This summer, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies hosted a weekend conference at the Kylemore Abbey Global Centre in Ireland, bringing together several past recipients of the Laura Shannon Prize—one of the preeminent book prizes in the European studies field, which carries an award of $10,000—alongside Notre Dame graduate students, faculty, and guest authors. The conference theme, Storytelling from the Margins, invited reflection on how certain voices and narratives have been historically pushed to the periphery—and what that means for both those storytellers and the world of literature today.
This conversation between Professor Alison Rice of the University of Notre Dame and acclaimed Mauritian author Ananda Devi, recipient of the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, covered Devi’s approach to storytelling, her numerous influences, and her experience in writing "from the margins." The discussion concluded with a reading from Devi's most recent novel, Manger l’Autre, and a Q&A with the audience.
Transcript included below.
Alison Rice: Hello. My name is Alison Rice, and I am a professor of French and Francophone literature at the University of Notre Dame. We are here at Notre Dame in Ireland, at the precise location of Kylemore Abbey, on a very beautiful evening with the torrential rain coming down outside and gorgeous hills in the foggy distance. It is my great honor to introduce to you Ananda Devi, who is an author I have been crazy about for a very long time, and I have brought some of her books but could not bring all of them because my bags were not big enough to transport them across the Atlantic. We are just thrilled to have a very prolific, very exciting, very innovative author who has won major awards both in France and in the United States, most recently, the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She has been active for a very long time, started writing, of course, as a youngster, started publishing at almost the age of 20. Were you just 19 when publishing began? This is a sort of mythical age in the French tradition to begin at, and extremely young.
We are here also as a collectivity to talk about storytelling. Storytelling is a vast term that has taken on, perhaps in recent times, even vaster implications. You have long been a storyteller, we might say, but if you don't mind taking us back to those early moments and maybe what made storytelling, or not, a compelling thing for you is something I'd love for you to address. Also, admittedly, stories don't always come together properly, and not everything lends itself to a story. Has that always been something you've grappled with? Has there been a need for a Disney narrative that wraps up very neatly for you, or have you approached writing and the storytelling of your writing in a different way from the beginning, or have you done it differently?
Ananda Devi: Well, thank you, Alison, and thank you everybody for being here. It’s, as you said, a lovely evening because I think it’s the absolutely best atmosphere for storytelling. The only thing missing is a campfire.
To go back to that time, so many, many years ago, I think storytelling begins in the family. Generally, for most children, it begins with the family. Very often, children are natural storytellers, even just to themselves. They’re telling stories in their own minds. I remember very well as a very young child that whenever I was alone, I was constantly having—engaging in a sort of dialogue—but an imaginary dialogue, building stories, telling myself whatever was happening somewhere in the world. It sort of grew up with me in part because I was an extremely silent and very, very shy child. So I wouldn't speak out in front of people unless it was my close family, or even in the classroom, or anything like that. I think that reading became first, before writing, the means of actually finding the place and the people I could talk to, who are not real, but who were perhaps more real in my mind than those I was meeting in everyday life.
So there was, on the one hand, the silence that made me turn toward writing, but on the other hand, both my parents loved telling stories. My father would read stories from—either in French or in English—to us, and my mother would tell stories from an oral Hindu tradition, Indian mythologies, but in two very different contexts. My father was at bedtime, or whenever we had time to be together, sitting, and he would read the stories. For my mother, it was in everyday life; she might be cooking and suddenly remember a scene from the Ramayana or the Mahabharata and start telling about it. But one thing I realized much later on was that it was always from a very feminist perspective. She would tell us these stories and end with a little sort of coda, I would say, where she would give the lesson without it being a lesson. "Well, you see, this person who was supposed to be God, who was supposed to be an incarnation and an exemplary person, but when it came to how he treated his wife, he wasn’t that much." And you know, it was sort of—or she would stress the political aspect of those religious stories.
I think with both these sorts of influences, plus the reading, which I started at a very young age and then sort of never stopped, it created a—it was a sort of world that I was moving into, or doors that were opening on a world. Because I was from a very, very small village in Mauritius. Mauritius is already a small island, 2,000 square kilometers, so it’s really a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. And Trois Boutiques, which is the village I came from, is even tinier. It wasn’t even a village, it was a hamlet, and it had three shops. It used to have three shops, which is why it was called Trois Boutiques. But then when I was born, there were only two.
