Abstract/Summary

Engaging with the work of feminist geographers, this chapter explores the ways in which the relationship between place, gender and belonging is depicted in Nathacha Appanah’s Blue Bay Palace (2004) and Ananda Devi’s Ève de ses décombres (2006). In both novels, the man-made spatial configurations of the fictionalised Mauritian environment are depicted as reflecting and constructing uneven, exploitative power and gender relations between its inhabitants. In contrast, this chapter analyses how both novels postulate alternative forms of female identification, though violence, with the island’s natural, non-human and pre-human geography. In both, a female harnessing of the island’s elemental power is seen to open up the possibility of more inclusive, woman-made forms of collective belonging to place in the future.