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Angles New Perspectives on the Anglophone World
9 | 2019 Reinventing the Sea
Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Ludmila Volná (dir.)
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/774 DOI: 10.4000/angles.774 ISSN: 2274-2042
Publisher Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur
Electronic reference Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Ludmila Volná (dir.), Angles, 9 | 2019, « Reinventing the Sea » [Online], Online since 01 November 2019, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/angles/774 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.774
This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020.
Angles est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Video introduction to issue 9 Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Ludmila Volná
Sailing the Indian Ocean in Ancient Times Jean-Marie Kowalski
Teaching Global History and Geography Using the Indian Ocean as a Unit of Analysis Ingrid Sankey
The Shipwrecked Slaves of Tromelin Island: A Crime of Lese-Humanity Joëlle Weeks
Salman Rushdie’s Sea World: Haroun and the Sea of Stories Ludmila Volná
Graphic Interlude: Reinventing the Sea Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Ludmila Volná, Walter Raleigh, Aristide Maillol, Joni Sternbach and David Cox
(Re)inventing a People on the Sea: Instances of Creolization in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies Ahmed Mulla
A Sea of Violence and Love: Precarity, Eco-Fiction and the American Factor in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru
Three Tsunami Narratives Sonali Deraniyagala's ‘Wave’ (2013), Philippa Hawley's ‘There’s No Sea in Salford’ (2013) and Minoli Salgado's ‘A Little Dust in the Eyes’ (2014) Geetha Ganapathy-Doré
The Sea as Metaphor in Alec Derwent Hope’s “Man Friday” and Christopher Brennan’s “Each Day I See the Long Ships Coming into Port” Malati Mathur
Varia
From “Discourses of Sobriety” to Deadpan Comedy: Christopher Guest’s Musical Trilogy Charles Holdefer
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Video introduction to issue 9
Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Ludmila Volná
This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// journals.openedition.org/angles/777
Transcript:
1 I am Geetha Ganapathy-Doré. I am the current president of the Society for Activities and Research on the Indian World (SARI). I am Ludmila Volná. I am currently one of Vice-Presidents of the Society for Activities and Research on the Indian World. Welcome to this special issue on “Reinventing the Sea”.
2 Most of the papers collected in this issue were first presented at the SARI conference on Reinventing the Sea, Precarity, Epistemology and Narratives held in June 2017. We, as guest editors of Angles, would like to particularly thank Prof. Cornelius Crowley and Dr. Corinne Alexandre-Garner of Paris Nanterre University for their support and contribution to the success of the conference.
3 The sea remains a symbol of what is vast, deep, mysterious and dangerous, and appears in our collective songs, myths, literature and art. Global economy and trade rely upon maritime routes and networks for keeping goods and ideas in circulation.
4 The conference was based on the premise that the sea is being reinvented everywhere as a means to resist and survive, as a strategic frontier to be redesigned, but also as home.
5 We think that a good introduction to the different and complex issues examined in this particular issue of Angles are illustrated by Derek Walcott’s poem “Sea is History”: The Sea Is History Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History.
6 This issue has articles from authors: 1. who deal with sea as history.
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2. from authors who explore the sea as a metaphor in literature, studying the impact on language and culture of sea crossings, especially during colonial times. 3. and from authors who take up postcolonial texts dealing with environmental crises and climate change, and discuss the resulting phenomena of migration and neglect of human rights.
7 Let’s start with facts and history.
8 Oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface and contain 97% of the Earth's water. The Chevalier de Jaucourt who wrote the entry on “Ocean” for Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie in the 18 th century observed that dividing the ocean into seas was a cognitive strategy to come to grips with the unknown.
9 One way to reinvent the ocean, as Philip Steinberg points out, is not to consider it as a space outside human beings who tend settle inside, i.e., on the land, but to look upon it as a mobile and dynamic space that is central to the flows of modern society.
10 Even before the Renaissance, when the centre of the world shifted to Europe, Greek and Roman travellers of the ancient world had known India and Sri Lanka. But unlike their Renaissance counterparts, Ancients had no maps. In the first article of this issue, Jean- Marie Kowalski argues that their knowledge and representations of the maritime spaces of India and Sri Lanka were “odological,” i.e. thinking about space in linear terms like, for example, lists of towns along the coasts, rather than “cartographical.”
11 In the 21st century, the world is slowly moving away from the Mercator projection where the developed Global North appears bigger than reality, and moving towards adopting the Peters Projection which shows the relative size of different countries in a more accurate manner. In the same way, while the Azimuthal polar projection depicted on the 1945 UN flag places the North pole at the centre, in the postcolonial era, attempts are made to represent the world with the south at the top, or centered on the Pacific, rather than the Atlantic.
12 These changes highlight the importance of areas such as the Indian Ocean which is often overlooked as a key area in history.
13 Ingrid Sankey invites history and geography teachers to treat the Indian Ocean world as a zone of dynamic interaction between peoples to enable the students to learn about past histories and present territories in a refreshingly south-up perspective.
14 Joëlle Weeks’s article returns to the colonial past and the Island of Sands (now called Tromelin Island) in the Indian Ocean where 80 Malagasy slaves were abandoned by a ship belonging to the French East India Company in 1761. It took fifteen years for First Officer Tromelin to rescue the surviving seven women and lone child. Joëlle Weeks’s article about this minor episode on the margins of the empire highlights a place of memory not only for the forgotten slaves, but also for slavery as a traumatic event of human history. Her contribution sheds light on a particularly harrowing episode of the slave trade which has received too little attention from history books.
15 Literature has also contributed to discussing the importance and reinventions of the sea. Ludmila Volná proposes an original reading of Salman Rushdie's metanarrative story on story-telling written in the form of a children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. She explores the depths of the sea metaphor with the help of Hindu mythology. For Hindus, water represents the dream world of Maya. For Ludmila Volná, the story’s villain creates a totalitarian system that wants to silence storytellers.
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16 In another contribution, Ahmed Mulla turns to Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies which recounts the story Indian indentured labourers who replaced African slaves in British plantation colonies. The Indians believed that crossing of black waters (kala pani) imperiled their selves and their culture. Ahmed Mulla sustains that the process of social, cultural and linguistic creolization of the migrant Indian labourers started in the heterotopic space of the ship.
17 Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru also studied texts by Amitav Ghosh, one a novel, The Hungry Tide, and the other, an essay, The Great Derangement, on climate change. If colonialism functioned on the basis of an assumption of European superiority over non- European civilizations, non-European forms of knowledge now seem to prevail over western knowledge.
18 Ghosh’s interest in climate change and the destruction caused by man can also be compared with natural catastrophes, such as the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. In her contribution, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré studies three different narratives written by women authors that depict this cataclysmic moment in Sri Lanka. Whether it is an intensely personal trauma narrative, or a humanitarian narrative of suffering told from the outsider’s point of view, or a narrative of mourning that purports to denounce the violation of human rights, the narratives she studies from and about Sri Lanka have a ripple effect on England and old hierarchies of power. They testify to the shift from the psychological to the ecological orientation of reality in the contemporary world of precarious lives.
19 The last contribution to this issue completes the sea-centred perspective of this issue. If we began this introduction by quoting a poem from Derek Walcott, we will conclude with Malati Mathur’s article on poetry written about the Pacific. Mathur discusses Alec Dervent Hope’s “Man Friday” and Christopher Brennan’s “Each Day I See the Long Ships Coming Into Port.” Hope’s reframing of Daniel Defoe’s famous novel, Robinson Crusoe, gives voice to the silenced slave, and pictures the sea as both a dividing barrier leading to exile and a welcoming bosom into the embrace of which ‘to return’ is ‘to go home’. In Christopher Brennan’s poem, on the contrary, Mathur argues that the ship carrying the narrator symbolizes prophecy, anticipation and a reaching out to other cultures. Brennan chooses to record the shaping of Australia by the migrant’s experience.
20 Malati Mathur is a poet herself, and we would like to repeat her concluding words to end this introduction on ‘Reinventing Sea’: The sea can never be possessed. It can only possess and possess absolutely.
21 We hope you enjoy the articles.
ABSTRACTS
This video introduces the thematic contributions on ‘Reinventing the Sea’.
La vidéo présente les contributions thématiques sur « Réinventer la mer ».
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INDEX
Keywords: sea, ocean, literature, colonial history, Indian Ocean, creolization, cartography, water, climate change Mots-clés: mer, océan, littérature, histoire coloniale, histoire antique, Océan Indien, créolisation, cartographie, eau, changement climatique
AUTHORS
GEETHA GANAPATHY-DORÉ Guest editor of Issue 9. Research accredited Associate Professor of English at the Faculty of Law, Social and Political Sciences at Sorbonne Paris Nord University. She is attached to the Centre de Recherches Anglophones of the University of Paris Nanterre, and is associate member of IDPS at Sorbonne Paris Nord University. She is currently president of the Society for Activities and Research on the Indian World (SARI), and is the author of The Postcolonial Indian Novel in English. She has edited and co-edited several books among which figure On the Move, The Journey of Refugees in New Literatures in English and Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema. Contact: geethagd[at]hotmail.com
LUDMILA VOLNÁ Guest editor of Issue 9. Lecturer in English at Charles University, Prague. She is an associate member of ERIAC at Rouen Normandie University and of IMAGER Research Centre at Paris Est- Créteil University. She is currently a Vice-President of the Society for Activities and Research on the Indian World (SARI), and the non-India membership representative at IACLALS (Delhi). She has published a large number of articles on Indian Writing in English and edited several books, among which Children of Midnight: Contemporary Indian Novel in English and Indian Birth and Western Rebirths of the Jataka Tales. Contact: ludmila.volna[at]free.fr
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Sailing the Indian Ocean in Ancient Times
Jean-Marie Kowalski
1 The oceans are no longer wide water deserts, but rather connections between continents, peoples and their economies. This is the picture of what is usually called globalization. Thanks to maritime routes, the sea is not a territory, but a particular space that looks like a huge network with human and commercial flows on seaways connected by harbors, narrow straits or canals, but also intersections. These routes are also highly dependent on the environment and changing weather conditions, but also changing weather systems from one place to another. A maritime route can be opened in some seasons, and closed in others.
2 We will not address 21st century maritime routes, but go far back in time, at an early globalization movement in Ancient times initiated by Greek merchants and sailors who gradually came to sail across the oceans and discovered new territories, notably the Indian Ocean — our main focus in this paper (Fig. 1). Although one can assume that there was a “World System” in the Bronze Age, progressive changes in the Ancient world came to a turning point by the 1st century AD (Beaujard, 2009), when connexions between different networks, but also regular and significant trade, built an Afro- Eurasian world system with three major core regions evolving synchronously from the Mediterranean to the China Sea. On the Western side, the accumulated sailing experience of the Indian Ocean both shaped literary representations and set the basic features of medieval maps. Our purpose is to focus on the encounter between the Indian Ocean and these Greek and Roman spatial representations, shaped by navigation in a specific environment.
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Figure 1. A world shaped by maritime routes
3 After discussing the different historical sources available to us (such as Arrian, Strabo, Agatharchide, and Pliny the Elder), we will see how these sources described the Indian Ocean and its importance in trade routes. Although these sources did not seem to draw the map of India, almost as if it did not exist, navigators and merchants knew about this area. Following Ptolemy and accounts by merchants and others, we will discuss the Ancients’ “experience” of the Indian Ocean, and the manner in which it was represented in the form of maps and likened to other areas of the world they were more familiar with.
Historical Background and Sources
4 In what follows, our point of view will be biased, as we will only address Greek and Roman representations of the Indian Ocean without discussing Asian and Indian sources detailing navigation across this area (Marcotte 2016), even if other peoples also navigated in those waters before, during and after Europe’s classical antiquity. For instance, the lack of written evidence of Arabian navigations before the Greek and Roman era does not mean that people from the Middle East did not sail at all: during the Achaemenid and Seleucid periods, trade routes between India and the West were first maritime routes to the Arab-Persian Gulf; afterwards, cargo was transferred through the Arabian Peninsula by caravans handled by the Gerrhaeans (Salles 1993).
