Tuesday 7th March 2023, 5:15-6:30pm 

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Elly Walters (Wadham): ‘C’est une danse de ressac, c’est un ballet de marée’: Water, Dance, and Nathacha Appanah’ 

This paper considers the symbiosis of water, dance, and traumatic memory in Mauritian-French writer Nathacha Appanah’s Rien ne t’appartient (2021). Beginning in France, the text follows Vijaya, a recent widow in deep psychological distress. Speaking in the first-person, she relays her grief alongside an ebb-and-flow of clarity, her mental processes skewed by panic, intrusive thoughts, hallucinations, and an unshakeable sense that she has lived through this before. Then, compelled by a feeling she cannot explain, she lifts herself from the sofa, removes her clothes, and starts to dance, moving through the poses and gestures of the Bharatanatyam she was taught as a child. As the novel progresses, the reader learns of the violences defining Vijaya’s early life in Sri Lanka: the murder of her family, and subsequent years of abuse in solitude, preceding the Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck the coast on 26 December 2004. Vijaya survives these crises, and survives a husband that helped her bury memory of them. In the wake of his death, the contours of Vijaya’s traumatic past resurface – often fleetingly, emerging and retracting like the tide, undulating in ‘une danse de ressac, un ballet de marée’. In this paper, my interest lies in how the shoring of Vijaya’s memory spans trauma and nostalgia; I argue that the process of remembering takes on the rhythms and movements of both water and dance, whose mutual fluidities see mind, muscle, and mer sink into one.