diego arrives. He disappears soon thereafter.
After meeting the undocumented Diego and sharing stories of homelessness and sagren, Demaris and Oliver become determined to uncover the hidden history of exile. In their research, they become increasingly concerned with the way the Foreign and Commonwealth Office presented the Chagossian people and their fights for their homeland as “a fiction.” This provokes a wealth of self-criticality as they attempt to assemble primary sources to build their own account of the Chagossian exile. The core question of the project rings clear: “How to share a story that needs to be told, if it is not your story?”
Diego Garcia is a ledger of annulments, which in its constant doubling back achieves a kind of fiction that is obsessed with the conditions of its conception.
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Italo Calvino argues that the role of the novelist is “to tell the piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.” If words are lies, then Diego Garcia is a house that burns down, and the only thing left standing is the candle that sparked the flame. The particular truth of this text—the flame of conception—is the first Chagossian “heritage trip” back to their homeland forty years after their exile. After a brutal legal battle in London, the natives “won” a single day of return to their home island, and we—via the authors—revisit this day over and over again as if attempting to get to the heart of a forgotten memory.
Rendered through different mediums, the original “heritage trip” back to the island of Diego Garcia feels like the only scene that actually exists in the text. Chagossian artist Clément Siatous takes up this event in painting, illustrating in his loose brushstrokes “a sense of energy, excitement, and joy to the whole group.” Meanwhile, Michel Daëron captures a more harrowing portrait in his documentary film Once Upon an Island, Diego Garcia. These forms are digested and regurgitated in ekphrastic meditations throughout the novel. In the final pages of Diego Garcia, Oliver describes the scene from the documentary to Demaris in an email:
I felt it: the vastness of the military operation, the whole machinery behind it… The man furthest away breaks down, crying as he declares his return to the island of his birth, where his umbilical cord is buried. The other man is composed. His face in profile shows no emotion. Still kneeling, he turns his head to find the camera, glances at it. Then turns back to look straight ahead. He begins to speak: slowly and deliberately, the pause between each phrase incredible, as though he is leading a prayer, listening to a silent repetition of his words:
Later:
mo mama
mo granmere
mo granpere
Then he gets up off his knees, walks off, his back to the camera. In Kreol, Later means “land.”
The pang of despair that strikes you while reading this passage isn’t a response to the content, but to the raw emotionality transmuted through layers of media. It is through the thinking and feeling Oliver that the pain captured in the documentary can be felt by the reader. In fact, simple descriptions of scenes from this documentary without Oliver and Demaris’ reactions as a crutch would feel too remote. Like a game of telephone, the metamorphosis of truth is the crux of intimacy.
Like Godot, Diego Garcia achieves an eternal absence that is both as specific as two dufuses waiting with fate on the side of a dirt road, and as general as the human soul in search of a home. This book isn’t for people looking for a straightforward novel, nor is it for those seeking a postmodern literary puzzle they can feel accomplished upon finishing. Diego Garcia is a text that I would perhaps hand off to my friend seeking a provocative book cover (in marmalade or Fitzcarraldo’s iconic cobalt) to pull out of her Berlin Biennale tote on the subway. I would definitely recommend it to artists who are seeking a methodology of solidarity—of relation—which is to say of friendship.
A mentor of mine loved to muse on the nature of friendship according to Agamben. It went something like this: Friendship isn’t standing across from someone, looking them in the eyes; it’s standing beside them and looking out into the world together. She liked to add that this aforementioned world was crumbling into an apocalyptic state of disrepair. Maybe that’s relevant here. What is integral to Agamben’s definition of friendship is the difference in prepositions: “beside” instead of “across from.” Demaris is particularly captivated by the power of prepositional shifts in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s philosophy of solidarity: “So perhaps solidarity is to write from the inside . . . to speak nearby. Not ‘over’, or ‘for.’ Not even ‘with.’. . . Solidarity requires us to get over ourselves. Outside ourselves.”
Stepping outside ourselves isn’t the solution, but a movement that Soobramanien and Willams choreograph for us. It’s an action that involves placing everything you’ve got on the table and taking stock—a dance that the protagonists learn from the late Daniel:
Daniel’s dancing mocks Jan Ader’s crying. Daniel’s dancing is ritualized shame. Daniel’s dancing is not-living, it is dying. In a loop. To put white male sadness in conversation with Baldwin being quoted by Blint. To put the Jan Ader work in conversation with Jafa’s film.
Dancing, mocking, and placing things in conversation. There’s no shame in copying this method because it’s one of ritualized shame. Through this artistic process akin to ekphrasis—more like a simulacrum of ekphrasis—in combination with their fiercely self-conscious, self-critical practice, the authors take on the challenge of “beside” and achieve a work that’s innovative and agile. There’s a certain joy in their process of gathering. It spreads to readers as we do our own work, like placing Beckett—who practiced failure as the ultimate premise of creation—in conversation with this text. And as we too become creators, we must also ask ourselves Beckett’s enduring questions of authorship: “Where now? Who now? When now?”
Despite emanating from the negative, there is an insistent light in this work—a hope that feels absurd, almost playful. It’s the hope of friendship, the promise that if you lose the game as a team, you can recuperate by dancing in the locker room afterward. Surely that’s too cheerful of a metaphor. But I’m sure you can see what I’m trying to say.