Nathacha Appanah’s Ecologies of Violence

Abstract: In the words of posthuman feminist Stacy Alaimo, ‘all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world’. In this article I study such intermeshing of embodied beings and material worlds in the work of the Mauritian French writer Nathacha Appanah (b. 1973). With a focus on Rien ne t’appartient (2021), I interrogate the ways in which ecological metaphor is used to conceptualize the protagonist’s experience of sexual abuse and forced abortion. I follow the vegetal and elemental imaginaries employed to depict these sexual and reproductive violences, which form part of Appanah’s ‘ecologies of violence’ in the novel.