In the article the author analyses various sources of inspiration noticeable in the works of Ananda Devi. Considering the writer’s background, her native island of Mauritius, a multi-ethnic multi-lingual and multi-cultural island, various cultural inspirations are noticeable in her works. The author of this article focuses on the novelist’s prose and analyses the cultural references rooted in Indian, European, African and Creole cultures. The aim of this analysis is also to describe the intertextual relations that exist between some of Ananda Devi’s texts and the works of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Arthur Rimbaud or Malcolm de Chazal, T. S. Eliot, Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee. In the analysis, the author draws on the research of Homi Bhabha and Gérard Genette.

Ananda Devis’s Manger l’autre (or “Eating the other”), published in 2018, is a western novel in its description of places as well as in the sociological issues it covers, but it remains nevertheless a very insular novel, although not necessarily limited to Mauritius. This study aims indeed at uncovering a different type of insular poetics in Devi’s writing, one that is construed around a contextualised intertext made out of À l’autre bout du monde (1979), a Mauritian novel about exile which is being pursued, and of Paul et Virginie (1788), the founding novel of Mauritian literature. The theme of the obese character’s isolation and her relation to the outside world is not just a playful echo, it translates the fundamental isolation of the islander.

The representation of the abused, sometimes deformed bodies of the characters, most often too thin, rarely obese, is one of the most salient points in Devi’s writing. We would like to observe her dialectic of emptiness and fullness. Fasting or cannibalistic bulimia might not simply embody, in one case a Hindu reference, in the other, the excesses of a Western consumer society. By comparing the dissemination of the forms of food in Devi’s “Western” works (Les Jours vivants (2013), Manger l’autre (2018)) and in “Indo-Mauritian” works (Le Voile de Draupadi (1993), Le Sari vert (2009)), one could read in them the marks of a paradoxical, self-sacrificial asceticism. The works are part of the same powerful and obsessive poetics of the flesh ‒ generally abject and rotting ‒ opening onto a redefinition of the human and the living that she comments on in her essays Fardo (2020) and Deux malles et une marmite (2021). All the worlds are creolised to propose the birth of a “personal mythology” of the author made of devouring and devoured “goddesses”. The novels “feed” on the writer’s plural imaginations to construct a metatextual questioning of the radicality of creation and the nature of Beauty.

Far from nourishing the image of a fantasized Orient, Devi takes a sceptical look at the ancestral culture and deconstructs the stereotypes of exotic images and those reducing women to a simple object. Taking pleasure in transgression, she rehabilitates through discursive and linguistic processes the place of the female subject in the narrative space. The author demonstrates intellectual nomadism, through the mixing of identity and culture. In Devi’s text, languages are in alchemy: they rub shoulders, inseminate and proliferate. She handles languages, makes her text dance to rhythms and intonations to accompany her universal themes with a nomadic poetic who works her work in-depth.

Manger l’autre (2018), a complex portrayal of contemporary paternity, is full of ambiguities when it comes to the role of the father in his daughter’s dramatic descent into hell. Far from the tormentors present in La Vie de Joséphin le Fou (2003) or in Le Sari vert (2009), the father figure is here associated with love and empathy. And yet, none of those qualities can absolve men in Ananda Devi’s world. In yet, another stigmatization of patriarchy, the novelist transports us into the morbid world of obesity, school based harassment as well as the reservoirs of hate that lie within social media. In this context, this paper attempts to show the various techniques used by Ananda Devi to reach her main objective: the failure of the father whatever he does.

In her novels, Ananda Devi has always known how to immerse us in texts ennobled by local paintings where matrix India appears through the representation of a Cosmogonic universe dominated by magico-spiritual symbolism. Certain homogeneous interpretations, the fruit of historical constructions, obscure, even sometimes neglect, the deeply rooted heterogeneity of Indian traditions in Mauritius. This “bipolar contrast” (Sen, 2007), the sum of imaginary splices and cultural inter-fusion, nevertheless constitutes the humus of the Mauritian identity built over the course of colonial history. The author then illustrated herself through her writings as a major figure in this form of binary representation of the Mauritian universe. Our study aims at revealing the imaginary amalgams that circulate in Devis texts, starting from forms of discourse and knowledge surreptitiously disseminated in motifs such as the “sari” and “the hair”. By relying on an ethnocritical analysis grid, we will show how the Devi’s ethnotexts” (Motsch, 2000), manage by a meiotic effect, to shape a “new humanism” at the antipodes of “orientalist representations” (Said, 1978) and ethnocentric of India as seen by the West.

References to the notion of karma abound in the fictional work Ananda Devi, a major female figure in the literary Francophonie of the Indian Ocean. These references evoke a tragic fate in connection with the idea of exile for the Indian community installed in Mauritius through the crossing of the Great Ocean. However, this crossing of “dark waters” (Kala pani) is a taboo, a curse in Hinduism. Installed in the island area of Mauritius, the Indo-descendants presented by Devi’s works experience a sort of eternal return from this original curse, the community feeling chastened by a feeling of uprooting, which constantly recalls the indestructible link with the mother country the ancestral culture. Based on two novels from the so-called Hindu cycle of Ananda Devi, and drawing on the work of Mircea Eliade (2009) on mythical symbols and structures, this study aims at showing that death is a figure of reincarnation in a new life. The analysis thus leads to understand that the Kala pani is a tragic space-time, at the same time, that it is a space-time of purifying immersion and of symbolic rebirth in the imaginary of the exiles that the novelist stages.

The present study aims to examine the representation of the female body as well as the food in two novels of Ananda Devi: Le Sari vert and Manger l’autre. The food and the female body have a close relationship in these two works, food is often used to describe the female body, making of women something that is consumed and cleared out. Food is defect, affront but in the same time loophole and revolt for Devi’s women. Thus, this analysis of the body with the point of view of food, allows the reader to see that the female body is considered as consumable, which has a strong impact on identity.

Although Le Sari Vert is presented as a masculine monologue, it is none the less a plea in favour of women, an illustration of ill-treatment in the name of virility in a context which cannot be simply limited to society in Mauritius.
In the course of this study, starting with the problematic centred on the monstrosity in its manifestations and its psychological limits, we will examine the elements specifically pertaining to the culture and the society of Mauritius, to its Indian heritage in the conception of women, to the influence of a hierarchical religion as well as the linguistic elements typical of Ananda Devi which give to the work a dimension opening onto the Western World in order to serve a cause which is sadly universal.

Inspired by Devi’s Ceux du large (2017) and by authors connected to her, a performance has been created by the author, who was to conduct an oral creative workshop among whose participants were young immigrants. Trying to take into account both dimensions of such an artistic but also human experience, the text points out the links between Ananda Devi’s words and the young immigrants’ ones, and also the influence of having read them on the way to lead the workshop. But, above all, it shows how such a poetic writing is necessary not to reduce migration to a simple and measurable fact.

An interview with Ananda Devi, which was conducted by Associate Professor Anna Czarnowus and Dr Marta Mamet-Michalkiewicz in 2019. The author talks about her own multilingualism, the novels where she dicusses violence, including sexual violence, her literary inspirations, the symbolism of her texts, female anger and feminism, the cultural meaning of cooking, and her novel 'The Living Days'.