Nekuja

Abstract

The author of this article considers the emotions expressed by the Mauritian writer Ananda Devi in the literary aftermath of her May 2019 visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, a memorial to mass extermination. Devi’s novella Hills, deliberately conceived as a nekyia, recalls to life, and in fact re-embodies, victims of Auschwitz. The novella can also be thought of as a sort of virulent fragment, stuck to an unpublished novel about a subject completely unrelated to Poland and concerning a phenomenon that the writer perceives as necro-tourism. Looking at the Holocaust from the point of view of her homeland, for which South Africa is the best known point of reference, Ananda Devi expands her vision of violence to consider the phenomenon of apartheid, mass communist crimes in the People’s Republic of China and the bloody Arab-Israeli conflict in the territory which now belongs to Israel. Devi’s reflections represent a broader current in her thinking, the most recent expression of which is the tri-lingual poem Ceux du large, which treats of the tragic fate of immigrants on their way to southern Europe by sea.