"Ton continent est noir": Rethinking Feminist Metaphors in Ananda Devi's Pagli

A n her influential studies on the fraught relationship between Western academia and ~S "Third World" women's writing, G. C. Spivak famously identifies two predominant but opposing reading approaches: the first takes an interest only in those texts which its sees, homogenizingly, as representative of marginality, whilst the second seeks to read non- Western texts according to (inappropriate) Western criteria and theoretical models.1 The publishing history and reception of the works of Mauritian-born, francophone writer Ananda Devi are strikingly illustrative of the first of these tendencies. For many years, her novels and short stories were rejected by the large French publishing houses because they did not consciously signal their minority status and "difference."2 When eventually, in 2001, Devi's sixth novel, Pagli, was accepted by Gallimard, it was included within the separate "Continents noirs" series, dedicated to francophone literature from Africa and its diaspora, and thus classified as distinct from mainstream French collections. Indeed, the "Continents noirs" series has received much negative criticism for its perceived "ghettoization" of African francophone texts and for the disturbing essentialism of its packaging and title (see Loupias). Given the problems of essentialist classification and marginalization that Devi's work has come up against, I should like to argue that there may nonetheless be strategic benefits to be obtained from reading it within a Western theoretical framework. Running counter to the tendency to marginalize francophone works, an approach which reads them on the same terms as French texts could facilitate their insertion into mainstream French literature. Devi's novel Pagli seems to offer particularly fertile ground for a French feminist reading.3 Whilst many of the texts produced by metropolitan women writers of the 1990s continue, as in past generations, to be concerned with female experience, the female body and sexuality, these subjects tend to be approached with an irony and bluntness of style that are at odds with the celebratory lycricism and revolutionary optimism of their predecessors.4 Devi's work stands out, both thematically and stylistically, in contrast to such writings: her texts constantly rework, in extreme, allegorical form, thematics of gender relations and the specificity of female experience. The lyrical, metaphorical style of her female-centred narratives, with their frequent disruptions of grammar and syntax, echo many of the concerns and stylistic practices of exponents of "ecriture feminine."