At a Remove: The Curious State(lessness) of Migrant Mothering in Novels by Shumona Sinha and Nathacha Appanah

Abstract

— Là, demandais-je?

— Là, me répondit Gatzo. C’est un beau pays.

“There?” I asked.

“There,” he answered. “It’s a beautiful country.”

Henri Bosco, L’enfant et la rivière

What is the appropriate distance from which to mother? Finding the right remove—the degree of proximity or separation from another—and asking what it means to occupy and to speak from that space as a migrant woman are the principal objects of this orchestrated conversation between works by contemporary French novelists Shumona Sinha and Nathacha Appanah. Both immigrated to Europe as adults, choosing France and French as the sites of their literary creation. While their literary representations of migrant women and motherhood may at first glance seem at odds, when read in light of each other, their portrayals share an interrogation, as I will show, of their state—or statelessness—questioning the possibility of holding a distance from which one might mother. Guided by the tools of French narratology (Dällenbach, Genette)—attentive to questions of doubling and difference (Rank, Freud)—and partly inspired by a feminist reading of the dynamics of migrant women mothering at a distance (Gedalof), I will perform close literary readings of and across several novels, foreground the textual relations these works weave, and resituate the insights gleaned in the French postcolonial context of their reception.

My study first explores how in novels by Indian-born Sinha—especially in Apatride (Stateless) (2017)¹—migrant protagonists ignore or explicitly refuse motherhood as part of a conscious quest for personal freedom—sexual, intellectual, and economic. Societal attitudes toward voluntary childlessness amplify Sinha’s broader critique of how women, in public space, are corrosively challenged, even usurped from the defensible territory of their own bodies, left metaphorically and sometimes literally apatride or stateless, homeless. In contrast, three novels by Mauritian-born Appanah—La noce d’Anna (Anna’s Wedding) (2005), En attendant demain (2015)/Waiting for Tomorrow (2018) and Tropique de la violence (2016)/Tropic of Violence (2016)—present a range of migrant protagonists for whom motherhood, unintended or desired, seems an anchoring fact of identity. However, over the course of these novels, Appanah’s mother characters also arrive at a curious remove, indicating a form of dispossession that resonates with Sinha’s statelessness. If not distant or dead, mothers are unfettered to the point of ghostly unbelonging.

Irene Gedalof’s observations about the practice of “mothering at a distance” in her seminal study of migrant women (89) are usefully reapplied to the poetic imagining at which Appanah arrives. What emerges for both novelists, I propose, is a disputed, de-centered dispossession, a form of mobile statelessness or apatridie, articulated differently but common to both. Finally, by examining remarks Appanah has made about Sinha’s literary reception in metropolitan France, I suggest this odd belonging/unbelonging—made perceptible in and likely constitutive of migrant motherhood itself—finds itself reformulated in how, as non-native writers, these authors discover themselves disjointedly situated within the French language, as a contested stateless space for literary expression.

Childless, Stateless: Apatride

Born in 1973, Shumona Sinha is the author of six novels, all written and published since moving from Kolkata to Paris in 2001. Sinha grew up in a middle-class family speaking principally Bengali but also fluent English and rudimentary Russian, and she subsequently learned French. In India, she published poetry in Bengali and later, while establishing herself as a writer in France, translated poetry and worked as an interpreter and translator for the French administration dealing with refugee claims. 2008 saw the publication of her first novel, Fenêtre sur l’abîme (Window on the abyss), followed since by five works of fiction that have garnered multiple awards, including the Prix du rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises. As an Indian national, next an immigrant, and now a French citizen, Sinha is building an engaging literary oeuvre.

Scholarship on Sinha’s works has thus far principally focused on the problematic of Otherness, especially since the publication in 2011 of her second, breakthrough novel, Assommons les pauvres! (Let’s Beat up the Poor!). Its jolting depiction of violence between a well-heeled, recent immigrant and a refugee claimant captured the public’s attention and led to a series of critical studies.² Motherhood is not addressed in Sinha scholarship because it does not explicitly reflect her immigrant protagonists’ experience. In this author’s first four novels, lead characters are busy charting professional, political, and personal paths where raising a child by choice or circumstance is not part of the picture. Madu, the first-person narrator of Fenêtre sur l’abîme, comes to Paris to study, eventually marries, and struggles with her sanity. The anonymous narrator of Assommons les pauvres! speaks from a cell where she mulls over the encounters that led her to assault an ethnic compatriot in the metro. Trisha, in Calcutta (2014), having rushed from France to India for her father’s funeral rites, mourns his loss by taking readers through family memories and exploring the tensions of her parents’ marriage. In Apatride, however, the question of having a child—or not—is explicitly addressed.

