Uprooting Violence:Transgenerational Legacies and Entangled Memories in Ananda Devi’s L’arbre fouet

In a remarkable essay, published in the 2023 special issue of SubStance on “Breathe,” literary critic Françoise Lionnet discusses how the work of acclaimed Mauritian writer Ananda Devi is “haunted” (166) by forms of exclusion and oppression impacting the most vulnerable groups and individuals of society across space, time, and cultural contexts. Putting into conversation the story of the outcast figure of Joséphin in Devi’s 2003 poetic novella, La vie de Joséphin le fou, with Aimé Césaire’s “Le cri,” and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Lionnet’s comparative analysis reveals how “the denial of air”—something which Devi’s character and someone like George Floyd alike suffered from—”frames a gruesome sacrificial outcome that ultimately serves to build community; among BLM supporters of Floyd, on the one hand, and in Joséphin’s new family of invertebrates on the other” (168).1 By positing “air” as her main analytical framework, and by thinking relationally about the experience of Joséphin, the critic eloquently demonstrates how Devi’s creative work, whose gestures to other stories of oppression may not always be obvious at first glance, in fact indexes “layers of sedimented meanings” and “traces of history” (170) that call for a rethinking of the “human/nature dualism and our ethical responsibility to ‘Mother’ nature as to one another” (172).