Childhood in Mauritius
the novel The last brother Nathacha Appanah's novel (Éditions de l'Olivier, 2007) is a work of great poetic density and narrative complexity. At its heart is a childhood friendship between Raj, the narrator, and David, a Jewish boy who arrived in Mauritius on the internment ship "Atlantic." The novel explores how individual identity is formed through memory, loss, and experiences of violence. The text is simultaneously a historical analysis and an intimate narrative. Appanah intertwines the individual story of a Mauritian boy with the broader historical context of the internment of Jewish refugees by British colonial authorities in Mauritius during the Second World War. This creates a narrative tapestry of historical facts, psychological introspection, and poetic reflection that offers the reader not only a literary but also an ethical experience.
Historical background
The last brother Based on historical events: In 1940, approximately 1600 Jewish refugees who had intended to travel to Palestine on the ship "Atlantic" were deported by the British Mandate authorities to Mauritius and interned there in the Beau Bassin prison until 1945. This episode remained virtually unknown for a long time, even in Mauritius. Even beyond the immediate war zones, people were held under extremely harsh conditions simply because they were Jewish and sought refuge. Today, a Jewish memorial in the Beau Bassin prison and the Jewish section of St. Martin's Cemetery commemorate the internees and their experiences.
Appanah's novel brings this aspect of colonial history to light and intertwines it with a personal narrative. The text maintains a balance between fiction and documentary. David is a fictional character, but his life situation corresponds to historical facts. However, Raj's subjective perspective disrupts the historical discourse: the Holocaust, the persecution of the Jews, migration—all of this is not explained, but felt. For Raj, these children are simply "the others." Only through his friendship with David does he gain access to the history of the Others—a history that also becomes his own. Thus, a text emerges that connects the personal with the political. Raj's individual traumatization reflects collective experiences: colonialism, racism, exclusion. The last brother This places it within a postcolonial literature of remembrance that not only expands what can be said, but also unlocks what can be felt.
The refugees were mainly from Eastern Europe (particularly Slovakia and Austria) and had attempted to reach Palestine via the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. This occurred under conditions severely restricted by the British White Paper of 1939. This White Paper had drastically limited Jewish immigration to Palestine in order to suppress Arab opposition and protect British interests in the region. When ships carrying Jewish refugees reached Haifa, they were turned back by the British authorities. A particularly tragic event was the Patria disaster in November 1940. Hundreds of refugees, who were to be transferred to the Patria for deportation to Mauritius, died when the Haganah (a Jewish paramilitary organization) attempted to sabotage the ship to prevent the deportation. The survivors of this disaster, as well as other refugees who had reached Haifa aboard other ships such as the Atlantic, were eventually sent to Mauritius.
On December 26, 1940, the first Jewish internees arrived in Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. They were taken to the Beau Bassin prison, which had been converted into an internment camp. Conditions in the camp were harsh: initially, men, women, and children were housed separately. Men were placed in the former prison cells, while women and children were put in adjacent huts. This segregation lasted for about 18 months before family visits and later, communal accommodation (often in makeshift tents), were permitted. The internees suffered from malaria and typhus, were malnourished, inadequately clothed, and lacked sanitation. A total of 128 internees died during their imprisonment, most from disease. They were buried in the Jewish section of St. Martin's Cemetery.
The legal status of the internees was unclear. They were neither prisoners of war nor criminals, but stateless refugees detained by the British authorities for political reasons. The British authorities initially feared that there might be spies among them. After the end of the Second World War in 1945, the internees were given the choice of either returning to their European homelands or emigrating to Palestine. The vast majority (approximately 1.320 people) chose Palestine. They arrived in Haifa on August 6, 1945.
Work context
The themes of migration, memory, and the complexities of belonging run like a common thread through Appanah's literary work. La mémoire délavée The author explores her own family history as Indian contract workers in Mauritius who were "dehumanized" and given numbers, a process of "erased memory." This connection to the historical "coolies" is already present in her debut novel. Les rochers de Poudre d'Or, which deals with the dangerous crossing of the "black water" ("kala pani") and the exploitation of the newcomers. Also in Tropic of violence Appanah addresses the current issue of "tragic and constant immigration" to Mayotte, where people arrive in "kwassas sanitaires" and are confronted with violence and precarious living conditions. Childhood in the face of trauma and societal harshness is also a recurring motif, as in The last brother through Raj's experiences in Mapou and Beau-Bassin or in Le ciel par-dessus le toit, where the young main character Loup ends up in prison.