5 From a Western perspective, the career of Alexander the Great can be considered as a major turning point. After a global recession during the first half of the 4th century BC, the South-Eastern part of Europe boasted a new period of development under the reigns of Philip II of Macedonia and Alexander the Great (Beaujard 2012). Under the reign of Alexander, Nearchus, the admiral of his fleet, visited the Iranian coast, but he
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did not explore the Arabian coast he had planned to visit. In 326 BC, Alexander sent his admiral with a fleet of more than 400 ships from the mouths of the Indus River to Susia, in the Persian Gulf (Marcotte 2013). It took him one year to get there. Unfortunately, Nearchus’ works are lost, but large passages remain thanks to Flavius Arrianus (Hammond 2007). Arrian’s description of the Indian coastline is a major contribution to the Ancients’ representation of India using parallel lines. Another sailor from Alexander’s expedition, Onesicrites, gave a similar picture of India, including a huge Sri Lanka.
6 Alexander’s expedition to India was certainly a major military event, but it also had consequences on maritime trade in the Hellenistic era. Alexander’s decision to make Alexandria the capital of his empire in 331 had a tremendous impact on the connection between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. His decision made it clear that maritime routes were the routes of this Ancient globalization movement that subsequently shaped European representations of the world (Méla & Möri 2014; Khalil 2005). His empire was designed as a network of maritime routes, centering on Alexandria in Egypt (more than 70 additional cities called Alexandria were founded by Alexander during his reign).
7 After his death, Alexander’s successors divided his empire. Two should be specifically mentioned here: the Ptolemies and the Seleucids (Anson 2014). The Ptolemies quickly gained a strong leadership over the Mediterranean coast, and the Seleucids had to leave their positions in this area but became stronger along the Persian Gulf (Fig. 2). The Seleucids’ leadership was already challenged by Arab navigators at that time.
Figure 2. Kingdoms of Alexander’s successors
8 The Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean gradually became interconnected. From the second half of the 3rd century to the 2nd century BC, Egypt and Mesopotamia declined because of six Syrian wars and internal conflicts. Babylonia even suffered an epidemic and starvation in 274 BC. The interruption of the flow of caravans through the Arabian peninsula caused by Syrian wars may have forced the Ptolemies to sail through the Red Sea, but the Bal-al-Mandab strait was not regularly crossed by western sailors before the end of the 2nd century BC and it was not before 100 BC that Egypt and the Red Sea were opened to Indian trade.
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9 In those times, the centre of gravity of the European world had shifted west and the Romans had enforced their naval leadership over the Western Mediterranean after the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. According to Strabo: Since the Romans have recently invaded Arabia Felix with an army […] and since the merchants of Alexandria are already sailing with fleets by way of the Nile and of the Arabian Gulf as far as India these regions have become far better known to us of today than to our predecessors. At any rate, when Gallus was prefect of Egypt, […] I learnt that as many as one hundred and twenty vessels were sailing from Myos Hormos to India, whereas formerly, under the Ptolemies, only a very few ventured to undertake the voyage and to carry on traffic in Indian merchandise. (Strabo 2.5.12) He adds: Now my first and important concern […] is this to try to give, in the simplest possible way, the shape and size of that part of the earth which falls within our map. (Strabo 2.5.13)
10 Geopolitics and international relations also contributed to shape the representations of the world: by the end of the 2nd century BC, the Seleucid supremacy over Babylonia and the Gulf was challenged by the Parthians, who had difficult relations with the Romans up to the reign of Trajan (1st and 2nd centuries AD). In those conditions, the maritime trade route between the Western world and India naturally became more favorable even if one cannot affirm that trade patterns suddenly shifted from the Arabian- Persian Gulf to the Red Sea (Salles 1993).
11 During the Hellenistic and Roman times, sources became more valuable, even if they remain quite fragmentary and do not provide us with information about the entire Indian Ocean (Arnaud 2005; Müller 1855, 1861). One source is Agatharchide’s late 2nd century BC description of the Red Sea, based on eyewitnesses and written documents from Alexandria in Egypt. Agatharchide’s work is based on Ariston, an explorer who sailed along the western Arabian coast for one of the Ptolemies (probably Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who ruled Egypt during the first half of the 3rd century BC). Therefore, one can hardly know if the information given is based on the 3rd century or 2nd century BC.
12 During the late 1st century BC and at the very beginning of the 1st century AD, Strabo wrote his Geography. Later, during the second half of the 1st century, a Greek merchant from Egypt wrote Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (Periplus maris erythraei) for merchants and sailors who planned to sail along the Western coast of the Indian ocean (Casson 1989). It included detailed information about the sailing conditions, ports and products of the Red Sea coast, Somalia, but also western India, but did not seem to be very familiar with the Persian Gulf. It is highly probable that details were based on the author’s personal experience of sailing along these coasts, while in other parts (East Africa, most of Arabia, and India south of modern-day Bombay), he relied on the statements of merchants with whom he was in contact. This document is the most important source on this particular issue, and the most global synthesis of the Indian Ocean which Greek and Roman merchants were actually familiar with. Many representations changed within the few decades since Strabo’s Geography had first appeared: now the ecoumene reached Zanzibar in the South, but also the Gulf of Bengal and China in the East. Authors like Ptolemy knew of these evolutions of geographical knowledge, but Ptolemy later proposed a synthesis of both traditional representations and sailors’ experiences.
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13 The last well-known source from this period is Pliny the Elder, who published his Natural History in 77 AD. It contains useful data about sea trade between the Roman Empire and India. He was the first author who spoke of the “Oceanus Indicus” (vol. II, book 6, chap. 26), or Indian Ocean, although what is described as the Indian Ocean in ancient texts is mainly the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, even if some information is given about other parts of the ocean (Alpers 2014; Marcotte 2006).
14 As a witness of the consequences of globalization, Pliny praised the profitable consequences of long distance trade fostered by the Pax Romana: Wondrous indeed is it, that a Scythian plant should be brought from the shores of the Palus Maeotis, and the euphorbia from Mount Atlas and the regions beyond the Pillars of Hercules, localities where the operations of Nature have reached their utmost limit! […] And then, in addition to all this, that there should be a perpetual interchange going on between all parts of the earth, of productions so instrumental to the welfare of mankind! (Pliny 27.1)
15 Strabo (2.5.12; 17.1.13) emphasized that the wealth of the Roman Empire fostered the trade of luxury products between Egypt and the East. Indian sailors also settled on the Red Sea and in Alexandria. As proof of this trade, Roman coinage can be found mainly in two Indian districts: Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu (SE) and Krishna River in Andhra Pradesh (East) (Ray 1993). This trade focused on luxury products trade for the Roman aristocracy. Many authors, including Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Arrian, Ptolemy and Cosmas mention this trade.
Greek and Roman Historical Evidence: Mapping the World Without Maps
16 The Ancients’ knowledge of the Indian Ocean remained fragmentary. There is no evidence of the existence of Greek or Roman maps of the Indian Ocean or any other sea. The most famous maps are Ptolemy’s, even if they are copies from the Middle Ages. Ptolemy’s information was based on longitude and latitude data about cities, harbors, mouths of rivers and other remarkable geographic entities. His description of the world with latitude and longitude coordinates provides the basic features required to draw maps, but the most ancient maps extant date back only to a 13th century Byzantine manuscript (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. Gr. 32). These maps became famous and many copies were made from the end of the 14th century to the end of the 15 th century. Unfortunately, they do not help us understand the geographer’s views.
17 A geographer’s representation of geographic areas actually looks like a cloud of points rather than a continuous coastline, borders or rivers (Fig. 5). This draws a highly specific mental map of the world in which it looks as if India did not exist at all: the Indus mouth and Taprobane (modern-day Sri Lanka) “exist,” but the main part of the Indian subcontinent does not, as navigators only experienced few places in this area (see Fig. 3 and 4).
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Figure 3. Taprobane in Ptolemy’s Claudii Ptolemaei Alexandrini geographicae enarrationis
Libri octo, 1535.
This representation can be synthesized in the following way:
Figure 4. Elisée Reclus’ view of Ptolemy’s Geography
Elisée Reclus 1905: 111
18 These were not the first maps of the inhabited world, but they were the most famous. Geographers like Ptolemy proposed representations of the Eastern part of the world that relied both on a long-lasting scientific tradition and on the experience of
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navigators that improved the quality of representations. As a result, these highly experience-based “maps” were deeply biased, as they gave information about “salient” places in merchants’ and navigators’ mental maps rather than about physical geography, hydrography and the actual dimensions of the inhabited world.
19 Salience is both a qualitative and a quantitative concept: some geographic entities are structural elements of space that shape the sailors’ and geographers’ representations and organize space because they are useful landmarks and nodes on the network of maritime routes. Some of these entities, such as capes or promontories, are visually salient, but others have a more cognitive relevance, characterized by their capabilities: to protect ships, to offer safe mooring places, to land on shore, to provide ships with fresh water or to make seafaring possible.
20 Ancient texts tell us more than about geography: they provide us with clues to understand people’s relationship with their environment. The definition of geographic entities itself depends on this relationship rather than on formal features. The ecological approach of visual perceptions designed in the field of psychology (Gibson 1979) provides us with relevant means for analyzing these representations. Gibson used a neologism, “affordance,” to describe whatever capabilities the surrounding environment provides to human beings. The theory of affordances is not a modern essentialism as these “affordances” are not attributes of objects but point to the relationship between these objects and people. As a result, different geographic entities can be endowed with the same affordance: a wharf, a cape or a bay can equally provide sailors with the affordance to protect their ships. At the same time, one single geographic entity may have different affordances, according to the different activities of people: a bay with shallow waters with rocks may have the affordance to protect small ships, but also the affordance to be a danger for bigger ones, or the affordance to provide fishermen with a good fishing spot.
21 The psychological concept of affordance sheds new light on salience that seems ambiguous, as salience combines quantitative and qualitative features, measurable and cognitive ones, but also geographical and cultural items. As a result Taprobane seems to be much bigger than the Indian subcontinent which is reduced to the mouths of the Indus, while Tabropane seems to be surrounded by many smaller islands, as shown in the following maps.
22 In these documents, it looks as if the Indian subcontinent did not exist. India is nothing but an illusion for the Western world in Ancient Greek and Roman times. The Indus’s mouth actually “exists” as Ptolemy locates eight mouths of the Indus River. The Ganges’s mouth also “exists,” but the continental part of India South of these places does not. One can easily distinguish on the left-hand side the northernmost part of the Arabian Sea which is said to be a kolpos (“a gulf”), the Gulf of Bengal, which Ptolemy calls “Gulf of Ganges,” and the “Great Sea,” situated south of China, on the right-hand side. India does not exist per se, but Taprobane does, with many surrounding islands; Malaysia and Indonesia are merged into a single peninsula in the Far East.
23 Even if India does not seem to exist in these maps, this does not mean ancient sailors and geographers ignored this part of the world. More probably, they did not mention places that were of no use to them on their maritime routes.
24 Even if one cannot draw a map of India from the indications given in Ancient texts, India obviously “exists” in Greek geographic literature. The following picture shows the
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different locations Ptolemy mentions in his Geography, with their longitude and their latitude (Fig. 5). Longitude is calculated from the first meridian, which is situated in the Atlantic Ocean, in the vicinity of the Canary Islands. Latitude is calculated from the equator.
Figure 5. Data of the Indian Ocean represented by Ptolemy
25 There is a sharp contrast between the 13th century cartographic representations and Ptolemy’s textual evidence. The geographer mentions 516 different locations in India, and 66 in Taprobane. 89 places he mentions in India are situated on the sea coast; 46 are situated on the Western Coast, north of Commaria promontorium, the southernmost cape of India. The density of points is much more important in this area.
26 This representation should be compared with the map by Elisée Reclus (Fig. 4), which raises several issues. First, the granularity of information is far less precise for Sri Lanka and the Far East than for the Northernmost part of India. Second, this granularity of information and the global frame of Ptolemy’s description question the nature of boundaries in the Ancient world. India seems to be a consistent entity from the Indus to the Ganges River while Taprobane is described in a separate chapter.
27 The previous representations of the Indian Ocean can be connected with the Ptolemaic representations of Eastern Africa. In Fig. 6, it looks as if there were two major capes on the Western part of the Indian Ocean. The first is Syagros akra (this cape is called Ras Fartak in Yemen, see Ptolemy 6.7). The latitude of this cape is situated slightly south of the Indus’s mouths and the Barygaza kolpos (modern Bharuch, and Gulf of Cambay).
