Review: Marooned in the mountains
Réunion Island’s very first novel reveals a neglected history of enslavement.
Jacqueline Nyathi
After a botched sedition trial for allegedly plotting to unsettle the settlers from Reunion Island, Louis Timagène Houat was exiled to France where he became a physician, and also wrote this novel. The very first Réunionese novel!
Written in 1844 and newly translated into English by Aqiil Gopee and Jeffrey Diteman, The Maroons is the story of four enslaved people who plan their escape.
They’ve been brought to Réunion from Madagascar and other places.
One young man in the group manages to reach a remote part of the island where he meets a couple: a black man, Frême, and his white wife, with their young child. Frême was born free, but the couple moved from the village where their relationship was frowned upon to the mountains where they live among other maroons (although we don’t meet them in the book, and only hear rumours of them). Later, the escaped enslaved man is recaptured and taken back to his cruel master, but he escapes again.
The escape attempt of his three friends as they try to recross the ocean fails. They are caught, and are set to be executed as an example to other enslaved people.
While the plot itself is not particularly engaging, The Maroons paints a vivid picture of the cruelty of slavery in French territories, and Réunion Island in particular. Also important is that this is a portrayal of the slave trade on the eastern side of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, neglected in literature and already partly forgotten in collective memory. As such The Maroons provides a snapshot of this important part of history.