At its heart, Apatride follows the life of Esha, an English teacher in her forties, originally from India, who works in a particularly challenging high school with undisciplined students, lives in an upscale Parisian neighborhood, and awaits news of her application for citizenship. Intellectually and sexually curious, Esha is constantly made aware of her contested status as a brown-skinned, immigrant woman living in a European capital. Among other things, her narration recounts the many macro- and micro-aggressions endured each day, whether at work, commuting, or walking down the street where she is often made to feel like an impostor, an intruder (17). This surveillance extends to her status as a single, childless woman. Esha finds herself at this stage of life alone, “croyant être plus heureuse ainsi, libre et indépendante, sans compagnon et sans enfant, sans attaches pour la freiner au quotidien”/“believing herself happier this way, free and independent without a partner and without a child, without ties to slow her down day to day” (56). Her choices stand in opposition to the varied restrictions of personal freedom that motivated her immigration to France: “en Inde il était impossible à une femme seule de louer un appartement”/“in India it was impossible for a single woman to rent an apartment” (73). Nevertheless, in supposedly cosmopolitan Paris Esha’s life decisions still mark her. Dinner invitations become less frequent, she feels, because her unfettered status elicits wariness not only among married women friends who fear their husbands will be attracted to her, but also among male friends who suspect she might “debauch” their wives, “par goût de l’aventure et une curiosité polissonne”/“out of a taste for adventure and naughty curiosity” (59).

Being childless is a choice that friends and strangers alike feel especially entitled to question and judge, transgressing the most basic of personal boundaries. Esha reflects that:

Comme un fait relevant de la physique quantique, l’absence d’un mari et celle d’un enfant lui tenaient toujours compagnie.

Elle ne pouvait pas éviter le sujet. L’absence d’enfant ne la dispensait pas des questions sur cet enfant pas né. On lui demandait si elle était stérile, si elle n’était pas déjà ménopausée, et surtout on la soupçonnait d’être mal aimée. Avoir un enfant était aussi important qu’avoir un travail, une maison, une voiture. Elle était SDF, Sans Devoir Féminin. (73)

Like a phenomenon found in quantum physics, the absence of a husband and a child always kept her company.

She couldn’t avoid the topic. The absence of a child did not exempt her from questions about this child not born. They asked her if she was sterile, if she was already in menopause, and especially they suspected her of being unloved. Having a child was as important as having a job, a house, a car. She was WFD, Without Feminine Duty.

Engaging intellectually and socially with one’s time is not enough for those unable to see Esha without also noticing the ghost-like absence of a husband or child at her side. Bolstered by pre-conceived ideas, they feel authorized to remind this immigrant that, “Pour savourer sa propre vie, elle devait en créer une autre. Pour être liée à la vie, elle devait en passer par un accord corps à corps. Sans cela les racines ne pousseraient pas sous ses pieds”/To savour her own life she had to create another. To be connected to life she had to go through a body-to-body bond. Failing that, roots would not grow under her feet” (74).

Esha’s terms and wordplay are significant. The societal attitudes she encounters confirm many of the stereotypes documented by scholars of voluntary childlessness in literature, concisely identified by Natalie Edwards in her 2015 study, “Deliberately Barren? The Rejection of Motherhood in Contemporary French Women’s Life Writing.”³ Echoing Esha’s remarks, Edwards shows how childless women are stigmatized for infertility, obsession with work, frivolity, questionable morals, and lack of long-term relationships (6). In this sense Esha’s adamant drive for freedom and independence lines up with Edwards’ narrators who, she concludes, “by restoring voice to the non-mother and insisting that there should be no shame in this lifestyle, . . . proclaim a female identity that does not depend upon reproduction” (“Deliberately Barren?” 36).

However, as an ethnically marked woman who left a more restrictive home country behind, Esha faces layered scrutiny in Apatride, a work that explicitly interrogates how—for women—the limit between the personal and the public is repeatedly transgressed by society writ small and large. Near the novel’s end, micro-aggressions turn physical when Esha is assaulted in the street by two women who, having cursorily evaluated her accent, skin color, and clothes, decide to sanction her for overstepping tacit public norms. Choosing to dress a certain way, deciding not to have a child or forming a monogamous relationship de-legitimatizes her right to occupy and move through social space with impunity. In this context Esha’s status is not simply contested but, as the novel’s title suggests, she has becomes stateless, apatride: her person is overrun by others who respect no borders. For a migrant woman who uprooted herself to build a life in a new country and language without also becoming a mother, the comment—“Sans cela les racines ne pousseraient pas sous ses pieds”—carries an extra charge of nonbelonging. The other term Esha cleverly adopts and re-deploys—SDF: “Sans Devoir Féminin,” unfulfilled feminine duty, or motherhood—wittingly or unwittingly condenses childlessness with lack of home and dislocation. “SDF” is the acronym for “sans domicile fixe”/“without fixed address,” or being homeless and, by extension in this context, being stateless. This wordplay foreshadows the novel’s last scene where Esha, nursing the wounds of her street assault in the supposed safety of her apartment, is blithely unaware that the candles she has lit to soothe herself have set fire to her dwelling and are about to consume it and her. Without a defensible home, body or country, and likely about to perish, Esha the migrant, childless woman is eminently apatride: stateless and homeless.

An Anchor Somewhere: La noce d’Anna

In representations of motherhood in three novels by Nathacha Appanah, unlike Esha, the migrant women characters do have children and ostensibly do put down roots. Also born in 1973, Appanah is one of France’s more original and recently successful contemporary writers. Raised and educated in Mauritius, Appanah grew up in a middle-class home speaking principally Mauritian Creole in addition to some Hindi and Telegu, and at school, she perfected her French and English. In her twenties, Appanah moved to France, and made a career as a print and radio journalist while progressively establishing herself as a talented fiction writer. Since 2003 Appanah has published eight novels that have earned numerous literary awards and expanded her reading public. Her 2018 collection of essays—Une année lumière (One Light Year)—gave valuable insight into the reality of being a writer of non-European ethnic origins publishing in contemporary France.

