Born in Mauritius, Ananda Devi is the author of a wealth of work that has won numerous awards and has been translated into a dozen languages. Among her most notable books: “Eve of her rubble” (Five Continents prize, RFO prize, 2006), “The Green Sari” (Louis Guilloux prize, 2009), and “The Laugh of the Goddesses” (Femina prize for high school students , 2021). She received the 2024 Neustadt International Literature Prize for her entire body of work. His new book entitled “The night is added to the night”, is the story of his night spent in the old Montluc prison in Lyon.
“What dark impulse did this text, which haunted me for many months, draw on? All I know is that I was carried away, swallowed up by the century of history that passed through this Lyon prison, the Montluc prison, Raymond Samuel, known as Aubrac, René Leynaud, André Devigny, the children of Izieu were all imprisoned there. Then many Algerian death row prisoners. was incarcerated there before his trial in 1983. It was only in 2009 that the women’s wing, the last in operation, was definitively closed, at the same time as the prison.
All the complexity of the story seems to have concentrated in a single point, but its tentacles extend much further. I tried to follow them, to untangle them. To penetrate them during a sleepless night when I thought I was going to meet the spirits of so many resistance fighters, and where I ended up realizing that the ghost, in these places, was me.” (Ananda Devi for the Stock editions)
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“Where did this tormented text come from, these tortured bodies, these dismantled existences, these ravaged souls and this omnipresence of evil around my narrator, Paule, who tries to make her voice emerge among the whirlwinds seeking to attract her towards darkness? Forest-Side, December 1984, I wrote at the end. It was forty years ago. And I don’t remember anything except the first sentence. which has never changed, and from the end, in the apocalyptic cries of the bulldozers. Enter, a vision similar to that of Bosch’s hell. Was it really Port-Louis No, of course? to plunge my pen into the manure to extract a writing of excess, to follow an obscure path, begun years earlier, and search, groping, just like Paule, my own voice Which would become that of Eve,. twenty years later, limping out of the same rubble.” Ananda Devi for Project’îles editions
“What is this mystery of writing? What leads to writing? What sentence, what text, can mark an author at the beginning and why? When does writing become a obvious? What influences? Who are the authors or the texts that never leave the writer? In this collection, authors speak freely and in a form that is specific to them? full of doubts, but who wants to write, sometimes confronted with insoluble questions, he or she is looking for answers, ways to take the plunge.
Two trunks and a pot is a tender and uncompromising look from novelist and poet Ananda Devi. The author creates a bridge, a dialogue between the young woman she was and the novelist she has become. A text of great generosity offered to its readers and to all enthusiasts of Indian-oceanic literature. There are keys there to penetrate a demanding, rich, moving work.
Confession story, Two trunks and a pot is one of those texts that dazzle you, change you and fill you when you come away from reading. Its language carves paths in the rock of existence like a quest for light. The violence reserved for beings in search of light requires a break to gather together. It is what remains of the shattered beings which constitutes the sum of this story. His flesh is made of wounded, bruised bodies which, through the sieve of writing, find a certain serenity.” (Éditions Project’îles)
