Walking on fire: Limits,transgressions and possibilities in the worlds of literature. An interview with Ananda Devi

To start off, I’d like to ask you some questions about your recent visibility in the Anglophone world. Ève de ses Décombres (2006) was both a highly consecrated book in the Francophone world and one whose translation into English was met with a lot of deserved critical acclaim in the English-speaking world. Your book, Les Jours Vivants (2013), has just been translated into English. What is the effect in France of the acclaim that you have accumulated in the Anglophone world?

It’s always considered a major recognition when a Francophone writer is translated into English, because so few are. The percentage of novels books translated into English is extremely small (indeed, the famous ‘3% problem’, indicating the percentage of novels translated into English every year still seems to hold true today), and it is an uphill battle for most publishers and writers, except if the book was a best-seller in its original language. My books have been translated in several languages since the early 2000s, including Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Rumanian, Finnish and a few others (Ève de ses décombres alone has been translated in 10 languages), but only four in English: Pagli (my own translation, published by Rupa publications in India and now out of print), Indian Tango (2007), Ève de ses décombres and Les jours vivants. However, the last two novels have indeed received some critical acclaim, including articles in The Guardian and the New Yorker as well as in the Irish Times, so I feel that I am getting to be known at least by critics. However, unless one of my books wins a prize in English, it will not have an enormous impact on the way my books are received in French. I already have a faithful readership in French and am known to a large number of French critics, and therefore their interest in my work will not be influenced to a significant degree by the fact that I am translated into English. Despite the feeling of recognition this affords, I do not feel that it will represent a major change in my position in the French literary world.

Do you find yourself being framed differently in English and in French? What possible identities are available to Francophone writers as they move between literary worlds (i.e. Francophone to Anglophone)?

I do feel that the approach of critics as well as universities to my novels in the Anglophone world is in a way ‘constrained’ by the prisms through which the work of most writers from former colonies is seen: that is, post-colonialism, racism, sexual exploitation etc. In France, I felt for a long time constrained by the identifying tags that were appended to my name, such as Mauritian writer, Indo-Mauritian writer, writer of Indian origin, African writer, Franco- Mauritian writer, Francophone writer, Indian Ocean writer, woman writer, feminist writer etc. This has changed in recent years to simply Mauritian writer or writer of Mauritian origin, which is fine by me. But in the Anglophone world, and especially with The Living Days (2020c), I felt that the labels and tags were restrictive and prevented the novel from being read in all its complexity and ambiguity. That the relationship between Mary and Cub is seen as being racist and paedophilic does not match my intention or my vision of this relationship and of these two characters. Yes, they are from two planets that co-exist in one country, England, but had not come within each other’s orbits until that particular day when they meet, and obviously the age disparity could be looked at from the point of view of paedophilia, but what is important to me is that they are people, not categories, and Mary’s wonder when she sees Cub for the first time is not the wonder of a white woman looking at a black young man, but of a woman who has all her life been denied the discovery of desire and who suddenly finds it in her seventy-five year old body and mind. Cub is almost the adult in their relationship. I am not making a statement about paedophilia or about condoning the exploitation of children. But I am trying to understand both of them from the inside, without putting labels on them or applying a judgemental attitude that would prevent them from meeting and knowing each other. They exist outside me as a writer, and therefore follow their own paths. It is a very fine line to tread, a very difficult position to defend; but I am delving into female desire at any age, and in this case it is not about sexual exploitation and it is not solely about a black/white relationship. It’s also about the myriad possibilities of human relationships. I feel that these aspects of the novel were better understood in the Francophone world than in the Anglophone world. I also feel that I have reached a point in France where I am no longer seen only in terms of labels and tags and national or regional identities. Maybe at last I am seen as just a writer. I don’t feel I am there in the Anglophone world as yet.

You have often talked about the recognition that comes with publishing with Gallimard, the hostility met by the series ‘Continents noirs’ in which some of your novels have been published as well as the acceptance, on the part of writers from the South, of the ‘compromises’ entailed. Could you perhaps elaborate on what you mean by ‘compromises’ in relation to your own literary trajectory?

