Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah (The Last Brother), translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan, offers readers a spellbinding immersion into the inner lives of slum dwellers, many of them lost, abandoned immigrant youth. Appanah humanizes their ordeals and gives them a haunting voice in the form of Moise, a boy with one dark eye and one green eye, the mark of the djinn.
The novel is set in Mayotte, a French island between Madagascar and the coast of Mozambique. Nestled in a sparkling lagoon, it is little more than a shantytown marred by poverty, filth and violence. Migrants and refugees arrive on Mayotte in overcrowded boats, many drowning in their desperation to reach French soil. Those who survive are dismayed to find the island is a distant "département" of France and functions as its most neglected outpost.
The largest slum on the island is nicknamed Gaza. It is "a violent no man's land... Gaza is Capetown, it's Calcutta, it's Rio... Gaza is France." The slum is ruled by a vicious gang leader named Bruce. Moise is Bruce's latest recruit, and it is his reluctant transformation from polite, scholarly teenager to scar-faced gang member that propels Appanah's novel, her fourth to be translated into English.
Moise's story is thrown into sharp relief by multiple narrators, including an idealistic NGO volunteer. By deploying their varied perspectives, as well as intensely vivid language to capture the reader's imagination, Appanah renders emotionally accessible a life experience most of us will never fully comprehend. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and reviewer