Speaker: Elly Walters, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford - Academia.edu

Abstract: »Since the publication of her most recent novel, Rien ne t'appartient (2021), the Mauritian-French writer Nathacha Appanah has been invited on more than one occasion to comment on her use of the term 'fille gâchée'. In the novel, set in an unnamed island in the Global South, protagonist Vijaya is sent to live in a carceral refuge for so-called 'filles gâchées' after falling pregnant as a teenager. The term is not particularly idiomatic in French, and readers have been curious to learn more about it. When one interviewer asked whether Appanah created the expression, she replied: 'Je crois que je l'ai inventée mais je suis sûre que je ne l'ai pas inventée, je suis sûre qu'elle existe'. This paper follows Appanah's discussion of the the 'fille gâchée' in Rien ne t'appartient and its metatexts. I explore the ways in which ecological metaphor is used to conceptualise the protagonist's experience of sexual abuse and forced abortion: namely, through the allegory of spoilt fruit, or 'fruits gâchés', and through the recurring motifs of tides and vines. My interest lies in how Appanah writes sexual and reproductive violence through ecology and vice versa, reconfiguring in her work the relationships between bodies, environments, and systems of power.« (Source: Academia.edu)

Wikipedia: Literature: Mauritian literature / Nathacha Appanah | Sex and the law: Sexual violence