2 - Belonging to the Island: Nathacha Appanah's Blue Bay Palace and Ananda Devi's Ève de ses dècombres

Summary

In Ananda Devi's 2006 novel Eve de ses decombres, the eponymous protagonist provocatively asks, ‘C’est l’endroit qui nous a faits ainsi, ou le contraire?’: an ultimately unanswered question on which the novel hinges. This narrative preoccupation with the mutually formative relationship between people, place and belonging reflects the concerns of contemporary geographers and theorists of the built environment. It is generally recognised that individual and group belonging is intimately intertwined with the ways in which people interact and identify with a particular place, and with the other individuals who inhabit that place. Neil Leach claims, for instance, that, ‘as individuals identify with an environment, so their identity comes to be constituted through that environment’. As a consequence, as Doreen Massey famously asserts, ‘social relations always have a spatial form and a spatial content’: that is, not only are man-made spaces constructed to reflect the social norms of their inhabitants, but social relations between these inhabitants, both positive and negative, are also conditioned by the spaces they occupy. In this context, as discussed in this book's introduction, Marco Antonsich distinguishes between the broadly positive notion of ‘place-belongingness’ – defined as ‘a personal, intimate, feeling of being “at home” in a place’ – and the more negative and normative ‘politics of belonging’: ‘a discursive resource that constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion’. As Antonsich and others recognise, however, individual ‘place-belongingness’ and collective ‘politics of belonging’ can rarely be separated: an individual’s personal and intimate ability to ‘feel at home’ in a place is fundamentally conditioned by the ways and the extent to which a prevailing ‘politics of belonging’ seeks to dictate the terms of his or – as is the case in this chapter – her inclusion or exclusion.

In addition to such broad formative links between people and place, the subfield of feminist geography focuses on the ways in which space is experienced differentially by men and by women. Feminist geographers are concerned with how the prevailing ‘politics of belonging’ within a particular environment may inhibit women's ability to connect, and self-assertively identify, with that place. As Tovi Fenster argues, ‘a gendered sense of belonging is about power relations and control’.