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Abstract
Engaging with the work of feminist geographers, this chapter explores the ways in which the relationship between place, gender and belonging is depicted in Nathacha Appanah’s Blue Bay Palace (2004) and Ananda Devi’s Eve de ses decombres (2006). In both novels, the man-made spatial configurations of the fictionalised Mauritian environment are depicted as reflecting and constructing uneven, exploitative power and gender relations between its inhabitants. In contrast, this chapter analyses how both novels postulate alternative forms of female identification, though violence, with the island’s natural, non-human and pre-human geography. In both, a female harnessing of the island’s elemental power is seen to open up the possibility of more inclusive, woman-made forms of collective belonging to place in the future.
Highlights
In Ananda Devi’s 2006 novel Ève de ses décombres, the eponymous protagonist provocatively asks, ‘C’est l’endroit qui nous a faits ainsi, ou le contraire?’:1 an unanswered question on which the novel hinges
As Doreen Massey famously asserts, ‘social relations always have a spatial form and a spatial content’:3 that is, are man-made spaces constructed to reflect the social norms of their inhabitants, but social relations between these inhabitants, both positive and negative, are conditioned by the spaces they occupy
As Antonsich and others recognise, individual ‘place-belongingness’ and collective ‘politics of belonging’ can rarely be separated: an individual’s personal and intimate ability to ‘feel at home’ in a place is fundamentally conditioned by the ways and the extent to which a prevailing ‘politics of belonging’ seeks to dictate the terms of his or – as is the case in this chapter – her inclusion or exclusion
Summary
In Ananda Devi’s 2006 novel Ève de ses décombres, the eponymous protagonist provocatively asks, ‘C’est l’endroit qui nous a faits ainsi, ou le contraire?’:1 an unanswered question on which the novel hinges.
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