Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi
Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Pages: 160
Publisher: Deep Vellum
Released: 2016
Reviewed by Bronwyn Mauldin
Saadiq is still hanging on in school, finding kinship in the
poetry of Rimbaud and trying to write his own story on his bedroom wall with a marker.
Clélio
is a thug who’s been in and out of jail all through his youth. Savita is the
good girl trying hard to set an example for her younger sister. Eve is the beautiful,
bone-thin object of their desires. She is the object of desire for many in the impoverished
cité
of Troumaron, on the edge of Port Louis.
The setting for Ananda Devi’s
heartbreaking and lyrical novel, Eve Out
of Her Ruins, is the capital of Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian
Ocean smaller than the state of Rhode Island. The island was colonized by the
Dutch in the 17th century, followed later by the French and the British, and
finally gained independence in 1968. Mauritian Creole, French, English,
Bhojpuri, and at least eight other languages are spoken by its nearly 1.3
million people.
Troumaron, home to those four main narrators of the story,
is a fictitious neighborhood created by Devi. Its name, she
explains, is meant to refer to a “brown hole” or a “hole for escaped slaves
(marrones).” On rutted neighborhood
streets littered with trash, Eve feels as if she is living through a siege:
“But this isn’t just the city. The
world is also fighting against everything that staggers forward, everything
that doesn’t walk in victory. Its distant rhythms aren’t for us. It’s better to
be born blind so as not to see the rage in its eyes. Everybody’s preparing for
war.”
Mauritius is generally presented as an African
success story. Sugar cane, jewelry manufacturing, tourism, and financial
services make up the bulk of the country’s economy. The annual growth rate has
been above three percent for several years. The Troumaronis of Devi’s novel,
however, are the people hidden behind national statistics.
At seventeen, Eve uses her body as a weapon to get what she
needs from those who have more of everything than she does: more money, more
power, more hope. She is as proud of her solitude as she is lonely, but she
refuses to let Troumaron steal her soul even as people use her body. Her
self-awareness is both keen and gendered:
“We’re all born with this naked and
open flesh. Then each of us fashions an armor of thorns and spiky brambles. But
the two sexes don’t have the same heritage. We’re not born with the same
burdens.”
Now is a good time to be reading about Mauritius and its
people. A long-standing dispute between the country and former colonial power Great
Britain over control of the nearby Chagos Islands has heated up in recent
months. The islands are home to the secretive Diego Garcia military
base jointly managed by the UK and the US. In June the United Nations General
Assembly voted to refer
their dispute to the International Court of Justice, which has no legal
power to enforce whatever ruling it makes.
Eve’s tragedy, when it strikes, has an inevitability about
it. There is a hierarchy even among the poor, and she is at the bottom of it. We
read to learn not only who committed the crime, but whether the powerful will
be held accountable.
Eve Out of Her Ruins was
originally published in French in 2006 and quickly began to gather awards. It
was adapted for film, appearing as Les
enfants de Troumaron in 2012. English language readers had to wait until
2016 when Deep Vellum brought out Jeffrey Zuckerman’s excellent translation,
which has garnered its own awards. The story Devi tells is as unique to its
place as it is universal. The beautiful language of the text and the voices of
its four main characters are what make it stand out and well worth the read.
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