‘Portrait of an Island on Fire is a fascinating look at Mauritius, a personal account of a homeland told with rage, rigour and love. Saramandi brilliantly, subtly teases out the threads of Mauritian history, politics and culture, honouring both the particularities of this unique place and showing the troubled connections – rapacious capitalism, racism, creeping authoritarianism, right-wing paranoia – that seem to stretch across the whole of our fragile planet. This is a beautifully written book of deep knowledge, righteous anger and fierce hope.’
— Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility

‘Ariel Saramandi is a courageous and mesmerizing new voice, a chronicler of contemporary Mauritius whose writing refracts the influences of her Mauritian compatriots, Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah and Shenaz Patel in French, Lindsey Collen in English, in a voice which is wholly her own. Portrait of an Island on Fire unpicks the knots of Mauritius’s entangled histories – of plantation slavery, of indentured labour, of colonisation, of communalism and patriarchy – laying out the threads which make up her own history of ancestral oppression and structure her lived experience of privilege and pain; which form the fabric of contemporary capitalist Mauritius, and its particular intersections of race, class, gender, and language – its politics – and its particular forms of the white supremacy, anti-Blackness and toxic masculinity acted out on the bodies of those without power the world over. Saramandi is laser-focused in her rage, joyful in both her refusal to look away, and in her insistence on what sustains her: writing, motherhood, her marriage, friendships, community – and the beauty of her island.’
— Natasha Soobramanien, co-author of Diego Garcia

'With an unflinching, searing clarity, Ariel Saramandi opens the festering wounds that have been sewn shut by silence in Mauritius since the time of colonialism and slavery. This legacy of racism sheds light on new forms of economic enslavement, the consequences of climate warming, abortion rights, old and new misogyny, the utter irresponsibility of successive governments. This important book is both heartbreaking and a wake-up call: is it too late to act? A small, supposedly paradisiac island is teetering on a brink – a mirror of our world. But who really cares?'
— Ananda Devi, author of Eve Out of Her Ruins

‘These overlapping essays form a coruscating portrait of a place and make for a searing indictment of our times. Portrait of an Island on Fire is written with a formidable intelligence and with a precisely-targeted rage, and comes from a place of passion and of deep love. Ariel Saramandi is a writer of Mauritius and for our whole twenty-first century world; these essays are cris de coeur, they are wake-up calls – they are essays everyone should read.’
— Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days