Khal Torabully

Khal Torabully is a Mauritian and French poet, who has coined the concept of "coolitude." Born in Mauritius in 1956, in the capital city Port Louis, his father was a Trinidadian sailor and his mother was a descendant of migrants from India and Malaysia.

As Mauritian History was made of various migratory waves, Torabully was soon immersed in Creole, English, French, and to a lesser degree, in Bhojpuri, Urdu, Arabic and Chinese languages. The cultural mosaic prevalent on the island accounts for his interest in diversity and the discourse of identity in History, as no nation was existent in this country made of several communities. Torabully started writing poetry at a very early age,Fact|date=May 2007 steadily explored the virtualities of the Encounter between cultures, histories and imaginaries.Or|date=September 2007

Work

Khal Torabully left for Lyon in 1976, to study at the University of Lyon II. Here he explored language with a need to reinterpret if profoundly, mixing exile with a desire to reconcile peoples across borders, through a "coral imaginary."

After studies in Comparative Literature, Torabully wrote a PHD thesis in Semiology of Poetics with Michel Cusin. He was highly interested in T. S. Eliot, Jacques Lacan, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, among others he met in his doctoral researches on intertextuality.

His poetry was to bear the imprint of those various theories, though it remained sensual, espousing the inner rhythms of the sea and the vision of meeting others akin to the "aesthetic shock" experimented by Victor Segalen.

The poet framed many of his poetic texts with a distance from exotic views in which many encapsulated their experience of otherness. In his early Fausse-île I and II, Torabully made a work of reinterpretation and started a quest for a poetic language mixing the music of various languages in an idiom imagined as "fossils of language".

His major work, Cale-d'étoiles-Coolitude gave new twists to the French language, subverting and enriching it with Indian, Creole and Scandinavian sources. He argued for the centrality of the seavoyage in the indentured migration, going against the taboo of the kala pani or dark seas. In so doing, the poet framed his transcultural vision in the concept of what he termed "coolitude."

Coolitude

His poetics of coolitude was defined as the articulation of the imaginaries of mosaic India and other human and cultural spaces. Starting from the derogatory word "coolie", which he revitalized, Torabully extended it to geographical and cultural migrants throughout the world. His poetry voiced the need of relation between the descents of the emancipated slaves and the indentured, allowing interplay with other cultures, thus clearly constructed far from essentialism or an exclusive "nostalgia of the origins".

Devised to fill a gap in postmodern and postcolonial theories, coolitude addresses anthropologists, aestheticians, historians, literary scolars and multicultural analysts to grasp the complexity of inter and transcultural exchanges in the modern world. What he terms the "coral imaginary" is a metaphor to this vision of the world. Torabully proposes an exchange between cultures and imaginaries on an egalitarian basis, underlining the necessity of muffles histories to engage in shared narratives and a mosaic identity construction.

The poet of négritude Aimé Césaire acclaimed his work "as containing all his humanity".Fact|date=May 2007 The Martinican writer Raphaël Confiant described his texts as having " a sovereign precision", and hailed Torabully as "the greatest poet of créolité".Fact|date=May 2007

Torabully is the author of 15 poetry books and of an essay co-authored with Marina Carter and has won several awards in France, Switzerland and Mauritius.Fact|date=May 2007

References

Poetry

* Fausse-île I. Port-Louis: Babel, 1981.
* Fausse-île II. Lyon: Université Lumière (Lyon II), 1986.
* Appels d'archipels, ou le livre des miroirs. Port-Louis: Babel, 1987.
* Le Printemps des ombres (Azalées éditions, 1991)
* Petite Anthologie de la poésie mauricienne (Poésie-Rencontres, 1991)
* Cale d'étoiles-Coolitude (Azalées éditions, 1992), avec des toiles de S.H. Raza.
* Kot sa parol la? Rode parole (Le Printemps, 1995), poèmes en créole, traduction française.
* Du code au codex (Éditions Thierry Lambert, 1996)
* Palabre à parole, préface de Werner Lambersy, (Le Bruit des autres, 1996)
* Dialogue de l'eau et du sel (Le Bruit des autres, 1998) ISBN 2909468623
* L'Ombre rouge des gazelles (Paroles d'Aube, 1998)
* Chair corail: fragments coolies, préface de Raphaël Confiant, (Ibis rouge, 1999)
* Roulis sur le Malecon, carnet de voyage cubain (L'Harmattan, 1999) ISBN 2738481949
* Paroles entre une mère et son enfant fusillé (Les éditions du mont Popey, 2002)
* La cendre des mots: Après l'incendie de la bibliothèque de Bagdad, textes sur l'indicible (ouvrage collectif, L'Harmattan 2003) ISBN 2747553582
* Mes Afriques, mes ivoires, préface de Tanella Boni, (L'Harmattan, 2004) ISBN 2747564134
* Arbres et Anabase (Ibis rouge, 2005) ISBN 2844502717

Prose

* Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (with Marina Carter, Anthem Press, London, 2002) ISBN 1843310031

Dictionary

* Dictionnaire francophone de poche, LE POUVOIR DES MOTS SUR LE MOUVOIR DES PEAUX, La Passe du vent, Grigny, 2007.

External links

* Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, [http://www.anthempress.com/product_info.php?products_id=178 Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labor Diaspora] (2002), page from Anthem Press website
* Khaleel Torabully, [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1996_Oct/ai_18826821 "The coolies' odyssey"] , "UNESCO Courier" (October 1996)
* Khal Torabully, [http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no=4678 "Créolité, Coolitude, Créolisation: Les imaginaires de la relation"] , at Africultures website (2006)
* Véronique Bragard, [http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/torabully.html Torabully biography] , at the [http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/ île en île] website (CUNY)
* Véronique Bragard, [http://www.connecting-africa.net/Search/ArticlesSet.aspx?query=TermQuery$identifiers$oai:ETDUCL:BelnUcetd-05142003-074243 "Voyages into Coolitude: A Comparative and Textual Analysis of Kala Pani Womens Cross-Cultural Creative Memory"] , thesis abstract
* Paget Henry, [http://www.ialhi.org/news/i0306_8.php Review of Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labor Diaspora] , from H-Net
* Commemoration of indentured, [http://www.lexpress.mu/display_article.php?news_id=96848]
* The coral imaginary : [http://www.halfvalue.com/wiki-search.jsp?topic=Coral+imaginary&x=10&y=14]
* Coolitude : [http://www.halfvalue.com/wiki.jsp?topic=Coolitude]
* Le pouvoir des mots sur le mouvoir des peaux, L'Express, [http://www.lexpress.mu/display_article_sup.php?news_id=99592 - 32k - ]
* 10 Mai 2006/2007 : un engagement pour les mémoires, [http://www.assemblee-martinique.com/joomla/news/10_mai_bis_un_engagement_pour_les_memoires_(par_khal_torabully).html - 36k -]
*Plaidoyer pour un itineraire de la memoire entre le Morne et le ghat, [http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no=7957]
*Pour un imaginaire indiaoceanique, propos sur le spectacle de Talipot [http://www.theatretalipot.com/article/article.php?id=57]