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Figure 6. Ptolemy’s view of the Indian Ocean
A mid-15th century Florentine map of the world based on Jacobus Angelus’s 1406 Latin translation of Maximus Planudes’s late 13th century rediscovered Greek manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Geography. Source: Wikipedia
28 The second cape is the Aromata cape, the “spice cape” (long 83°, lat 06°), situated on the same latitude as the mouth of the Soana River in Taprobane and close to Rhizala harbor on the western coast of this island.
Experience-based Representations of the Indian Ocean
29 In the 3rd century BC, Eratosthenes described a different world that extended less to the east, but shared a common vision of this area. It was as if India did not really exist, but the mouths of the Indus River were already situated on the same latitude as Ras Khalfat, which was not mentioned at all. Taprobane was further south. It was already a huge island, which nevertheless remained smaller than the British Isles (Fig. 7).
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Figure 7. Eratosthenes’ world
30 Strabo’s world, more than two hundred years later, had evolved, as the cape of spices became a more salient feature. Even if Strabo does not explicitly mention cape Syagros, a more salient landmark appears on the map. At the same time, Sri Lanka becomes elongated and is considered as larger than the British Isles (Fig. 8).
Figure 8. Strabo’s world
31 From Eratosthenes to Ptolemy, there are constant features, as Taprobane seems to be placed on the same latitude as cape Gardafui, while the different mouths of the Indus are connected to the Arabian Peninsula.
32 Ptolemy’s representation of the Indian Ocean seems to be underpinned by a long- lasting geographic tradition highly influenced by the growing experience of navigation
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and travel which led historians to draw comparisons between the different areas they knew. For instance, around 130 CE Arrian writes in his Indika (Book 8, chapter 6): The plains of India also receive rain in summer, and much part of them becomes swamp; in fact Alexander’s army retired from the river Acesines in midsummer, when the river had overflowed on to the plains; from these, therefore, one can gauge the flooding of the Nile, since probably the mountains of Ethiopia receive rain in summer, and from them the Nile is swollen and overflows its banks on to the land of Egypt. The Nile therefore also runs turbid this time of the year, as it probably would not be from melting snow; nor yet if its stream was dammed up by the seasonal winds which blow during the summer; and besides, the mountains of Ethiopia are probably not snow-covered, on account of the heat. But that they receive rain as India does is not outside the bounds of probability; since in other respects India is not unlike Ethiopia, and the Indian rivers have crocodiles like the Ethiopian and Egyptian Nile; and some of the Indian rivers have fish and other large water animals like those of the Nile, save the river-horse: though Onesicritus states that they do have the river-horse also. The appearance of the inhabitants, too, is not so far different in India and Ethiopia; the southern Indians resemble the Ethiopians a good deal, and, are black of countenance, and their hair black also, only they are not as snub-nosed or so woolly-haired as the Ethiopians; but the northern Indians are most like the Egyptians in appearance. (Arrian 1929)
33 According to Arrian, Egypt and India share many common features: similar weather conditions, animals, and even people. It seems therefore relevant that both Egypt and India should be placed on similar latitudes.
34 This tradition was enhanced by sailors’ experiences. India looked like a diamond with angles stretching east and west rather than north and south. This representation was accepted up to Marcus Agrippa, whose works were reused by Pliny the Elder who knew the maritime route that connected Bal-al-Mandab and the southern part of India within 40 days (vol. II, book 6, chap. 26).: Passengers generally set sail at midsummer, before the rising of the Dog-star, or else immediately after, and in about thirty days arrive at Ocelis in Arabia, or else at Cane, in the region which bears frankincense. There is also a third port of Arabia, Muza by name; it is not, however, used by persons on their passage to India, as only those touch at it who deal in incense and the perfumes of Arabia. More in the interior there is a city; the residence of the king there is called Sapphar, and there is another city known by the name of Save. To those who are bound for India, Ocelis is the best place for embarcation. If the wind, called Hippalus, happens to be blowing, it is possible to arrive in forty days at the nearest mart of India, Muziris by name. This, however, is not a very desirable place for disembarcation, on account of the pirates who frequent its vicinity, where they occupy a place called Nitrias; nor, in fact, is it very rich in articles of merchandize. Besides, the road-stead for shipping is a considerable distance from the shore, and the cargoes have to be conveyed in boats, either for loading or discharging. At the moment that I am writing these pages, the name of the king of this place is Cælobothras. Another port, and a much more convenient one, is that which lies in the territory of the people called Neacyndi, Barace by name. Here King Pandion used to reign, dwelling at a considerable distance from the mart in the interior, in a city known as Modiera. (Pliny 1855: 64-5)
35 Under the reign of the emperor Claudius in the middle of the 1st century AD (Casson 1989), the route to Sri Lanka was definitely open for sailors. Pliny testifies that several sources attest to an important development of maritime knowledge around the middle of the 1st century AD.
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36 The routes remained quite the same, but people settled in different cities. Some changes occurred at the turn of the 2nd and the 1st century BC, however, when Greek sailors came to realize Monsoon winds could probably help them sail directly from Africa to India without navigating along the coast from Bab al-Mandab to the province of Gujarat (Marcotte 2016). Indian and Arab sailors had probably sailed this route before them, as Pliny the Elder (vol. II, book 6, chap. 26:62-3) writes that the Monsoon wind was called Hippalus by the natives. There is archaeological evidence of Greek trading in the south of India since the 2nd century BC as many Greek amphorae have been found in the South-East around Arikamedu (Mathew 2017; Will 1996, 2004). It should also be mentioned that after the fall of the Mauryan Empire, a Greek Seleucid satrap called Diodotus settled a kingdom in 240 BC in Bactriane and Sogdiana. Later on, these sailors discovered the route from this strait to the harbor of Mouziris on the Southern coast of India. From this location, they could also sail to Sri Lanka.
37 On the Ptolemies’ side, maritime routes were developed between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. These routes threatened Arab caravan routes along this sea. The harbors of Berenice and Myos Hormos developed during the Ptolemies, but harbors were also founded on the Arabian side, such as Ampelone, north of modern Jeddah. At the very beginning of the 3rd century BC, Ptolemy II decided to dig the canal Darius had drawn between the Nile and the Red Sea 200 years earlier. From this date, the canal made it possible for sailors to not unload their ships on their way from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, even if this canal followed a different course than the modern Suez Canal (Schörner 2000).
38 Cities quickly developed in our era, while both maritime and land routes remained nearly identical, despite a growing number of coastal cities fostered by coastal trade and maritime expansion. Egyptian trade decreased during the 1st century and the Roman conquest in 30 BC served as a new starting point. Trade with the Middle East and the Far East became more important, as the Indian Ocean became the center of gravity of globalization.
Conclusion
39 The Ancients’ representation of the Indian Ocean was based both on a vivid literary tradition and the growing knowledge about the environment attributable to the sailing experience of merchants who gradually helped map the world. The main geographers’ concern was not to draw precise scientific maps, but to make understandable and measurable what was visible. Their representations of maritime spaces is mostly consistent with Pietro Janni’s “odological space” (Janni 1984), which contrasts sharply with cartographical representations of space because of the introduction of cultural and cognitive features that influenced the perception of geographic entities. At the very beginning of the Christian era, the basic schemes, routes and nodes of trade had already been laid out. The typology of goods that would be sold between east and west were largely the same as in modern times: luxury goods, silk, cotton, spices or pepper, carried over long distances for trade. The world was ready for a new globalization with new generations of sailors and new experiences of navigation that would contribute to shape new representations of the Indian Ocean.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alpers, Edward A. The Indian Ocean in World History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
Anson, Edward M. Alexander’s Heirs. The Age of the Successors. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014.
Arnaud, Pascal. Les Routes de la navigation antique. Itinéraires en Méditerranée. Paris: Éditions errance, 2005.
Arrian. Anabasis Alexandri. Indica. Transl. E. Liff Robson. London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1929.
Beaujard, Philippe. “Un seul système-monde avant le 16e siècle ? L’océan Indien au cœur de l’intégration de l’hémisphère afro-eurasien.” In P. Beaujard, L. Berger et P. Norel. Histoire globale, mondialisations et capitalisme. Paris: La Découverte, 2009: 82-148.
Beaujard, Philippe. Les Mondes de l’océan Indien. Paris: Armand Colin, 2012.
Casson, Lionel (transl.). The Periplus Maris Eythraei. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.
Gibson, J.J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1979.
Hammond, N.G.L. Three Historians of Alexander the Great. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.
Janni, Pietro. La mappa e il periplo : cartografia antica e spazio odologico. Rome: Breithschneider, 1984.
Khalil, Emad K. H. “Egypt and the Roman Maritime Trade: a focus on Alexandria.” PhD Dissertation, University of Southampton, 2005.
Marcotte, Didier. “The Indian Ocean from Agatharchides of Cnidus to the Periplus Maris Erythraei.” In Serena Bianchetti et al. (ed.). Brill’s companion to Ancient Geography: the inhabited world in Greek and Roman tradition. Leiden: Brill, 2006: 163-183.
Marcotte, Didier (ed.). Néarque, d’Arrien à Alexandre, d’Arrien à William Vincent : le périple de Néarque et sa postérité. Estratto da Geographia Antiqua, xxii. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2013.
Marcotte, Didier. “L’océan Indien des Grecs, entre tradition savante et actualité maritime.” In Emmanuelle Vagnon and Eric Vallet (eds.). La Fabrique de l’océan Indien. Cartes d’Orient et d’Occident (Antiquité-XVIe siècle). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016: 7-14.
Méla, Charles & Frédéric Möri. Alexandrie la Divine. 2 Vol. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 2014.
Müller, Karl. Geographi Graeci Minores. Vol. I. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1855.
Müller, Karl. Geographi Graeci Minores. Vol. II. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1861.
Pliny. The Natural History of Pliny. John Bostock and H.T. Riley (trans.). Vol. II. London, 1855.
Mathew K.S. (ed.). Imperial Rome, Indian Ocean Regions and Muziris, New Perspectives on Maritime Trade. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Ray, Himanshu Prabha. “A resurvey of Roman Contacts with the East.” Topoi 3.2 1993: 479-491. DOI: 10.3406/topoi.1993.1481
Reade, Julian. The Indian Ocean in Antiquity. London: Routledge, 2009.
Reclus, Elisée. L’Homme et la terre. Vol. III. Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905.
Salles, Jean-François. “The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and the Arab-Persian Gulf.” Topoi 3.2 (1993): 493-523. DOI: 10.3406/topoi.1993.1482
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Schörner, Hadwiga. “Künstliche Schiffahrtskanäle in der Antike. Der sogenannte antike Suez- Kanal.” Skyllis 3-1 (2000): 28-43.
Strabo. Geography. Books 1-2. Trans. Horace Leonard Jones. London: Harvard UP, 2005.
Will, Elizabeth Lyding. “Mediterranean shipping amphoras from the 1941-50; Excavations (at Arikamedu).” In V. Begley (ed.). The Ancient Port of Arikamedu: New Excavations and Researches, 1989-1992. Vol. I. Paris: Centre d’Histoire et d’Archéologie, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1996: 325-403.
ABSTRACTS
Navigations in the Indian Ocean, well attested in the ancient periplographical and geographical literature, pose a series of questions to the historian. These investigations are more often than not fragmentary and provide information only on some of the desired data. Nor can they attest the existence of cartographic representations. However, whether they are Greek or Latin, many navigators had experienced what is was to sail in the Indian Ocean at that time, offering a constantly evolving representation of this area.
Les navigations en océan Indien, bien attestées dans la littérature périplographique et géographique ancienne, posent une série de questions à l’historien. Plus encore que d’autres, elles sont parcellaires et ne renseignent que sur une partie des données souhaitées. Elles ne permettent pas non plus d’attester l’existence de représentations cartographiques. Pourtant, qu’ils soient grecs ou latins, de nombreux navigateurs ont fait l’expérience de la navigation en océan Indien au fil de l’Antiquité, proposant une représentation en constante évolution.
