Ananda Devi
In the context of the Month of the Francophonie
In cooperation with the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF)
Through contact with « colonial » realities, that is to say with overseas civilizations, French humanism has been enriched, deepened, and expanded to integrate the values of these civilizations(…). At the moment that, by addition and socialization, the Civilization of the Universal was created, it was a question of how to use this wonderful tool, found in the rubble of the colonial regime(…) Negritude, Arabism, it is you too, the French from France!
Léopold Sédar Senghor (1962)
L'Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF)
The International Organization for La Francophonie (OIF) is an institution based on a shared language, French, and values. The OIF currently has 55 member states and governments and 13 observers. Present on five continents, the OIF represents nearly a third of the member states in the United Nations. OIF gives its member states extra force in developing and consolidating policies and helps develop multilateral cooperation. Such actions conform to the mission set out in the Summit on La Francophonie: promoting the French language and cultural and linguistic diversity; promoting peace, democracy, and human rights; supporting education, training, higher education, and research; developing cooperation for sustainable development and solidarity. The OIF helps Southern hemisphere and transitioning countries to acquire funds for development and to create their own programs that will allow for sustainable and fair human and social development.
Created by the OIF in 2001, the Award of the Five Continents of La Francophonie is aimed at spotlighting literary talents that reflect the cultural and editorial diversity of the French language on the five continents. The award is given to a book whose author has born witness to a specific cultural experience that enriches the expression of the French language.
The Speaker
Ananda Devi was born March 23, 1957, in Trois-Boutiques (Île Maurice), a village lost among fields of sugar cane. In its splendor and diversity, Île Maurice is at the heart of the work by Ananda Nirsimloo-Anenden.
Ananda Devi was a prodigy, at the age of 15 winning a literary prize for a short story in a contest organized by French radio and television and the ACCT. It was the beginning of a long career, more then 30 years, during which she progressively has become a more prominent figure in French-language literature from the Indian Ocean.
An ethnologist by training as well as a doctor of social anthropology and a translator, Ananda Devi is sensitive to the overlap of identities and languages. She keenly perceives the human characters and universes that can brush up against one another, clash with one another, and destroy one another in an insular space that is no less analyzed than recreated.
Her works published since 2001 by Gallimard, she has received several literary prizes, in particular for her 2006 novel Eve de ses Décombres, which won the Award of the Five Continents of La Francophonie and the RFO Prize.
Her incisive, lyrical, and penetrating style gives the French language new cultural and linguistic dimensions tied to her native island. Her writing is characterized by bleak themes and her unflinching regard for Mauritian society. Her characters are trapped by forces contrary to society, religion, human cruelty, and fractures in the region's violent history. Their only recourse during their solitary journey is their mental clarity and their profound humanness. On the outside they may look like monsters, but the real monsters are the others—ordinary people who refuse to understand. The only way for them to escape is to know who they are.
Books by Ananda Devi have been translated into several languages. Perfectly trilingual in French, English, and Creole, she did her own English translation for her novel Pagli. Her most recent novel, Indian Tango, takes place in New Delhi.
Lectures
A question of engagement
Are you a politically engaged writer? Writers are often asked this question. They may indeed ask it of themselves without being able to provide a clear answer.
In my case, the question did not arise for most of my writing career: I felt the need to jealously preserve my solitude, remaining out of the confines of the world to better observe it, using the byways of the imagination to better penetrate the truth of beings, and rejecting the label of feminist and politically engaged writer to enjoy an individualistic freedom that I needed to defend and protect at all times.
But then, something happened: at the age of fifty, I began to reconsider this stance; to contradict my own convictions; to go against my own nature. Was this the result of the wisdom brought by age, or a sudden and totally inexplicable reversal? I will try to provide some answers in this text.
Writing or psychoanalysis?
I am not a psychoanalyst. I have been, for a short period, a linguist. I believe I am above all a poet. But it became clear very early on that, to be a poet, one needed to be both the material being sculpted and the sculptor, one had to delve into one’s subconscious to extricate rich and multiple incarnations from it, and to dig into the closed space of the intimate with the trowel of words.
I am quite purposely indulging in a series of metaphors. Writing has always been, for me, a way of drawing from the exacerbated splendor of language and the hidden dualities beneath its surface. I create myself through my words. I turn myself into anything I desire, something better, at any rate, something stronger, more ardent, that I give to the page, briefly appeased. Outside the act of writing, I am nothing.
This is why I am convinced that writers suffer from incipient schizophrenia. Their only good fortune is that it is expressed in words rather than acts.
I will draw from the concrete example of one of my novels to explain this, to become, in a way, my subject, to explain what I feel to be a dual, psychoanalytic and poetic act, which must nevertheless pass through the mediation of language to take place.
Langage(s), writing(s) and identitie(s)
You could say that Mauritians live in a translated universe, since from childhood onwards, we are called upon to juggle Creole and Bhojpuri, English and French, Hindi and Mandarin, all these ancestral languages heard in every day life. It is with our minds full of words, sounds, intonations, accents, understood or not, mastered or not, that we move forward in life.
Does this better prepare us for a multilingual world? Are we high wire dancers of language or, on the contrary, jacks of all trades mastering none? What is, in this symphony or cacophony, the foundation of our common culture, of our understanding of one another? These questions are not trivial. They cannot be. The proximity of language and identity is such that their separation can be nothing less than a rupture.
And yet, to solve our unresolved identity issues by using a language inherited from colonization … can this be the answer ?
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