Descent into the hollows and crevices of consciousness, with the Mauritian Nathacha Appanah
Audio 04:07
Figure of Mauritian literature, Nathacha Appanah is part of a certain militant, social and feminist movement. JOEL SAGET / AFP
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
12 mins
A journalist by training, the Mauritian Nathacha Appanah became known in 2004 by publishing her first novel
Les Rochers de Poudre d'Or
.
His work, rich in eight novels, is striking for its thematic and aesthetic consistency.
The traumas of history, the intimate drama, violence are the privileged themes of his stories, admirably served by a lyrical and precise writing.
His new novel
Rien ne t'appartient
is one of the essential works of this literary season 2021.
Advertising
For the Mauritian
Nathacha Appanah
, it all started when she was still a teenager, growing up in her native island, between sea and land. “
I remember this first text very well
,” she confides.
The main character returned years later to the house where she had grown up. While walking, she discovered an object that had belonged to her and that she thought she had lost. It was a little piece of news probably inspired by sorrows I had at the time. I was barely 14 years old. But as I read the news again, I can't help but notice that there was real work of the imagination, an attempt to figure out what is going on in other people's minds.
"
In her forties today, the Mauritian has established herself on the French-language literary scene as one of the most unique novelists of our time. His eighth novel,
Rien ne t'appartient
(Gallimard, 2021), which has just been published, is perhaps one of the most poignant works of the literary re-entry 2021. The most subtle also in the writing of the rise of the despair.
Nothing belongs to you
tells the story of a woman's slow drift following the disappearance of her husband.
It is not a banal story of mourning and reconstruction that Nathacha Appanah gives to read, but a story of astonishment and self-disintegration, as after an exploding seawall.
The disappearance of her husband Emmanuel represents, for Tara, the collapse of the “
fabricated life
” that she had laboriously constructed since their meeting in tragic circumstances, which occurred in a country in the South.
Loosely inspired by the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka in 2004, without the country ever being named, Tara's story takes place in this unstable country with a shifting identity.
"Tai taam dîth taï taam"
Tara, who was called Vijaya (meaning "victory") in her childhood, grew up in a large and beautiful house where life was "
delicious, sweet, twirling and singular
", writes the novelist. Little "Vivi" loved to laugh and dance the sacred Indian dance to which a friend of her mother came to initiate her every week to the rhythm of the
adavus
: tât taï taam dîth taï taam
. For the little girl, this childhood could only be eternal, until the day when she was brutally torn from her life of "
luxury, calm and pleasure
". His parents, opposition figures to the nationalist and obscurantist government in power, were assassinated. Vijaya, hidden in the trunk of the gardener's car, saves her skin
in extremis,
but now has to face, alone, the laws of an implacable world, particularly hard for girls.
"
Bad dog
" for some, "
spoiled girl
" for others, the teenager will eventually find asylum in a refuge for young girls, who are hit upon their arrival: "
Nothing belongs to you
". A terrible philosophy of life! The protagonist will understand, along the way, that "
these words encompass the dress I wear, my skin, my body, my thoughts, my present, my future, my dreams and my name
". Vijaya was in fact dispossessed of everything when the tsunami hit the shores of her fortress town. She is carried away by the wave, but she will emerge alive from the ordeal. Broken, injured, she is sewn up at the local hospital by a
French doctor
sent as reinforcement. She will fall in love with him and follow him to her country where Vijaya, now Tara, reinvents herself, pushing her painful past back to the depths of her memory.
The novel begins fifteen years later, with the death of Emmanuel, Tara's husband.
The trauma of the loss brings the past back to life, breaking the psychological barriers it had built to protect itself from rising despair and memories.
“
I'm really looking for
this moment of change in the life of my character, this moment when all his integrity is threatened,
explains the novelist she
.
My stories often start with things that can be very anchored in social life and sometimes in historical facts, but my imagination is stimulated by what remains in the shadows, the faults, the hollows where I manage to deploy my fiction.
"
Source of inspiration
Born into a family of Indian origin, Nathacha Appanah herself grew up in a southern country. Living in France for more than two decades, in 2003 she published her very first novel,
Les Rochers de Poudre d'Or
, which made her known. This novel stages in an almost theatrical form, the arrival in Mauritius, in the 19th century, of Indian migrants. According to legend, these "
engaged
" workers had given up their miserable life in the Indian subcontinent to go to work in the distant islands, in the hope of finding gold under the rocks, a dream that had sparked in them. recruiters. Reality will turn out to be much more sordid.
“
I lived with my grandmother who told me about her life in the cane fields,”
recalls the novelist
. She had been a plowman. She told me how things worked in the cane fields, but also how their community worked, how they lived, whether or not they participated in religious ceremonies. It was almost political. These stories marked me a lot, because my grandparents had had such a different life, so old, so quirky and yet so real. I am often asked where the source of my writing is. It seems to me that it is here, in my grandmother's stories
”.
Despite this imagination deeply marked by origins, the work of the novelist, today rich in eight novels, seems little linked to ancestral India or Mauritius. Nathacha Appanah early abandoned the community imagination to inscribe her novels in universal veins. I wanted "
very early on to embody other lives than mine,
" she says, and to explore "
what is happening in society, how its turmoil can affect me as a woman, as a mother, as a mother. as a girl, as a writer
”.
The themes of Nathacha Appanah's stories range from the question of transmission between mother and daughter (
La noce d'Anna
, Gallimard 2005) to dark pages in the history of the British Raj with the deportation of Jews to camps in Mauritius during the Second World War (
The Last Brother
, L'Olivier 2009), through social issues and the violence that devastates the tropics, under the combined effect of misery and migration, for example in his striking novel
Tropique de violence
(Gallimard 2016).
Concern for form
Strong themes, coupled with a concern for form, characterize the fictional work of Nathacha Appanah. "
For each of my books, I have an ambition of form
", likes to repeat the author.
Nothing belongs to you is
no exception to the rule. Separated into two parts, entitled "Tara" and "Vijaya", the narration is organized here according to an inverted chronological structure, the end preceding the beginning, the consequences preceding the cause. The here and now is opposed to the ghostly elsewhere, which threatens to emerge from its memory enclosure and swallow up the present.
Lighting of the author: “
The first part is a nocturnal part, that of the end. In this section, my main character, Tara, who has fought so hard to keep the past away, has to deal with nostalgia, which compels in an overwhelming way. As this part takes place in the night, in the dark, she is forced to look inside herself. Also, here, everything happens in the head of the character. The second part is that of childhood, that of returning to the past, returning to this distant country where life was both wonderful and mysterious. Water is also a fundamental element. I wanted to convey from the first part the notion of wetness, which is so important in the story.
"
Water is indeed omnipresent, at the beginning and at the end of the book.
Its moisture permeates the pages and wins the spirits.
It heralds the psychic tsunami against which the protagonist is struggling, gradually sinking into the confusion that invades him.
The reader does not come out of this close combat unscathed.
Nothing Belongs to You
, by Nathacha Appanah.
Editions Gallimard, 160 pages, 16.90 euros.
Newsletter
Receive all international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_FR
Literature
Mauritius
Culture Africa
On the same subject
Literature Without Borders
Mauritian novelist Nathacha Appanah
The RFI club
The guest of the RFI Club: the novelist Nathacha Appanah
Literature / Mauritius / Francophonie
"Until tomorrow": the return of Nathacha Appanah