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- Title
Transoceanic echoes: coolitude and the work of the Mauritian poet Khal Torabully.
- Authors
Bragard, Véronique
- Abstract
Khal Torabully's poetry (mainly Cale d'étoiles coolitude and Chair corail, fragments coolies) surfaces as a marine odyssey of the coolie diaspora. Coolitude epitomizes in many respects a double articulation in Torabully's work: his commitment to denouncing trauma and violence at the eve of the twenty-first century as well as the concern of the contemporary artist to find adequate words, styles and modes to engage with this suffering. Torabully, similarly to Paul Gilroy, maps a more complex picture of the notion of 'Indian identity', shifting the emphasis from a fossilizing nostalgia for a fixed India to the ocean space that mediates the numerous cultural (ex)changes coolie culture has undergone. His rehabilitation of the coolie memory embodied in coolitude has provided him with a framework to understand, not only his own but on a more universal level, the cross-cultural chaotic relationships that can lead to bursts of creativity but also devastating violence. Coolitude thus emerges as a poetics that attempts to recover and reassess the transoceanic crossing of coolies, establishing it as a central metaphor that is constitutive of a new perspective on Indian identities characterized by multiple crossings: crossings between cultures, heritages, places, generations, gender, historical assertions, and mythical references.
- Subjects
MAURITIAN literature; POETRY (Literary form); TORABULLY, Khal; DIASPORA; TRANSNATIONALISM; MAURITIAN poetry (French)
- Publication
International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2005, Vol 8, Issue 2, p219
- ISSN
1368-2679
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1386/ijfs.8.2.219/1