Academic scholarship on Appanah’s writing has taken several directions. As a writer hailing from Mauritius, Appanah has been studied with respect to other authors with affiliations in the Indian Ocean.⁴ The publication of her widely read 2007 novel, Le dernier frère (The Last Brother), with its story of friendship between two boys at the end of World War II—one a young Mauritian, the other a sickly Jewish child imprisoned on the island—led to probing analyses of the inscription of history and the workings of memory, often in relationship to Holocaust literature.⁵ And almost improbably, given the initial silence it encountered in the press upon its release in 2005,⁶La noce d’Anna, with its charming, matrifocal⁷ narrator has generated studies⁸ on the role of mothering and the representation of cultural transmission. My analysis will build on and modify some of these readings in two other novels by Appanah. La noce d’Anna is narrated over a one-day period through the voice of Sonia. A forty-two-year-old mother and novelist originally from Mauritius who made her career in France, Sonia looks over her past and her present and considers the future, as she prepares for and then attends her twenty-three-year-old daughter’s wedding. Adventurous, Bohemian in outlook, Sonia fell in love and became pregnant not long after immigrating to Europe as a young adult. With the child’s father unaware of her pregnancy and no longer in the picture, this determined, budding writer decided to raise her daughter, Anna, on her own in France. In coming to that decision she recognized that, whatever the future challenges of her then recent, immigrant existence, the experience of mothering this child will give her an anchor somewhere in the world: “Je savais que désormais, avec un enfant, quoi que je fasse j’aurais une ancre quelque part”/“I knew that from then on, with a child, whatever I do I would have an anchor somewhere” (141). Unlike Esha, Sonia has ostensibly built stability and a home around mothering a child in a new country.

Although by no means a fragile personality, Sonia struggles like many mothers with doubts over her parenting decisions. In her 2019 study of migrant mothering, Eglė Kačkutė traces the complex relationship between this free-spirited woman of foreign origin and darker skin and her more sedentary, middle-class, and fair-skinned French-born daughter, Anna. Kačkutė astutely identifies the novel’s dominant issue as “[t]he mothers’ negotiations of the maternal guilt in relation to the cultural differences between them and their offspring” (1). She discerns how many facets of maternal guilt are regulated in the text and contests other critics’ arguments that the more cosmopolitan Sonia is a bad mother for not passing on the most salient aspect of her native culture: language.

Sonia’s experience of motherhood has been marked by enduring tension and by an incident that occurred when Anna was six. Out shopping in a big Parisian department store, Sonia refused to buy her daughter candy, and when Anna threw a tantrum Sonia threatened to punish her. Briefly distracted, Sonia turns around to discover her daughter has disappeared. She panics. An announcement eventually calls Anna’s mother to the front desk (121). However, to Sonia’s shock a security guard questions whether she is indeed the child’s mother, presumably because her daughter has a much lighter complexion. Finally, the 6-year-old recognizes Sonia as her mother and reunites with her. Relieved but shaken, Sonia subsequently decides to move to another city, concluding, “Je crois que si un jour on me demandait de résumer ma maternité, ce serait par ce sentiment-là: la crainte”/“I think that if one day I was asked to sum up motherhood, it would be by that particular feeling: fear” (175): fear of losing Anna, the anchor for this otherwise rather nomadic character; fear too, perhaps, of Anna being so visibly connected to her biological father despite his complete absence. With her now adult daughter about to be married and moving out, Sonia is implicitly re-opening the question of home and of her place in the world since that anchor will no longer explicitly position her. Though different from Esha in Sonia’s motherhood, the latter resembles Esha when she fears becoming unmoored and conjugates sans domicile fixe with sans devoir féminin.

The Novel Within the Novel: Robin, Loss, and Origins

Sonia also struggles with layers of tension not yet evident in the department store scene. This tension outwardly has less to do with doubts about whether she should have inculcated Mauritian culture in her decidedly bourgeoise, French daughter and more to do with a question most working parents have about child-rearing. Throughout Anna’s upbringing, Sonia struggled with dividing her attention between artistic ambition and raising Anna. Sonia wonders if she was present enough, suspecting she alienated Anna by being absorbed in the creation of imaginary worlds for her novels. This mother worries that “[elle] a fait le premier pas de côté à force d’être penchée sur des livres, de nourrir des familles entières dans ma tête, de les aimer, de les faire grandir”/“[she] took the first step aside by always being focussed on books, on feeding whole families in her head, on loving them and raising them” (17). Even on her daughter’s wedding day, when this mother knows she should be most invested in what Anna wants and needs, Sonia is guiltily preoccupied with a storyline forming in her mind that keeps her at a slight remove. This unfinished novel, I propose, strangely encapsulates a modernist, narrative mise en abyme⁹—generating a deformed, alternate, and concentrated novel within the novel, not only articulating the mother–daughter tensions of La noce d’Anna and of the department store incident but also announcing even more vexed plot lines that will uncannily return in subsequent fiction by Appanah. Here is Sonia’s shortened version of what she is writing:

