Event Highlights: Writing the Limits, the Limits of Writing with Ananda Devi
On Thursday, September 22nd, the Pardee School’s Center for the Study of Europe opened its doors to world renowned Mauritanian writer Ananda Devi to discuss the role a writer plays in the world today, and to illuminate both the struggles and beauties that come with such a responsibility. Moderated by Professor Odile Cazenave, a Professor of French and Chair of Romance Studies at Boston University, Devi’s talk wove together pertinent questions of identity, lyricism, and the experience of alterity.
Devi’s prodigious skill has been recognized since the age of 15, when she won a short story competition, and has given her the international audience to write eleven novels, as well as short stories and poems, all met positively on a global stage.
“She is always surprising you,” says Cazenave. “One of the key features at times that readers or critics have found is the place of violence [in her writing]. I think she wanted to address it from a different standpoint, what it means to be writing violence into the text, doing maybe at times violence to the text, and what it can do to the writer; what the writer may feel when writing something that is violent.”
Devi’s stories all explore and consider a wide range of rather dark topics, including trauma, disability, the struggle for autonomy, and often, graphic violence. One of the questions Devi tackled in her lecture was exactly that—why can writers not seem to turn away from the harsh truth of violence, and how does it effect the writers themselves?
“It is indeed the result of a reflection of many many years and of questioning from my readers about why do i write such dark, violent stories,” remarks Devi. “One of the remarks that people say to me after having read my books when they meet me is, ‘you’re not at all like your books, you don’t look like somebody who is writing such tortured stories.’ There is a french saying, les apparances sont trompeuses, or, don’t trust appearances. What’s under the surface might be completely different.”
Devi explains how, in one of her most viscerally received novels, Le sari vert, she told the story through a first-person narrator who happened to be the perpetrator of violences against women. “The entire book is written in a language of hate, of misogyny and utter contempt for women and the human race in general,” Devi explains. “For two hundred and fifty odd pages, [the readers] had to remain inside the head of this terrible man. They had to follow his own logic and his self justification, which made it painful to read.”
When it comes to the reason behind Devi’s dark choice of subject matter, however, she makes an interesting contrast between the world she belongs to and the worlds she narrates. “However sincere my distress, I was still living in comfortable surroundings, while those i was writing about were dying in the cold and dark outside. If it was the case that we shouldn’t write about anything that disturbs us, and that disrupts our well being and comfort, we writers would have no subjects left.”
Devi’s brutal and lyrical writing style lends itself perfectly to the intimate worlds she creates in her stories. “I’m not writing about big epics,” she notes. Instead, Devi’s works focus on tangible, commonplace social realities expressed through honest poetics. Why, then, combine such passionate, expressive prose with such agonizing themes?
“It is the same question that any writer should ask when addressing the issues of our time, not using the issues but serving them. Not writing about them because they are in the news or in fashion, but because you feel compelled to write about them and you have no choice… perhaps the sanest approach is to be aware of our own limits and to know that we will not be able to change the world, but this has never been the purpose of writing. We can, perhaps, change a few people.”
-Toria Rainey, ‘18
Listen to this event on WBUR’s World of Ideas: http://www.wbur.org/worldofideas/2016/10/30/devi