Gagging on égalité : French culinary imperialism on the island of Reunion in Axel Gauvin’s Faims d’enfance

Abstract

In Axel Gauvin’s 1987 novel, Faims d’enfance, food aversions sketch out the lines of finely nuanced Reunionese identities, as an adolescent of Tamil descent and his poor white classmates find themselves gagging on the égalité they are served in their rural school’s cafeteria in 1958. Using Laurent Médéa’s 2010 work on neo-colonialism in departmentalised Reunion and Laurence Tibère’s 2009 study of the role of foodways in structuring Reunion’s multicultural society in conjunction with a close reading of the novel itself, this article demonstrates that Axel Gauvin’s Faims d’enfance widens the scope of the defence of Creoleness to include the notion of patrimoine gastronomique and intimates that the Reunionese attachment to ‘eating Creole’ is a legitimate first step in the pursuit of cultural and political self-determination.