J’écris en ce moment un roman sur un enfant. Il s’appelle Robin, il a dix ans, ses parents se sont tués dans un accident de voiture, il prend l’avion pour rejoindre son demi-frère en Afrique du Sud … qu’il n’a jamais vu . . . Il est persuadé d’avoir tué ses parents, puisque ce soir-là, ils l’avaient puni parce qu’il avait mangé du chocolat dans sa chambre et tâché son pyjama. L’espace d’une seconde, il a souhaité ses parents morts, tellement ils lui criaient dessus . . . et quand le policier vient sonner à la porte, il est persuadé que c’est de sa faute, cet accident. Voilà l’histoire que je veux raconter. (35–36)

I am at this moment writing a novel about a child. His name is Robin, he is ten years old, his parents were killed in a car accident, he boards a plane to join his half-brother in South Africa … whom he has never met . . . He is convinced he killed his parents since, that night, they had punished him for having eaten chocolate in his bedroom and stained his pajamas. They shouted at him so much that, for a split second, he wished his parents dead . . . and when the policeman comes knocking at the door, he’s convinced it is his fault, this accident. That’s the story I want to tell.

This unfinished novel about a child who suddenly loses his parents—a story of fear, anger, loss, exile, and guilt—distracts Sonia from her daughter’s wedding. Upon closer examination, however, it also repeats many contentious elements (despite a few reversals) in Sonia and Anna’s mother–daughter relationship, allowing Sonia to engage with them dramatically and empathically, albeit indirectly. Robin, shouted at for soiling his clothes with chocolate, briefly wishes his parents dead and feels guilty, while six-year-old Anna, threatened with punishment for demanding sweets in the store, likely wished her mother dead too and decided to punish her in return by disappearing, abandoning her. The figure of a police officer or security guard recurs in both narratives as the mediator between separation and reunion. Also raised is the specter of an absent parent via the mention of a distant half-brother. Robin’s sudden dislocation—when he is sent to South Africa—may echo Sonia’s own migration when she left her parents, never to return, but as an echo of her relationship with her own daughter, it betrays also the guilty unmooring tacitly felt by Sonia and then by Anna, given Anna’s impending departure from home and entry into married life.

Instead of functioning as a source of distraction, alienation, and remove, the creative energy Sonia invests in dreaming of this novel ultimately serves the opposite function. Imagining this story allows Sonia to become closer to her daughter, to address indirectly the mutual experiences of fear, loss, punishment, dislocation, and guilt generated by the incident in the store and tacitly present elsewhere in their mother–daughter relationship. Indeed, Robin’s story unwittingly communicates the underlying, ultimate source of distance between mother and daughter. It is, in Sonia’s words, “the story I want to tell,” but one that until now she has not disclosed. That affective distance derives specifically from the weight of silence Sonia has imposed over Anna’s origins, origins that Anna—like her fictive double, Robin—has been radically cut off from and that Sonia knows she alone is responsible for. Sonia has never told her daughter of the sweet love affair with a young Englishman, Matthew, that resulted in her conception. Sonia deprived Anna not just of the sweets she desired but also of the story of this absent father who left for Africa to pursue his journalism career, unaware of Sonia’s pregnancy. Anna—silently angry, frustrated, perhaps imagining she was the cause of her father’s disappearance, as Robin briefly does—has progressively pulled away from her mother, not for being different in cultural outlook or skin tone, but for keeping that secret from her.

Still, the fictive world Sonia dreams of—circuitously, imaginatively doubling the real world—ultimately allows Sonia to come closer to her daughter even while allowing her autonomy. At the end of La noce d’Anna Sonia puts her creative talents to use by telling Anna the story of love and loss at the origin of Anna’s life, and the two women make peace with each other. The lesson seems to be that, to find the right distance to successfully mother in migration, one must reveal the secret of origins. Sonia may be unmoored—in the sense that the anchor her child represented until now has been raised—but she is also unburdened and reconciled, now able to accept the salutary gap of difference with her daughter. To borrow Sinha’s term, Sonia’s post-mothering statelessness, her SDF status—both sans devoir féminin and sans domicile fixe—remains uncertain but is clearly liberating.

En attendant demain: Doubled Troubled Mother

If La noce d’Anna shows a migrant mother who “navigated the emotional landscape of difference, love and belonging with emotional skill and wisdom” (Kačkutė, 10), ten years later similar pressures recur in En attendant demain (2015), producing a much less positive outcome. Many of the elements articulated in Sonia’s unfinished novel within the novel uncannily return, tragically realized.

En attendant demain rewrites the story of Sonia and Anna with a few significant twists. Like La noce d’Anna, this novel depicts a mother character, Anita, who is also a writer, also originally from Mauritius, and also raising her French-born, lighter-complexioned daughter in France. Anita, however, is married to Adam, an architect and native of southwestern France. At the start of the novel, we learn Anita has been raising her child, Laura, alone for the past four years, while Adam is in prison, and that today he will be released. The novel goes back in time to recount how the couple formed while students in Paris and leads readers through the dramatic events resulting in one character’s death, Adam’s incarceration, and a severe brain injury for Laura who, cognitively impaired, is now solely in her mother’s care.