At that time, in the 1960s, the only way of traveling, or moving out of, discovering the world, was through books. Whenever my father would go to the capital city, Port Louis, for his—he had a sugarcane plantation—so in order to buy the things he needed, he would always stop at a secondhand bookshop in Port Louis and buy piles of books and bring a box. I think he didn’t—well, he would choose some he would choose because he loved them—but mostly it was a very, very eclectic type of collection of books, French and English, both very literary books like Victor Hugo or Shakespeare, or very—you know, what they called it in French, roman-de-gare [airport novels]. But also he and my mother loved "who done it's," you know, that kind of Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes. So there would be that whole sort of mix of high literature and less high, or low literature. And for us, the girls, whenever my father would come back home on Saturdays, it was like waiting for Father Christmas to come, because we could delve in and read whatever we wanted, which is something—I mean, they didn't prevent us from reading anything by saying it’s too adult for you or anything like that. So we read and read, and it was our mostly our main pastime. It was before television, before, obviously, computers and internet and all that.
I will never exactly be able to pinpoint why I started writing. That’s the one thing which remains very, very mysterious, because as I said, I was writing stories in my mind, but I then started putting them down on paper and suddenly finding I couldn't stop. For a long time, I thought that was normal, for everybody to write, and slowly, and I wouldn't show my writings to anybody, and then slowly at school, the teachers started sort of reading my essays, when I was about 10 or 11, sometimes asking who wrote it, or thinking maybe my parents had written them. And I would say no, and then they started taking an interest in what I was doing. So I would say maybe around the age of 12, I sort of—I wouldn’t say knew, but wanted to be a writer. So I started writing longer stories, which I called "novels" in my mind. The thing was at that time, I used to always set them outside Mauritius. So we had this atlas of the world, and I would open it at random on a page and close my eyes and put my finger on the place, and I would choose that place to set the story in and imagine what it was like. So at the beginning it was like sort of going away from Mauritius; I didn't think of writing about what was around me, until I was around 15. Then I sort of discovered, through the Alliance Française, the library of the Alliance Française, books from African writers, from the African continent. And that was a major discovery for me because at school we never read them. These books were not taught. We only taught classical French, English literature, not even contemporary ones. But discovering those writers who were writing at that time about the fight for independence, and from a continent that was closer to Mauritius than Europe or India, and finding the—discovering the language with which they were using, especially for the French language for me, the way they were taking the language and sort of bullying it into doing something completely different, very far from the classical tropes that we used to read. And that was like a sort of a major eye-opener for me. And that was, perhaps by coincidence, the year there was a competition, a writing competition which was organized by French Radio Television at the time called RTF, and which was a short story competition and open to the world basically for writing in French. And I sent my story, and it won a prize. It was published, and it was read on radio, and it sort of, you know, was the first step. After that, discovering the short story was an amazing, a very powerful learning tool for me because I was, I think, at that age, you can't really write novels. You don't have enough experience, you don't know enough, but writing short stories was an amazing, amazing way of being able to get something from the immediate experience and then turn it into something that you want to say more about what you thought about life in general. So I wrote from that age onwards—for the next four years before I left for my studies—I sort of wrote many, many short stories, which were, well, 10 of which were published in that first collection.
Alison Rice: No, it's excellent. Thank you for these insights into... I love this idea of multilingualism and, of course, the many, many traditions and genres that you were, of course, exposed to early on and that there wasn't necessarily a hierarchy that was in place in the joy of discovering these boxes of books and all of this and bathing in it. And when you say you enjoyed saying, at a young age, you know, "I'm writing my novels" or conceiving of them as novels, was there a way that you came across writing as you continued to progress and an approach that sort of made you say, "Here's how I distinguish myself as an author"? I'm thinking particularly about our gathering here and our storytelling from the margins, as we're calling it. Margins being something, of course, we can interpret in many ways. We could, of course, see the island of Mauritius as a margin of France and the Francophone world, perhaps. But, you know, marginal means of bringing to the forefront in a major literary work, perhaps marginal characters who aren't often represented, etc.
Ananda Devi: Yes, this is really absolutely true because, as I said, when we were at school, we never read about ourselves. You read about the center, about a sort of—you build an image of what it is to write, and it’s been in a way lucky that I started that young without having that realization that I couldn't possibly do what they're doing. I started doing it before realizing what I was doing. So I didn't think about being outside or being marginal in any way. Or about having to explain what I was writing to a particular public or readership, because at that time I wasn't thinking as a child of publishing immediately, obviously. So I was writing basically for myself, and not thinking of the—all that explanation that you have to do—I mean, especially at that time in the '70s, where most of the writers who were coming from this margin felt that they had to write for the center, and that they had to sort of include an explanation of what was happening.
