Towards a poetics of reconciliation: Humans and animals in Ananda Devi’s writing

Abstract

This article analyses the flux of metamorphosis that is richly evoked in the literary works of the Mauritian-born writer Ananda Devi and that testifies both to the radical positions of alterity experienced by her various protagonists and to the political and poetical possibilities involved in reimagining boundaries between humans and animals. Placing Moi, l’interdite and La Vie de Joséphin le fou (A. Devi) in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of bare life and Judith Butler’s expositions on precarious life, the article explores the multiple tensions at play in Devi’s depictions of the human-animal. Devi’s writing neither exclusively relegates the human-animal to an abject debasement, nor excessively celebrates the hybrid as a revolutionary figure. At times basely stripped of their humanity, at others tantalizingly transgressive, and often both, Devi’s metamorphic protagonists are intricately and subtly bound up with the political layerings and divisions of postcolonial Mauritian society, all the while hinting towards a poetics of reconciliation that emerges in an acknowledgment of shared vulnerability.