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Nathacha APPANAH MAURITIUS, FOUNTAIN OF IMAGINATION Maurice, un puits d’imaginaire Nathacha Appanah grew up on Mauritius. At the age of 25, she left to live in France. There she wrote six novels, all haunted by her native island, so near and yet so far. Nathacha Appanah a grandi à Maurice. À 25 ans, elle est partie vivre en France. Elle y a écrit six romans, hantés par l’île natale, si loin, si près. W With the passing of time, the sheet of paper on which her grandmother wrote her first words has disappeared, and for Nathacha Appanah, it’s like a treasure lost forever. She was ten when the old lady, unable to read, asked her to teach her the alphabet. With the help of her granddaughter, she practised every day, and the first words she managed to write were the first names of her grandchildren, “Nathacha” and “Davin”. This was in Piton, on the island of Mauritius, the village where the writer spent the first six years of her life. Since then, Nathacha Appanah has dreamed of writing “a lucid tale” about her grandparents, not only because she loved their old-fashionedwayof life, but also because they were the source of her inspiration: “ They are my first ghosts, the ones I write for. ” Nostalgic but freer Today, with six novels, a collection of short stories, translated into many languages, and numerous literary prizes, including the prix Femina des lycéens in 2016, Nathacha Appanah is a writer crowned with success. She began to write as a teenager, starting with a diary, then quickly moving on to fiction. She remembers stories of “ women prevented from living their lives as they would have wanted, because of tradition, because of men, because of children, becauseof the veryplacewhere they lived ”. At that time she was reading Camus and the Brontë sisters, and also discovering the Mauritian writers Pierre Renaud, Loys Masson and Édouard Maunick: “ They opened my eyes to the beauty of my own country and the love you can feel for it. ” At the age of 25, in 1998, she left Mauritius for a three-month internship with the French newspaper Le Dauphiné Libéré , in Grenoble. She took only one suitcase, thinking she would soon be back home. But at the end of the three months, they offered her a job, and then another. She decided to remain in France, living first in Lyon, then Paris, and finally in Caen. She is nostalgic, of course, but she feels freer here, more anonymous, and less confined. The desire to write, which obsessed her since her adolescence returned stronger than ever: “In Mauritius, my hands seemed tied; writingwas too complicated. This time, I was determined to be published. ” And she was. In 2003, Gallimard – the nec plus ultra – published her first book, Les Rochers dePoudred’Or . It is a tribute toher grandparents, whose ancestorswere among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came from India to work on the sugar plantations on Mauritius after the abolition of slavery in 1835. They were known as the “indentured” labourers, and the beauti- fully documented Les Rochers de Poudre d’Or retraces their storybook odyssey. “ In France, people always asked me where I came from, she says . This is my answer. ” Mauritius, a never ending inspiration Mauritius is never absent from her books. Rather like Piton, her childhood village, it is ‘a fountainof imagination’. Either herplots are based there, or her characters, living in exile as she does, are haunted by its far-off presence. In Blue Bay Palace , she says of her country: “ The people who come from here say that it was not intended, that it just sprang up, without anyone asking it to, and that is why it remains so mysterious. ” Like many expatriates, NathachaAppanah feels torn between two cultures, two worlds. by Antoine de Gaudemar Photographs Patrick Swirc