“Identity is, to me, an exploration of all the possibilities of being. It is the opposite of the monolithic. I don’t know whether I became a writer because I was made up of so many pieces of the world, or whether being a writer has made me aware of the wealth of this multiplicity. I sometimes feel that it is a dance on the wire of possibilities and this, for me, is both a literary credo and a life credo. As people tend to entrench themselves behind the barriers of a fixed, immutable identity, I believe our chance of survival is in the exact opposite: in embracing our hybridity, in accepting that identities are soluble in one another, in recognizing that the other is ourselves.” Ananda Devi is a novelist and scholar born in Trois-Boutiques, Mauritius in 1957. She has lived in Ferney-Voltaire, France (near Geneva) since 1989, after having spent some years in Congo-Brazzaville. As an ethnologist and a translator, Devi is sensitive to the interconnection between identities and languages. Choosing to write in French, her novels and short stories also incorporate Creole and Hindi. Her incisive, lyrical and shrewd style offers the French language new cultural and linguistic scope linked to her native island.
New York City, NY; NYC