Stylistically, Appanah often prefers polyphonic narrative styles and a sensitive, yet direct and unvarnished language. Tropic of violence It is explicitly described as a "polyphonic narrative" that gives a voice to different protagonists, whether dead or alive. Even if The last brother Although primarily told from Raj's perspective, the novel illuminates the fates of various individuals and the limitations and possibilities of language itself, particularly when the characters must communicate in a foreign language (French). The search for a place in the world and the feeling of being a stranger ("étranger") are overarching themes, whether it be Raj's isolation or Anita's experiences in Paris in "En attendant demain," where she feels like a stranger and is subjected to prejudice. The author herself reflects on these themes in her chronicles. Une année lumière about her own identity as a writer of “foreign origin” and the perception of her work.
Jewish themes also appear in some of Appanah's other works. This is most explicitly evident in her chronicle collection. Une année lumièreIn a chapter titled "Vanessa, powerful heart," the author reflects on the Holocaust, which she first heard about from her mother as a child and which at the time seemed geographically distant. She describes a visit to a memorial in a small chapel in Mauritius, where photographs, testimonies, and artifacts are displayed. There, she meets a guide named Vanessa, who is dedicated to the "duty of memory" and refers to the inmates of Beau-Bassin prison, such as Jakob and Anna, by their first names. The author is deeply moved when Vanessa reveals that she has discovered the complete list of inmates, which for Appanah means: "Everything is possible again," restoring each prisoner a name and a story. This illustrates how Appanah personally confronts the historical trauma and the "inhumanity" of that time and grapples with the meaning of remembrance.
Also in Tropic of violence There is a direct, albeit broader, thematic connection. Although the novel primarily addresses the violence and misery on Mayotte, where "Gaza" is used as a metaphor for a slum, Appanah, in a key passage, lists various historically persecuted and displaced groups who were forced to travel across the seas "for or against their will." This list includes "slaves, hired men, pests, brigands, repatriated Jews, boat people, refugees, undocumented immigrants, and illegals." By explicitly mentioning "Jews" in this context of forced migration and dehumanization, Appanah establishes a direct historical parallel. This expands the Jewish theme beyond the specific internment on Mauritius and links it to a universal narrative of suffering and displacement that runs through history and recurs in various forms.
Although The last brother While this novel occupies a special place in Appanah's work through its specific focus on the almost forgotten history of Jewish internees in Mauritius, it fits seamlessly into her oeuvre. It deepens her characteristic exploration of the power of memory, the consequences of migration and displacement, and human resilience in the face of adversity. Appanah uses her novels to explore "truth and identity" and "expand human empathy," often through personal or historically grounded stories from her native Mauritius or other "margins" of the world. Her writing is like a complex mosaic, with each novel adding a new detail that nonetheless contributes to the larger picture of human experiences of loss, survival, and the relentless search for meaning and connection.
Raj's Story
The elderly Raj recalls a brief but profound episode from his childhood: his friendship with David. In a flashback triggered by a dream, Raj takes us from his childhood in the Mapou slum, through the move to Beau-Bassin, to his life with his mother near the prison walls behind which David is incarcerated. Raj loses his two brothers in a natural disaster and encounters David as a new "last brother." The friendship ends abruptly with David's death. Sixty years later, Raj seeks his final rest at David's grave and, in an act of remembrance, recounts his story. The novel is divided into nine chapters, with the first and last sections framing the present-day Raj, while the intervening chapters unfold his childhood memories in epic breadth. The narrative voice is retrospective, reflective, and at the same time deeply emotionally bound to the remembered events.
Raj reconstructs the social and physical spaces of his childhood with remarkable vividness: the impoverished conditions in Mapou, his father's violence, the oppressive nature, and the precarious struggle for survival all shape him. The death of his brothers Anil and Vinod in a flood leaves Raj with a sense of guilt that runs like a thread through his life. Only in David does he find a way to reconnect and heal. This relationship, however, remains fragile, scarred by the political situation and the collision of two worlds. David's death in the internment camp crisis of 1945 leads to another traumatic rupture. Raj's narrative is an act of remembrance, an attempt to reconstruct himself through memory.
A poetic montage
Appanah employs a dual temporal structure: childhood experiences are reconstructed from the perspective of an old man, motivated to recount his memories by a dream. This framing device allows for constant reflection on the mechanisms of memory itself: what is recounted is not only past but always also a product of a present-day narrative. The plot is episodically structured: extended flashbacks overlay the simple opening frame. The novel thus follows a poetic logic of memory that is not linear but rather structured by traumatic moments and affective nexus.