I probably do it without realizing it in my books because, obviously, I'm still writing in French and being published in France, so somewhere that readership has to understand what I'm saying. But I never wrote with the idea that I have to explain everything. So maybe sort of my generation, at least for Mauritians who were writing after independence, it was no longer an idea of having to make it, sort of to present it on the platter to the literary centers but to try to bring them towards an understanding of what we were writing about. So, yes, we were writing from the margin, but we were also saying, "Well, you have to make that effort to come and understand what we're talking about.". So the first novel which I sent to publishers, Rue la poudrière, I sent it, that was after my studies, because there was a kind of hiatus while I was studying in London. I did write short stories. I did write small pieces, but there was such a—well, it was such a digression, such a huge change from coming from Mauritius, going to London in the '70s, having to adjust to a society that was, you know, completely closed, in a way, to foreigners. And, of course, there wasn't telephone; there weren't mails. So there were letters from my father and so we were—I was waiting every week for that letter from my father. But that sort of—I think there was quite such a huge change in my life that writing sort of took a step back while I was studying. But then immediately afterwards, I—well, I never stopped, but then I went back seriously working on that novel. When I sent it to the major sort of French publishers, some of the reactions I got were, "You write very beautifully, but we think you need more 'couleur locale'" [local color]. Which is sort of, you know. Because it was set in Port Louis, in a kind of completely dark… I mean, like, you don't see the beaches, you don't see the tropical island, you don't see the sun hardly. You know, it's a very, very, very dark story. I have to say, myself, now when I read it, I think, "My goodness." It's really such a tragedy. But the thing is they said "couleur locale," which is very strange because it was about that local color. It was what was happening after independence, out of poverty, and people just trying to survive. And so I couldn't really understand what they wanted. So finally it was accepted by an African publisher, Nouvelles Editions Africaines, and it was published. But when they wanted to send it. (It was published in 1988, but I wrote it in 1984) to booksellers in Mauritius, these bookshops, I mean the people who were responsible, wrote and said, "Oh, we think it's too harsh a story for our readership.". You know, it's too—too tragic and then people will say, "Why is this woman from a sort of good Hindu family, a good Indian family, writing about the Creole people in Port Louis?". And so there was this two extremes of reactions, and I—I was in the middle and couldn't maybe find a place, I think, for a readership. And this actually lasted a long time, where I couldn't be categorized. Either like the sort of writers from the Caribbean were, you know, they were already fairly established, like Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, you know, all these writers who had a presence in the French literary world. But it was also about this kind of tropical island. So they were sort of waiting maybe for something similar on my part. Or else maybe they were thinking of the Indian sort of type of writing. And I wasn't—it wasn't easy to sort of know maybe how, where to—I was situated in this. And for me that this specific hybridity was so important that I felt I had such a—I had been lucky in having this cultural heritage from India, having a completely Western education, having the African influence from my Creole identity and the African continent and African literary family that I felt so close to, that it was for me an amazingly enriching and powerful to seep into everything I was writing about. But then it made me perhaps too difficult to sort of put into a little, you know, class of writers. So even though I was—I kept publishing, but with very small publishers, it didn't—it didn't really sort of take off, take off is a big word. It didn't take off until I was in my '40s. So which is a long time when you think about that—that meant 20 years of writing my books and sending them to the publishers and then finding other publishers. So in a way there was a kind of different type of marginality that I was fighting against also. But the one thing I'm happy about is that I didn't do what sometimes writers do in that case, is adapt to what is expected of them. So I think that was a—I was writing what I wanted to write and how I wanted to write. And the other thing criticism I got from the publishers who were refusing me was because I wrote a—I was writing poetically, in a very poetic style, they would say to me, "Well, you have to 'faire la part des choses' [make distinctions], you have to know how to differentiate between poetry and prose.". Which is not today an issue, but it was at that time, in the '80s I'm talking about, you know, "you can't sort of mix up poetry and prose; you have to make a choice.". And this is not a choice I wanted to make because this is how I wanted to write. So that was another area which I thought was I had sort of—in a way—a kind of resistance to those—to what was being imposed from, you know, publishers especially.
Alison Rice: I find that word to be one that does recur in some of your works. Something that characterizes some of your very impactful characters, I think. A resistance to a norm, to what is expected. And also there's a bit of a shock value to a lot of your work. So from the very outset, we might say, some have reacted to that. How have you approached that as well, you know?. Is writing resistance and do we wish to—have you wished to portray individuals who do go against the grain and who might really shock some readers?.