The series ‘Continents noirs’ made a splash when it was created, but it was a negative splash. The quality of the physical books at the time (it was created in 2000) was not good, even though this has changed considerably since. The preface that appeared in every book was terrible. It could be seen as very paternalistic, a kind of remnant of colonialism, and was seen as such by critics, journalists and writers. However, at the time it was created, the doors to the major publishers in France were far from open to writers who were not from France. They had one or two flagship writers from the African continent, from the Maghreb or from the Caribbean, but the majority of writers from these spaces were confined to small publishers and were almost never reviewed by the mainstream critics. I believe I am fairly representative of the generation of writers who had to struggle for many years before being accepted by a major publisher. They waited for us to make a name with tiny publishers before offering us any kind of opportunity. Therefore, when a writer I met at a book festival told me about this new Gallimard collection, and advised me to send a text to the director of the collection, I did not have to think about it. I was not aware at the time of the negative way in which the collection was seen, and was just keen to be published by Gallimard (I was at the time published by a small publisher, Dapper, who had just launched their new literary series). When my novel Pagli was accepted, I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted and a very long wait had come to an end. I was in my early forties at the time, and had often been dispirited by the struggle to find a publisher. In fact, Pagli (2001) was well-received by the critics, as were the three other books I published in that series. Soupir (2002) was short-listed for the Renaudot prize. Most of the critics who still follow me today got to know me from that time with Continents Noirs. However, after four books, I felt that it was time for me to move out of the ‘regional’ straightjacket that this series still represented at the time, publishing mostly writers who were not of French origin, and in a way characterised by a kind of exclusion from the mainstream. After I wrote Ève de ses décombres, I sent the manuscript to two other publishers, who both accepted it with enthusiasm. But when I told the director of Continents Noirs that I was leaving Gallimard, he told me he would propose the manuscript to Antoine Gallimard for publication in their main collection, the most prestigious NRF series called . . . la Blanche! At that time, none of the writers published in Continents Noirs had been accepted by la Blanche. But my novel was accepted, and since from my childhood onwards I had dreamed of being published in this prestigious series, I accepted it. After that, I felt that anything was a ‘bonus’, that I had fulfilled a dream and could be satisfied with where my writing career had arrived. Of course, this was a momentary feeling of fulfilment, for my real purpose and objective is for each new book to be better than the last, to explore other territories, to go further than the last, both in content and in the stylistic choices. I don’t know if I will be able to achieve this, but I can still try . . .

The 2007 Manifesto ‘pour une littérature-monde en français’ [towards a world literature in French], you explained, was meant for the French literary establishment; it was a way to push against the marginalization of your work and demand the kind of recognition given to writers of French ancestry. Do you see your work being read and received differently now (post-Manifesto) than it was before (pre-Manifesto)?

I engaged in a reflection on this for the ten-year anniversary of the Manifesto. I believe that the Manifesto did bring about a reflection among the French literary establishment, journalists and bookshops about the arbitrary categorisation of writers as ‘French’ and as ‘Francophone’, with all writers who are not of French origin being lumped into the latter, even if they were born in France, and the franco-français writers, that is, white and of French nationality, belonging to the former. At the very least, it gave rise to heated debates, to the point where I began to feel frustrated by the fact that for some time after its publication, the conversation was about it rather than these writers’ work itself. But the change was coming in any case, and writers like Alain Mabanckou, Atiq Rahimi, Nancy Huston, Fatou Diome and others were already receiving recognition and major literary prizes. I think the Manifesto crystallised some of the thinking behind the existing disparity, but I do not think it brought about that huge change by itself: the times were right for the change to happen. It hasn’t so much changed the way my own work is read and received, I think this would have happened any way, but it has changed the way the younger generation of writers who would have been called Francophone at that time have now become part of French-language writers, and have seen the doors of the major publishers open widely for them. They arrive on the scene with none of the anxiety and frustration that those of my generation felt when starting out. They are able to become part of the literary scene without reticence and without the fear that they will be negatively categorised. Their voices are heard everywhere, they have a kind of confidence that is wonderful to see. These voices are even dominating the French literary scene today: Nathacha Appanah, Kaouter Adimi, Mackenzy Orcel, Mbougar Mohammed Sarr, to name but a few, are all major voices that have conquered their space without having to carry the label of Francophone writer and I think this is a wonderful achievement!

