Appanah's Polyphonic Novel Themes of Migration and Violence: Tropic of Violence

Mauritian author Nathacha Appanah, one of the important representatives of contemporary Francophone literature, often deals with themes that reflect the complex and polyphonic world of our age, such as identity, alienation, exile, immigration, and violence. His novel Tropique de la Violence, published in 2016, draws the reader into the criminal world of the Gaza Strip on the Island of Mayot. In the work, which has a polyphonic narrative structure where the themes of migration, violence, and alienation are covered, five different narrators address the reader with their own consciousness. The novel's characters effectively use the elements that activate the social and cultural memory of violence and migration through their descriptions of senses, objects, and universal space. In the novel, which also draws attention to the historical dimension of the concept of migration and immigrant, different semantic connotations of migration in social memory are included. The author, who pushes the reader to think about the psycho-social factors that lead to crime rather than the crime itself, draws attention to the cultural and structural dimensions of violence. Appanah shows the illusions in the perception of reality with this narrative universe that he builds with contrasts. In this study, we draw attention to the elements that provide polyphony in the text within the framework of Bakhtin and Kristeva's theory of polyphony, and we examined how the themes of migration, identity, alienation and violence are handled by the narrative characters.