Ananda Devi: Yes, yes. I think it was something that didn't come out of a sort of a deliberate choice. When I read those first short stories that were published in that first collection, I'm sort of surprised to think it was actually everything was there, who I was as a writer, obviously without the experience, the maturity in the style and, you know, but the subject matter was really already there. This need to sort of, especially to say "je" [I], that first-person narrative which is in almost—present in almost all of my books. Where I can really go and put myself into somebody else's skin, I would say. This, it was there from the start. And I think this was what I found so extraordinary and magical about writing was that you could become anything you wanted. And I really, literally mean anything because I could write a story as if I'm a table, or you know, as an animal, or as an old man, or as a woman. So I never felt sort of constrained by my own identity. So, I've lost the thread of what was—
Alison Rice: Just interested in the resistance as it's embodied in some of these really powerful people, often women, of various ages and who you've brought to life.
Ananda Devi: I think this goes back to this idea of silence, of needing to be heard. So I slowly realized it wasn't just me as a person or my character to be a silent person, but that a lot of people who I was seeing around me didn't have any kind of possibility of expressing themselves, of speaking out, of being heard. And so there was also a kind of connection between these two types of silences. One is the one of somebody who's watching, who's looking at the world, who's not just sort of passing on the surface of things but trying to—through mentally delve under the surface of people, trying to guess what's happening. "What is that person thinking about?". And I remember as a teenager, I used to sort of go with my father when he was, you know, during holidays and things like that, and I'd have my little notebook, and I'd sit in the car while he was doing whatever he was doing and look at people. And just look at them. And these—the stories that were coming then just seeing those people living their life or not living, you know, a beggar woman sitting on the pavement, and you start thinking, "Well, what's happening in her mind? What is she thinking about?". And I remember one young girl running. She was a very beautiful adolescent girl with long hair, and she was just running barefoot, passing in front of me. And that image was so powerful that she became a short story, but she became what's also called "the other women running.". You know, like Eve—well, Eve starts not running but sort of limping. Rue la Poudrière's Paul is running. So, I think that image of that girl running barefoot and me wondering, "Where is she going?" trying to follow her in my mind and become her and think, "Well, where is she going? What's happening to her?". And then it sort of, you know, leads on to the stories.
So, yeah, I think that this kind of giving a kind of—I don't like this idea of giving a voice because it's a bit pretentious to say, "I'm giving them a voice." But just trying to be in their mind and thinking, "You know, deeply what is happening to them," and not just letting it flow by. I think we've had this discussion maybe this morning, I think, about making people become visible by the means of fiction and by being able to embody who they are as far as you can.
Alison Rice: Yes. And you've done some very interesting work, I think, in genres that have brought more perhaps of yourself in in more recent years, with a "je" [I] that can represent yourself outside as well as within the text. And a real eye to a variety of ways in which fiction can bring such variety and truth to life. And sort of contemplation of that. And even in our recent age, our current age of AI and, you know, of course, the absolute proliferation of images and social media. You've contemplated this a lot in your written work of fiction, in essays, and I find all of that coming together in just such fascinating ways. And I think the insertion of the self as you've been doing it is mingled with these contemplations of the power of fiction and how it can influence how we see the world.
Ananda Devi: Yeah, I think it’s taken me a long time to admit myself into into my stories, into my writing because I always felt, "You know, I'm not interesting. I'm not interesting myself, and I want to be some—someone who's—". And then slowly I realized, maybe from the time of writing Indian Tango, where one of the characters is a writer, and suddenly I found myself sort of putting in quite a lot of my own experience into that character. And then I started, maybe also with time, thinking, "The experience I have can be used in what I'm saying.". And also being able to express maybe where fiction starts and where, you know, the self ends, maybe, you know. So I've started sort of putting in much more of myself, that's true. But at the same time, I'm absolutely convinced even more nowadays of the power and importance of fiction. Well, writing generally, but also fiction, because that's the only way you can really sort of, as I was saying, go and become the other in in the most sort of the the deepest and most intense way you you can, where you're not just a spectator and just sort of sitting and looking at a screen of people, you know, dying or, you know, sort of or hearing about it and then it just slips by. It's like sort of—at least in a in a book, you have the, you you sort of have the reader in a way staying still for for just the time when they're reading that book, being with these people and living what's what is happening to them and inhabiting their world just for that moment of stillness. Whether it's two hours, or a day, or a week, they are there. They have to stop and they have to think and they have to be, if, you know, you're doing your job the way you should be doing your job. So it's not a superficial encounter with characters or with anecdotes. It's like you have to be inside the life of somebody else. And that's when you understand where that person is coming from and what's happening to them and why is it happening. So to me, that's the place of where you can address the complexity of human beings and their ambiguity also. There are no heroes, there are no maybe no monsters, but they are just people, and they're making these choices. Why are they making these choices?. And this is where you can understand and not just sit in judgment, you know, which I think more and more social media lead toward. It's just sort of a black and white type of relationship with the world, where the judgment is made almost as soon as you, you know, you're putting the words there, and the judgment is made, whereas in writing, there's so much thought that goes into each word, and you come back to it, and you sort of question yourself all the time. And that questioning is something that I think we're missing a lot in in the media today and in social media especially. People are sort of, it's freed. In a way it's good to have a free sort of flow of maybe opinions and ideas, but if there's no thought behind it and if it's an immediate and sort of impulsive type of freedom, then you, you know, it's, you write it and it's there. And if you say, "I hate this," you can't go back and sort of rethink it. "Do I really hate it or why am I hating it? Is it worth being hated?". You know, that kind of questioning that you do with—you should do. I think that's sort of been really slowly eroded, completely eroded. And everything is transitory. You have to have do it immediately, and then that goes, and it's the next news that comes. It's the next and the next one and the next one. And in the end, we're just sort of sitting passively and seeing the film of life go in front of us without wondering, "Well, how can we stop this?". You know, at what point are we engaging into that everything that's happening. So we become spectators of, you know, of the world. And that's why I still believe in the power of books and fiction. Because as I was saying, that's where you can address this complexity, these questions, these ambiguities, and the fact that we don't know, we don't always know everything about everything.