Ceux du Large (2017), your trilingual poetry collection on the global migration crisis, is a work that is intensely invested in ‘travelling’, in crossing linguistic, cultural, and national borders. The free translations into English and Mauritian Creole, form a triangular hermeneutic structure with French, the language the poems were initially written in, and help parse the layers of your poetry. One of the lines reads ‘L’ocean n’a plus de nom’ [the ocean no longer has a name] but is interestingly translated as ‘the ocean erases faces and names’ (35) in English, and ‘losean in bliye ziska to nom’ [the ocean has forgotten even your name] (61) in Creole, breaking each time to some degree from the original pronouncement. Meanings shift and, like the frothy ooze of the sea, seem to accrue in the fissures between the languages, each bubbling over to inform, thwart or augment one another. In Prismatic Translation (2019), Matthew Reynolds writes that conflict is constitutive of the exercise of translation. Yet being versed in all the three languages, and being simultaneously author and translator here, you are in a way very actively responsible for the creative disjunctions between each version. I wonder how much of this ‘conflict’ – the contrasting energies of the translations – is a wilful orchestration, as opposed to being necessarily an inevitable consequence of translation, as implied by Reynolds.

You’ve condensed my work process in this collection in an absolutely beautiful way. Yes, the three parts of the book, each in a different language, were a conversation with myself, with each other and with my readers about how fluid barriers are and should be, whether between places or people or languages, how ocean-like poetry is, as it washes those inner shores that we dream about and that we live to reach and die to reach. It is the beginning of yearning and sometimes the end of hope. So, yes, it is a free re-writing from the original French, but it was more than that: I had just written the French series in 2016 when I was invited for a book tour in the US for the publication of Eve out of her Ruins. My visit coincided with the 2016 election campaign in the US. My publisher was from Texas and wanted to include Houston and Austin in my tour because of the importance of ‘other’ voices in the climate of the times. As I read and heard about Donald Trump’s campaign speeches, I realised that he was giving free rein to a language of hate that had until then not been so openly expressed. He was opening the cage to beasts of violence, misogyny, racism and demagogy in an unprecedented way (unless you go back to the darker hours of history), and I was horrified by it, by his promise to build a wall, by the way he played on people’s fear of the Other, by his use of populism to gain a following. I decided there and then to translate some of the poems, which were so resonant with these fears, into English, so that I could read them in public every time I could do so. The urgency of this translation, done in the evenings in between talks and travelling, fed by my heightening horror at what was happening, led to the slippage of meanings, but felt totally valid, almost ineluctable. So yes, l’océan n’a plus de nom relates to the fact that geographies become anonymous as migrants try to cross endless spaces towards l’autre versant des possibles, the other side of possibilities, but in the English version, the sea actually erases them, their faces and their names because when they arrive, they are seen as an invading herd, not people, not faces, not names. The passive rejection and forgetting becomes active erasure. And in Creole, we have yet another change linked to history: the ocean has forgotten their names, because their crossing took place so long ago and the process of erasure has been finalised by the double murders of slavery and indentureship. This forgetting is so violent in the case of the descendants of slaves, as they lost their original cultures, languages, geographies and identities, and the new ones had to be forged in pain and humiliation, that today still they suffer from this loss and can only painfully rebuild themselves in the face of a country that also very often tries to erase them. History plays a huge part in this collection of poetry, and as translation is not just a process but a becoming, this history infused the three versions as they were being written.

So, yes, there are many changes and slippages between the three, as if they were voices responding to each other rather than repeating each other. I did go back and forth between the three languages as new ideas came into being in each version, but I did not force them into a single meaning because they were each different, each with a specific song that also reflected my inner multiplicity and hybridity. No conflict but a three-headed hydra? Of course, it is translation of a different kind, which I completely acknowledge because I have also translated other authors and would never take such liberties, but I do encourage translators working on my books to follow their intuition and to listen to the song rather than force words into overly restrictive meanings.

