Freedoms Won and Freedoms Lost : Travel, Displacement, Exile and their Translations in Romesh Gunesekera’s The Prisoner of Paradise - Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2015

Freedoms Won and Freedoms Lost : Travel, Displacement, Exile and their Translations in Romesh Gunesekera’s The Prisoner of Paradise

Résumé

1825, Mauritius. Ehelopola, the former Maha Nilame (Prime Minister) of the Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka was exiled to Mauritius by the British, and spent the last four years of his life in Pamplemousses. He joined a contingent of about 25 prisoners from Ceylon and was accompanied by a small retinue, including an interpreter. It is out of this slight historical detail that Romesh Gunesekera constructs his novel The Prisoner of Paradise (2012). Situated after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire but before the abolition of slavery and the advent of indentured labour from India, the novel explores in a highly sophisticated way the different facets and interfaces of exile, transport, travel and displacement, voluntary or not. Convicts from India, princes from Ceylon, slaves from Africa, colonizers from Europe, they all brush shoulders in the restricted space of Mauritius island. In the process of their being relocated, they have to cope with shifting grounds to create a new place for themselves. However, Gunesekera appears to be even more interested in another kind of shift, a mental, linguistic and an emotional one. If the characters appear to be transported beings, ie carried across, from one place to another, they are also translated beings (‘Having been borne across the world, we are translated men’ as Rushdie says in Imaginary Homelands, 17). Gunesekera gives the different meanings of transport and translation an active part to play in the dynamics of the narrative, through the central figure of the interpreter, Don Lambodar. Sinhala and Tamil, French and English shape the text, constantly raising the central question of how much we understand and have in common, how separated we stand, how close we come to the truth. The novel will be an opportunity to delve further into the interwoven meanings of the themes of the conference and to wonder why Gunesekera takes us to 1825 Mauritius and its multiple languages and historical trajectories.
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hal-04407452 , version 1 (20-01-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04407452 , version 1

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Judith Misrahi-Barak. Freedoms Won and Freedoms Lost : Travel, Displacement, Exile and their Translations in Romesh Gunesekera’s The Prisoner of Paradise. Space, Place, Travel, Displacement, Exile, IACLALS, Feb 2015, Goa, India, India. ⟨hal-04407452⟩

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