Remembering here doesn't function as a chronological sequence, but rather as a network of motifs, images, and emotions. It's striking how Appanah repeatedly interrupts the biographical chronology to embed specific experiences that are distinguished not by their temporal position, but by their psychological impact. For example, the scene of Vinod's death, in all its cruelty and graphic power, is recalled and varied multiple times. This technique of iterative condensation creates a palimpsest-like text in which each memory represents a rewriting of earlier truths. The past is never closed, but open, vulnerable, and in constant flux. The novel thus stages a poetics of memory that closely resembles the actual function of remembrance: fragmentary, emotionally charged, and performative.
Memory as a narrative movement
The narrative structure of The last brother It is not based on a linear sequence of time, but rather follows the flow of memory, which is more associative than chronological. In Paul Ricœur's terminology, one could speak of a narrative configuration in which time only acquires meaning through the act of narration. Time is not merely the medium of the action, but a theme in itself: the difference between narrated time (childhood) and narrative time (old age) is constitutive for reflecting on loss and identity. The structuring power of narration is reinforced by the repetition of certain motifs (water, light, flying objects, stars, silence), which hold the text together like anchor points of memory.
The novel moves in concentric circles around traumatic turning points, particularly the flood disaster, the loss of the brothers, and David's death. These events are not merely singular historical moments, but repeatedly intrude upon Raj's present experience. Time appears not as a healing force, but as a wounded continuity. This structure also reflects post-traumatic memory, as described by Cathy Caruth: the trauma does not return as a rememberable image, but as an affect, a void, an "unconnected" scene.
The novel's circularity is reinforced by its framing: the narrative begins with a dream, a vision of the deceased David, and ends with the actual act of visiting his grave. In between unfolds an inner monologue, a memorial text that aims less at enlightenment than at evoking emotion. Time in the novel is thus poetically condensed; it doesn't flow but circles, opening up into snapshots and lingering on symbolic details. Through this aesthetic temporal structure, Appanah makes it possible to experience how remembering and narrating function as modes of dwelling and understanding.
Spaces between prison walls and the forces of nature
A central theme in The last brother The symbolic spatial design is key. The main locations – the Mapou slum, the wooded Beau-Bassin, the Saint-Martin prison – represent different states of being. Mapou is a place of deprivation, violence, and confinement. The space there is open yet imprisoned – the dust, the wind, the dripping rain, and the muddy ground offer no stability. Mapou is marked by the forces of nature to which the family is exposed. The place becomes a metaphor for a childhood without protection, characterized by precarious existence.
Beau-Bassin, on the other hand, is ambivalent. On the one hand, it means liberation from the camp, new opportunities, and a bit more security; on the other, it lies near a prison—a place that is both real and symbolic. The father now works as a guard, and the boy lives on the fringes of state control. The forest surrounding Beau-Bassin becomes Raj's refuge, a place where memory, fear, and fantasy intertwine. The forest possesses a mythical quality, serving simultaneously as a sanctuary and a mirror to his inner life.
In Raj's experience, the prison becomes the place of the Other—the Jewish refugees—and embodies a new form of violence: an administrative, political, colonial violence that imprisons people without charge. It is in this place that David dies, even though he had sought safety. Thus, spaces in the novel are always imbued with existential significance: they reflect emotional states, social orders, and cultural differences.
Symbolism: Water, light, star and flight
Appanah's novel is permeated with dense symbolism, mostly revealed through the lens of childhood. Water is the central element – on the one hand, a source of purification and life force (the rivers in which the brothers play), on the other, destructive (the flood that kills Anil and Vinod). Water represents the uncontrollability of the world, death, and memory simultaneously.
Another central symbol is light. It permeates the text as a moment of longing—for example, the “purple light” in old Raj’s dream or the glow in David’s hair. Light represents revelation, the moment of closeness and transcendence. It is often associated with David, who is imbued with a quasi-messianic radiance: the last brother, the last light.
The stars, in turn, are significant in several respects. Firstly, they symbolize David's Jewish identity – his star necklace is a central motif. Secondly, they point to the universal, to the afterlife, to a connection beyond death. The moment when Raj takes off David's star necklace and places it back on his grave decades later is a highly symbolic gesture of reconciliation with the past.