You published recently another, very different and very personal, poetry collection, Danser Sur tes Braises suivi de Six Décennies (2020a), an homage to your mother as well as the women who came before you. The work is also a meditation on the sometimes-fraught child-parent relationship, on matrilineal lineage, inheritance, debt, the feeling that something is owed at the expense of the self. You write, ‘you would have wanted me to be your secret revenge . . . But I had my own path to follow; my demons to face’ ¹ (12). Later we have the impression that you see this hankering after autonomy as an act of betrayal. You write, ‘I tell myself that I have not served you well, neither you nor the generations that precede you . . . Should I not have been one of those women who are not afraid of anything . . .’ ² (20). The titular notion of firewalking, the idea of wading into the burning embers of an ancestor, carries with it the idea of filial obligation, and the flip side of that imperative, the risk of burning, of imperilling the self. Of course, in Hinduism, firewalking is both patriarchal edict and act of faith. Draupadi walks, unscathed, through fire, which you hint at through this beautiful line later where you write about coming to understand ‘the extent to which myths are anchored in us and convince us to dance permanently on embers’ ³ (22). Firewalking is also present in your novel, Le Voile de Draupadi (1993), albeit as an abetment to what is seen as the duty of your heroine Anjali, as a necessarily feminine bargaining with God. ‘Danser’ however lends new inflection to this act, a certain wilfulness, freedom, maybe, delight and jubilation even, something approaching a politics of embodied happiness. Can you speak about this collection and its title? I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on the evolving imagery of fire in your work. Is there something about it that makes it amenable to the kind of stories you tell?

I would like to address the first part of your analysis: about the feeling that my mother was expecting her daughters to fulfil the dreams and ambitions she was unable to fulfil because of the generation she was born in and the condition of women at the time, and that in some way I had failed her. It isn’t exactly autonomy I resented, but the responsibility and the weight of this expectation. And although I have completely fulfilled her dreams in becoming the writer I am today, having objectively achieved a lot, I used to feel that as a woman, I was not sufficiently strong, sufficiently free, sufficiently powerful to earn her respect. This is where the feeling of having betrayed, not only her, but the previous generations of women, comes from: I have not gone as far as I could, as I should, in so far as I conformed to a certain type of female behaviour, to certain roles, when I should perhaps have chosen another road. However, this in no way diminishes my sense of having served the gods of art and writing to my utmost ability, and I do not look down on that part of my persona, of my being. It is the other part, the more quotidian part, the one whom I sometimes see as the ineffectual double of the strong, fearless writer, that I so often question.

Yes, the symbolism of fire is a leitmotiv in almost all my books, probably because my mother related the major Hindu myths to me from early childhood onwards, and I think the idea of Sita having to go through the ordeal of fire to prove her fidelity was utterly frightening to the imaginative child I was; in addition, Mauritians of Tamil origin perform this ritual where they walk on live embers, and the myth goes that Draupadi extends her veil over the embers to prevent them from burning. I was born a Hindu, but I am not a believer in organised religion and moved early on away from the fanaticism it generates. When I got married, my husband was from a very orthodox family that practised all these rites, and I had to make it clear that I would not follow them. The idea of the novel Le voile de Draupadi came from a real incident where I was seriously ill in 1985, and my husband told me that I could make a ‘promise’ to accomplish one of these rites to ask for my health back. I was in hospital at the time and I said that I would never do anything like this, but the idea was a very strong one and I wrote the first draft of this novel by hand in my hospital bed, pushing the stakes even further by making it a sick child for whom the mother, who is a non-believer, is asked to accomplish the ritual.

So, walking on fire is a kind of symbolic fil conducteur both as a woman and as a writer, because as a writer I also push myself to extreme limits that are sometimes almost dangerous in that I find it difficult to come back to normality afterwards. After writing Le sari vert (2009), for example, I had lived in my narrator’s head for so long and had pursued this exploration of violence to such an extreme that afterwards I didn’t know how I would ‘ground’ myself again. I needed to write the last chapter, where the women get their voice back, to finally feel whole. When I wrote the last pages of my novel Manger l’autre (2018), I called one of my sisters and told her I had crossed another limit of what is bearable. And she said that I had been doing this all my life as a writer. Anyway, what I am saying is that I don’t write in a detached, lucid, intellectual way; it is not just a mental process. It is a process that encompasses mind and body, emotions and thought, and the more I feel my body is contained in each word, the more I feel I am doing what I set out to do.

