Copyright by Yasmina Fawaz 2018 The Dissertation Committee for Yasmina Fawaz Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: Re-Imagining Environmental Waste: An Ecocritical Reading of Contemporary African Women Writers Committee: Alexandra Wettlaufer, Supervisor Hélène Tissières, Co-Supervisor Hervé Tchumkam Hervé Picherit Benjamin Brower Re-Imagining Environmental Waste: An Ecocritical Reading of Contemporary African Women Writers by Yasmina Fawaz Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2018 Dedication To my mother, For all the sacrifices you’ve made. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Alexandra Wettlaufer for providing the support I needed during a difficult transitional time which led to her role as primary supervisor of my dissertation. It is with her encouragement and careful critique that I was able to complete this work. I am especially indebted to Dr. Hélène Tissières with whom I have worked since the beginning of my doctoral program at the University of Texas. Her invaluable expertise on African francophone literature made her the obvious choice as my initial committee chair. Despite having to become co-chair of my doctoral work when she left the University of Texas, Dr. Tissières remained integrally involved in advising me, providing much needed guidance and continued support. It is because of her unwavering commitment to my personal and professional success that I was able to bring this project to fruition. I would also like to recognize Ananda Devi and Barlen Pyamootoo who generously agreed to meet with me and inspired my writing. Similarly, I’d like to thank Dr. Byron Caminero- Santangelo for his helpful suggestions and feedback during an ALA conference panel, and Dr. Karl Butzer with whom I had the opportunity to engage in thought-provoking conversations that deeply shaped my understanding of cultural geography. Finally, I would like to thank the Department of French and Italian through which I received the Walther Summer Research funds as well as well as the Julia Emerson Walther Fellowships. These scholarships provided me with the opportunity to do field work in Mauritius and enrich my research experience. v Abstract Re-Imagining Environmental Waste: An Ecocritical Reading of Contemporary African Women Writers Yasmina Fawaz, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 Co-Supervisors: Hélène Tissières and Alexandra Wettlaufer The field of ecocriticism has been growing rapidly since its beginnings in the early 1990s. Since then, critics like Elizabeth Deloughrey and Byron Caminero-Santangelo have indicated the importance of considering African works and their postcolonial contexts in these inquiries, as well as the remaining need to engage with francophone parts of the continent. With a growing interest in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism galvanized by the increasing environmental disasters across the African continent and the globe, contemporary women writers Ananda Devi, Tanella Boni and Fatou Diome offer invaluable perspectives on the various forms of environmental waste as they consider some of the myriad connections between material, human and cultural elements of pollution and degradation. Through the study of three novels, Devi’s Eve de ses décombres (2006), Boni’s Les baigneurs du lac Rose (1995), and Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique (2003), this project articulates the ways in which these African writers go beyond portrayals of exploitation and waste by re-imagining polluted landscapes and gesture instead to the continent’s potential for material and cultural renewal. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Re-Imagining Environmental Waste; An Ecocritical Reading of Contemporary African Women Writers (Devi, Boni and Diome) ......................1 Chapter 1: De-Romanticizing the Island; Pollution of the Mind and the “désir de repli” in Ananda Devi’s Ève de ses décombres.........................................................20 Pollution of the Mind ..............................................................................................26 Troumaron, cité of refuse and refuge....................................................................38 A Haunting Loss .....................................................................................................44 The “désir de repli” ................................................................................................51 The heart of development.......................................................................................59 Chapter 2: Enchanted Ecology; Reading Mud, Salt and Clay in Tanella Boni’s Les baigneurs du lac Rose ..........................................................................................63 Salted wounds: ........................................................................................................73 Mud and Monsters, the mired aspects of development .......................................83 Enchanting mud: ....................................................................................................90 Nature and the Sacred, The Teachings of Clay....................................................97 Chapter 3: Deep Waters; Pollution and Economies of Meaning in Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique...........................................................................................106 Plundered waters ..................................................................................................114 The first economy of pollution ...................................................................114 The power of the Belly ...............................................................................122 The second economy of pollution ...............................................................133 Who’s your mother? .............................................................................................137 Wombs and Graves ...............................................................................................148 vii Economies of meaning................................................................................148 Conclusion: The role of environmental aesthetics and sensibility in constructing cultural identity ........................................................................................................155 References .......................................................................................................................164 viii Introduction: Re-Imagining Environmental Waste; An Ecocritical Reading of Contemporary African Women Writers (Devi, Boni and Diome) “…équilibrer les énergies les plus élémentaires pour assurer un minimum vital à toutes les populations de la planète” (Liking 37) “Les différences de richesses entre Nord et Sud, ainsi qu’au sein de chaque société, n’ont fait qu’augmenter, renforçant en particulier les inégalités de sexe, de classe et d’‘éthnie’”(Falquet 9) Early in 2017, the newly-elected U.S president stated his intent to back out of the historical Paris Agreement made during the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference also referred to as COP 21. This agreement aimed to mitigate the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale by asking each country represented to commit to keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees celcius in this century. As a major world economic power and polluter, the United States’ damaging decision to back out of the agreement received major criticism from many world governments including the French who spearheaded and hosted the meetings in Paris that year. France’s outrage at the United States’ decision was weakened a few weeks later when footage of newly elected President Emmanuel Macron’s speech alluded to Africa’s inability to rise to Western definitions of civilization, because of the continent’s natality rate. The president’s comments further undermined the progress that seemed underway with the COP 21. Both these events betray the deep-seated relationship between issues of global socio-economic inequality and environmentalism. At the same time, there has been a systematic failure on 1 the part of global lending entities to properly consider African values and approaches to the environment when devising methods for sustainable economic development for the continent. A possible reason for this oversight, we might posit, could be the erroneous and damaging assumption that Africa bears complete responsibility for the pollution and economic deficits it contends with, making any traditional knowledge or input appear obsolete when planning an economic future that aims to rival Western and capitalist standards of development and prosperity. This of course is far from true, particularly with respect to the continent’s pollution production, as demonstrated by Valadkhani et al.’s “A Multiplicative Environmental DEA Approach to Measure Efficiency Changes in the World’s Major Polluters” (2016), a study aimed at demonstrating how efficiently the world’s largest climate polluters managed to reduce their harmful emissions. Using data from the World Bank (2015) they determine that: in terms of CO2 emissions, the US, China and Russia were the largest CO2 polluters in 2002 and 2007, but in 2011 Russia was replaced by India. In terms of the size of the labour force, freshwater, energy, GDP, CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions, the three largest countries in 2011