Esther Pujolras-Noguer and Felicity Hand: Working/Writing Through the Trauma of Displacement: The Chagos Islanders

Ataya: HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

Speaker: Esther Pujolràs-Noguer and Felicity Hand

Bio: Esther Pujolràs-Noguer is a Serra-Húnter Fellow at the University of Lleida. She teaches postcolonial literature and culture, gender studies and poetry in English. She is a poet and uses creative writing as a therapeutic tool to help people overcome traumas related to gender violence and forced displacement. Esther has published widely on Indian Ocean writers especially Abdulrazak Gurnah and M.G.Vassanji. She is the director of the research group Ratnakara – Indian Ocean Literatures and Cultures and chief investigator of the group’s current financed project on Aquatic Imaginaries.

Felicity Hand is honorary professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has taught postcolonial literature and history and culture of the UK and the USA. She has published on various Indian Ocean writers including Abdulrazak Gurnah and Lindsey Collen. Felicity is the editor of the electronic journal Indialogs. Spanish Journal of India Studies.

Topic: In the late 1960s the Chagos Islanders were subjected to forced displacement for complex geopolitical reasons. Until very recently, the possibility and materiality of returning to their homeland was literally out of bounds. Their experience of dislocation was framed around what we call “the myth of the empty territory” (Pujolràs-Noguer & Hand, 2021), in which their present reality is powerfully shaped, conditioned by an elusive myth of return. In this talk we will highlight the fact that the Chagos Islanders’ experience of displacement has always been mediated by a third party, the author that writes about them. It is precisely to counteract this fact that we organised a creative writing workshop, “Myth and Memory. Fighting Cultural Injustice” in August 2019 at the University of Mauritius with members of the Chagos Refugees Group of Port Louis. Our experience with creative writing has shown us that creative writing workshops generate a space wherein traumatic experiences can be, in LaCapra’s terminology, worked through. This is because participants are able to voice their suffering in a meaningful manner. With this objective in mind, the creative writing workshop we organised, allowed participants to delve into individual and communal aspects of their traumatic experiences of loss, in its geographical and psychological dimension. Without undermining historical narrative, we conclude that literature equipped them with the tools to reflect upon, and own the history of their displacement.

How Ataya works: One presenter and their work – in exchange with the audience. Each Ataya session engages with selected work by the presenter (a text, artwork, performance, even food). The presenter introduces their work and grounds the subsequent discussion with the participants. For best engagement, we recommend participants to view the work (made available in advance on our website) before the session.