Unanticipated maternity, unresolved issues with ethnic origins, and unrealized ambition are also revealed, intertwined, at the core of this couple’s relationship. Anita starts a career in journalism but desires above all to be a creative writer, while Adam’s passion is painting. When Anita discovers an unplanned pregnancy, she represses “ce sentiment désagréable et piqueté de culpabilité de se soumettre à la tradition, à Adam, à la maternité, à la loi de la nature” (En attendant demain 39) / “this unwelcome notion, shot through as it is with guilt at submitting to tradition, to Adam, to motherhood, to the law of nature” (Waiting for Tomorrow 22). Like Sinha’s Esha, Anita has second thoughts about surrendering her freedom to become a wife and mother. Ultimately, the couple decides to marry, have the child, move to Adam’s hometown, and make their lives there. As time passes, dissatisfaction grows. Although not presented as the patent reason for her unhappiness, Anita’s connection to Mauritius quietly starts fading: “la petite mémoire de son pays pâlit—ces choses intimes qui se nichent non pas dans la tête mais sur la peau et au creux de l’estomac” (En attendant demain 39) / “the minor memories of her homeland are slowly fading—those intimate details that linger not in the head, but on the skin and in the pit of the stomach” (Waiting for Tomorrow 21). Years pass. Anita finds intermittent and unfulfilling work at a local newspaper. Looking at her old poetry notebooks she regrets the creative writing career not realized, describing “une petite poche vide” (En attendant demain 48) / “a little pocket of emptiness” (Waiting for Tomorrow 28) at the center of an existence divided between domestic life and frustrated artistic ambition. Anita has checked out of her marriage and of mothering. The conflict between domestic life and writing renders her unhappy and, similarly to Sonia’s early relationship with her daughter, the tension created by this gap or pocket alienates those who love her, keeping them at a remove.

A fortuitous encounter appears to bridge all gaps in this migrant mother’s life. Assigned to write an article on a band from La Réunion playing at a local nightclub, Anita strikes up a conversation with a barmaid, Adèle, and learns she too is from Mauritius. The omniscient narrator announces their initial connection through the music they hear in the bar, in visceral, womb-like terms: “Anita et Adèle . . . sont traversées par un même frisson . . . les mots . . . trouvent un chemin jusque dans leur ventre, exactement à l’endroit où elles avaient senti pour la première fois leur bébé bouger” (En attendant demain 105) / “Anita and Adèle . . . both feel the same thrill pass through them . . . the words . . . find a way deep into the pit of the stomach, precisely where for the first time each had felt her baby stirring” (Waiting for Tomorrow 75). A latent kinship of motherhood, it is suggested, unites these two compatriots.

Adèle then enters the family home as a nanny and transforms it. She looks after Laura while Anita and Adam are at work: “elle cuisine, elle sème, elle encourage, elle raccommode, elle les aime” (En attendant demain 126) / “she cooks, she [sows], she encourages, she mends, she loves them” (Waiting for Tomorrow 91). With Adèle taking over mothering and domestic duties, not only is everyone more satisfied with their lives, but Anita also rediscovers her writerly instincts and strength, “ce quelque chose de mystérieux … qui ne se brouille pas avec les tâches ménagères, la maternité, le maternage, l’amour” (En attendant demain 127) / “that mysterious thing … that does not interfere with household tasks, motherhood, parenting, love” (Waiting for Tomorrow 91). The same is true for Adam who takes up painting with renewed energy. In brief, although taller, with a shaved head and of African ancestry, Adèle is in almost every way Anita’s Mauritian mothering doppelgänger. They enjoy the same traditional foods and music, and they speak the same language. Anita willingly outsources most of her domestic responsibilities to Adèle, who even acts as a substitute cultural transmitter, singing nursery rhymes to Laura that Anita’s mother sang to her and that Anita claims she has forgotten (191). As Anita thinks, at one point, “elles auraient pu être sœurs” (En attendant demain 193) / “they could have been sisters” (Waiting for Tomorrow 138). If the lesson from La noce d’Anna was that, to mother happily in migration, you must reveal the secret of origins, at this point in En attendant demain, to mother successfully, one apparently needs a double,¹⁰ preferably from one’s country of origin.

However, in reading these two novels together, one wonders if Anita’s mothering double represents some unspoken secret of love and loss. To be sure, Adèle is Anita’s double but with the significant difference that she is not just an immigrant from Mauritius like Anita, but an illegal immigrant who, to survive in the daylight of society, has had most of her identity erased, partly by choice, partly by force. As Anita’s “ombre démesurée” (En attendant demain 123)/“giant shadow” (Waiting for Tomorrow 89), the suggestion is that clandestine, Adèle incarnates something hidden that has come back into the light of day, a figurative “return of the repressed.”¹¹ Indeed, Adèle’s back-story has eerie echoes to the unfinished story of Robin that preoccupied Sonia in La noce d’Anna and that indirectly spoke the secret that came between Sonia and her daughter. Robin’s plotline returns unannounced here, reformulated, and potent. The day Anita first met her, Adèle was shaken up in a traffic accident. The collision revived the tragedy that had initiated her itinerant, unfettered state. Before coming to France, married and with a young son in Mauritius, Adèle was a working mother taking exams to advance her career. She came home one evening to an empty house and waited two days without news, confused, angry, and distressed. As in Robin’s story, the police finally knocked at the door with news of a double death: her son and husband had perished in a road accident, having missed a sharp turn, and gone over a cliff, where they remained undiscovered for days. Similarly to Robin, these deaths lead to exile. Grief-stricken, Adèle sells everything, buys a ticket to Europe, wanders, burns her ID papers, shaves her head, and hopes death will find her too. It does not. On the day of the traffic accident in France, in shock, Adèle is convinced she is actually helping her husband and child escape from the wreck. In Anita’s home, through an act of displaced mourning, this deeply troubled woman mothers by substitution the child she lost and creates a home for her dead husband. SDF—both homeless and childless—she unconsciously repeats and perhaps repairs her lost life, assuming the duties Anita does not relish and seems only too glad for Adèle to take on.

