A Quiet Author's Written Rebellion: An Interview with Ananda Devi

Abstract

22 World Literature Today WLT INterview photo : h . anenden may–june 2013 • 23 Dinah Assouline Stillman: At what moment in your life did you feel drawn to write? Ananda Devi: It started with reading. When I was a young child, I read many tales and poems. My parents loved books. My father used to read poems to us, and pages and pages of tales and novels. Each time he went to the capital city for his business, he would come back home with many books. I was an avid reader, and I had started to write poems as early as age seven or eight. And very naturally, at the age of twelve, I started writing longer texts, even a first novel of fifty pages, not having any inkling then that it would later become my principal activity. My teachers noticed my aptitude and encouraged me. I was thirteen when I wrote Les vagues vertes de la solitude (Solitude’s green waves), which was set in Scotland, a country I had never set foot in! At fifteen, I participated in a shortstory contest, and mine got the first prize—it was published and even read on the radio. At nineteen, I had published my first collection of short stories. I have never stopped writing since then. DAS: In view of the recurring themes in your novels, one might wonder if you do not purposely A Quiet Author’s Written Rebellion An Interview with Ananda Devi Dinah Assouline Stillman * Devi is among the francophone writers who signed the manifesto “Pour une littérature-monde en Français” in 2007; see “Toward a ‘World-Literature’ in French” WLT, March–April 2009, 54–56. A nanda Devi is a noted francophone poet, writer, ethnologist, translator, and occasional scriptwriter for the movie adaptations to her short stories and novels. Born in Mauritius, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean and the setting for most of her works, she is considered one of the country’s major writers, although she writes in French and has been living in France for more than twenty years.* Owing to its colonial past, Mauritius is home to many languages and communities. A few of the dominant languages are Creole for everyday life, English for administrative matters, and French for cultural life. Reading Ananda Devi is like receiving a stunningly poetic punch on the subject of tragic lives in a violent environment. Stifling religious and social rules constrict the lives of the weakest beings in society, primarily women and children. Rebellious characters wishing to live their lives by their own standards are met with violent abuse or exclusion. When I met Ananda Devi at the Assises Internationales du Roman de Lyon (AIR) festival in June 2012, I found myself talking to a very quiet, graceful woman with a shy smile, a stark contrast to the rebellious, passionate women she conjures in her novels. She had published in 2011 a semiautobiographical type of confession, Les hommes qui me parlent, revealing how men who were important to her had considered her place in the family, her work, her motives for writing, how a writer friend in time of doubt had pushed her to keep creating her forceful stories, and how her heroines themselves persuaded her to “free herself.” 24 World Literature Today make yourself unhappy to be in the mood to write your stories. AD: No, there is no need for me to; there are enough situations that speak to me. I am attracted to the distress I see or hear about. The stories my mother and grandmother used to tell me about the lives of generations of women before me were transmissions of the voices and fates of women that moved me. Already in my first writings, those themes were recurrent. “La cité Attlee,” a short story I had written at fifteen, is the story of a very poor girl who loves writing. Her mother is a cleaning lady, her father a violent alcoholic. When her mother dies giving birth to an umpteenth child, the girl tears up her notebooks. She understands she must forget about her dreams. DAS: In your latest book, Les hommes qui me parlent, you write: “Each book...