In an interview given following the publication of her third novel, Le Silence des Chagos, in 2005, author-journalist Shenaz Patel made the following statement about the role of the writer – and of the novel – in relation to real-life ‘stories’:

The long-occluded real-life story to which Patel is referring here, and which is the inspiration for her novel, is that of the forced deportation of 2,000 Chagossian islanders from their homes, between 1967 and 1973, in order to make way for the construction of a US military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos archipelago. Based largely on the testimonies of Charlesia, Raymonde and Désiré, three Chagossian refugees to Mauritius, the interwoven ‘histoires romancées’ of Le Silence des Chagos recount the circumstances of the Chagossian people’s expulsion from their homeland, the terrible hardships they continue to suffer in their country of involuntary exile and their abiding yearning to return home.

Central to all aspects of the Chagos islanders’ story – to their original expulsion, to their ongoing legal battles for the right to return and to their continued exclusion from Mauritian society – is the notion of belonging, in both politico-legal and emotional senses. At the heart of the Chagossians’ recent history lies a brutal and profoundly uneven clash between the ‘politics of belonging’ as cynically deployed by US and British governments, on the one hand, and the affective and embodied sense of belonging to, and longing for, an annexed homeland experienced by the displaced Chagossian population, on the other. As I shall explore, Patel's novel seeks both to convey the Chagossians’ feelings – and lived realities – of deracinement and exclusion in their country of involuntary residence, and also, by depicting memories of life in the Chagos before their expulsion, to assert their moral and legal right to belong – and thus to return – to their islands.