Adèle’s migration and availability to play Anita’s domestic double are predicated on the un-anchoring of Adèle’s personal identity, on the deaths of her son and husband, and on surrendering her person to this new couple, of Adam and Anita. There is, moreover, the suggestion that Adèle’s backstory tacitly plays out Anita’s own dark fantasy of being suddenly free to pursue her life without the encumbrance of a child and husband. Although now in plain sight, Adèle as Anita’s doppelgänger remains secret, clandestine. Despite the outward appearance of harmony, this relationship is based on a profound exploitation. Without informing her, Anita appropriates Adèle’s story for a novel, literally narrating her misfortune in the first person. Likewise, Adam uses her presence as inspiration for a powerful series of paintings. They both tacitly know this appropriation is wrong since they hide it from Adèle. They are effectively vampirizing this vulnerable woman’s person for their own artistic ends, and it will cost Adèle her life.

The novel ends in a rapid series of dramatic events when Adèle learns of this exploitation. She flees the family home with Anita’s manuscript, pausing on the floating dock at a lake where Anita and her daughter confront her. Unlike little Anna, who once destroyed one of Sonia’s manuscripts to get her attention, six-year-old Laura rushes at Adèle to save her mother’s papers. Laura and Adèle fall into the lake and are unable to swim. Anita cannot swim either, yet she dives in, with thoughts of saving not only her daughter but especially her unfinished book. No mention is made of rescuing Adèle. Adam appears, to rescue his wife and daughter. He ultimately goes to prison due to not saving Adèle also from drowning. Having initially welcomed her mothering double—a tragically childless, husband-free version of herself—to bridge a gap in her life, Anita too pays a heavy price for her eerie return and suppression. Her husband in jail, her daughter disabled, her artistic ambitions abandoned, Anita is wracked with guilt and lost dreams.

However, it is the other migrant mother who is dispossessed in the extreme: Adèle is again not only SDF—homeless and childless; having been exploited, but also she is now dead and forgotten. Yet our final novel takes this state of mothering dispossession to still another level.

Tropique de la violence: Mothering Beyond Genetics

Like the two previous novels by Appanah, Tropique de la violence (2016) features a woman from a far-away land raising, on her own, a child of a different complexion, but with some important reversals. The mother, Marie, is a white, French woman—a nurse by profession—rearing her black-skinned son, Moïse, on Mayotte, an island in the Indian Ocean. Unlike previous characters, Marie feels no tension between ambition and motherhood. On the contrary, she avidly desires to become a mother and to put down roots.

Her inability to conceive leads to the breakdown of her marriage to a fellow nurse and native of Mayotte whom Marie had followed from metropolitan France to his home island. But this does not break her ambition to become a mother, here again without a husband. Mayotte is an overseas French Department overrun with clandestine immigrants from neighboring islands. One night a teenage migrant, having just arrived on a precarious vessel, comes into Marie’s hospital ward holding a baby with eyes of different colors. Fearing the baby’s heterochromia is a sign her son is possessed by a djinn, the frightened young mother abandons her son to Marie and disappears into the night. Marie manages through subterfuge to adopt this baby. She convinces her estranged husband to falsely recognize the child as his and to give Marie sole custody in return for a quick divorce. Since the child arrived as if miraculously, over water, she names him Moïse, saying, “il est né dans mon cœur . . . j’ai traversé les continents et les mers pour le retrouver et . . . je l’ai attendu longtemps” (Tropique de la violence 27) / “he was born in my heart . . . I crossed continents and seas to find him and spent a long time waiting for him” (Tropic of Violence 17). Marie’s powerful connection to this child, echoing Adèle’s bond to Laura, counters the biological imperative about mothering in migration promoted by society in Apatride. Whereas Esha was told that, “[p]our être liée à la vie” (74), she must create—biologically—another life, Marie as adoptive mother ostensibly proves that genetics are not essential to bonding a person to a child and a place.¹²

Despite her personal openness to adoption, dramatic tension focused on motherhood in migration—as in every Appanah novel studied here—arises from a dissimulated story of origins. Marie avoids telling Moïse, nicknamed Mo, about her childhood in eastern France for fear he will in return ask about his own origins. Her concern is intense, but so are her love and sense of connection: “Je le regarde et me vient tout à coup cette pensée extraordinaire qu’il me ressemble” (Tropique de la violence 30) / “I’m gazing at him and suddenly this extraordinary notion occurs to me that he looks like me” (Tropic of Violence 20). She starts but cannot complete a letter to her child. Similarly to Sonia—with her unfinished novel about Robin—and to Anita—with her appropriation of Adèle’s life story—Marie indirectly addresses her son’s origins and unknowingly anticipates his future hardships by building an alternate, imaginatively strong bond through a creative narrative. She and Mo read and reread together Henri Bosco’s L’enfant et la rivière (The Boy and the River) (1945): a children’s novel about a youth who strikes out alone over water, finding danger, adventure, and friendship. But both their stories end instead as tragically as Adèle’s—in death.