Alison Rice: And you've engaged in some interesting work of late. One was spending the night in a former prison, now a memorial in Lyon. I'm wondering, you know, if there's a work that's really marked you of late. That could be one, but there might be another that comes to mind, that really perhaps cost you, or in which you were deeply engaged and it somehow been transformative in some way, perhaps, or stayed with you in some way?
Ananda Devi: Yeah, well, I think there are several, but recently, well, the novel which is there, Le Jour des caméléons, which is which was published in 2023, and it's set in Mauritius, but it's like I wanted to condense all these issues I was talking about in that small island, but everything I'm talking about applies to the world in general. So I sort of consider it a kind of political book. At the same time, it's like a sort of—well, it's supposed to be happening in the near future, but it's also everything is collapsing because of the climate, because of the social unrest. And there are several sort of catalytical events that will lead to this entire collapse of society on the island and a lot of violence. But then the island also is speaking. And she's saying, the island is saying, that "Well, I'm—" she's existed for for tens of millions of years. Mankind arrived less than 400 years ago, and as soon as men arrived, they started destroying everything. The fauna, the flora, there's hardly any endemic animals or plants left, to start with the dodo, which is the most famous, but, you know, a lot of them. So the island is saying, "Now I've had enough with the human virus. I want to get rid of that virus which has sort of, you know, killed everything that was present, that was alive." And so her sort of anger sort of compounds everything that's happening around the social unrest and everything. And the chameleons are waiting and they're watching, and they're sort of thinking, "Okay, one of these days, men will get rid of themselves. Man will, you know, they will disappear. So our turn will come to sort of start, you know, getting our place back in a way." So it's a—and also it's a book where each character—there are many characters—but each one will be changed in a very, very powerful way. Some of them more sympathetic ones at the beginning will commit, you know, acts—well, two of them will commit an act of utter cowardice that you don't expect. And that I had to describe in such a way that it became credible, that you could feel, "Okay, I don't agree, but I understand where they're coming from.". And one of them who's the most violent at the beginning has his moment of redemption and sort of—so it's like sort of turning things, the expectations of the readers on their head. So that we don't come and thinking, "Okay, these are the good guys and these is the bad guy." But that everybody has the possibility of change and metamorphosis.
So, in a way, I think that it's a book I wanted to write, and I felt I've done quite a lot with it, which... And well, the other one is the one about the prison, which was completely unexpected. Because it's a—it's a collection by a publisher who asks authors, who invites certain authors to go and spend a night in a museum and to write a book about this experience, about spending the night, about their contact with the museum. So it's not an essay about an artist or about a place or about history. It's that encounter during one night. And it's an amazing concept because all the writers have read sort of have something so personal coming out of there because you're spending a night alone, without sleeping, in a place that's very powerful. So something emerges because of that moment of solitude and also introspection and connection with a place. And when they asked me, you know, whether I would like to participate in this collection, to contribute to the collection, that was a thought I had visited a few months before that, a a prison in Lyon in France, which has become a Second World War memorial, but which has been kept as it is. So it's a 1921 old prison. And all the cells are as they were, all the place, the, you know, the first time I visited it, I really felt as if this place was speaking to me, it was sort of so the encounter again was amazingly powerful. So when they asked me, you know, whether I would like to participate in this collection, I immediately felt my heart drop, you know, because I knew it was going to be so difficult to spend a night alone there. And not only sort of being—I wasn't afraid of being alone, but the idea of what would emerge out of it, or what wouldn't emerge. I mean, there's also a possibility that nothing happens. But at the same time, I was convinced, "This is what I had to do." So, they accepted, so I spent the night there. It was pouring rain like—the wind was blowing. I mean, everything was sort of, it was like a film, you know, you arrive and then you find yourself in this place.
