Kaya Days

This novel is set in a single point of a time - a day and a night in 1999 during the riots after the death in custody of Joseph Réginald Topize, better known as Kaya - a local musician whose only crime was that he smoked weed during a concert (there is no way to read this in 2021 America and not flash back to last summer). The author is from Mauritius and still lives there.

The main narrator is a young Indian girl (a teenager most likely although we never learn her age) who is sent by her mother from the village they live in to pick up her 11-years old brother from his school in the city. The boy is not where he is supposed to so our narrator is off looking for him - getting herself in all kind of weird situations - a pair of Chinese show more casino girls mistake her for someone else and dress her like themselves, the casino owner almost rapes her, a taxi driver takes her for what she is dresses and tries to fulfill his own dreams while driving around the town, a Creole boy seems to fall in love with her. It is a stream of consciousness novel (or novella... it may be too short to be a novel) which occasionally shifts the narrator to a different character. And through the eyes of the narrators, we see Mauritius in its multi-ethnic glory - all together, all apart. And somewhere in there, our narrator passes from her childhood into her womanhood - not physically but mentally and we get a front seat to her memories and regrets. She grows from naive to confident; from the village girl to the woman that can order a man to do things for her; from the one that was always supposed to care for her brother to the one her brother is afraid of. It is claustrophobic and crazy and the rioting and he looting and history just merge into one to make the story of a girl. Or a woman - which somehow becomes the story of the island. That novel will either work for a reader or it won't - it has this very weird quality that tends to split people's opinions.

I am not sure I would have appreciated it as much as I did without reading Vinod Busjeet's novel "Silent Winds, Dry Seas" before that. Not because they are connected. It gave me the history and the background; it gave me an understanding of the complexity of the ethnic makeup of the small island. de Souza has some of that as well but because of how the novel works, because of the short period it covers, because of who the narrator is, it cannot really show you all of that. show less

I knew nothing about Mauritius, nor about Kaya, a seggae (fusion "of sega, the traditional music of the Mascarene Islands, and reggae") musician who was arrested because he smoked pot onstage in 1999, then died in police custody a few days later. It led to days of rioting.

This is a fictional account set in those days, centered around a naive 15-year-old girl who is sent to the city to pick up her younger brother from school. She doesn't find him at school &, instead, gets pulled into the suspended-reality of worlds unknown to her (from being a young, naive girl in a city on her own, prey to a certain extent, to being one of multitudes on the fringes of, then within, riots, looting, & more). It has a stream-of-consciousness feel, show more occasionally & briefly jumping into the thoughts of others, not just the main character. Some of the Kreol words & slang remain untranslated, partially reflecting the multiplicity of the peoples & languages in Mauritius & the ease of mixing languages. The beautiful, surreal cover reflects the contents of the story -- a delicate balance of ethereal floating, vividness, & singularity, off-kilter & plunged into the depths of the unknown. I'm not quite sure how I felt about the story as a whole (& what references & knowledge I may have missed) but it was an intriguing reading experience. show less

In 1999 the Mauritian musician Kaya was killed while in police custody. This book takes place during the rioting and looting that occurred after. It is frenetic and confusing, as Santee tries to navigate the crowded streets and angry people while looking for her younger brother, Ram.

This book takes place over 24-48 hours. And during that time Santee goes from being a sheltered, naive girl who seems about 13-14 years old to an active, politically aware woman who is maybe 18--speaking with a prisoner after the crowd breaks in to free prisoners, participating in looting, being afraid of strangers to traveling with different men. I am left wondering if her transformation is meant to represent the Mauritian people (working class?) who were show more galvanized by the murder of Kaya. show less