INDEX
Keywords: navigation, Antiquity, geography, voyage, Indian Ocean, sea Mots-clés: navigation, antiquité, géographie, périple, Océan Indien, mer
AUTHOR
JEAN-MARIE KOWALSKI Associate Professor (Ancient History) at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Jean-Marie Kowalski wrote a doctoral thesis entitled “Thalassographeïn, Mesure, Representation et Description of Maritime Spaces in Ancient Greece,” under the joint guidance of Prof. Arnaud Zucker (University of Nice) and Prof. Christophe Claramunt (Naval School). Since 2007, he has been head of the Department of Humanities at the French Naval Academy. His fields of research are navigation, naval operations and military ethics. He is attached to the Laboratoire d’histoire et d’archéologie maritimes - FED 4124 (Sorbonne Université). The book entitled Navigation et géographie dans l’antiquité gréco-romaine (Éditions A&J Picard, 2012) and the article “Du héros épique à l’ennemi public : représentations antiques de la figure du pirate” published in the volume La piraterie au fil de l’histoire : un défi pour l’Etat (Paris, PUPS, 2014) and Images des Américains dans la Grande Guerre (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017) feature among the numerous publications he has authored. Contact: jean-marie.kowalski[at]ecole-navale.fr
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Teaching Global History and Geography Using the Indian Ocean as a Unit of Analysis
Ingrid Sankey
1 The units of analysis historians and geographers use enable them to identify key questions about the past and the present which, in turn, determine which stories are told and, eventually, what patterns emerge. This is why units of analysis can be regarded as framing tools that help scholars identify patterns at different scales in their analysis of global processes. By focusing on seas and ocean basins, one can bring out the processes of interaction that have connected peoples living in the various regions around a sea and ocean basin up to the present day.
2 To illustrate this recent development in the fields of History and Geography, one may recall the pioneering work of French historian Fernand Braudel who was the first to use the large-scale unit of analysis of the Mediterranean Sea as a framework for his study of the reign of Philip II of Spain, originally published in 1949. In a paper published in the Journal of Modern History in 1972, Braudel wrote: I contemplated the Mediterranean, tête à tête, for years on end and my vision of History took its definitive form without my being entirely aware of it, partly as a direct intellectual response to a spectacle — the Mediterranean — which no traditional historical account seemed capable of encompassing. (Braudel 1972: 453-4)
3 Nowadays, as Global History is emerging as a dominant paradigm and develops new and innovative approaches in various fields of the Humanities, large scale studies have emerged in History, a field previously reluctant to such vast units of analysis. As Global Geography is now being taught in French lycées (high schools), the Indian Ocean framework, like Braudel’s Mediterranean Sea decades ago, can be used to explain the early development of global trade networks and regional cross-cultural interactions in what is commonly referred to as the Old World, as opposed to the New World “discovered” by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
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4 The finest example of such large scale oceanic studies is that of French historian Philippe Beaujard who published a rather exhaustive analysis of the history of the Indian Ocean, recently translated into English (Beaujard 2012, 2019). In this vast study, he displays a broad-spectrum analysis of a very large area that stretches from the Eurasian Silk Roads network to the island of Madagascar, and from the Himalayas to the African Swahili coast and the archipelagoes of South East Asia. The topics addressed range from the economics and politics of the region through the analysis of maritime and land-based trade networks, to an anthropological study of the ethnic diversity found across this vast unit of analysis, from Antiquity to the arrival of Europeans in the Indian Ocean in the 15th century.
5 This paper will deal with this recent and unprecedented use of the Indian Ocean as a global framework for historical and geographic analysis in teaching and research fields, showing why discussing in class the Indian Ocean world as a zone of dynamic interaction between peoples makes more pedagogical, historical and geographic sense in a globalized world than using traditionally delineated national or continental units.
6 One must acknowledge the limitations of the use of such a broad unit of analysis, however, and the potential teleological bias that prompts historians and teachers to try integrating the human past into a comprehensive big picture that emphasises the shared experiences of all humans, sometimes at the expense of a more traditional historiography focusing on the idea that the human past is marked by important differences between peoples across space and time.
7 This is why the major issue for Global History and Geography is to reconcile the idea of an increasing integration at the global scale with that of an increasing difference at the local and regional scales, and to construct and teach a global historical and geographic narrative of the past and of our contemporary world that may help students understand the growing complexities and challenges of Globalization.
8 In an introduction to the history of the Indian Ocean World in a teacher’s resource website in 2007, Erik Gilbert stated that, even though world historians do not seem to agree on a common definition of World History, the majority concede that “if world history has an opposite, something it strives not to be, it is national history” (Gilbert 2006-7: 6). Like most modern fields of study, History and Geography as we know them today were born at the end at the 19th century, in an era of dynamic state building. The preferred unit of analysis that emerged to frame historians and geographers’ narratives of the world’s past and present was, and to some extent still is, the national scale. It is easy to acknowledge the ideological background that has led most countries around the world to build national histories to back emerging national identities, at a time when another political unit, the Imperial one, was crumbling almost everywhere. Today, the United Nations hosts 193 member states (South Sudan is the latest addition in 2011). All are national political entities.
9 Nevertheless, over the past decades, History and Geography, like many other fields of study, have had to adapt to a paradigm shift that has enlarged the scope of their narratives from a national to a global scale. This new paradigm is what defines most of our contemporary representations of the world: globalization. One could discuss the validity or reality of such a broad and ill-defined concept and its consequences over various fields of studies, including the Humanities, but this goes beyond the scope of this paper.
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10 As world history emerged as a global alternative to the national narrative, it soon became clear that a global perspective also had to include a transdisciplinary approach in its analysis to provide a truly global perspective on history and geography. The fields of History and Geography have thus become more connected than ever before. Broader units of analysis have been added to the nation state, such as civilizations, area studies, continents, language groups… All in an attempt to transcend the limits of the nation- state. But as Erik Gilbert recalls, “the more we employ these units of analysis, the more they start to seem like nation-states warmed over” (Gilbert 2006-7: 6). Some of these broader units are geographic ones: natural spaces or ecosystems such as deserts, grasslands, mountains or oceans. These harsh environments, which may look like barriers limiting human contacts, have come to be regarded as “zones of interactions” that have served as meeting places between peoples of different backgrounds (Gilbert 2006-7: 6).
11 The Indian Ocean is one such place and it provides History and Geography teachers with examples of trade, travel, migration, imperial conquest and religious and cultural interaction in almost every period that reach far beyond the limits of national state borders. This approach aims at enabling students to analyse events and phenomena with a broadened perspective and a less restricted focus, introducing the complexities of writing historical and geographical narratives that manage to articulate the global and the local in a coherent and comprehensive analysis of past and present events.
12 Seas and oceans, by their size and contact with multiple and diverse areas, look like the perfect historical and geographic frame to display exchanges of all kinds and scales, an aspect sometimes overlooked by classical history.
Figure 1. The Indian Ocean floor, by NatGeo dated 1967
Source: https://imgur.com/eIhUdNv
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13 Maritime networks provided important linkages between diverse ecological zones and facilitated contacts between societies that had access to diverse resources. The richness and complexity of these cross-regional connections set the pattern for the globe- spanning interconnections we know today as globalization.
14 Jerry Bentley has argued that since the Second World War, historians have focused more closely on large-scale processes that have deeply influenced both the experiences of individual societies and the development of the world as a whole. These processes include mass migration, campaigns of imperial expansion, cross-cultural trade, biological exchanges, transfers of technology and cultural exchanges that have left a mark on the world’s past. Therefore, “adequate study of these processes requires historians to recognize analytical categories much larger than national communities” (Bentley 1999:1).
15 Thus, the recognition of large-scale economic regions, for example, has laid the foundation for Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory (Wallerstein 1974) and that of large-scale ecological zones has developed our understanding of processes of biological diffusions and their widespread and long-lasting consequences, such as the Great plague in Eurasia or the so-called “Columbian exchange” (Crosby 1972) between the Old World and the New World.
16 As History unfolds on different levels and scales such as local, regional, continental, hemispheric, oceanic, global, and so on, processes of integration and differentiation maintain tension at all levels. In the lack of stable nailed-down categories capable of supporting historical and geographical analysis at all times and places, sea and ocean basins offer particularly useful alternatives to earlier constructs because of their capacity to bring focus to so many large-scale processes of social and economic integration. (Bentley 1999: 9).
17 Nevertheless, seas and oceanic frameworks would not serve well as the absolute or definitive categories of historical analysis because their contours and characteristics have changed dramatically over time with shifting relationships between bodies of water and masses of land (Wallerstein 1974: 1).
18 Despite their advantages, such categories no doubt mirror an era of globalization and may represent a significant bias as they have the potential to serve at legitimising altogether an ideology of globalism that endorses or promotes the contemporary capitalist style of present-day globalization. In order to prevent such teleological biases, large-scale processes and cross-cultural interactions that have long been important ingredients in the development of human societies must be subject to analysis and critique. This is why the study of sea and ocean basins must probe the connections and dynamics fuelling processes of integration in individual maritime regions without losing sight either of the local experiences or global interactions that sometimes conditioned the experiences of the regions themselves (Wallerstein 1974: 9).
19 Connections made by water routes have helped integrate distant peoples through trade, contact and cultural influences for thousands of years. It also led to the spreading of religious traditions across distant regions as goods and commodities were not travelling alone along these ancient trade networks. Furthermore, contacts made through water-based as well as land-based trade also caused peoples to become more aware of cultural differences and sharpen distinction between diverse societies.
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20 In a manual of World History published in 2013, Candice Goucher and Linda Walton recall that World/global history looks for global patterns that emerge from the world’s vast collection of historical narratives and for significant connections across both time and space. In doing so, it aims to attenuate the tensions between the dynamics of continued global integration, mostly through international trade, at the global scale and the acceleration of proliferating differences at the local scale. These two opposing trends are still important features of our contemporary globalization. Therefore, it is fair to acknowledge that, even if historians create narratives of the past from records of individual and collective experiences, they interpret the past in response to questions shaped by the world they live in (Goucher 2013: 5).
21 French historian Fernand Braudel is usually credited with being one of the first to acknowledge the sea as a unit of analysis in his study of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, published in 1949. In those days, historians were beginning to probe the impact of global processes that had caused two major world-scale conflicts. As the title suggests, Braudel identifies the “Mediterranean Sea” as the geographic physical background of his analysis and the “Mediterranean World” understood and described as the cultural space and manmade territory created, delineated and organized by successive waves of peoples who settled around the coastline surrounding what geographers call this “body of water” that is the Mediterranean Sea over past millennia (Braudel 1949, 1972).
22 Braudel’s work consists of three volumes, each dealing with different time scales. The first volume deals with geological times and focuses on the physical geography of the Mediterranean Sea and its surrounding lands, such as the climate, the landscapes, the natural resources and raw materials available to the various peoples dwelling on its shores. It seeks to analyse Mediterranean societies in their geographic context and assess the impact of the environment on the history of the region and on the creation of a somewhat unified Mediterranean space. He acknowledges that geography is not enough, however, and that “the Mediterranean had no unity but that created by the movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow” (Braudel 1972: 276).
23 Following this methodology, the second volume deals with societies at large and focuses on the long social time needed for the development of social processes that contributed to the creation or evolution of specific cultures and civilisations. That is the time that is needed to create social structures, to develop social processes, cultural identities and long-lasting political structures — a time that measures the impact of cross-cultural interactions or the creation of hybrid societies. These processes usually develop and unfold over several generations.
24 The third volume deals with what previous historians regarded as real History, eventful time, the time of historical individual events understood in the span of a human lifetime.
25 Nowadays, world regions far from the Mediterranean can be referred to as “Mediterranean Seas,” such as the Caribbean or the South China Sea. These interconnected regions share common features that define the “Braudelian” Mediterranean, thus shaping single space units forming what can be referred to as unique maritime worlds. An example that shows the vitality of Braudel’s legacy in France is the publication of a book by François Gipouloux on “The Asian
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Mediterranean, port-cities and trade networks in China, Japan and Southeast Asia from the 16th to the 21st century” (Gipouloux 2009).
26 This leads us to another, much larger, maritime unit of analysis, that of the Indian Ocean, which raises the question of the unity of such a vast, diverse but densely interconnected, maritime region.
27 In his book on the history of the Indian Ocean first published in 2008, Michael Pearson raises the following question: is there something which we call the Indian Ocean and which can be studied, analysed, treated as a coherent object? For Pearson, The Indian Ocean is not only older, it also has a fundamentally different history. The Mediterranean has always been dominated by people from its littoral; the North Atlantic is the creation of people from one of its coasts; the Pacific arguably was created by Europeans, but in the Indian Ocean there is a long history of contact and distant voyages done by peoples from its coasts, and then a brief hiatus, maybe 150 years, when Westerners controlled things. (Pearson 2010: 5)
28 He also recalls that Andre Gunder Frank in ReOrient, first published in 1998, has claimed that the Indian Ocean area, extending to the South China Sea, has been central to global history in all the millennia up to about 1800, and is now re-emerging as a major area of exchange and interactions in the Old world. By contrast, European dominance in the world covers at most 200 years out of a total of perhaps six millennia (Gunder Frank 2010: 4).
