I was intrigued to read a book by a Mauritian author during Women in Translation month. Eve out of her Ruins hadn’t been on my initial list, but it was recommended to me and I decided to get a copy especially as I’ve been seeing many images of the island of Mauritius recently.

My Uncle is spending some months there at present, designing a noir thriller film called Serenity, starring Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey. A fishing boat captain’s past is about to crash up against his life on a tropical island.

Thank you Andrew McAlpine for the photos shared below, which so well depict the contrasts of Mauritius.

Ananda Devi writes from her roots. Deep within the Indian Ocean, Mauritius was colonised by Dutch, French and English explorers, traces of this colonial past remain evident both in the landscape and among the languages spoken by its multifarious population, descendants of settlers, slaves, indentured servants, and finally immigrants.

Though the blurb does mention the novel is enchanting and harrowing in equal measures, it is the story that is harrowing and the lyrical prose that is enchanting.

…she has trained her novelistic gaze on disenfranchised populations and the ways in which femininity is shaped and established. Her gorgeously hewn sentences rarely shy away from depicting violence or suffering; her novels, rather, embrace the entirety of human experience, from abject suffering to unalloyed joy. Jeffrey Zuckerman, Translator

The novel is narrated through four teenage voices, two young men Saad and Clélio, who like many young people on the island are bored and belong to a gang, not through any desire to cause harm, but almost to create some kind of a sense of community, their destructive tendencies more a result of a restless energy that has no other channel.

Saadiq, though everyone calls him Saad is in love with Eve and wants nothing more than to be able to protect her, and though she is used by everyone, there is something between these two, something that both draws them together and keeps them apart. He loves words, he expresses himself through the poetry of others, inscribing lines upon a wall, when he finds the phrase that resonates.

“Our cité is our kingdom. Our city in the city, our town in the town. Port Louis has changed shape; it has grown long teeth and buildings taller than its mountains. But our neighbourhood hasn’t changed. It’s the last bastion. Here, we let our identities happen: we are those who do not belong. We call ourselves bann Troumaron – the Troumaronis – as if we were yet another kind of people on this island filled with so many kinds already. Maybe we actually are.

Our lair, our playground, our battleground, our cemetery. Everything is here. We don’t need anything else. One day we’ll be invincible and the world will tremble. That’s our ambition.”

The two girls Eve and Savita are friends, the light in each others eyes and lives, something observed by the boys that generates jealousy and inspires something terrible.

There is  a second person narrative throughout, written in italics, employing the you voice, an omniscient presence that sees everything, enters the minds of characters, in particular Eve and all who encounter her, it understands everything and voices thoughts that can not be expressed.

Out of distress. Out of misery. Confirming angrily, belligerently, hopelessly, what they’re all thinking, over there, outside.

Being. Becoming. Not disappearing in your eyes. Escaping the straitjacket of passivity, of idleness, of failure, of ashen gazes, of leaden days, of sharpened hours, of shadowy lives,of faraway deaths, of gravelly failures, of lingering, of nakedness, of ugliness, of mockery, of laughter, of tears, of moments, of eternity, of shortness, of heaviness, of night, of day, of afternoons, of dawns, of faded Madonnas, of vanished temptresses.

None of that is you.

It is a tragic account, full of foreboding, it seems as if there is no escape, the one that did, a brother, promised to return, a hollow promise.

She forces open a door in darkness’s wall. This opening indeed reveals the beauty of the island, of this gift from the gods that is Mauritius, this gift that humans do not deserve but only a few innocents may ever see. J.M G. Le Clézio