We no longer present Ananda Devi. A major figure in the French-speaking literary world, this Mauritian-born novelist is the author of some twenty books including novels, collections of short stories and poetry, stories. His award-winning, celebrated work is taught in schools and universities in Mauritius and around the world. She has just published an essay on writing titled Two trunks and a pot and a new novel (rerun).
” I always say you started writing in innocence. Perhaps I should say in ignorance, because you were ignorant of what this commits you to, of the true meaning of this word, of this act, to write. Perhaps it was the cry that was restrained and enshrined that had thus seduced you, you the mute? Can we ever know? This passage taken from Two trunks and a potthe autobiographical essay ofAnanda Devi devoted to her coming to writing makes her voice heard, incandescent with sincerity. This sincerity is the hallmark of the work of this great Mauritian author.
This essay is both a theoretical work on poetic art and an autofiction. On the model of Letter to a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the novelist retraces here her own ” birth in writing “, evoking along the way the questions and concerns that accompanied his becoming a writer. Devi also renews the exercise, choosing to speak not to an anonymous young poet, but to the teenager she was fifty years ago, growing up in a small village on her native island, obscurely aspiring to a future in literature.
In the space of 11 chapters and 127 pages, this deep and poetic opus traces the beginnings of a life dedicated to writing, an investment of which Devi explained to RFI the extent and purpose: ” What has characterized me all my life is to express myself through writing and it is in my books that I really feel alive, by writing that I feel alive and that I feel that I worth something, that it was worth living because I wrote. Without writing, I wouldn’t have been a very interesting person. Without writing, I would be nothing. In fact, I can say that honestly, very honestly, without writing, I am nothing. »
Writing is life
Writing is life, that is the theme of this book. The objective here is clearly not to present the chronological stages of the publications, but to recount the inner journey and the external pressures linked to the place, to the intellectual and family circumstances which led the adolescent Ananda, evolving far from the cultural centers of the world, to embrace the vocation of writer.
” You were not a writer: you would become one writes Ananda Devi, addressing her former double. She remembers the shyness, the silence, the heaviness in the body and in the head that she had to overcome to imagine herself as a writer. We are here in sociology, in psychoanalysis, aesthetics, but also in the tale and the family legend, as the title of the essay reminds us: Two trunks and a pot. This folkloric title, which evokes the tales of Grimm and Perrault, summarizes the three main moments of the author’s trajectory, symbolized by the trunks and the pot.
Among the Devi, the first trunk served as a family library where the parents kept the books that the father brought back from his weekly trips to the capital. The future novelist and her sisters drew with delight from this treasure chest their tools for discovering the world, but also those for knowing its delights and its cruelties when added to the rose water stories and adventures, The thousand and One Nights. ” A far more murky, insidious, fascinating, cruel bookwrites Ananda Devi, a book with a thousand open mouths “, which will be a source of many ” pleasurable outbursts ” and a ” sublime disorder “.
The second trunk is that of writing. Devi’s mother will keep her daughter’s thousands of handwritten pages there for a long time, before a violent cyclone, followed by flooding, annihilates these youthful writings and their budding sensuality forever. Between the two trunks, is inserted the anecdote of the pot, carrying a founding violence.
Listen to Ananda Devi: Then there was the story of the cooking pot, which my mother told me when I was very young, about a young woman whose husband was so violent that because she had cooked the rice, one day she spilled a pot of boiling rice on his head. This violence was such that this woman went to bed and she never got up again. She died shortly afterwards. And that very story upset me so much. The image, especially of this woman as if statuesque, frozen under a pot of boiling rice, stayed in my mind. The violent, dark and black aspect that was already present in the first stories probably comes from there… »
Storytellers, actresses and goddesses
According to the author, this family story, transmitted by her mother through a ” non-cyclone evening made her the writer she has become, seeking to make heard the voices of those excluded and brutalized by life who populate her stories. No exception to the rule The laughter of the goddesses, his new novel, crossed by the constant themes of confinement and exclusion. These themes are embodied here by figures of prostitutes, storytellers and actors of the story camped somewhere in northern India.
These women are named Gowri, Kabita, Bholi, but also Vina. Vina and her ten-year-old daughter Chinti, which means “ant” in Hindi, are the main characters in this novel. Among Vina’s frequent customers is a priest of the goddess Kali, who is more predatory than priestly. Shivnath, the pedophile does not content himself with crushing the mother’s body under his all-powerful Brahman weight, he has also set his sights on the fresh flesh of his minor daughter. He coaxes the last with gifts, ice cream, sweets and promises of a life of opulence and luxury. He ends up kidnapping the little one and organizes a pilgrimage to the sacred city of Benares where he plans to impose his protege on his gullible disciples as the new avatar of the goddess Kali.
But that was without reckoning with the child’s mother’s protective instinct and the solidarity of the voiceless, including a community of transsexuals who have made Chinti their mascot. The laughter of goddesses of these women warriors » illuminate the last pages of the book.
The fight of life
“ During the periods of great religious pilgrimages in India, says the author, it was there where the prostitutes had the most work, because during these journeys, these journeys which can last several weeks, the men also need the services of prostitutes during this period. And it really made me so angry to think of the hypocrisy of this society which claims to be deeply inhabited by religious sentiment, which claims to be spiritual, which claims to be deeply inhabited by religious sentiment, but which does not offer any chance of redemption to these women, even if they follow the pilgrimage. It’s a bit like that that the character of the religious man was born, Shivnath who is the one through whom evil happens in fact, evil and the male arrive in my story. »
However, the potential for evil of the predatory males who govern our societies holds no secrets for the Mauritian Ananda Devi. At book length, whose actions take place somewhere between Mauritius birthplace, the India where her family is from and the Europe where she lives today, this powerful novelist, feminist to the end of her sari, has built a deeply militant and beautiful work, which fights with a constancy made art , patriarchy in all its forms and under all skies. It is a battle of life carried out in memory of this statuesque grandmother, carrying on her head the pot of boiling rice like a cap announcing the victories to come!
Two trunks and a pot, by Ananda Devi. Project’îles editions, 2021, 127 pages, 14 euros.
The laughter of the goddesses, by Ananda Devi. Grasset editions, 2021, 240 pages, 19.50 euros.