“My life has been buried… It's as if I was pulled from my paradise to put me in hell.”
Losing one's home can feel like losing life itself, even while the body goes on living.
— Rita Elysée Bancoult, British Indian Ocean Territory
Source: Rita Elysée Bancoult, quoted in David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009)
More Proverbs from British Indian Ocean Territory
The UK decided to lease our motherland to the US to build a military base.
A homeland can be signed away by distant powers without the consent of the people who belong to it.
Since I was four years old, my people, the Chagossians, have lived in impoverished exile, while the US military has been enjoying the fruits of my homeland.
A single act of dispossession can echo across an entire lifetime and an entire people.
I maintain justice must be done.
However long a wrong is allowed to stand, the demand for justice does not fade.
This battle has just begun.
A single legal or moral victory is only a step, not the end, of a long struggle.
We Chagossians will continue fighting for our fundamental rights to be respected.
Dignity is defended by continuing to demand it, generation after generation.
There is nothing, just structures of houses and of the church. There is nothing inside. Nothing. It's deserted. It was heartbreaking to see it with my own eyes.
Seeing a lost home with one's own eyes can make an old grief suddenly, freshly real.