Ultimately, the "flying game" is a powerful metaphor for freedom, care, and failure. When Raj carries David through the air like an airplane, it symbolizes the desire to free him from his situation, to protect him. However, David's eventual fall and resulting in a tooth injury also marks the limits of childlike love and the inability to overcome the violence of the world. This game is later remembered as an attempt to make the unbearable bearable—at least within the context of the game.
Silence, gestures, shared physicality
In the novel, language is often inadequate. Communication between the characters, especially between Raj and David, is frequently nonverbal. This is due to various reasons: linguistic barriers (David initially speaks hardly any French), social differences, cultural distance, and a child's inability to reflect. Instead, Appanah works with an aesthetic of gesture. The friendship between Raj and David develops through glances, actions, and shared activities—carrying, playing, and sharing silence. In these moments, a physical closeness arises that needs no words.
Silence, too, possesses a unique quality in the novel: it is an expression of pain, of incomprehension, of trauma. The father hardly speaks—he hits. The mother says little—she functions. Raj himself remains silent at crucial moments—for example, when he cannot comprehend David's death. In this silence, the limitations of what can be said are revealed. Language becomes an emptiness, a wound.
Appanah demonstrates how communication is not expressed solely through words, but also through glances, movements, touches—and in its failure. The novel's deepest connections are not dialogic, but embodied. In doing so, she places the body at the center as a medium of memory: a body that carries, suffers, and remembers.
Narrative Strategies
Appanah's style is characterized by a lyrically dense, highly subjective language. The narrative is introspective, focused on Raj's perception, and thus genuinely poetic: the world is not reported, but reflected, felt, and explored. The text thrives on rhythmic repetitions, elliptical sentences, anaphora, and a sentence structure that often mimics the breathing pattern of emotion. The poetic language does not serve as embellishment, but is the medium of remembering itself.
Narratively, the story is dominated by the personal perspective of the first-person narrator, Raj. This perspective is retrospective and reflective, yet at certain moments it becomes completely immersed in the child's experience. Appanah thus achieves a double focalization: the events are narrated from the child's perspective, but framed and interpreted through the adult's eyes. This creates a tension between affective closeness and reflective distance.
A characteristic feature of Appanah's poetics is the combination of realism and symbolism. The places and characters are grounded in reality, but always imbued with symbolic meaning. The prison is not merely a prison, but also a metaphor for political blindness, for collective turning a blind eye. The forest is not just a forest, but an inner labyrinth, a mirror reflecting the landscape of memory. This allows for a narrative complexity in which factual and metaphorical levels of meaning merge seamlessly.
Poetics of Childhood
Childhood in Nathacha Appanah's life The last brother Childhood is not an idyllic state, but a period of experience marked by violence, loss, and uncertainty. It is precisely in its fragility that it becomes the epistemological starting point for experiencing and remembering. Appanah develops a poetics of childhood that doesn't simply look back from an adult perspective, but takes seriously the child's viewpoint with its sensory overload, its silence, and its vivid imagery. Raj's perception of the world is not cognitively, but affectively structured: the environment appears to him as an excess of sound, smell, color, and violence. In this hyper-aesthetic world, childhood is not a naive phase, but an existential confrontation with the other, with mortality, with the ineffably foreign. The poetic representation of this childhood occurs through condensation, through symbolic motifs (water, flight, star), through the fragmentation of memory, and through a language that doesn't explain, but reflects, recreates, and explores.
This poetics of childhood is simultaneously a poetics of trauma. The novel shows how remembering a wounded childhood doesn't function as a coherent reconstruction, but rather as a fragmented, embodied return. Appanah's language becomes the site of this return: elliptical and rhythmic, figurative and vulnerable. The child's gaze is not sentimental, but decidedly radical: it sees the injustice before it understands it. The text thus positions itself against an idealizing or pedagogical portrayal of childhood. Instead, it shows childhood as a liminal period in which the subject constitutes itself under conditions of structural powerlessness. By not denying the child its poetic authority, but rather taking it seriously in a literary sense, Appanah makes The last brother to a work in which childhood is not recounted, but made present: as the origin of storytelling, of memory, and of humanity.
David's Star of David
The Star of David becomes a central symbol in the novel, reflecting the development of the relationship between the narrator, Raj, and David, as well as Raj's personal processing of memory and history. At the beginning of his childhood, nine-year-old Raj does not understand the meaning of the Star of David that David wears around his neck. From his isolated colonial environment in Mauritius, Raj knows neither about the Second World War nor about Jewish identity. He even believes David is teasing him when he says the star is named after him, and Raj mistakenly thinks "Jew" is a kind of illness, as he meets David in a hospital. This initial ignorance underscores the colony's isolation from the European events of the Second World War.
