Abstract Natasha Soobramanien’s novel Genie and Paul (2012) creatively appropriates the plot and characteristic language of Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) to give voice to the dispossessed and displaced of the Indian Ocean, and to denounce the socio-environmental effects of colonialism and globalization on the island of Mauritius. In the process, the novel stakes out a theoretical position for itself within contemporary debates about the roles of landscape and arboreal imagery in the elaboration of a poetics of identity and place. As Genie and Paul interrogates the roles of trees and roots both literal and figurative in relation to its characters’ individuation efforts, it offers an interesting opportunity to reconsider Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation. This reading of the novel also sheds light on the ecological ramifications of Soobramanien’s poetics of landscape, illustrating how one might effectively denounce the West’s impact on Mauritius without falling back on mythical notions of an Edenic nature.