5 November 2025

What the Sea Carries, What the Body Remembers

This suite of essays, brought together by the Commonwealth Foundation, gathers four voices from four islands—each drawn, in their own way, to the restless dance between the corporeal and the ancestral. Their essays construct a scaffolding of thought and memory, letting us hear the echo of waves breaking on far-flung shores. Again and again, they return to the body: how it moves through space, how it is shaped by the gaze, how it might reclaim a quiet, insistent power.

Across these pages, the writers map lines between home and metropole—Las Lomas and New York, Castries and Calcutta, Port Louis and London. There is MacDonald Dixon’s meditative reimagining of his grandmother Ramdulari’s departure from India, Shivanee Ramlochan’s luminous inquiry into the divine feminine, Muna Mohamed’s elegy to the Maldives of her childhood, and Joe-Ann Chavry’s unflinching portrait of colourism in the world of online dating. Dixon’s return to the kala pani begins with a father he barely knew. Ramlochan’s rediscovery of Mirabai is sparked by a Devata in the galleries of the Met. Mohamed’s reflections anchor themselves in memory and longing. Chavry’s Not a Match opens in Beau Bassin-Rose Hill and detours—brilliantly—through a 1990s romantic comedy.

Mauritius. Trinidad. St. Lucia. Maldives. Each writer, in Brathwaite’s words, has “sojourned in stoniest cities.” Each turns us outward and inward, and outward again—like the tide. What they offer is a celebration of creative nonfiction and a reminder of what the form can hold: story, vision, memory, and truth.

Island Writings

Image: John O’Nolan

About the Authors

Sonia Faleiro

Sonia Faleiro’s most recent book, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (2021) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, Sunday Times Book of the Year, and a Human Rights Watch Book Club pick, and was nominated for several awards including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction. Her forthcoming projects include an investigation on the rise of Buddhist extremism (Columbia Global Reports, 2025) and a collection of essays on the genocide in Gaza (Verso, 2025). Sonia is the co-founder of the fundraising initiative Books for Gaza, and the founder of South Asia Speaks, a groundbreaking literary mentorship program that supports emerging writers across eight South Asian countries.

Richard Georges

Richard Georges is a writer and editor in the British Virgin Islands. His most recent book, Epiphaneia (2019), won the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and his first book, Make Us All Islands (2017), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second book, Giant (2018), was highly commended by the Forward Prizes and longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize.