Oppression

• Published in: SubStance 2023, Vol.52 (1), p.169-176
• Main Author: Lionnet, Françoise
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; Aspiration; Devi, Ananda (1957- ); Infants; Murders & murder attempts; Narratives; Novellas; Oppression; Philosophy; Police brutality; Postcolonialism; Prose; Respiration
• ISSN: 0049-2426; 1527-2095; 1527-2095
• DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900550

[...] like Césaire, she works exclusively on the resources of poetic language to work through social concerns, and it is essentially by relation and analogy that her lyrical prose evokes or translates such concerns. _______ There is, at first glance, little in common between Devi's broken and exploited Mauritian Creole mother and the trials of grieving African American motherhood, as addressed by O'Neal. Horrific as it is, his death at the end of the book is but a peaceful surrender to the ruthless laws of nature: smelling blood on him (he has just murdered two young girls), they cannot recognize his more familiar marine odor, and the hungry migrating eels, on their journey to lay eggs, methodically set to work on his flesh and start a slow process of eating and incorporating him, piece by small piece of flesh. [...] he is also her complex narrative study of our ambiguous relationship to air and breath, and to the maternal as alternately protective embrace and suffocating power. "Le premier appel est un appel d'air, il se confond avec un cri" (42) ["The first call is an aspiration of air, it is indistinguishable from a cry"]: the cry of the newborn that signals entry into the human condition, and "le cri de détresse" (42) ["the cry