The Last Brother

The Atlantic’s passengers, fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust, had been refused entry to Palestine by the British authorities (designated by the League of Nations to administer the Mandate of Palestine) because their papers were not in order. They were to spend the next five years imprisoned on the island, the men in the former prison of Beau-Bassin, the women and children in adjoining corrugated sheds. Of those who originally arrived, 1,320 survived to travel to Haifa in 1945 after their ban was rescinded. Natacha Appanah, a French-Mauritian, has given voice to this shameful episode in the history of World War II. The Last Brother is a plaintive monologue delivered by an old man, Raj, who continues, as he approaches his own death, to grieve for the loss of a child prisoner in Beau-Bassin with whom he formed a brief, life-changing relationship.

Raj lives with his parents and two brothers in a shanty town sprung up around a sugar factory. His father, a brutal drunk, works cutting sugar cane; his mother works in the homes of the owners, managers; he and his brothers, Anil and Vinod, gather kindling, prepare the house for their mother’s return, and collect water from the mountain stream. In a marvellously evocative depiction of the life in the village, sugar cane determines the life cycle and nature provides the antidote to poverty. If a god has any role to play in this world, it is to convert the magical clouds rising from the factory chimneys to the angry masses that spew rain with such force the stream becomes a raging torrent which takes the lives of Raj’s two brothers.

The family attempts to escape the tragedy and move to Beau-Bassin where the father gets work as a prison warder and they live in a house in the forest. The mother is the earth mother who, with her concoctions, protects the home from the forest and restores Raj from the drunken beatings of the father. Heavy with the guilt of his brothers’ deaths, Raj becomes introverted to such an extent that he continuously becomes subsumed into the vegetation — burrowing into the earth, receding into the shadows of the forest. From the vantage point of one such hide, he observes the grey, lethargic bodies released into the prison parade ground.

Unaware that a war was raging in the outside world, or that those white prisoners were fugitives from that war, his life changes forever when he watches a skeletal, blond-haired boy weep uncontrollably beside a barbed-wire fence. From this moment forward, it becomes Raj’s mission to help David, a Jew, to escape the torment of the “concentration camp”, the torment of the life he has had to endure.

Natacha Appanah has created a notable study of guilt and redemption through love, pure and absolute. The work will inevitably be compared with John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, as both explore childhood relationships formed across the barbed wire, but there the comparison ends. Appanah has delved into the soul of a suffering old man and exposed a sensitive, moving narrative which is at once disturbing, yet celebratory of man’s resilience in the face of terror.

Geoffrey Strachan’s translation bears witness to a powerfully lyrical and poetic work of literature that encourages reflection on the frailty of man in the face of recurring “holocausts”, a work that staggers in its power to move the most cynical reader.