29 The first comprehensive study of the Indian Ocean as a unit of historical analysis following Braudel’s footsteps was the K.N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: an Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, published in 1985. There was a firm impression in the minds of contemporaries, sensed also by historians later, that the ocean had its own unity, a distinct sphere of influence. Means of travel, movements of people, economic exchange, climate and historical forces created elements of cohesion. Religion, social systems, and cultural traditions on the other hand, provided the contrasts (Gipouloux 2009).
30 As Pearson recalls, Chaudhuri comes to the conclusion that, for certain kinds of analysts, the Indian Ocean is a single unit of space, and that for others it is not and must be broken-up into smaller entities (Pearson 2010: 5). Some scholars advocate that, in spite of the great variety of landscapes and ecosystems (from rainforests to deserts, and continents to islands), the lands bordering the Indian Ocean had a lot in common, from the garland of harbours along the coasts where maritime trade met land-routes to the common kinds of ships used, such as the elegant dhows which used to roam across these oceanic territories long before Sindbad, the famous sailor of the Arabian Nights.
31 On the contrary, other scholars such as Frank Broeze suggest that the term ‘Indian Ocean’ is inappropriate and refers to a string of closely related regional systems stretching from East Asia around the continent and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, to which sea space a new generic name such as “the Asian Seas” might well be given. (Broeze 1989: 3-21)
32 What makes the Indian Ocean unique is that it was the first real ocean that humans could cross rather than just clinging to the shorelines, using the regular pattern of Monsoon winds. Erik Gilbert adds that the Indian Ocean is more like a giant version of the Mediterranean, the archetype of the manageable, human-scale body of water, and quite unlike the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans which were, until fairly recently, insurmountable barriers, crossed only by accident or out of desperation […] if the Mediterranean may take the prize for earliest long-distance trade, as there seems
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to have been a maritime trade in Obsidian as early as 6000 BCE, it lacks both the size and ecological variety of the Indian Ocean. (Gilbert 2006-7: 6-7)
33 Thus, when one compares the Indian Ocean to the unity of the Mediterranean world, one may acknowledge, as Gilbert suggests, that what makes the Indian Ocean interesting is its lack of unity. It is large enough to connect different cultures and environments. Unlike the Mediterranean, which runs east-west, the Indian Ocean includes environments as varied as tropical East Africa and its grassland, wooded, mountainous and desert hinterland, the deserts that border the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the hot and wet areas around Southern India and the tropical rainforests covering both mainland and island Southeast Asia (Gilbert 2006-7: 8). Revealingly, Fernand Braudel’s analysis of the Mediterranean Sea has sometimes been criticised for the author’s clear focus on its Northern shores, rarely providing facts about the Southern shore of Mare Nostrum.
34 Another element that makes the Indian Ocean such a interesting unit of analysis is that it is, together with the Mediterranean Sea, one of two major and interconnected bodies of water of what is commonly referred to as “the Old World” as opposed to the New Atlantic and Pacific Worlds. The Indian Ocean is the only body of water of such geographic scale that witnessed the early development of regular and extensive trade networks long before the arrival of Europeans. It allows teachers using this unit of analysis to adopt a different historical approach, one less influenced by 19th-century Eurocentric perceptions of the world. To illustrate this point, teachers can use several maps drawn before the arrival of European conquerors in the Indian Ocean, such as Al- Idrissi’s world map designed in 1154 (Figure 2), or the Kangnido map designed in Korea in 1402 (Figure 3). These maps provide visions of the world at different periods of time that are not exclusively or specifically centred on the Mediterranean Sea or the European continent.
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Figure 2. A map of the world by Al-Idrisi (1154) in The Book of Roger, Norman king of Sicily, showing the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean
The map is centred on the Arabian Peninsula at the crossroads between the two bodies of water. Note the southern orientation of the map. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1154_world_map_by_Moroccan_cartographer_al- Idrisi_for_king_Roger_of_Sicily.jpg
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Figure 3. The Kangnido Map (1402)
A Chinese perspective on the Indian Ocean. Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/KangnidoMap.jpg
35 Varied units of analysis may include the study of trade networks and areas of strategic importance for communications around the Indian Ocean at different periods of time and in different sub-regional areas such as the Persian Gulf, the Red, Arabian and South China Seas, the straits of Hormuz, Bab El-Mandeb or Malacca in Southeast Asia, the Swahili shores along the East African coast, the Mozambique Channel or the Bay of Bengal.
36 Depending on the period studied, topics can range from the ancient maritime Spice Routes network, or the Medieval Swahili coastal and urban network of trading city- states to the Portuguese Estado da India in the 16 th century, or the British colonial Empire and its shift to the East after the loss of large parts of its American Atlantic empire in the 18th century.
37 Students may be asked to evaluate the significance and impact of the development of global trade networks in the history of the Old World that included the interconnected system made of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, as opposed to the New Atlantic and Pacific Worlds “discovered” after 1492. They may also identify and describe zones of interaction and areas of hybridity and creolization and assess the impact of trade on local cultures and societies with respect to arts, religious beliefs and syncretisms, food and diets, languages, science and techniques. Other ideas include the evaluation of the consequences of trade on political, economic, social and cultural structures of various societies in the rimlands surrounding the ocean and on their natural environments. To further their analysis, students may present their network in space and time. They may use different maps with different scales, identify core and peripheral areas and describe the organisation of the trade networks included in their
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units of analysis. They may be asked to draw their own annotated maps and produce their own timelines.
38 Having to describe unfamiliar time periods can help students identify periods of continuity and change more easily as they are not locked in a traditional Eurocentric chronology that identifies pre-determined slices of History from Antiquity to the present day, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Modern and Contemporary Ages.
39 Eventually, students may identify areas where water-based met land-based trade networks, emerging and declining key areas such as trade-posts or coastal urban networks, using a systemic approach. Students may identify and describe big port cities around the Indian Ocean such as those where the trans-continental Silk Roads met the maritime Spice Routes network to form huge cosmopolitan hubs and crossroad areas such as the trans-Saharan caravan trade network or the Frankincense routes from the Arabian peninsula and the shores of the Oman Sultanate.
Figure 4. A map of the Indian Ocean
Dated c. 1519 from the Miller Atlas in La fabrique de l’Océan indien, Emmanuelle Vagnon and Eric Vallet eds., Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne, 2017, p. 113. Source: https://www.mapmania.org/map/63688/1519_map_of_the_indian_ocean_and_surroundings
40 Students’ analysis of such trade systems may also question the actors and the goods and commodities exchanged throughout the delineated units of analysis. In such a perspective, actors may include traders and customers but also intermediaries and diasporas, lesser-known minority groups such as the Peranakan Straits Chinese — a trade diaspora that established itself along the coasts of Malaysia and later on the island of Singapore, developing a unique hybrid Chinese-Malay culture that survives in the Baba Nyonya cuisine, still popular today in this part of the Indian Ocean.
41 Students may also ask themselves what types of goods and commodities travelled along the various networks (spices from India or the Moluccas, porcelain from China), and
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analyse the supply and demand for such goods, the means of transport used and the evolution of commercial, trading or navigation skills and techniques such as dhow ships, the use of monsoon winds, mapmaking, the development of banking and insurance, letters of credit, changes in supply and demand, and the evolution of political systems along the way such as empires, kingdoms, city-states and informal trade competitors such as pirates.
42 For thousands of years, connections made by water routes have helped integrate distant peoples through trade, contact and cultural influences. Water-based trade and travel have linked widely separated cultures since Antiquity. Therefore, water should be seen as a connecting element rather than as a barrier.
43 Although water-based trade routes have not received as much historical attention as land-based routes, they have been equally—if not more—important in the history of the world. Studying water-based trade routes allows historians to understand the complex interconnected network formed by the crossing of many maritime and land routes and to evaluate the significance of important crossroads that developed over time as core areas in a series of interconnected world systems which also included distant peripheries. One example of such water/land interface was the urban coastal network of Swahili city-states that developed along the East African coast from Somalia to Mozambique. The rise of the Swahili people was only made possible because they were able to profit from both land-based trade with Africa’s interior and seaborne trade in the Indian Ocean.
44 As Michael Pearson recalls in his narrative of the history of the Indian Ocean from an oceanic perspective, Our perceptions of the sea have changed dramatically over the last few decades. […] For most of us today the sea has little practical significance. This is very recent. […] In the past the sea was much more central in our minds, connecting people and goods all over the world, inspiring great literature. (Pearson 2010: 1) Why have seas and oceans regained such importance as units of analysis in the recent years?
45 In France, students in their final year in high school have to study a chapter in Geography entitled: “Globalization: Territories in a global context”. The two examples chosen to illustrate the key ideas developed in the syllabus are the network of global cities and seas and oceans as global territories. The chapter recalls that, in the past decades, global trade has experienced a boom in international maritime transport activities. Nowadays, world freight amounts to 71% of global transports, with figures rising to 90% for intercontinental transports.
46 As oceans cover more than 71% of the world surface, maritime hubs, networks, sea routes, straits and passageways have gained considerable importance and global geopolitics has gained momentum with ever more important issues: international migrations, piracy, global transboundary pollution, the scramble for the Arctic and the control of the Antarctic sanctuary, global warming, overfishing and the threats to ocean sustainability, the emergence of India and China as major powers on the global stage and the shift of global power towards the Asian-Pacific region, and so on.
47 The development of interconnected ocean territories constitutes a major trend in globalization, along with the expanding garland of mostly coastal urban hubs called global cities. Due to their geographic location, most of these are interfaces between land and water-based trade networks. This reorientation of human activity towards
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coastal areas and seas and ocean basins have thus made the latter territories of globalization in their own right and created new communication networks, global power shifts, new areas of conflicting interests, and an updated international legislation. These territories are also highly vulnerable to environmental challenges as they attract and concentrate an ever-growing human population. Risk assessment policies are being implemented in order to prevent major threats caused by the challenges of global warming.
48 Very recently, a new reform in French lycées has included this topic in the syllabus for the Baccalauréat. In the new syllabus, a whole chapter is now devoted to seas and oceans as the heart of the global system. The latest reform also includes geopolitical studies encouraging teachers to take a closer look at maps with their students, and focusing on global environmental challenges. It also acknowledges the growing strategic importance of the Indian Ocean as a central area in the global system through various regional case studies on the Straits of Melaka or the Persian Gulf. Through various cartographic analyses at different scales (global, local), students understand that the Indian Ocean is to be regarded as a strategic territory torn between regional rivalries and international cooperation.
49 Map analysis has become a key component in the French syllabi in History and Geography. Teachers are encouraged to use more maps during classes and develop students’ ability to read and analyse different types of maps as an important source of information on the world’s past and on contemporary events. This encourages students to adopt a global perspective and understand that some contemporary issues and challenges affect multiple areas around the world and can only be addressed through multilateral cooperation. Through the study of maps, students understand that environmental issues such as global warming or transboundary pollution call for an international response and cut across former conceptions of space such as the national scale and the concept of territory.
50 The concept of territory is a rather new addition to the study of Geography in France. The notion of space which was previously used was thought to be too vague to describe areas under human control, whereas a territory can be bounded conceptually (as a space) or physically (as a territory). Space is an abstract vision, but in Geography in France, a territory can be defined as an area which is structured, organised, divided by human activity. Sometimes, space and territory coincide. The analysis of a territory is the analysis of man’s interactions with and impacts on his environment.
51 In Introduction à la géohistoire, French scholar Christian Grataloup explains his concept of ‘geohistory’. He forged this term to display the growing need for transdisciplinary approaches to understand the complexities of an ever-more connected world. Géohistoire associates the tools of the historian with those of the geographer to insist on the simultaneity of various events. Grataloup suggests that maps are important tools to develop a global perspective on the history of the world. Traditional historical narratives usually insist on the succession of events and the construction of parallel histories with no immediate connections between them. Maps, on the other hand, display a bird’s eye view that may help our understanding of past and present connections between different parts of the world, particularly in the case of seas and oceans.
