EVE OUT OF HER RUINS, Paradise for whom?

EVE OUT OF HER RUINS
ANANDA DEVI (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.96 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: "Devi writes about terrible and bitter events with a soft, delicate voice."—Le Figaro

With brutal honesty and poetic urgency, Ananda Devi relates the tale of four young Mauritians trapped in their country's endless cycle of fear and violence: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve's best friend, the only one who loves Eve without self-interest, who has plans to leave but will not go alone; Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, inspired by Rimbaud, in love with Eve; Clélio, belligerent rebel, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France.

Eve out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the dark corners of the island nation of Mauritius that tourists never see, and a poignant exploration of the construction of personhood at the margins of society. Awarded the prestigious Prix des cinq continents upon publication as the best book written in French outside of France, Eve Out of her Ruins is a harrowing account of the violent reality of life in her native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.

The book featurues an original introduction by Nobel Prize winner J.M.G. Le Clézio, who declares Devi "a truly great writer."

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Paradise is always a fantasy, a construct imposed on a much more complicated reality. It is also used, with distressing regularity and near-universal success, as a trap for the seekers and for the sacrificial victims the entrappers designate.

The sea by the luxury hotel gleams with hazy fire. Where we live, it looks like oil and smells like an armpit. People walk past, sit at a café, take in the air, drink beers, enjoy the weather, and think about nothing. Eve once told me that we were on another planet. I think she’s right. Our sun and theirs aren’t the same.

No tourist could fail to wince at the reality of Paradise; so they're carefully steered away from contact with it.

Sometimes, when the neighbourhood is quiet, the island’s sounds seem different. Other kinds of music, less funereal tones, the clang of cash registers, the dazzle of development. The tourists scorn us without realizing it. Money has made them naïve. We cheat them out of a few rupees until they begin to mistrust our pleasant, false faces.

The country puts on its sky-blue dress, the better to seduce them. A marine perfume wafts from its crotch. From here we can’t see the island all dolled up, and their eyes, dazzled by the sun, can’t see us. As things should be.

Fantasy is good business, and good for business. Look at Disney's "entertainment" empire, its parks, hotels, cruise ships, retirement homes for fucksake. What it costs, what it does to the homes of real people, isn't priced into the fantasist's experience. It's an economic externality. Tourists, often with the very best of intentions, go to places to have experiences, learn things, be broadened and hopefully improved. Travel does alter people who can afford to do it.

The capitalist system demands that, wherever there is money to be made, as much as possible of it should be funnelled into the pockets of the very richest. So that broadening travel? It benefits you, the comparatively rich tourist and it enriches the service providers; leaving the people whose home you're staying in, whose lives you're altering, with less than a fair share. Most destructively, people like Eve are encouraged to commodify their being on this Earth:

The school principal told me: Vous vous devez de réussir. Then she said it again in English: You owe it to yourself to succeed. And finally in Mauritian Creole: Pa gaspiy u lavi.

Careful now...read that again. This is the colonizer's hand showing through the glove. Like that deeply and disturbingly unchristian "prosperity doctrine," it exchanges the idea of development, improvement, education for "success" that ever-elusive endlessly mutable chimera of the economic system. And look how beautifully succinct that message is, delivered in the colonizers' tongue, the dominant language of capitalism, then the hearer's local language. The hierarchy is laid bare. Fewer than thirty words to create the spine of a story.

Eve is, in the eyes of those around her who purport to love her, a wild creature of iron whims and large passions. She is a small woman. That means her intensity is almost fetishized in acknowledging it; it also has the side effect of making her sexually desirable. As she's a person very capable of dissociation, like many intelligent women, she uses sex to acquire things she needs and things she wants.

This willingness to divorce herself from the use of her body is, ironically, the greatest guide to the woman she loves and who returns that love, Savita.

Eve's silence is the rumble deep within the volcano. It hurts me to see her so fragile when she thinks she's so strong.

Savita sees Eve's magma, her soul heating the rock of her life to boiling point. She longs for the abillity to soothe her, to release the pressure that pushes Eve away from everyone else. In a grim, horrible way, she does that.

The shortness of this read shouldn't be mistaken for truncation or cursoriness. Savita's arc, not long, so hugely, consequentially alters Eve's and Troumaron's as an entire "native" (that ugly colonizers' term for the owners of the land) community, that an entire fifty thousand more words could be spent on it without adding a scintilla of intensity, meaning, or passion. Eve is transformed, attains an apotheosis, that alters her male admirer Saadiq (a poetry-obsessed yobbo whose yearning for her organizes his life and leaves hers untouched) perhaps most. The end of the story isn't a cheery, uplifting one. The end of the story is, instead, the realization of the inevitability of sacrifices in pursuit of the idea of Paradise.

I'll comment that the narrative voice here is not, nor was it meant to be, an accurate presentation of young people's actual spoken language. When you're telling a story this consequential, using more poetic, lyrical cadences is a useful way of communicating to the reader they're to look for more than the surface of the tale. I also note that Nobel-winner J.M.G. Le Clézio wrote an introduction that is one long spoiler for the story. I advise you to read it last.

I enjoyed this read very much. I hope you'll take heed of the content warning for sexual abuse...it's not graphically shown but it is absolutely pervasive of every aspect of the story told here.