But I am glad you noticed the change from ‘walking’ to ‘dancing’! From book to book, I have also changed as a person. My female protagonists, for example, went from being victims as in Le voile de Draupadi to being avengers as in Ève de ses décombres (not the Marvel-type, obviously!) to being free of the burden of family as in Indian Tango. Danser sur tes braises is an ode to my mother, to whom I owe so much, but also a way of saying goodbye, although she died in 1993. It so happens that this book was published when I reached her dying age. And I think this is an important milestone, because the second part of the book, Six décennies, talks about how the body can still rejoice in being, after six decades of existence! In this sense, yes, I am saying goodbye to my mother (and father), but also saying hello to this woman who might at last start to move closer to the writer who, from adolescence onwards, was a fearless and driven being who knew what she wanted to do in life.

Fire is still playing a huge role in my current work, I am not done with it!

Fardo (2020b), your latest work, might be described as an ekphrastic piece of lyrical nonfiction. You are not exactly writing about a visual art object, but you do draw on two ‘corps’, to use your own term, from the Musée des Confluences in Lyon (France), the mummy of a Yschma weaver and the tombal remains of a Koban woman, to convey to the reader what is at the moment of encounter necessarily an ‘aesthetic’ experience, and then to reflect on a broad range of things: death, life, the migration crisis, otherness or what you describe as ‘la terreur de l’autre’ [the fear of the other] (44), the condition of women (historically and globally), your own writing, the powers of art and poetry etc. Do you see this work as treading similar creative grounds as the practice of ekphrasis? Regardless of the technical appellation, is there something about the fact of taking inspiration from these particular ‘objects’ that allows you to talk so organically about the things mentioned above?

I had to look up the definition of ekphrasis, but yes, it does follow this practice, which is a fairly frequent one, uniting writers and works of art, whether under the impulse of a writer or of a Museum or of an artist. I have often written texts for photographers’ books, as I like the exercise and welcome any kind of challenge or exercice de style where the constraint becomes the point of emergence of inspiration. A writer’s craft can be honed by such constraints, as the Oulipo movement in France, with its foremost writer, George Perrec, demonstrated in an extreme way. When I am asked to write on a specific subject, I am interested in exploring new avenues that I would probably not have followed on my own. The one that was most distant from my interests was when I was asked to contribute to an anthology entitled Nouvelles d’Afrique Nouvelles de Foot, published on the occasion of the 2010 Football World Cup. I found it both amusing and challenging!

Thus, when the Musée des Confluences of Lyon asked me to participate in their series Récits d’objets, and to write a novella or non-fiction book on one of their objects, I readily accepted. But I was unsure whether my take would be wholly fictional, as the short-story I wrote for the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Lyon on the painting by Géricault, La Monomane de l’Envie, or whether it would be more personal. It ended up being the latter, because I was going through an intense period of self-doubt, and, as I was in the train to Lyon, I kept thinking about what would happen if there was absolutely no trigger, no spark, no fire. I started writing about my state of mind while on the train, having no idea which object I would write about. Then I arrived at this beautiful museum, at the confluence of two great rivers, I started the visit in the room of the dead and . . . everything followed on from this. As soon as I saw the two dead bodies, the skeleton of a woman surrounded by her jewels and adornments and a tea-set, and the half-lit crouching mummy of whom I was told she was buried in a fardo consisting of cotton fibres, the spark fired. The homonymy of fardo and fardeau (burden) was too irresistible.

I would perhaps not have been able to write in such a personal way fifteen years ago. For the major part of my writing life, I have been wholly immersed in fiction, which allowed me, at ten or twelve years old, to live other lives in places I could not reach. But it so happens that the fact of writing becomes your way of understanding your own life, not just the world. And so, when I wrote Les hommes qui me parlent (2011), the book started in real time, with my writing down my feelings at the time and going on through a difficult period of my life. This painful realisation led me to more autobiographical ventures, and in the end to Fardo. Perhaps that was the only way I could engage with this project.

