A Former Banned Book Traverses the Little-Known History of Enslavement on the Islands in the Indian Ocean
by Shanta Lee
We do not really choose books: rather, we are chosen, adopted, by them.
—Shenaz Patel, “Unsilencing a (hi)Story,” The Maroons
The Maroons, a novel silenced 180 years ago, in 1844, has adopted our time—the year 2024—as its new era. The book—and the occasion—calls to mind these oft-quoted words, reiterated by Lucille Clifton: “I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”
Translated from the French by Aqiil Gopee and Jeffrey Diteman, the novel offers hope for those who seek to secure their unassailable human right to liberty. The Maroons, now available in English for the first time, is the only known novel by political exile and Black abolitionist Louis Timagène Houat, and it brings both uncomfortable truths and a space of respite for those wrestling with inequity and a lack of freedom. This juxtaposition comes at a cost. In this instance, the price paid was the suppression and silencing of Houat’s work. The book was confiscated after publication as part of a seized shipment of books that were declared “a threat to public order” by the French colonial government. Houat was forced into exile for seven years, and the novel was erased from collective memory for nearly two centuries.
In the end, suppression finds a release. However, we must keep in mind the ongoing control over literature and the continuing book bans across America. And so, any conversation about The Maroons must also include the context of how the text faced a heightened level of censorship in a political space already full of redactions. As Shenaz Patel writes in the book’s introduction, The Maroons was exiled, silenced, and “doomed to obscurity.” Through its revival today, The Maroons holds a mirror to our society and forces us to truly see ourselves, our histories, and the complexities of freedom.
The Maroons is then a long-awaited lesson in history for all of us. As Patel further argues:
We tend to focus mainly on the Transatlantic trade. For years, the focus of historians has been on the fate of the eleven to thirteen million people deported from Africa to the Americas between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By comparison, the Indian Ocean trade has been largely overlooked. In the span of two centuries, roughly four to five million African natives were captured and subsequently enslaved on the islands of the Indian Ocean—though this figure is likely underestimated, given that the region’s ship and land owners tended to under-declare their slaves to escape higher taxation and to avoid getting caught when, following the official abolition of the trade at the start of the nineteenth century, they continued illegally bringing African captives as slaves to the islands.
Having access to this text for the first time in America gives rise to a social moment that invites all of us to question the who, what, and how of power and authority. We cannot know where we are headed unless we know where we’ve been. How do we otherwise ensure that we have a truthful and unobstructed map that ties to our human past? How can we retrace the steps of where we have been while maintaining the tenacity of inquiry about what is needed, about what is missing?
While the story of The Maroons takes place on an island, the pages of the book hold global and historical ramifications. Specifically, we are invited to challenge the myopic vision of enslavement: to look beyond America. Houat beckons us to venture outside of the transatlantic trade route. As translator Aqiil Gopee writes, “as one of the many itineraries of human trafficking that involved the African continent, and it is imperative that we break the historic silence surrounding trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean, and Mascarene (including the islands of Mauritius, Réunion, and Rodrigues) economies of enslavement.” Much like the characters within its pages, The Maroons invites us to see beyond what we know and investigate what we don’t. This is crucial to free us from accepted and normative narratives on enslavement. Thus, this is an invitation to challenge the nineteenth-century literary canon.
The title, The Maroons, is itself enough to send anyone down a historical rabbit hole. For those of us who missed that specific lesson in school, maroon communities—“maroon” hailing from “dwellers of the peaks,” or cimarrón in Spanish—lived in the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Islands of the Indian Ocean. Maroons escaped enslavement and formed independent communities in Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, parts of the southern United States, and Haiti, among other locations.
The setting of The Maroons is Réunion Island, east of Madagascar. The book begins in media res, and within the first pages, we are greeted by the ravishing landscape and meet four enslaved men. One of them announces to the others, “Our time as slaves is up, brothers! Enough is enough!” A fight toward freedom unfolds as these individuals explore different pathways. Is it better to cut their losses and flee the land where they are held as slaves? Is a revolution the way to win their rights? And if revolution is the path to freedom, who can be trusted?
One of the men decides to find his grandfather rather than participate in a risky plan. In doing so, he encounters the protagonist, a young African man named Frême, who seized his freedom in order to find and marry his white childhood sweetheart, Marie. At the risk of providing light spoilers, I can tell you that Frême and Marie live in the forest away from society due to the persecution they faced for their relationship. But their existence in The Maroons presents another question about the nature of rights and freedom: Can true freedom be won—even in isolation, and within love—away from the very social structures that bind us in discrimination and hierarchy?
We meet Frême again at the end of the book as he ventures to rescue the men from execution after their failed escape attempt. And here yet another question arises, one that can’t be ignored amidst today’s social unrest: What is one willing to risk for the emancipation of oneself, and for a fellow human?
This deceptively slim 176-pager leaves us with many questions, calling readers’ attention to what is left amiss in our history books. What other redactions have we failed to see? At one point, one of the men sermonizes, “We’ll work when we have to, but for ourselves, not for them. We will not be beaten, we will be the masters of our own bodies.” These lines resonate within today’s society as we struggle for rights over our own bodies, our way of life, and our work. From the wars currently ravaging our world to the ways in which we remain indentured to oppressive institutions to society’s worship of capitalism, The Maroons forces us to think, question, and agitate.
As we turn to the last page of the novel, yet another chilling question arises, one as timeless and timely as the inquiry of freedom. Houat writes, “As the masters’ abuses escalate, so do their numbers.” In his statement, “their numbers” refers to the growing population of individuals who become maroons: that is, those that resist, and fight for their autonomy. But who exactly are the masters? Can we name the oppressors within our society today? Are we brave enough to emulate the maroons who dared to take their own rights, freedom, and command of the self? This may be the biggest lesson to take from The Maroons, and from its author who dared to pen such a work in 1844. We must look unflinchingly at our reflection. We must not only bear witness but be unafraid to speak and write the truth lest we risk being exiled from ourselves.
Shanta Lee is an award-winning artist who works in different mediums as a photographer, writer across genres, and a public intellectual. Her work has been widely featured in a number of anthologies and in places such as Harper's, the Poetry Foundation, The Massachusetts Review, ITERANT literary magazine, Palette Poetry, BLAVITY, and DAME magazine. Shanta Lee is the author of the poetry collection, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Her latest poetry collection, Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023), illustrated by Alan Blackwell, interrogates, interprets, and converses with Ovid, and was named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and longlisted for the 2021 Idaho poetry prize. Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, her latest exhibition—which includes her short film, interviews, photography, and other curated items—has been featured at the Southern Vermont Arts Center and the Fleming Museum of Art. The work will be debuting in its third installment as Dark Goddess: Sacroprofanity (Volume III of the Dark Goddess series) at the Bennington Museum in collaboration with Damon Honeycutt. Shanta Lee’s forthcoming work, This is How They Teach You How to Want It . . . The Slaughter (Harbor Editions) is out this spring. To learn more about her work, visit: Shantalee.com.