The Star of David becomes a tangible symbol of their brotherly bond, which develops despite the language barrier (they communicate in French) and their different worlds. After David's death, as Raj carries his lifeless body, he finds David's Star of David on the ground and puts it in his pocket, where he keeps it for sixty years. For Raj, the star becomes an amulet that accompanies him throughout his life, preserving the memory of David and their shared traumatic childhood experiences.
Only much later, at the age of fifteen, when Raj learns in history class about World War II, pogroms, yellow stars, extermination camps, and gas chambers, does the truth about David's identity and fate fall into place. This realization allows David to "return" to Raj and brings him inner peace by dispelling his long-standing anger. In 1973, as an adult, Raj learns the full story of the internment of Jewish refugees in Mauritius through a newspaper article, which finally reveals to him the full extent of David's experiences. Raj had previously placed the necklace with David's star in a small red box, which his wife, the only person to whom he had confided his story, kept with her jewelry. At the end of the novel, as an old man, Raj travels to the Jewish cemetery in Saint-Martin, where David is buried and whose gravestone reads "David Stein 1935–1945." There, he places the Star of David from the red box onto David's grave. This act is a deeply emotional conclusion for Raj, bringing to a close his lifelong search for the truth and understanding of David's fate. It is a vow to tell David's story to his son so that he will not be forgotten.
The Star of David thus transforms from an initial object of misunderstanding into a powerful symbol of Raj's deep connection to David, his personal traumas, his gradual historical discovery, and ultimately his commitment to remembrance and the power of storytelling to keep the past alive. It embodies the "forgotten" history of Jewish internment in Mauritius, brought to light through an intimate human connection. One could say the Star of David is like a missing puzzle piece in Raj's memory, which only finds its complete place through the painful confrontation with history and the acceptance of his own role in David's life, thus piecing together Raj's entire recollection into a coherent picture.
Last brother
The title The last brother The title carries a double meaning: First, it refers specifically to David, who, after the loss of his biological brothers Anil and Vinod, becomes Raj's last brother—a final bond of closeness, tenderness, and childlike loyalty. At the same time, the title evokes a definitive loss, a final figure in the relationship: This "last brother" is also taken violently. In its dual semantics of hope and rupture, of closeness and disappearance, the title points to the central structure of the novel: the constant re-loss of what once meant closeness. The "last brother" is not only David—he is the child itself, lost within the adult, saved by memory yet never truly recovered. Thus, the title is not merely a reference to a character, but a cipher for the poetic and existential core of the novel.
The conclusion of The last brother It is quiet, understated, and precisely because of this, profoundly emotionally impactful. Raj, as an old man, visits David's grave. He places David's star in a small red tin, an act of remembrance that is not pathetic but tender. In this gesture, the entire concern of the novel is encapsulated: remembrance as a form of care, as an act of ethical restoration.
Raj symbolically brings David back into history. The star, a symbol of Jewish identity, is not preserved in a museum-like gesture, but given to his deceased friend. Here, remembrance is not a monument, but a dialogue, a passing on, a "response" to one's own past. This moment signifies not a resolution, not a cathartic liberation, but rather a quiet pause, an acknowledgment of one's own wounding—and the wounding of the other.
The peace that old Raj feels at the end is not reconciliation in the classical sense, but a form of acceptance. Now, after decades of silence, he can tell the story. Not to liberate himself, but to give David—and himself—a place in memory. The ending makes it clear that memory cannot undo what has happened, but that it can give form to loss.
Our preview of The last brother Nathacha Appanah has created a quiet yet enduring masterpiece. The novel blends intimate childhood memories with political history, traumatic experience with poetic language, and psychological insight with documentary precision. The narrative style creates a topography of inner memory: the places, gestures, images, and sounds of the novel are not representations of reality, but rather media of remembrance.
The novel's poetics thrive on the tension between what can be said and what can be silenced, between visibility and disappearance. What cannot be spoken is shown—in movement, in a glance, or in a gesture. This aesthetic of the fragment, of the unspoken, makes the text not only stylistically distinctive but also ethically significant: it respects the trauma by not appropriating it. At the same time, the novel powerfully demonstrates how literary storytelling can open up spaces in which identity remains not fixed but negotiable. In the end, Raj is not the boy he once was, but neither is he entirely free of it. He is the bearer of a memory that claims not to be true, but rather to be connected.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
