Female writing across the Indian Ocean: identity, nature, motherhood and sorority in Ananda Devi and Esther Nirina

Abstract

There exists a multiplicity of concomitances between contemporary poetry made by women in Reunion and Madagascar. The poetic ‘I’ in both of them evokes solidarity through a feeling of sorority, aiming at overcoming a situation of double colonization: the one they suffer for being women and the one because of being a postcolonial subject, triggered by the everlasting gap between the so called First and the Third World. Throughout the poetic work by Ananda Devi and Esther Nirina, sorority is spoken out in the shape of greed, fatigue, but also learnings and the expectation of a better future. In this poetic works hybridity between elements of African and Indian identity can be appreciated, due to the influence of the subcontinent via its diaspora in the insular territories of the Indian Ocean. Thus nature, the apprehension of the world through the senses, education in the framework of the family, the relevance of the oneiric element or the allegory between the colonization of female bodies and (post)colonial spaces are vital to the comprehension of these poetic texts.