52 Seas and oceans have become such important territories for our understanding of global processes that entire research fields have now turned them into key categories
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through which to analyse the past, present and future developments of the global system. They have become historians and geographers’ new units of analysis to understand and teach students the growing complexities of globalization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beaujard, Philippe. Les Mondes de l’Océan Indien. 2 vols. Paris: Armand Colin, 2012.
Beaujard, Philippe. The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History. 2 vols. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Bentley, Jerry. “Seas and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis.” Geographical Review 89-2 (April 1999): 215-225. DOI: 10.2307/216087
Braudel, Fernand. “Personal Testimony.” Journal of Modern History 44.4 (December 1972): 448-467. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1876804
Braudel, Fernand. La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Paris: Armand Colin, 1949.
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. 2 vols. London: Collins, 1972.
Broeze, Frank, ed. Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th-20th Centuries. Sydney: New South Wales UP, 1989.
Chaudhuri, Kirti Narayan. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Crosby, A. W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1972.
Gilbert, Erik. “Introduction to the Indian Ocean World. Teaching about the Indian Ocean World.” AP World History. Workshop material (2006-2007): 6-12. https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ world-history-sf-indian-ocean-world07.pdf?course=ap-world-history
Gipouloux, François. La Méditerranée asiatique. Villes portuaires et réseaux marchands en Chine, au Japon et en Asie du Sud-Est, XVIe-XXIe siècle. Paris: CNRS éditions, 2009.
Goucher, Candice and Walton, Linda. World History. Journeys from Past to Present. Abington: Routledge, 2013.
Grataloup, Christian. Introduction à la géohistoire. Paris: Armand Colin, 2015.
Gunder Frank, Andre. ReOrient. Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: U. of California P., 1998.
Pearson, Michael. The Indian Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. 3 vols. New York: Academic Press, 1974.
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ABSTRACTS
The units of analysis historians and geographers use dictate what questions are asked, which stories are told and eventually which patterns emerge. Units of analysis are framing tools that help scholars identify global patterns. By focusing on seas and ocean basins, one can bring out the processes of interaction that link peoples living in the various regions around a sea and ocean basin. Nowadays, as Global History is emerging as a new historical paradigm and as a form of “global geography” is being taught in French high schools, the Indian Ocean framework, like the Mediterranean Sea decades ago with historians such as Fernand Braudel, is commonly used to explain the early development of global trade networks and regional cross-cultural interactions in what is commonly referred to as the “Old World”, as opposed to the “New World” “discovered” by Christopher Columbus in 1492. This article deals with this recent and unprecedented use of the Indian Ocean as a global framework for historical and geographical analysis in teaching and research fields and explains why teaching about the Indian Ocean world as a zone of dynamic interaction between peoples makes more pedagogical, historical and geographical sense than teaching about it through traditionally delineated national or continental units in a globalized world. It also discusses the limitations of the use of such a broad unit of analysis and the potential consequences of a teleological bias that prompts historians and teachers to try integrating the human past into a comprehensive big picture that emphasises the shared experiences of all humans sometimes at the expense of a somewhat traditional historiography, focusing on the idea that the human past is marked by important differences between peoples across space and time. The conclusion assesses how global historians and geographers are attempting to reconcile the idea of an increasing integration at the global scale with that of proliferating difference at the local and regional scales and envisages the ways in which they can construct and teach a global historical and geographical narrative of the past and of our contemporary world that may help students understand the growing complexities and challenges of globalization, including global environmental issues such as the building of a sustainable future for all.
Les unités d’analyse que les historiens et les géographes utilisent déterminent quelles sont les questions posées, quelles histoires sont racontées et, en fin de compte, quels motifs récurrents en émergent. Les unités d’analyse sont des outils d’encadrement qui permettent aux chercheurs d’identifier les modèles mondiaux. Ainsi, en mettant l’accent sur les bassins maritimes et océaniques, on peut faire ressortir plus clairement les processus d’interaction qui relient les peuples vivant dans les différentes régions autour d’un bassin maritime et océanique. De nos jours, alors que l’histoire mondiale apparaît comme un nouveau paradigme historique, et qu’une forme de “géographie mondiale” est enseignée dans les lycées français, le cadre de l’océan Indien, comme la Méditerranée il y a plusieurs décennies à l’instar de Fernand Braudel, est couramment utilisé pour expliquer le développement précoce des réseaux commerciaux mondiaux et les interactions interculturelles régionales dans ce que l’on appelle communément le “Monde antique”, par opposition au “Nouveau Monde” “découvert” par Christophe Colomb en 1492. Cet article traite de cette utilisation récente et sans précédent de l’océan Indien en tant que cadre mondial pour l’analyse historique et géographique dans les domaines de l’enseignement et de la recherche. Il expliquera pourquoi enseigner le monde de l’océan indien en tant que zone d’interaction dynamique entre les peuples a plus de sens pédagogiquement et historiquement parlant dans un monde globalisé que l’enseigner à travers les unités nationales ou continentales traditionnelles. Il examine également les limites de l’utilisation d’une telle unité d’analyse large et les conséquences potentielles d’un biais téléologique menant les historiens et les enseignants à essayer d’intégrer le passé humain dans un grand tableau complet qui met l’accent sur les expériences partagées de tous les êtres humains au détriment d’une historiographie quelque peu
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traditionnelle axée sur l’idée que le passé humain est marqué par des différences importantes entre les peuples, à travers l’espace et le temps. La conclusion évalue la façon dont les historiens et les géographes mondiaux tentent de concilier l’idée d’une intégration croissante à l’échelle mondiale avec celle de la prolifération des différences aux échelles locales et régionales et envisage la façon dont ils peuvent construire et enseigner un récit historique et géographique mondial du passé et de notre monde contemporain qui peut aider les élèves à comprendre les complexités et les défis croissants de la mondialisation, y compris les problèmes environnementaux mondiaux tels que la construction d’un avenir durable pour tous.
INDEX
Mots-clés: globalisation, histoire, géographie, unité d’analyse, enseignement, Braudel Fernand, Océan Indien Keywords: globalization, history, geography, unit of analysis, teaching, Braudel Fernand, Indian Ocean
AUTHOR
INGRID SANKEY Teacher of History, Geography and Globalization at ESPOL (European School of Political and Social Sciences) attached to UCL (Université Catholique de Lille). Ingrid Sankey holds a PhD in British civilization from the University of Lille 3. Her thesis (defended in 2008) dealt with the issue of Indirect Rule in the Indian Princely States in the heyday of the British Empire. She is currently teaching a course entitled “History, Geography and Globalization” at the ESPOL and history and geography for an international OIB (option internationale du baccalauréat) section at Thérèse d’Avila European High School in Lille. She has been a member of the SARI (Society for the promotion of Research and Activities on the Indian worlds) since 2008 and contributed to several SARI conferences and publications on India, Africa and Globalization. Her paper entitled “Les princes et le Raj britannique ou les aléas du système d’administration indirecte dans l’Empire des Indes” was published in Decolonization and the Struggle for National Liberation in India (1909-1971), edited by Thierry Di Costanzo and Guillaume Ducoeur, in Anglo-American Studies (vol. 48), Peter Lang Edition, 2014. Her main research topics focus on the analysis of cultural representations and intercultural issues, exoticism, colonial and post-colonial issues, industrial Britain, British society in the 19th century, Global history and geography and Globalization. Contact: iclairesankey2003[at]yahoo.fr
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The Shipwrecked Slaves of Tromelin Island: A Crime of Lese-Humanity
Joëlle Weeks
1 Tromelin Island, a tiny speck in the Indian Ocean, was the stage of a tragedy which became a cause célèbre in France and led to the short-lived abolition of slavery during the French Revolution. “A crime of lese-humanity” was the condemnatory expression used by Condorcet in his 1781 pamphlet “Reflections on Negro Slavery” which included the tale of the 1761 shipwreck of The Utile, 450 kilometres from Madagascar. It led to the stranding on what was then called the Isle de Sable (Sand Island) of 123 crew and over 80 slaves (half of the slave men, women and children who had initially boarded the ship were drowned in the shipwreck). While the 123 seamen sailed back to civilisation, the fourscore surviving slaves embarked in Madagascar had to wait for 15 years before being rescued. Only seven women survived the ordeal, along with a baby boy — all the other men, women and children had died.
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Figure 1. Map of Tromelin Island (in French: île de Sable), Paris, Archives Nationales, 1761
Source: http://m.musee-aquitaine-bordeaux.fr/fr/evenement/conference-tromelin-bilan-10-ans-de- recherches
2 This Robinson-Crusoesque tragedy encapsulates many of the geopolitical issues of the closing 18th century: the rivalry between the French and the English during the Seven Years’ War for dominance in India and control of the sea route across the Indian Ocean.
3 The economic role of the ports of call in the Indian Ocean was crucial as a source of food and water. A budding plantation economy emerged in the wake of the need for ships’ crews to obtain fresh supplies and nurse their sick. Western ideology was reflected in the predatory relation to the natives, with the practice of slavery and the drastic exploitation of natural resources which exemplified environmental awareness and greed.
4 Utopian dreams and schemes were enacted on these tiny islands, either picked randomly or as stopovers, refuge and safe havens for castaways after shipwrecks. They could be selected as spaces where societies would be born anew for modern pilgrims and outcasts. A large body of literature emerged on those topics both in France and Britain foregrounding the revolutionary ideas and upheavals of 1789 in France. This contribution will attempt to cast light on all of these aspects in the hope of paying tribute to the marooned slaves of Tromelin Island.
Geopolitics: Anglo-French Rivalry
5 By the end of the 18th century, the British had asserted their supremacy in India after the battle of Plassey in 1757 which led to the annexation of Bengal; the Dutch concentrated their activities on Indonesia and the Spice Islands and the Portuguese kept a few factories in India but focused rather on South America. The French also
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retained a measure of power in their factories on the Eastern coast of India, but the British were in a better position as a result of their commercial superiority due in part to the private ownership of the East India Company and the support of the British government. After Dupleix’s impeachment in 1754 and death in 1763, the French lost their clout and advantage and the backing of the king. Nevertheless, trade with India and South East Asia was on the rise and all countries needed to ensure access to, and control of, various ports of call in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, namely, Ile de France and Bourbon Island, colonised to ensure safe passage to India. Those ports ranged from outposts and basic havens to trading posts, settlements or factories. Most had been disputed territories like Cape Verde, Madeira, Ascension, Saint Helena, and the Cape. The Macarena Islands, Bourbon (Reunion) and Ile de France (Mauritius) had been successively Portuguese, Dutch, French and British.
Logistics
6 Logistics were also crucial: navigation constraints dictated by winds, currents, the layout of ports, access of leeward bays, problems of calculating latitude and longitude, and last but not least, health problems resulting from the lack of fresh food, source of scorbutic illnesses which decimated crews. Contrary to popular belief, these islands were not virgin territories — previous countries, navigators and traders had left their imprint. Very few territories did not feature on maps and charts and some were the source of heated dispute among navigators and scientists. This was the case of Sand Island, renamed Tromelin Island after the rescue of the marooned slaves. Its coordinates were calculated as late as 1954, along with other scattered islands identified by d’Après de Mannevillette whose aim was to amend the standard Company map of Bayonne.1
Economics of the Passage to India
7 Though essential transactions were carried on in India, American bullion was needed for textiles in India and spices in Indonesia. Those ports of calls were essential for supplies of fresh food and water. Over time, those ports became settlements which would be peopled and exploited. A plantation economy was created, the primary products being cloves, coffee, and sugar besides spices and plants a clever botanist had stowed away from Indonesia. Pierre Poivre, the aptly named French botanist, had indeed stolen seeds from Dutch colonies in Indonesia and managed to grow nutmeg, pepper, and clove in Mauritius. These new plantations required more labour force. The darker side of this logistics emerged in the mid 1750s as human trafficking, although illegal in France, had become the new trade in the colonies. Bourbon Island (Reunion) and Ile de France (Mauritius) launched their particular plantation systems for cloves, coffee and sugar in the Mascarene Islands.
8 As we shall see, a brighter aspect of this evolution was the birth of the green economy: conscious of the need to protect and nurse nature essentially to fend off drought, settlers engaged in extensive and successful tree plantation programmes (Grove 1995). The realisation that resources were limited became obvious and there was food shortage on Mauritius as early as 1735. Land management and conservation policy response in Saint Helena was due to the strategic value of the island. The downside of
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these discoveries was the extinction of entire species such as turtles on Rodrigues Island and the dodo on Mauritius and other tropical areas dominated by European trading companies (Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French).