But it became, yeah, a very important book for me because as you said in your article, for the first time I was saying "I" and writing a book, I was sort of living the book before I wrote it. I didn't know where it would take me. I didn't read much before so that I wouldn't sort of have too many preconceptions. But then so sort of so there's two parallel sort of roads in the book if you like. One of them is, I was dictating in my phone every hour, you know, what I was feeling, going into each of these cells. So you had the the resistance French resistance people, some of them are very well known like Jean Moulin, but so many are not known at all, and so young. And that was what struck me. They were so young and knew what they were going for. And then you had the—so and then there's sort of strata of history. I mean, not even strata, they're sort of intermingling. So after them, there were Jews, there were tens of thousands of Jews who were imprisoned there and then sent to the camps or to be shot. But after the liberation, German Nazis were were imprisoned there, plus collaborators, French collaborators. And then after that, communists were imprisoned there. And then during the Algerian war, there were Algerians who were imprisoned also there. And that part of history is not very well known. And 11 of these Algerian prisoners were guillotined in the prison itself. One of them was 18, and people were writing to the—to de Gaulle saying, "You know, he has—he can be spared. You know, please spare him." Even the Pope, I think, wrote in. And he said, "I can't interfere with the 'raison d'État' [reason of state]." So, so he—the boy was guillotined. And then after that it became a civil prison, and then it became a women's prison, and it was closed in 2009, which is sort of recent. So, it was so flabbergasting to imagine in that small—it wasn't it's not a very big prison—in that small place, you had almost a century of history that was sort of that passed through it. And so much of it was contradictory because the French were tortured, but they also tortured the Algerians. You know, I mean, it's like repeating the same sort of errors. Obviously, the same—the same historical errors we've done. You can see it happening as we go.
So while I was writing that book, everything that's happening in the world was sort of coming as echoes and filtering into the writing. And again a kind of desperation about, "When do we ever learn? You know, when will we ever learn?". But so the other thread that led the book, one of them was the hourly experience, what's happening, why I'm not sleeping, etc., but the other is finding the writings of the prisoners of different eras. And their writing helped sort of, serve—helped me sort of connect, become, sort of it grounded me in a way by being able to read what was there. And I was also not trying to, again, write something historical about the place, but just being like, sort of establishing a very brief moment of connection, of just being able to see, to feel who they are, to be in that place, in the same cell, and just to know that, you know, they passed through this place, and I'm here at this place. They shouldn't be forgotten. You shouldn't sort of put it in, sort of classify it as history and then it's over, or classify them as heroes or as, you know, because they were people, you know, they were really, really human beings. And then it brought the question of what would we do or what do we do? How do we engage with the world? And what does that mean today, that word engagement? And so even at that time you had people who were, well, obviously the resistance fighters, they went into it knowing, for most of them knowing what they were exposing themselves to, but a big majority was also very passive or sometimes indifferent, sometimes complicit, sometimes actively going to denounce. So you had all these categories of people. But if we insist on thinking of that as history, then we'd never ask ourselves, well, where are we in that kind of situation? You know, where do we, where's our place? Who are we? Are we complicit? Are we passive? Are we, you know, active? Are we indifferent? And I think that, so that became the important question in that book.
Alison Rice: Yes. I think so as well. And it's something you've grappled with in more than one text and, you know, the act of writing, is it enough?. The act of, you know. And, of course, we have a history of engagement in, you know, literature. What is engaged literature?. What is committed literature? in the French tradition, but I've found your contemplations of that subject very, very compelling and it's something I think will run through the rest of this conversation as well.
Ananda Devi: No, I mean, I think it's very important to keep asking myself or ourselves as writers the question because, yeah, you know, you can say, "It's enough. I've written that book, so it's fine, you know. This is my job." At the same time, it's my pleasure also to write, you know. I'm not just doing it as sort of a self-sacrificing. Not at all. I'm also getting some kind of recognition for this. But these people I'm writing about, are they getting the recognition or not?. So what am I taking from this? And what am I giving to them? So I think that's the question with a big question mark, which in a way makes me—"Should I be more of an activist or more of a writer?" And I've found myself become much more of a—I mean, being a writer all my life and not an activist. But there's a kind of self-reproach that goes on, self-blame that goes on in my mind about not doing enough and maybe not endangering myself. I mean, that's a term I very often use about. I don't "me mets pas en danger" [put myself in danger] by writing. I'm behind my four walls, I'm in front of my computer. I'm very comfortable. I wrote a poem about it once because I was writing about migrants. And I thought, "You know, I'm writing about this," and I wrote the poem saying, "I'm sitting behind my desk, next to the chimney, with a glass of wine." And then "the children are dying, or or drowning, and things like that.". So it's trying to be as honest as possible by saying, "I'm not suffering, or what they're suffering. I'm not going through what they're going through, but maybe just be a kind of witness." That's also something.
