Barriers, Borders, Boundaries, and Crossings in the Work of Ananda Devi
As one of the world’s preeminent writers, Devi’s work tests readers’ ethics while crossing corporeal, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. Here, a professor of global francophone literature shares how she and her students found enlightenment in such multiple crossings.
In fall 2024 I had the privilege of teaching the Neustadt seminar on the work of Ananda Devi. In the process, I discovered a new favorite pedagogical model for teaching literature: focus on a single author, read as much as possible of their work, and then spend three days with them exchanging ideas. My students became experts in Devi’s short stories, novels, and poems, intimately connected with their words, images, and patterns; they took ownership of their learning and joined enthusiastically in the events of the Neustadt Lit Fest. They were perfect models of how to engage with complex critical thought.
I can imagine no better œuvre for students to become experts in than Ananda Devi’s. It is simultaneously evocative and unyielding: it conjures strong images, emotions, amazements, but it resists any conclusive interpretation, refusing to be pinned down. It signifies exquisite horror and horrendous splendor without resolution, with a finality that remains playfully open. And yet it is firmly engaged, in the French sense of being engagé, rooted in an ethic of care that amounts to a political statement—if only politics were tangibly concerned with the well-being of humans, animals, humans-as-animals, and the planet more generally. If only politics carefully paid attention to words and to meaning the way Devi does; if only politics mindfully paid its dues to the disenfranchised and the marginalized the way she does. As she expressed in her Neustadt Prize acceptance speech, “Heavy the World Lies on the Pen,” her writing bears witness to and tries to understand the origins of conflicts rather than simply pass judgment, weighing each word for its aptness and its peal of truth.
As my students and I read and talked through August, September, and October, we noticed one recurring theme that connected to many other themes across Devi’s texts: barriers, borders, and boundaries—and their crossings. And I was struck, in Devi’s beautiful keynote address at the beginning of the festival, by her explanation of how she is able to write about the difficult topics she chooses and yet at the same time remain a happy woman, a happy mother. She described the “nonporous barrier” between her “writerly persona” and her “womanly persona” as a kind of internal boundary between the multiple fictions she has created and her own personal experience. Elsewhere, however, in an investigation of her writing process, she indicates that her writing sometimes crosses this barrier. Devi
show[s] the reader that the daily person, the bone-and-flesh being presented as the author of these texts, is not really so; the person who wrote these books is entirely different, a different type of creature, something occasionally monstrous, gloomy, and strange, a being without identity since its true identity is that of the characters it tries to reach in a shared conflagration. (“Genesis of Novels”)
The writerly ego blends with the lived ego, crossing the nonporous barrier in a contagion of monstrosity that leaves the writer feeling void of a sense of self.
One type of barrier that Devi’s works represent is the concept of the national border. Clélio, the seventeen-year-old rebel in Eve Out of Her Ruins, wonders if the border of Mauritius is the edge of the world. Listen, here, to Jeffrey Zuckerman’s masterful translation: “And where would they go if they wanted to move on? To the end of the island, which is the end of the world. We can’t leave it. We can’t escape it unless we fly. We can’t free ourselves unless we die.” The national border becomes a metaphysical representation of the young characters’ isolation, imprisoned as they are by their poverty and the global capitalist systems that have caused it—the shuttered factory, “an empty metal shell” with its “hundreds of sewing machines that carved into [the workers’] shoulders that curve of despair and into their hands those nicks and cuts like tattoos.” Labor is inscribed on the humans, leaving them twisted and blemished even as it abandons them for cheaper shores inhabited by even more exploitable populations. Mauritius remains, its ex-workers and their children unable to see a future either within or beyond its horizons.
Devi’s story “Weaving Dreams” features a more local boundary, a wall-and-barbed-wire affair that separates two enemy communities in an unnamed and fictionalized Palestine. Two characters from opposite sides, a man and a woman, breach the wall, effortlessly, through their attraction to each other:
. . . the wall, shaken by such innocence, is hollowed and gapped. . . . Pressured by their gaze, the hole becomes wider and wider, cracking and groaning quietly. A little wider, just a little wider, just far enough to see a surprised face, alarmed and joyful, a little wider, just a little wider, to reveal the rest, because a head without a body is not enough for the overflow of love that unfurls from them, they must embrace even more, and still that is not enough, they each want to see the world as it is contained in the whole of the other.
The wall melts away, granting love a way across the chasm of imperial entrenchment and segregation.
Boundaries in Devi’s texts are also, often, bodily boundaries: the limit that is our skin, the border between us and the world, the very thin layer that allows me to be “me” and to have my own identity separate from others. In many texts, this boundary is vulnerable, porous, threatening any sense of firm and finite identity. Jamila, the young wife in the short story “The Orchid,” for example, sees the boundaries of her body constantly infiltrated. She births ten children and becomes a feeding machine: “The babies would all cry at the same time, their little mouths wide open, clamouring for the fullness of my breasts; so much need in such tiny bodies. Drip-drip would go the nipples, soaking my nightgown with tepid stickiness.” We feel here a woman unable to control the boundaries of her body, unable to define herself as she would like. When she tries to tell her husband that she doesn’t want any more children, he refuses to listen, saying instead, “When your eyes are full of tears I want to drink them.” Jamila adds, “And he did. How many times did he drink my tears? I can’t remember now.” Devi’s story presents the woman as a fountain from which others drink, continually, until she is drained of her own being. The borders of her body are porous to the avid family members who actively consume her.
Sometimes porous bodily and identity barriers allow for solace, for a rejuvenating connection with the world and with nature.
Sometimes, however, porous bodily and identity barriers allow for solace, for a rejuvenating connection with the world and with nature. In the short story “Lakshmi’s Gift,” Shanti, unhappy wife and mother of five children, is penetrated and transformed by the magic of her garden on one enchanting Diwali day:
The air around her was redolent with pungent aromas: the powerful green smell of mint, thyme and coriander plants, the intoxicating fragrance wafted from the gandia flower; all these treasures amassed as a result of the endless ferment deep in the bowels of the earth, which was transformed on the surface into growth and fruitfulness. With a strange detachment, almost as if under a spell, Shanti saw the disparate elements of her existence lock together to form an intricate chain. They wound around her, binding her to her obligations, and to all the allegiances that a woman forms about her in the course of her existence, while she gradually wears herself out—the better to fulfill them, the better to share the immense, inexhaustible wealth of love hidden in her innermost heart, on which she feeds endlessly.
The boundaries between Shanti and her garden disappear as she starts to empathize with the earth itself in an unbounded ecology of care.
Devi’s texts pierce the invisible border between life and death, often in conjunction with other crossings, planes and skiffs of all kinds carrying mortality as ballast
And finally, Devi’s texts pierce the invisible border between life and death, often in conjunction with other crossings, planes and skiffs of all kinds carrying mortality as ballast. In the collection of poems titled Ceux du large, a long meditation on migrancy becomes a metaphor for passing:
Trying to see beyond the shores
The fuzzy stretch of your fate
The sand at your feet has churned to mud
The sea washes faces and names
A verse that begins in the second person, imagining you envisioning your future across the horizonless sea, veers into mud, the primal medium of life, and the vast anonymity of death. The ocean figures as our last border and final ally, cleansing and emptying the sack of identity we have called our skin, our self.
Thank you, Ananda, for inviting us into your complicated beauty, and for greeting us with such warmth and generosity as we cross over.
University of Oklahoma
