I have read

Amal Sewtohul, Made in Mauritius (2012)
Ananda Devi, Le long désir (2003)

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I have written

... nothing ...

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la littérature d'expression masochiste

How to get rid of one's bad karma?
Cutting the tree under which one had been lashed.

​I never read Ananda Devi properly. I've only received some translated fragments from a colleague that has written to me to say the writer is coming to Warsaw. Supposedly I am among those few people that might eventually get excited with the news; and I'm not in Warsaw, of course. 
Ananda Devi doesn't make a pleasant or relaxing reading. But she might make a good material for me. Not for the translingual potential that must be common to any inhabitant of the Ile Maurice; she makes rather a mediocre use of it, spicing her prose with some Creole sentences. But there is something else, the accumulated tension between her and her inherited culture. Does this prepare some sort of ground for the extracultural becoming of man I am after?
Certainly, she is very angry indeed about all those falsified messages with which the female subject is stuffed by her cultural context; all those tales of submission and dependence. But I'm not sure if it's really what I want. How deep is this cultural criticism supposed to cut. 

​

Ananda Devi, L'arbre fouet, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1997.

Leiden, 28.04.2019
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I try to read Ananda Devi properly. It's a book half the way between poetry and prose. As far as I can construe it, it speaks of love. Yet of what love? Ta peau est un territoire d'attente (p. 18). As if she waited just for the first strike. 
Universal, I would say. There is hardly anything in this book to say things about Mauritius, and proves how fallible is my traveller's approach to world literature. It doesn't allow a cartography derived from a world map, no matter how metaphorically taken. The only thing that brings about Mauritius is le silence furieux des jambosiers (p. 21). A fruit that belongs to some southern paradise, pomme d'eau in Martinique, pomme d'amour in Guyana. And it is rather for love that it stands here, not for Mauritius. 
Le sanglant de nos chairs (p. 22), crânes écrasés par des camions. Est-ce qu'ils font l'amour comme ça, à Mauritius? Ou c'est encore un manifeste contre une culture?
If it is against a culture, a specific cultured way of making love, oh, how universal it might be. We are all bleeding; is the jamboise fruit bleeding a red juice? No, it seems white inside. 
In any case, this book isnot from Mauritius, it is French. It place on the map should be quite near such books as Houellebecq's Soumission, with the hero's taste for decadence, and the culminating moments such as the conversation in the Parisian villa where L'Histoire d'O. was born. Demandez-moi ma couleur, et je vous parlerai du noir (p. 31). This is not about her race, of course. She wants to speak of black, plus sombre que le temps. Noire rengaine (p. 33), c'est-à-dire refrain, ritournelle. 
Be as it may, this book is an exalted hymn to pain. Maybe I took it all wrong. I hope so. 



​Ananda Devi, Le long désir, Paris, Gallimard, 2003.

Neuville-sur-Oise, 30.03.2021.