Utopian Dreams & Schemes
9 Those islands could be construed as a refuge for exiles and dissenters. As early as 1691, Protestants fled Catholic France to settle on Rodrigues Island2 which stood as a new Eden for dissenters. Yet the slave Crusoes of Tromelin Island, as they were later called, marooned on a barren island, had no choice but to reconstruct a social structure which would enable them to survive. Their resourcefulness and ingenuity were a mirror image of what had happened fifteen years earlier when some of the crew and slaves managed to build a raft. Yet the slaves were ultimately prevented from sailing away with the crew: class and race meant they were not worthy of such a fate.
Western Ideology: From an “Environmental Gospel” to Humanitarian Concerns and Reformism
10 The European ideology of the late 18th century was reflected in the predatory nature of the relation between Europeans, the new environments and native populations (in the case of Tromelin Island, with the marooned slaves). Paradoxically, this relation also was at the root of environmentalism and humanitarian concerns.
11 European expansion along sea routes, triggered by nascent capitalism and operated by charter trading companies, confronted traders, travellers, seamen, scientists with a radically different natural world. While journeying was a collective intellectual experience, it involved producing personal accounts which often added minor details to the wealth of material gathered by earlier travellers. It was also religious in nature.
12 From the 17th century onwards the physio-naturalists dictated their imperative to the scientists and the educated which implied reading the divine design in the universe. Understanding and making sense of the patterns in the Creation was the duty of the learned and an acknowledgement of God’s power.
13 This intellectual grasp entailed moral responsibility; while this divine design set man firmly at the centre of creation, it implied rigorous stewardship and responsible husbandry. The same religious sensibilities and intellectual framework inspired Calvinist Holland in re-evaluating the natural world as a path to God. After 1770, Scottish protestant doctors and missionary travellers set out to preach an environmental gospel (Grove 1995).
14 Both philosophical and religious responses to the encounter with the tropical world were dictated by observations of tropical islands. Islands were a central motif in a new discourse about nature which reflected environmentalist and conservationist approaches. In his ground-breaking study, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860, Richard Grove points to two concepts, the island and the botanical garden, as metaphors defining man’s relationship to nature but also, and more to the point, as microcosms and laboratories where environmental crises were played out, tensions resolved and agendas set up and implemented (Grove 1995).
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15 Islands acted as locations for an ideal, uncorrupted society, a vehicle for religious dissent, reformism, utopianism and social experiment. The desert island theme is related to this state of mind. The island was invested with environmental, cultural and moral significance freely drawn upon by Daniel Defoe. In the French mindscape of Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, islands became utopian fashion sites for nurturing a better society in which safeguarding a natural order was a vital condition for sustaining a physical and social utopia.
16 In the late 18th century, after the Island of Mauritius was sold by the French East India Company to the French crown, Pierre Poivre, famous for his botanical experiments in spice transfers and founder of the botanical garden on Mauritius, crusaded against slavery by advocating a new moral order. He formulated a concept which had rarely been expounded before. It was the symbiosis of humanitarian and naturalistic motivations.
17 Although different sensibilities emerged in Europe and Asia throughout this period, there was an increasingly strong identification between environmental concerns and reformist sympathies as illustrated by the Quakers who staged anti-slavery campaigns as early as 1775.
18 It is very likely that this specific worldview transformed the ordeal of the marooned slaves into a cause célèbre not only in France but also across Europe.
19 When analysing the tragedy of the shipwreck as it unfolded over the crucial couple of months it took to organise the return of the marooned crew and slaves, it is clear that the relationship between crew and slaves was uncomfortably paradoxical, cooperation was crucial for both parties, as the slaves agreed to contribute to building the pram or raft which they believed was to take them all back to Bourbon. Humanitarian concerns were not a priority, even though Barthélémy Castellan du Vernet, the second in command, saw the final rescue mission of the slaves as a moral issue. Yet the slaves were ultimately abandoned with the promise of a forthcoming rescue. Four unsuccessful attempts to make good on this promise were made over the long fifteen years of their ordeal. The very first one by Castellan himself, four months after the rescue.
20 The example of the Tromelin Island marooned slaves can be envisaged as a significant event in the long history of slavery. Much of France’s Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade was tied up in the expansion of slavery. Slave labour was gradually beginning to replace indentured servitude in the Caribbean as sugar edged out tobacco production. During the 1700s, French planters established sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations off the east coast of Africa, modelled after those in the Americas, and the demand for workers seemed inexhaustible (Peabody 1994).3 As sugar emerged as the major cash crop, this meant more slaves were needed. Most of the slaves were imported from Portuguese Mozambique and Madagascar. The slave population in the Mascarene Islands rose from 33,000 in 1765 to more than 93,000 in the 1790s (Campbell 2004: 35).
21 Slavery was illegal in France itself. Since the 16th century, French courts recognised that a person became free once he or she set foot on French soil, which became the basis of the French “free soil” principle. In 1765, Louis de Jaucourt, who contributed to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, stated that slavery as a system violates religion, morality, natural law, and all human rights. There is not one of those unfortunate souls who does not have the right to be declared free, since in truth he has never lost his freedom; and he could not lose it, since it was impossible
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for him to lose it; and neither his prince, his father, nor anyone else had the right to dispose of it. (Jaucourt qtd. in Thomas 1997: 466)
22 The Parliament of Paris, France’s highest court, refused to register two of the king’s laws allowing even a conditional slavery to exist within the country. The most cited articulation of France’s “free soil” principle was “France, mother of liberty, allows no slaves,” as the Parliament of Guyenne reportedly ruled after a Norman merchant attempted to sell several Moors he had purchased on the Barbary Coast. And before the French Empire’s expansion into the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, the archetypal French slave was either a Muslim abducted to Europe or a Christian abducted to North Africa (Weiss 2011).
23 This trade remained the monopoly of the Company until the 1740, but this traffic became more and more the prerogative of the Company’s servants. The slave trade increased with the 1769 Royal Decree opening the Mascarene Islands to free trade by all French nationals.
Utopia or Dystopia
24 The mindset of 18th-century traders, seamen, and officials from trading companies was illustrated in the telling tragedy of 1761 which was the shipwreck and ordeal of the French crew from the Utile and its cargo of slaves on Tromelin Island. The episode epitomised the geopolitics of the period, the science, the economics, the ideology and ethics prevailing during the closing 18th century.
25 The political context, the Seven Years’ War between the French and the English, drove various protagonists to risk-taking and profiteering. It was the case of Captain Lafargue, in command of the French vessel the Utile, challenging the blockade imposed by the Company on slave trade in the French Mascarene islands, as he picked up his human Malagasy cargo intending to make a handsome profit by selling them on Bourbon. Some of the crew were very likely also involved in this trafficking following the new trend of pacotille (private trade conducted by sailors). The French word traite referred both to “slave trade” and “trade of various commodities”.
26 The inaccuracy of maps — several versions were in use in the navy — including the one established by d’Après de Mannevillette, and another known as the Bayonne chart, combined with the stubbornness of the captain, drove the ship onto reefs that caused the shipwreck. The crew survived along with only half of the slaves who were trapped beneath nailed-down hatches. Many then died of thirst after landing before fresh water could be located on the island. The slaves nevertheless volunteered to build a raft (pram), while the majority of the crew spent their time hunting for birds and eggs. After the crew managed to sail away on a makeshift vessel two months later, leaving the surviving slaves behind with the promise of rescue, the slaves managed to build a raft with debris and beams and feathers for sails, and may have kept a fire burning for 15 years, though it has also been argued they used flint stones. A few women were finally rescued and taken to Bourbon. They said they had fed on fish, tortoises and birds’ eggs, built shelters, and repaired utensils.
27 The story is known from various sources. One is a manuscript kept by the ship’s writer, Hilarion Dubuisson de Keraudic, which he intended for his family, and in which he stressed the various stages of the dramatic wreck:
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The coming of day and the sight of land, which diminished our terrors, reduced none of the furies of the sea. Several people threw themselves into the water with a line to try to reach the land, to no end. A few reached the shore. We had to haul some others back over the debris, where they drowned. We were terrified all the while because the [shattered] stern of the ship, on which we were standing, opened and closed at each moment, cutting more than one person in two. (SHD Marine, Lorient - 1P297, liasse 14, pièce 85).4
28 Keraudic spotted a man who was reaching for a plank and, realising he was a slave, kicked him unconscious, rescuing a wounded sailor instead. Eventually, the ship turned its stern towards the shore, allowing the sailors to establish a rope-way to the island. “All the remaining Gentlemen and crew were saved. Our losses were only 20 white men, and (two gentlemen) and many blacks, the hatches being closed or nailed down.”
29 Some kind of discipline and hierarchy was immediately applied: one sailor sentenced for stealing was later pardoned. Space was allocated sparingly, the island being very small, i.e., less than 100 ha. The manuscript went on to indicate that almost a third of the 88 slaves originally rescued died on the next day because the sailors kept the meagre water supplies to themselves while only 20 additional Frenchmen were lost. We made a big tent with the main sail and some flags and we (i.e. the gentlemen) lived there with all the supplies. The crew were placed in small tents. We started to feel very strongly the shortage of water. A number of blacks died, not being given any. (SHD Marine, Lorient - 1P297, liasse 14, pièce 85).
30 The French set up camp on the western tip of the island, while the slaves settled on the northern tip.
31 Order and discipline were crucial if any attempt of escape was to be made: the shipwrecks had provisions for three months. Luckily, fresh water had been found by sailors, and there was an abundant supply of fish, and birds’ eggs which would provide a fairly balanced diet. The French also had numerical superiority. But Barthélémy Castellan, the first officer who had taken command after captain Lafargue had broken down, realised that he had to build a new ship very quickly if he wanted to avoid a rebellion or worse.
32 It seems that the ship’s carpenter was useless. Castellan persuaded some slaves and crew to build the barge that would return them to Reunion Island (Bourbon Island) or Madagascar. It was reported that “The slaves toiled with great zeal” but the barge could only accommodate the 123 crew members. The slave Crusoes were left behind with the promise of rescue and letters testifying their good conduct. All but 20 out of the 100 crew played a part in constructing the barge, most preferring bird hunting, yet they were all allowed to sail away on The Providence without any of the slaves which had built the boat.
33 It only took four days for The Providence to reach Foulpoint in Madagascar, then Bourbon, but the local governor, Desforges-Boucher refused to send a ship to rescue the slaves citing the lack of sails and spare ships due to the war with the British, despite the pleas from the French gentlemen and sailors of the Utile and the arguments of several local dignitaries in favour of the rescue. Desforges-Boucher had other reasons to refuse. As an official of the French East India Company who had officially banned slave importation, he wanted to punish the slave-traffickers. According to Guérout, “The governor of Île de France was so angry at the late Captain La Fargue for having disobeyed his order by taking slaves aboard that he refused to send a ship to rescue the slaves.” Guérout continues: “On the day the crew arrived, he (the Governor) wrote,
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‘Today, the Utile survivors arrived. The captain has died. Good for him.’” The slaves had to pay for the captain’s transgression, and rescue was not sent. But Desforges-Boucher was also most likely looking after his future profits on an illicit cargo of slaves he himself had traded; by refusing to send rescue for the slaves, he assured that there would be no competition on the market.
34 Determination, obstinacy and moral stamina by Castellan failed to work wonders. He almost reached the island four months later in January 1762, but the marooned slaves had to wait another 15 years, despite four rescue missions sent in 1773, 1775, and 1776. Castellan’s lobbying continued in France where the castaways’ ordeal had become a cause célèbre. Eventually The Dauphine, a corvette captained by Jacques-Marie Lanuguy de Tromelin, rescued seven women and a baby. The baby was christened Jacques Moyse Tsimiavo (“the one who is not proud”), his mother, Eve, and his grandmother, Dauphine.
Figure 2. Sylvain Savoia, Les Naufragés de Tromelin, Paris, Aire Libre, 2015
Microsociety
35 The details of this extraordinary ordeal of the castaways were revealed after Max Guérout, a French naval researcher whose studies focus on the archaeology of distress, published the findings of his four missions on Tromelin Island. The slaves had to survive as a community of about 60 people in the hope of the rescue they were promised. They built houses with compacted sand and blocks of coral, a meter and a half thick, to shelter themselves from the cyclones; they had a communal oven and kept a fire burning for fifteen years according to the legend although it was more likely that flint stones were used. They lived on a diet of fish, shells, birds and eggs. Several attempts to build a raft were reported, but in the absence of sails they stood little chance of reaching Madagascar or Bourbon. When a French sailor was stranded in one of the four rescue missions, he soon built a raft and then left with some volunteers for a destination they never reached (Guérout & Romon 2010).