When Mo enters adolescence, Marie seemingly follows the lead of Sonia in La noce d’Anna and tells her child how he came into her life. In Tropique de la violence, however, that strategy fails. Disoriented, hurt, and ashamed at having been abandoned by his birth mother, Moïse forces Marie to recount the story over and over, seeking but unable to absorb its narrative. Angry, he blames Marie for cutting him off from his biological origins, for raising him like a European, and in all probability—like Robin and like Anna in the previous fiction—he wishes his mother dead. The pair have no time to resolve this, for, as if by wish-fulfillment, Marie dies suddenly one morning in the kitchen from a brain aneurysm. Moïse, afraid, runs away from the house, taking a few items: most notably the Bosco novel he shared with his mother.

Mo ends up, however, with a band of violent migrant teens with whom he identifies—initially, idealistically—through the story of his birth mother’s origins. The majority of the novel will recount from different points of view Mo’s appalling experience. He is exploited, scarred, and brutally assaulted by these teens, living in a slum on the fringe of legitimate society. All the while Mo hangs onto L’enfant et la rivière, calling it a “talisman” (133) that connects him to Marie and to his lost childhood home, sheltering him imaginatively from abuse in the real world. Ironically, what he repeats is, not the narrative of their favorite story, but the death he wished on his mother: he repeats their story, with the death of another authority figure and then with his own. The narrative culminates in Moïse killing the gang’s ringleader and seeking refuge with sympathetic police officers. However, just as readers hope he will escape this nightmare, the novel ends in a scene of terror where Moïse, pursued by a riotous, vengeful mob, jumps into the ocean. Unlike Laura in En attendant demain who plunges into water pursued by her parents to rescue her, Moïse drowns: “je fends l’océan de mon corps souple, mon corps vivant, et je ne remonte pas” (Tropique de la violence 183) / “I cleave the ocean with my supple living body, and I don’t resurface” (Tropic of Violence 154). It is as if Appanah were suggesting that the desire to mother is no more likely than the genetic bond to generate a thriving tie between mother and son in the vexed, layered contexts of migration.

Unanchored, Unbound: Mothering at a Distance

As in Sonia’s unfinished novel about Robin, Mo loses not one but two mothers; he carries the burden of regret for having likely wished his parent dead and subsequently finds himself suddenly dislocated, homeless, living with distant proto-relatives he barely knows (in this case the other teens, as clandestine as his birth mother). At the end of this version of that underlying narrative, with the child and all parents either dead or absent, it appears that mothering has come completely unbound. To bring back the term pithily reinvented in Apatride, Marie is doubly SDF: she has lost her home in the world and her child too. Indeed, the novel’s last image of Moïse plunging into the ocean, never to resurface, tragically echoes the very terms Sonia used in La noce d’Anna, to describe her mothering relationship to her daughter: “Je savais que désormais, avec un enfant, quoi que je fasse j’aurais une ancre quelque part.” However, for Marie, her anchor—her son—now literally lies at the bottom of the sea.

Yet in this final iteration, has the mooring tether between migrant mother, son, and the place truly been severed? Asking this question allows us to identify the curious state—or rather statelessness—of mothering in Appanah’s literary imagination, which is very different from but oddly similar to Sinha’s notion of apatridie. Let me remark that the term “curious” derives etymologically from Old French curios and back through Latin to curiosus, “careful” and cura or “care.” Although I have not mentioned it until now, Marie’s narration—as becomes apparent after a few chapters—is related after her death, by some deeply caring, curious spirit version of Marie, who lingers in the world—without body, without a home—until the death of the boy she raised as her son.

That is to say, despite all that separates Marie from her child, her bond to Moïse is such that she continues to watch over him, to mother him, from her own bodily dislocation beyond the grave. It is a distance ghostly proximate yet physically unbridgeable. Marie, in this respect, is a migrant woman who performs—albeit spectrally—what Gedalof characterizes as “mothering at a distance”: the social practices or “mechanisms of sustaining a sense of ‘co-presence’ and caring relationships in the context of transnational separations” (89), observed among migrant women whose children reside in another country. Creating that copresence and “mothering-at-a-distance,” Gedalof concludes, “is a complicated, fascinating work that involves all kinds of complex reinventions of everyday practices to produce a sense of identity and belonging that is never fixed and taken-for-granted” (89). Indeed, in a manner not anticipated by Sinha’s Esha who reported, rather sardonically, that as a single migrant woman, “l’absence d’un mari et celle d’un enfant lui tenaient toujours compagnie,” Marie continues to accompany her son and speak to us—at a distance—both from and of a curious place of migrant mothering. While Sinha’s notion of apatridie evokes a hostile expropriation of body and place, producing mobile statelessness or homelessness, Appanah arrives through this imaginative leap at the notion of a relational gap, of being bound and unbound at the same time.

