Portrait of an Island on Fire - by Ariel Saramandi (Paperback)

About the Book

A deeply moving and revelatory reading experience, the essays collected in Portrait of an Island on Fire form an account of Mauritius at a crucial moment in its history.

Book Synopsis

A deeply moving and revelatory reading experience, the essays collected in Portrait of an Island on Fire form a searing account of Mauritius at a crucial moment in its history.

Unceasing in its critiques of racist, patriarchal abuses of power, in its unpicking of the ills at the core of contemporary Mauritian society and their roots, the collection is a milestone in thinking about the lasting social and political effects of colonialism and how they play out at the level of government policy, the handling of environmental issues, in schools, in hospitals, in families, in language. For all its well-placed anger, Ariel Saramandi's sparklingly intelligent and intimate debut is full of love and momentum - a push for a better future for Mauritius and, by extension, for the world.

Review Quotes

'Portrait of an Island on Fire is a fascinating look at Mauritius, a personal account of a homeland told with rage, rigour and love. Saramandi brilliantly, subtly teases out the threads of Mauritian history, politics and culture, honouring both the particularities of this unique place and showing the troubled connections - rapacious capitalism, racism, creeping authoritarianism, right-wing paranoia - that seem to stretch across the whole of our fragile planet. This is a beautifully written book of deep knowledge, righteous anger and fierce hope.'
-- Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility

'Ariel Saramandi is a courageous and mesmerising new voice, a chronicler of contemporary Mauritius whose writing refracts the influences of her Mauritian compatriots, Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah and Shenaz Patel in French, Lindsey Collen in English, in a voice which is wholly her own. Portrait of an Island on Fire unpicks the knots of Mauritius's entangled histories - of plantation slavery, of indentured labour, of colonisation, of communalism and patriarchy - laying out the threads which make up her own history of ancestral oppression and structure her lived experience of privilege and pain; which form the fabric of contemporary capitalist Mauritius, and its particular intersections of race, class, gender, and language - its politics - and its particular forms of the white supremacy, anti-Blackness and toxic masculinity acted out on the bodies of those without power the world over. Saramandi is laser-focused in her rage, joyful in both her refusal to look away, and in her insistence on what sustains her: writing, motherhood, her marriage, friendships, community - and the beauty of her island.'
-- Natasha Soobramanien, co-author of Diego Garcia

'With an unflinching, searing clarity, Ariel Saramandi opens the festering wounds that have been sewn shut by silence in Mauritius since the time of colonialism and slavery. This legacy of racism sheds light on new forms of economic enslavement, the consequences of climate warming, abortion rights, old and new misogyny, the utter irresponsibility of successive governments. This important book is both heartbreaking and a wake-up call: is it too late to act? A small, supposedly paradisiac island is teetering on a brink - a mirror of our world. But who really cares?'
-- Ananda Devi, author of Eve Out of Her Ruins

'These overlapping essays form a coruscating portrait of a place and make for a searing indictment of our times. Portrait of an Island on Fire is written with a formidable intelligence and with a precisely-targeted rage, and comes from a place of passion and of deep love. Ariel Saramandi is a writer of Mauritius and for our whole twenty-first century world; these essays are cris de coeur, they are wake-up calls - they are essays everyone should read.'
-- Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days

About the Author

Ariel Saramandi is an Anglo-Mauritian writer living in Mauritius. Her fiction and essays have been published by Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The White Review, among others. She has reported on Mauritius for the likes of the BBC and NBC. Her work has been supported by the Tin House Winter Workshop 2023 and the Stinging Fly Summer School 2023. She is a member of the MMM's Commission de Développement Durable.