Free Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia by David Vine Page A

Chiefs of Staff
NASA
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NSC
National Security Council
Rs
Rupees [currency of Mauritius and the Seychelles]
USG
U.S. Government
USO
United Service Organization

A NOTE TO THE READER
    Quotations that appear in this book without citation come from interviews and conversations conducted during my research. Translations from French, Mauritian Kreol, and Seselwa (Seychelles Kreol) are my own. The names and some basic identifying features of Chagossians in the book (other than members of the Bancoult family and representatives of the Chagos Refugees Group) have been changed in accordance with anonymity agreements made during the research.
     

CHAPTER 10
    DYING OF SAGREN
    “ Sagren , that’s to say, it’s sagren for his country. Where he came from, he didn’t experience mizer like we were experiencing here. He was seeing it in his eyes, laba . * His children were going without, were going without food. They didn’t have anything,” Rita said of Julien’s death. “And so he got so, so many worries, do you understand? That’s sagren . Many people have died like that. You know, David?”
    “Died from—” I started to ask, wanting to understand more about how people could die from sagren .
    “ Sagren ! Yes! When one has sagren in your heart, it eats at you. No doctor, no one will be able to heal you! If you have a sagren , if you, even—you can’t get it out. That’s to say, David— Ayo ! What can you do? Let it go—something that came on like that. There are many people that can’t bear it.”
    “Mmm,” I uttered, trying to take in what she was saying.
    “Yes. Do you understand? Then, it goes, it goes, until at the end, you don’t want to eat, you don’t want anything. Nothing. You don’t want it. . . . There’s nothing that you do, that you have that’s good. You’ve withdrawn from the world completely and entered into a state of sagren .”
    “Have you experienced sagren ?” I asked.
    “Yes. Sagren . Yes,” Rita replied slowly.
    “It’s very hard,” I said.
    “Do you understand? You have sagren when in your country you haven’t experienced things like this. Here you’re finding food in the trashcan.”
    How do we understand Julien’s dying of sagren , of profound sorrow? How do we understand the deaths of others that Chagossians likewise attributeto sagren ? And how do we understand the islanders’ comparisons of an almost disease-free, healthy life in Chagos to one filled with sickness and death in Mauritius and the Seychelles? And how are we to make sense of the comparisons people make between an idyllic life in Chagos and what Rita and others call the “hell” of exile?
    To start, we must return to neighborhoods like Cassis and Pointe aux Sables where Chagossians have lived since the time when Rita and Julien arrived in Mauritius. Rita now lives in the Cité Ilois , the Ilois Plot, in Pointe aux Sables, where she received her small concrete block house and some land from the compensation provided in the 1980s. Her yard there is hedged in by a wall nailed together out of corrugated iron and wood. Three dogs patrol the inside, chained to a line allowing them to roam back and forth, barking at passersby. On one side of the house stand several trees: three mango, a bred murum, and two coconut—only one produces nuts. On the other side, Rita has allowed her youngest son Ivo to build a smaller three-room metal-sheeted home for his wife and two sons; they couldn’t afford to buy a place of their own. Hanging on the wall inside her house, Rita proudly displays a sun-bleached poster of a fruit and vegetable still life—pineapple, broccoli, melons, grapes, green-hued oranges. Another print of a dew-spotted rose hangs nearby, alongside a poster of a coconut tree on a beach in the Seychelles. Rita told me it reminds her of beaches in Peros.
    Housing conditions have improved to some extent for those like Rita who received and kept their compensation homes.