The appropriation of human remains and other culturally significant objects by ‘outsiders’ for scientific, academic or heritage ends can raise ethical questions. Reading Fardo (2020b) I couldn’t help but think how very opposite the work of a poet is. A poet never lays claim to anything. There is a kind of reciprocity in your interaction with the two women, as though they’re talking to you, and you’re just an interpreter, a friend. You write with aching lyricism, sensitivity and humility about these women, their remains, their silences. This work, as you write in the book, is an offering to them. About the Yschma woman, you write, ‘I would have liked to share the night with her. To be alone with her, to accompany her silence, to hold her hand beyond the glass panel, and above all, to tell her that she is not forgotten’ ⁴ (57). There is a sense of being-with, that is the antithesis of the ownership of the other, the violent trespassing into otherness that you explore in relation to the Magistrate’s relationship with the barbarian girl in J.M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (2004 [1980]). Could you comment on this?

Oh, what a wonderful way you have of reading my books! I am amazed at your insight. What happened on that day was the realisation that these bodies had ‘survived’ through millennia to reach us today, and that these women were living, breathing people. These bones existed then. If we touched them, we would be touching people who had actually lived. It could seem as if this had nothing to do with art, which is the representation of reality, but rather with existence, with survival, with extinction, with remanence, and yet, it is also what artists try to do, not appropriate a subject but join with them to perpetuate them in a wholly individual way. Art tries to grasp the transitory to make it eternal or intemporal. What I mean to say is that history, for instance, tries to grasp periods of time through a process of description, of analysis, of reconstitution. But it often remains a cold representation where, as I say in the book, you cannot feel individuals living, breathing, dying. The Musée des Confluences tries to go beyond this coldness and to make us feel the presence of its subjects. And I felt as though I wanted to be, yes, at the service of these two women of the past, through my words express the reverence I felt for them at that moment, and how we are linked by this intemporal thread, fabric, fardo that we all experience. There is no sense of possessiveness, no game of power and dominance as is played in every society. In this book, as in the Musée, there was a respect for the infinity of the universe, the rich tapestry of life on our planet, and the wonder of the many, many cultures and civilisations that have existed since mankind has existed. These cultural artifacts (created by individuals) are finally the true expression of human contribution to the planet, a continuity and an understanding, as opposed to social structures that have always played on hierarchies, domination, conflicts, oppression, wars, to lead to the depredation and devastation we are witnessing today. Which political leader would look at my ladies from Ychsma and Koban and feel a reverence about the sheer fact of their having existed? And yes, I would have liked to have spent a night alone with them, immobile as they are, reflecting on all these chains that link us and bind us.

Are you currently working on anything that you can tell us about? And do you find your experience of the pandemic and the lockdown filtering in or colouring your creative process in any way?

The effect of the lockdown has been to make me realise how much I needed a down time to write, and how much travelling, even though it is a pleasure to be invited everywhere to talk about my books, has been a stress over the past few years. I am lucky to live in an airy house with a garden, in a region of France that is not overly urbanised, so that I could take long walks and listen to the silence – the absence of cars, the absence of planes, the absence of machines –, which made me realise how harsh noise pollution can be. The revival of nature was immediately visible. I had never seen so many bees around the cherry tree in thirty years. Butterflies, birds, although always present, were even more numerous. Our garden was an explosion of colours. And yes, I wrote, I remembered to breathe and I wrote.

So, despite the anxiety of the times, my worry for my adult children who live in other countries, my sadness for not being able to see my three-year old grandson, and the contemplation of the devastation that the pandemic was wreaking on people’s health but also their livelihood and futures, I found that I was able to channel all of this, both the good and the bad, into my writing. I completed within a few weeks two novels that I had started over the past two years but did not seem to be able to finish. One, entitled Le jour des caméléons, is set in Mauritius and has an appropriately apocalyptic feel, as a lone incident triggers widespread riots on the island while chameleons watch all this and bide their time, knowing that the day of reckoning for humans has arrived. The other, which will be published in September, is entitled Le Rire des Déesses. It is set in India, and the main protagonists are a prostitute and her daughter, while the narrator is a Hijra. The daughter is abducted by a Hindu swami who pretends she is the Goddess Kali’s incarnation. But the mother, the Hijra and other prostitutes who love the little girl unite to follow a pilgrimage led by the swami in order to get her back. And to wreak their vengeance, like true Goddesses!

So that’s where I am right now. Writers are familiar with solitude; it doesn’t frighten us. But the uncertainty about the future, the horror of finding extremists ruling the world, the feeling of rushing down a slope and towards an abyss are constantly on my mind, and I am wondering where hope lies.