Alison Rice: It's such a compelling question. And you've been a part of several volumes. This, of course, is solo authored and very interesting because it is published in three languages. You translated yourself from French into English and into Creole in this text, but you've contributed to some collective works that have brought attention to the question of migration in particular. And, yes. And one of the words that emerges in your corpus quite often is also responsibility, you know?. So as a concept it is something running through a lot of your work. I loved the fact that family came up almost in the very first sentence, I think, as we began to speak today. And I think of family, I think of the intense connections you're describing in the prison itself with those who had been in this space, but, you know, of course, intense familial connections come up so often in your text. And also figures of doubles and the idea of doubling. And I'm thinking, of course, leading into the text Manger l'Autre which you mentioned will be published quite imminently in English translation, and we were thinking of having you maybe address the text a little bit and maybe read a portion of that forthcoming text.
Ananda Devi: Um, yeah, it's a text that's quite different in a way from my other novels because it does address the sort of same kind of issues of difference, of being—of exclusion and all that but in a different way. First of all, it's not sort of set in any specific country or place, whereas usually the place is very important because it sort of gives me that grounding, literally, to be able to to build my stories from. And in this one, in fact, it's the narrator's body that becomes the place from which she's telling the story and where the story is set. So you don't need to know exactly where she is. She doesn't have a name, and she's a—so the story is about a morbidly obese girl, and she's telling her story. And her mother sort of leaves when she's a baby because she can't face the hunger, constant hunger, constant feeding, and things like that. So she escapes basically and leaves her with the father, who tries to sort of "déculpabiliser," try to sort of remove her guilt by saying that they were they were twins in the mother in utero, and that the father actually keeps treating her as if she were twins and keeps talking to her as if they were were two sisters and feeding her as if they were two. So obviously she keeps on growing and growing exponentially, but she also has this idea that maybe she devoured her twin in her mother's womb. And so she has this sort of shadow or ghost that's constantly with her. But so there's not only this psychological part of her life, but also when she goes out in the world, obviously she's exposed to that scrutiny, the way people look at her, at school, the constant mockery, and the eye of of internet basically, of the phones that keep filming her constantly with that mockery and everything. So until, well, in the end, everything will go haywire.
So, yeah, it's a strange book even for me. It will be published next year in, well, in April in the U.S. and and in the U.K. as well. So, yeah, maybe I'll read a—yeah. I still have a voice. I was talking a lot, and my voice is going.
This is about the possibility of taking a trip when she's obviously homebound.
Ananda Devi (reading from her book):
"To leave is no certain thing. We are stuck in this asphalt of our world, our feet are trapped in the concrete block of our life, and our body can lurch and stumble. It will never get seasick, because we've never had so much as a glimpse of the sea. My imagination can lure me with new places all it likes. I'll never manage to believe in them, and I've made my peace with that. When I turned 15, though, Dad decided to make me a present of a trip that I had long dreamed of, yet never thought would actually happen. I couldn't guess what flash of inspiration came over him. Had he woken up one morning realizing that the walls of this house were closing in around me? And soon enough, I would never again be able to leave? Had he made up his mind to gift me the open sea and its spray, the world's unknown stretches and the euphoria of rebellion? But he couldn't have possibly known what I would consider a perfect trip. He booked the tickets without telling me. The night before he said, "Darlings, tomorrow morning, we're taking a plane." What a glorious feeling. My imagination, hemmed in for so long, was suddenly off and away, dragging me in the blink of an eye to Ulaanbaatar, to Guam, to Lapland, to Timor, to Southern Patagonia, to the Andaman Islands, to the Amazon rainforest. To all sorts of unlikely destinations that might allow me to experience what the common run of humanity so very rarely did. What mattered most was that I wouldn't, couldn't be an ordinary tourist. I would be an extraordinary tourist, the sort who climbed up volcanoes and shuffled past dunes, braving hostile nature, the better to understand the danger lurking beneath its beauty. What I wouldn't have done to escape my own self. I'd have shouldered all the exhaustion of a body unused to exercise, I'd have lugged it around, driven by sheer force of will, uphills and down valleys. I'd have braced my mass on the edge of lava lakes, even at the risk of falling in. Could I have dreamed a better way to go out? Yes, I'd have pushed my body to its limits, to the brink of the unbearable. But at least I would have experienced the world as very few have, plumbed its nooks and crannies, followed the footsteps of explorers, ventured down to the roots of the Earth, coiled around its mystery. For once, it would not have been my appearance, but my accomplishments that set me apart. I'd have made fools of those sentencing me to sit and wait for my end, nothing more than dregs of ugliness soon to be forgotten amidst all the world's beauty. I didn't sleep a wink that night, dreaming of journeys, of a conquest I could finally achieve. I got up at midnight to pack my bags. It was quick work. XXXXXL sweatpants and similarly proportioned sweatshirts, sturdy sneakers and hiking boots, the better to brave any climate I might encounter. In the fever of anticipation, even these rugged outfits became more vivid, more promising. My whole body was thrumming with excitement. At long last, a dream that was not unthinkable, not foreclosed, but within reach."
