Book: Eve Out of Her Ruins (Eve de ses décombres)
Author: Ananda Devi (translator: Jeffrey Zuckerman)
Publication Year: 2016 (2006)
Genre: Fiction
Mauritius is another of those places, like Iceland (see: Iceland) or Morocco (see: Morocco) that straddles the line between two continents. Technically part of the continent of Africa, the tiny island lies a thousand miles east of Mozambique, out beyond the much larger island of Madagascar. While it is closer to Africa than any other land mass, it could just as well be described as a halfway house between Africa and Asia.
For such a small country (790 square miles) in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Mauritius has ingrained itself into the western consciousness more than other territories in the region. It was here the dodo lived, until the first Dutch explorers arrived and hunted the bird to extinction in six short decades. It is questionable whether such an unremarkable bird would be so famous if it had survived. As it is, it’s destruction has become a cautionary tale about ecology and preservation (one we have stubbornly refused to heed). It has turned up in the writing of everyone from Lewis Carroll to Douglas Adams and Jasper Fforde.
Even before the Dutch, Arab records mention the
island all the way back in the 10th century. The Portuguese were the next to
arrive at the beginning of the 16th, but they saw little of
interest and the island remained uninhabited until the Dutch arrived at the end
of the century. They were the first to transport slaves to harvest sugar and
coffee and all of the usual cash crops of European colonialism.
Alice meets the Dodo
France took over the island in 1715 (nearby Réunion is still a French dependency), but it was captured by the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. It remained a British colony until independence in 1968. French continues to be spoken on the island, along with English and Mauritian Creole.
Following independence, the British retained control of the Chagos Archipelago to the north west of the country, which includes the island of Diego Garcia. Diego Garcia has been used as a joint airforce base with the USA since the 1970s.
After decades of dispute and obfustication by the UK government, it finally agreed to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in 2025. Diego Garcia is to remain under UK control. A whole entry could be written on this history alone and I might return to the Chagos islands at a later date as part of my Reading the Dependencies sub-project.
In the meantime, the population of Mauritius, as a result of colonialism, slavery and sitting in the middle of the Indian Ocean, has a heady mix of ethnicities. Indian descendents make up the majority of the population, followed by African, Chinese, French and a large Madagascan population. By some measures, it has the highest population density in Africa with 1.3 million people living there. It is also reckoned to be most developed country in Africa.
Statistics, however, rarely tell the whole picture. A dense population usually equals slums and grinding inequality. In choosing Ananda Devi’s novel, Eve out of Her Ruins, to represent Mauritius, we come face to face with these issues.
The titular Eve is named for obvious reasons. A 17 year old school girl, she has used her body to get what she wants throughout her teenage years. The novel is told by Eve and three of her contemporaries in short, dense passages. The consequences of her actions play out like the Garden of Eden story for which she is named. The tale has been retold by everyone from Emile Zola to John Steinbeck.
Eve Out of Her Ruins is another of those books we have seen in this project that are universal. It could be set in any slum or impoverished country throughout the globe. The problem of teenage prostitution and predatory men is hardly unique to Mauritius. What is less common, at least in literature, is Eve’s disassociation from her own body, even when her encounters can in no sense be considered consensual.
Against Eve’s narrative, we have that of Saadiq, poet and gang member, who is in love with Eve, but for whom she is forever off limits. He is the typical male who wants to save the working girl from herself, as seen in countless movies and songs (cf. Roxanne, where Sting mansplains sex work). There is also her best friend, Savita, and Clélio, another gang member who has already committed vandalism and petty theft and is working his way up to murder.
All four are residents of the fiction slum town of Troumaron, which translates from French into Brown Hole, and, by extension, Shit Hole. Subtlety isn’t always needed. They are all trapped; subjected to violent fathers and distant mothers. Each talks about leaving but escape is all but impossible. Clélio’s brother has emigrated to France, but Clélio knows his brother’s tales of prosperity are just that. He is poor even there.
It’s a short book of only about a hundred and fifty pages, but the short three or four page chapters make it seem longer. The second half of the book hinges on the murder of a girl, the reasons for her killing and Clélio’s arrest and imprisonment. Again the issues of prejudice and poverty rear their ugly heads. There is a resolution of kinds, but it is left sufficiently ambiguous to remind us that life is rarely so neat and tidy as it is in Hollywood movies.
A good book and as I have said countless times, Devi is an author to whom I will return long after this project ends. I read this one in translation, but she writes principally in French and I would like to read some of her many other books in their original language. There are also many other Mauritian writers to explore, but we can’t do a deep dive into every country’s oeuvre or we’ll be here until doomsday.
Anyway, it almost seems apt to restrict an island nation to one or two books to reflect its relative isolation. Even if Mauritius is less isolated than its geographical position suggests.
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