Hitting the road in kwassa in the Most Beautiful Lagoon in the World

The Malagasy David Jaomanoro’s, the Mauritian Nathacha Appanah’s and the Comorians Soeuf Elbadawi and Ali Zamir’s fictions focus on the drama of the new, deadly roads of emigration to Mayotte. They build an inversion of the tropicalizing gaze which, from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to contemporary travel diaries, celebrates the paradisiacal beauty of the islands in the South-East of the Indian Ocean and the Edenic kindness of its inhabitants.