"In the morning, we headed to the airport. Still half-asleep, I was shocked, looking out of the car windows, to see the city's strange transformation. As if I had been asleep for centuries and was awaking to a changed world. High walls around houses, obscene graffiti, barbed wire, militia patrolling the streets, metal signs saying, "Under armed surveillance," and, overall, a sense of disintegration. I was dumbfounded. Never had the buildings struck me as so drab. The public squares were littered with trash. A once vibrant neighborhood had become a slum, where people out of work loitered, their eyes vacant. Nearly a mile later, glass towers rose up, new and gleaming, housing luxury apartments, shops, a private clinic, gyms, a movie theater. There was a billboard boasting a self-sufficient world within. The subliminal message: "Better put up barricades now." I had a feeling that a jungle of terror was engulfing the city. Chaos had done its work and spread far more quickly than anyone had thought possible. Where had the beaming town of my childhood gone?. The armies of gardeners tending to each petal and each leaf, until they were as shiny and plump as a child's lips. Preoccupied as I was with my physical self, I had stopped paying attention to the world. As I saw the ugliness of this gray, these walls, this artificial luxury, I felt absolutely no desire to partake of it. Nothing interested me anymore, apart from faraway lands. I was a reverse mirror to the city. I was growing, it was declining. I couldn't help but see through the distorting lens of my sadness. I could tell that this would be my last chance to go somewhere. At the airport, we went to the one ticket counter that had a person rather than a machine. That was a colossal mistake. The young employee gave us a fake smile, looked at me, and blanched. She leaned over to Dad… "How much does she weigh?" she asked quietly. I had on a fake smile, too, and I looked her in the eyes to reject the question, to hang on to the dream that lingered under my eyelids, to moor it, to tie it fast, so that the thin idiot with her skimpy ponytail couldn't take it from me. "How much does she weigh?" As if I weren't right here. Was it so hard to ask me directly? Was I deaf and mute and brain-dead on top of being obese? I looked at Dad, my last hope of this odyssey. He stood ramrod straight. "That doesn't matter one bit," he said sternly. She blanched again. She with her pretty lips lathered in lipstick, and told him to wait. She and her limp ponytail and her perfect 30-something Barbie looks left. Her buttocks wedged into a narrow skirt, danced in refusal. In the meantime, the other passengers were looking in disgust or pity at me. Dad was seething. Planes were taking off, and I was bound to the ground. Dropped. I wanted to lie flat on the floor and scream, to throw a tantrum, a gigantic toddler tantrum. At last, a supervisor of the airline appeared. He led us into an office. He started talking with my father. But I wasn't listening anymore. I'd just found out we were going to London. I shut my eyes and thought once more of my volcanoes, my waterfalls, my untouched lands, my impossible Niagara Falls. The Earth was still offering me some of its magma, its splendor, its wealth, its terror. I imagined myself as vast as the Earth and as unconstrained, made of metal and blood."
(Clapping from audience)
Alison Rice:
Thank you. Thank you. And this evening reminds us of maybe the birth of Frankenstein, recounting aloud around a campfire. Our fire here, with the rain coming down outside. You certainly have been very willing to answer our questions and we are so grateful. And your work is so important in the sense that it doesn't seek an easy ending that would be forgettable. And we wish to end, of course, this conversation well by thanking you for putting together such an oeuvre of constant probing, constant seeking out, denunciation of stereotypes and situations that are difficult in many, many settings. And it's just a pleasure to have the opportunity to interact with you. And thank you for your generosity. And certainly vanquishing the stage fright. We appreciate that.
(Clapping from audience)
This transcript was created with the help of AI tools (Adobe Premiere Pro and Claude) and edited for improved accuracy and readability. Minor errors and discrepancies from the original interview may persist; please reach out to the Nanovic Institute if you take notice of any significant issues.
Originally published by at eitw.nd.edu on October 16, 2025.