Tropic of Violence
Nathacha Appanah
Reviewed by Ryan Chamberlain
In her third novel to appear in English, Mauritian-French author Nathacha Appanah has written a dazzling glass mosaic reflecting still-colonial France whose shards are edged with blood. Tropic of Violence unfolds on Mayotte—a French overseas territory between Madagascar and Mozambique—evoking the island’s dueling mix of precariousness and invitation. Appanah’s prose is filled with Morrison-esque lyricism, multi-generational narrative, and cutting tragedy.
The story turns around the arrival of an orphan named Moïse—the French rendering of Moses—by his adoptive mother and nurse, Marie. Wanting a child and left by her husband, Marie finds the miracle of Moïse beached on Mayotte’s shore. His life, though, more closely resembles a curse. Embroiled in the ongoing scrum for significance in gang-ruled “Gaza,” Moïse tries to pry himself out. That escape, with France as the final slumlord, is a fantasy.
Geoffrey Strachan, whose career as a translator has garnered as many prizes as Appanah has for writing, delicately relays a choir diverse enough never to meet shoulders under the roof of one language. Reading of these lives is like wading in the warm waters of a mile-high cataract. There’s pleasure in every sustained moment, but you find yourself urgently attuned to the fate of a place whose pristine allure is thanks only to neglect.