Fittingly enough, we find this liminal state materialized at the edge, in the frame of the novel itself. Sitting within yet without, proximate yet at a slight remove, the exergue, the epigraph of Tropique de la violence illustrates this curious space of mothering not only by its situation with respect to the body of the novel but also by what it says about an unnamed “pays” (“country”). The epigraph consists of this brief quotation from L’Enfant et la rivière, the work of imagination that invisibly ties Mo to his mother, beyond genetics and death:

— Là, demandais-je?

— Là, me répondit Gatzo. C’est un beau pays. (Tropique de la violence 9)

“There?” I asked.

“There,” he answered. “It’s a beautiful country” (Tropic of Violence 2)

This deictically designated, nameless “pays” to which Marie—displaced and itinerant, like so many characters in the novel¹³—aspires but which she cannot fully inhabit, is the same stateless, apatride territory from which she nevertheless speaks and from which she continues to mother.

Coda: At One Remove—The Statelessness of French

In concluding remarks—removed yet connected to this discussion—note that Appanah and Sinha have both also described the French language in spatial terms that we may now recognize as resembling a dislocated, borderless, yet imaginative, and policed pays. Despite seeing themselves primarily as creative writers, as women of non-European origin whose initial language was not French, Sinha and Appanah encounter subtle and not-so-subtle reminders of their otherness in the metropolitan French literary space. Indeed, in Une année lumière Appanah cites the example of Sinha’s literary reception to illustrate the ambivalent and somewhat menacing surveillance of that space: “L’écrivain Shumona Sinha, dont la langue maternelle est le bengali, manie à merveille la langue de Molière”/“Writer Shumona Sinha, whose mother tongue is Bengali, wonderfully wields the language of Molière” (23). The circumlocution—“la langue de Molière”—might seem an innocuous lexical alternative to saying “French.” However, as Appanah astutely notes, it is almost never used when speaking of authors born and raised in the French language, especially from metropolitan France, and almost always employed when referring to trans-lingual French speakers who, for social, economic, ethnic, or cultural reasons, are judged as not having the right codes to access literary language. While there may be something straightforwardly laudatory in situating a writer within a literary tradition going back some four hundred years, the expression communicates a singular, static notion of the French language as guarded by a long-dead seventeenth-century dramatist. Whether intended or not, it conveys the idea of a fixed linguistic and institutional center against which others are measured and potentially marginalized.

Nonetheless, both trans-lingual authors speak of the French language as a personally creative, liberating space for their literary projects. In a 2013 filmed interview, Sinha—citing French poet, Arthur Rimbaud—speaks of how France and French represented a liberating elsewhere in her intellectual formation as a young adult in India, an ailleurs standing in stark difference to her Bengali upbringing and to British colonial structures (qtd. in a video interview with Sinha: Rice, “An Interview” 8:15). Later, once established in her writing life, Sinha affirms, “[C]’est la langue française qui est ma patrie”/“The French language is my homeland” (Rice, “An Interview” 28:00) As for Appanah, she asserts that although she had several mother tongues, French was and remains intimate, chosen because “[elle] représentait un lieu, une géographie, dans lesquels j’étais très libre d’exprimer ce que je voulais exprimer”/“[it] represented a place, a geography in which I was very free to express what I wanted to express” (Artus). In a 2016 television interview, contesting the idea of a fixed center for French, Appanah deploys a different spatial metaphor, declaring, “le français est une langue-archipel”/“French is an archipelago language” (“Une année lumière” 5:12). If we put this notion together with Sinha’s affirmation that “la langue française . . . est ma patrie,” then in light of the discussion above about mothering in migration, this dislocated, evolving, and emancipatory territory can be understood as facing many of the pressures imagined for women’s bodies in Apatride. In that novel, bodies—particularly non-normative, non-European bodies—are territories whose borders are policed, transgressed, and even overrun by others. In this final example, we have a language as a territory where one’s the legitimate right of abode is contested, yet where one nevertheless continues and perhaps flourishes precisely because one is at a remove from a supposedly homogeneous center.

In conclusion, whereas Sinha’s non-mothering subject finds herself perilously stateless—usurped from within the seemingly defensible space of a body when she herself dares to inhabit a country or language without having been born into it—Appanah’s migrant mothers discover in their varied iterations the apparent necessity of a relational remove. Having addressed Anna’s origins indirectly through imagining Robin’s story and later directly through telling her own story, Sonia is able to negotiate a salutary distance of difference between herself and her daughter at the end of La noce d’Anna. Anita does not find that distance in En attendant demain and does not assume her own narrative. She closes her mothering gap with a clandestine doppelgänger whose origin story she somehow envies and tragically usurps, spelling disaster for the freedom and safety of her child and husband. Marie, buoyed by her bond to her son through Bosco’s imaginative narrative, manages in Tropique de la violence to persist in her mothering of Moïse, despite the distance of death, from a liminal territory, the pays of a spectral remove. What emerges from this critical conversation is a caring, curious state(lessness) of mothering: an at times salutary but more often frustrating, even ghostly space, perhaps inherent to the migrant experience.

Works Cited

Footnotes