![]() In real life and in the novel, Gaza is a tropical shantytown on the outskirts of the city of Mamoudzou where much of the action of the novel takes place, but it is also one of the novel’s primary acts of translation. The Gaza at the heart of the novel is in the island of Mayotte, a French overseas department in the Comoros archipelago of the Indian Ocean. Although it shares a name with the territory of Gaza, the eponymous neighborhood in Nathacha Appanah’s Tropic of Violence (Graywolf 2020) is not in the Middle East. Media coverage of life in Gaza tends to revolve, almost singularly, around the theme of violence. ![]() ![]() ![]() The name has also become synonymous with contested sovereignty in an era of postcolonial globalization, where, despite their supposed ephemerality, words like “settlements” and “camps” are imbued with a certain permanence. Gaza is a name capable of conjuring many ideas: statelessness, precarity, violence, tenuous and embargoed freedom, occupation, colonialism, and the list goes on. ![]()
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