Ananda Devi VOICE AND SMELL OF MOTHER EARTH LA VOIX ET L’ODEUR DE LA TERRE-MÈRE Born in Mauritius, Ananda Devi has lived in England, Africa, and now in France. Her work is a poignant ode to the earth, both native and fatal, and to all forgotten women. Née à Maurice, Ananda Devi a vécu en Angleterre, en Afrique, et aujourd’hui en France. Son œuvre est une ode poignante à la terre, natale et fatale, et à toutes les femmes oubliées. BY ANTOINE DE GAUDEMAR PHOTOGRAPHS DAMIEN GRENON Ananda Devi left Mauritius a long time ago. She has lived for thirty years in FerneyVoltaire, a small peaceful French town on the Swiss border. Very close to Geneva, where she worked for many years as a translator for the UN. Ananda Devi loves crossing borders. She studied anthropology in London, she lived for several years in Congo-Brazzaville, she returned to the India of her ancestors, and her occupation as a writer takes her through Europe and America. But in her life, as in her books, written in French, Mauritius continues to course through her veins. “I left the island to see new horizons,” she says. “But in my heart, I have never really left.” A PERPETUAL WRENCH “The child leaves and will always continue to leave,” she writes however in her very personal collection, Danser sur tes braises (Ed. Bruno Doucey, 2020). For her, life is one long separation, an “exploration of loss”, a perpetual wrench, of which exile is but one of the representations. In India, she says, there were death ritual for those who went into exile; as if dead, they were erased from the world of the living. In deference to her Indian origins and her ancestors who migrated to Mauritius in the late nineteenth century as “indentured labourers”, after the abolition of slavery, Ananda Devi wears a sari. Born in Trois-Boutiques in southern Mauritius, the writer grew up among the sugar cane fields her father cultivated. Throughout her youth she lived with the harvests, the noise of the fangourin (old sugar cane mills) and the song of the turtledoves. She still harbours an almost mystical attachment to nature and the land of her birth, as seen in her first collection of short stories, Solstices, published in Mauritius when she was barely twenty. AN ELEGY TO HER MOTHER However, Ananda Devi, despite her childhood immersed in tales from A Thousand and One Nights, the novels of the comtesse de Ségur and Hindu myths that her mother told her, does not feel made from one single block. On the contrary: she believes that Mauritius is fortunate in being a hybrid country, full of people from all continents, with different languages and cultures. From this plural identity, she has drawn a universalism that runs through all her work. “Unfortunately,” she regrets today, “rather than profiting from this multiplicity, many Mauritians sink into an increasingly rigid divide. You’d think the insularity, the isolation, would strengthen the feeling of belonging to one single community. But no. What strikes me each time I go there is that people now define themselves as Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, Creole. We identify most as Mauritian when we’re away from the country.” Danser sur tes braises is a poignant tribute to this attachment to the motherland. It is an ode, or rather an elegy, to her mother, who died some twenty years ago. “I have reached the age my mother was when she died, 62. The time had come, I believed, to put into words my feelings that I had never told her. I have never written about her, but I think I have always written
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