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36 On the island Guérout’s team unearthed stone buildings used for tombs in Madagascar, but no tombs or bodies were found. The site had probably been disturbed when a weather station was put up in the 1950s. The castaways had salvaged basic implements, which they had repaired with rivets a dozen times. They had used copper for eating vessels and lead for water cisterns. Excavations unearthed the foundations of a very well organised habitat. Out of the 400 objects found, about 50 were of real interest. They testify to the imagination and industry of the people who lived there. The inhabitants fed on birds, tortoises and their eggs. Using driftwood they protected the fire left by the sailors. Copper bowls were forged and clothes made out of bird feathers and cords. Archaeologists found shell amulets and copper bracelets made by the castaways. “These people had moved beyond the needs of survival and had set up a micro-society” explained Max Guérout. “We found sixteen spoons and sixteen copper cooking utensils.” (Hopquin 2009, my translation). The population number dropped during the first few years and then stood at about 15, five years after the wreck and remained so over the next decade. Women, who were hardier, coped better with extreme living conditions. Did this demographic trend fit in with the resources or are there other factors? What is known is that after two years of vain hopes, eighteen people attempted to escape on a makeshift raft. For the rest, we can assume they died of despair, diseases or intestine fights. Did they fight for survival or was solidarity the key? The expedition searched a graveyard spotted by a British navigator in 1851. Bones, broken skulls would give us precious details (Guérout & Romon 2010, my translation).5 For Guérout, the Tromelin Island castaways were true survivors: These were not people who were overwhelmed by their fate. They were people who worked together successfully in an orderly manner. We have found evidence of where they lived and what they ate. We have found copper cooking utensils, repaired over and over again, which must have originally come from the ship. It’s a very human story, a story of instinct and survival of people who were abandoned because they were regarded by some of their fellow human beings as less human (Guérout & Romon 2010).
A Crime of Lese-Humanity
37 That the story of the slaves has survived is largely due to a central figure of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Condorcet, and his 1781 pamphlet Reflections on Negro Slavery. Yet this awareness did not come to the Navy officers or to the East India Company officials too concerned with the protection of their own slave trade, hence the stern refusal of Desforges-Boucher, then Bourbon’s governor, to save the shipwrecked slaves. When they were finally rescued in 1776, this wake-up call spread to Ile de France, then to philosophical circles, Masonic lodges and learned salons. The story of the castaways was included by Condorcet in his Reflexions on Negro Slavery: De l’Esclavage des Noirs, which then lead to the decree on the abolition of slavery passed on February 4, 1794 by the Convention, according to which all men without any distinction of color, living in the colonies as French citizens, enjoyed all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution (Hunt 1996: 55-57).6 Slavery would be reinstated shortly afterwards under Napoleon in 1802, before being finally unconditionally abolished in 1848.
38 In the late eighteenth-century, the Tromelin Island tragedy was further reported in literary circles by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Abbé Pingré, Abbé Rochon, published in gazettes and newspapers in Liege and Geneva, and the tale was also circulated by peddlers across Europe.
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Conclusion
Realpolitics: Tromelin’s Status in the 21st Century
39 Claimed by Mauritius and Madagascar, the island has remained a French territory. Novelist Irène Frain, called upon to give her opinion to a parliamentary committee in the light of the slave tragedy 250 years ago, reminded the committee that France had displayed throughout the centuries its interest for this island, asserting its presence there. As of late, other countries have also expressed interest because of the wealth included in the 240,000 km2 of exclusive economic zone around Tromelin, two-thirds the size of France’s own economic zone. Yet France had a duty to be the watchman in this area. Frain stressed that pirates attempted to take possession of the island a few years ago. Tromelin stands as a bulwark against pirates who could operate from there if it were abandoned by France. The same can be said of the Scattered Islands. Far from being “the Empire’s confetti”, Tromelin is strategically important for France (Frain 2015).
40 Philippe Foliot, a French Member of Parliament, indicated that the refusal of the French Parliament to vet the treaty of co-management of Tromelin with Mauritius was a unique example in the history of the Fifth Republic. The dispute goes back to the Versailles Treaty in 1815 by which France handed Mauritius and other islands over to Britain, but Tromelin is not mentioned as such in the Treaty. Historically and legally, Mauritius cannot claim any rights on Tromelin and has not started any formal proceedings before the International Court of Justice. An agreement handing the island over to Mauritius could be unjust and dangerous. It could have a domino effect on other French islands in the area: Scattered Islands, claimed by Madagascar, and Juan de Nova (also known as Saint-Christophe), claimed by Mozambique.
Afterword: A “lieu de mémoire”
41 Memorialisation of slavery is still a major concern in some parts of the world, notably in Africa and Europe. The little-known tragedy of the slaves of Tromelin Island inspired Irène Frain and was the theme of an exhibition in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 2019. Yet beyond such literary tracks, a more enduring legacy is needed, and some charities could start a campaign to honour the men and women who triggered Western awareness and helped put an end to human trafficking. The idea of a monument erected on the island is worth considering. It could be named Tsimiavo — the one who is not proud — after the name of the last baby born on Tromelin.
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Figure 3. An aerial view of Tromelin Island
Source: AFP
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archives, Compte rendu par le Sr de Lanuguy Tromelin, lieutenant de vaisseau du roi à Monsieur de Sartine de sa mission aux Indes, Ms 161/90, Service historique de la défense, Brest.
Boateng, Osei. “Just an ‘Appalling Tragedy’?” New African 398 (July/August 2001): 24-29.
Campbell, Gwyn. The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. London: Frank Cass, 2004.
Frain, Irene. “Compte rendu de l’audition de Mme Irène Frain, écrivain et auteur de « Les naufragés de l’île Tromelin » à l’Assemblée Nationale par Christophe Premat. Député suppléant des Français établis en Europe du Nord (XIVème législature).” 17 March 2015. https:// christophepremat.com/2015/03/17/compte-rendu-de-laudition-de-mme-irene-frain-a- lassemblee-nationale-ecrivain-et-auteur-de-les-naufrages-de-lile-tromelin-2/
Frain, Irene. Les Naufragés de l’île Tromelin. Paris: Michel Laffont, 2009.
Groupe de Recherche en Archéologie Navale (GRAN), http://archeonavale.org/gran2012/
Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
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Guérout, Max et Thomas Romon. Tromelin - L’île aux esclaves oubliés. Paris: CNRS Éditions, INRAP, 2010.
Guérout, Max. Tromelin, Mémoire d’une île. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2015
Gupta, Pamila. Island-ness in the Indian Ocean.Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010.
Hopquin, Benoit. “Archéologie : sur les traces des Robinson noirs.” In Le Monde 2 May 2009. http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/04/30/archeologie-sur-les-traces-des-robinson- noirs_1187426_3244.html
Hunt, Lynn (ed. & trans.). “A Brief Documentary History, Marie Jean de Caritat, Reflections on Negro Slavery.” In The French Revolution and Human Rights. Boston: Bedford, 1996. 55-57.
Le Lan, Jean-Yves. “Le Naufrage de l’Utile.” Histoire Généalogie. March 12, 2009. https:// www.histoire-genealogie.com/Le-Naufrage-de-l-Utile?lang=fr
“Lèse humanité: An 18th-century outrage.” The Economist, 16 Dec. 2016. https:// www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2015/12/16/lese-humanite?fsrc=scn/tw/te/rfd/pe? fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/lsehumanit
Lichfield, John. “Shipwrecked and Abandoned: The Story of the Slave Crusoes.” The Independent. February 5, 2007. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/shipwrecked-and- abandoned-the-story-of-the-slave-crusoes-435092.html
Peabody, Sue. “Race, Slavery, and the Law in Early Modern France.” The Historian 57.4 (1994): 501-510. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1994.tb01322.x
“Piracy: Special Edition.” Standard Bulletin. September 2011. https://www.standard-club.com/ media/1557914/introduction-to-standard-bulletin-piracy-special-edition-september-2011.pdf
Richardson, David. Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context 1790-1916. London: Routledge, 1988.
Savoia, Syvain. Les Esclaves Oubliés de Tromelin. Paris : Aire Libre, 2015.
“Shipwrecked and abandoned: the story of the slave Crusoes.” The Independent, 5 February 2007. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/shipwrecked-and-abandoned-the-story-of- the-slave-crusoes-435092.html
Sopova, Jasmina. “The Shipwrecked Memory of the Slaves.” In The New Courier. UNESCO. May 2005. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000139495
Sutter, John D. “Slavery’s Last Stronghold.” CNN. 2014. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/ 2012/03/world/mauritania.slaverys.last.stronghold/index.html
The History of Rodrigues. http://iocp.potomitan.info/rodrigues/rodrigues.htm
The Indian Ocean and East African Slave Trade: Ethiopia. http://histclo.com/act/work/slave/ast/ io/cou/sc-eth.html
Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870. New York: Simon &Schuster, 1997.
“Tromelin.” BirdLife International Important Bird Areas (IBAs) Fact Sheet. Birdlife.org. 2004. http://datazone.birdlife.org/site/factsheet/tromelin-iba-french-southern-territories
Weiss, Gillian. Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2011.
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APPENDIXES
Marie Jean de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-94) published Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres, a powerful pamphlet attacking slavery written under the pseudonym of Mr. Schwartz, pastor at Bienne, in Neufchatel (Switzerland) in 1781. Condorcet described the slave system as a crime and demanded its abolition. He associated the abolition of slavery with other reforms such as civil rights for Protestants, the elimination of the last vestiges of serfdom and the rights of women. In 1788, Condorcet helped found a French Society of the Friends of the Blacks based on earlier groups. Affiliated with the Girondins, he was arrested during the Terror for opposing the growing power of the state and died in jail.
Figure 4. Réflexions sur l'esclavage des nègres par M. Schwartz (Reflections on the Enslavement Negroes by M. Schwartz)
Épître dédicatoire aux nègres esclaves A dedicatory letter to the Negro slaves
Mes amis, My Friends,
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Although I am not of the same color as you, Quoique que je ne sois pas de la même couleur que I have always regarded you as my brothers. vous, je vous ai toujours regardé comme mes frères. Nature has formed you to have the same La nature vous a formés pour avoir le même esprit, la spirit, the same reason, the same virtues as même raison, les mêmes vertus que les Blancs. Je ne Whites. I speak here only of those in parle ici que de ceux d’Europe, car pour les Blancs des Europe, as for Whites of the Colonies, I do Colonies, je ne vous fais pas l’injure de les comparer not insult you to compare them with you; I avec vous, je sais combien de fois votre fidélité, votre know how many times your loyalty, your probité, votre courage ont fait rougir vos maîtres. Si honesty, your courage have left your on alloit chercher un homme dans les Isles de masters ashamed. If we were looking for l’Amérique, ce ne seroit point parmi les gens de chair man in the Caribbean, the point would not blanche qu’on le trouveroit. be to search among the white people.
Votre suffrage ne procure point de places dans les You have no right to vote in the colonies, colonies, votre protection ne fait point obtenir de you get no pensions, you have nothing to pensions, vous n’avez pas de quoi soudoyer les bribe the lawyers with so it is not avocats ; il n’est donc pas étonnant que vos maîtres surprising that your masters dishonor trouvent plus de gens qui se déshonorent en themselves by defending their cause rather défendant leur cause, que vous n’en avez trouvés qui than find honor by defending yours. There se soient honorés en défendant la vôtre. Il y a même are even countries where those who would des pays où ceux qui voudroient écrire en votre write in your favor are not free to. All faveur n’en auroient point la liberté. Tous ceux qui se those who got rich in the colonies at the sont enrichis dans les Isles aux dépens de vos travaux expense of your work and your sufferings & de vos souffrances, ont, à leur retour, le droit de have, in turn, the right to insult you with vous insulter dans des libelles calomnieux ; mais il scurrilous libels, and it is not possible to n’est point permis de leur répondre. Telle est l’idée answer them. This is the idea that your que vos maîtres ont de la bonté de leur droit; telle est masters have of the propriety of their la conscience qu’ils ont de leur humanité à votre right, such is their awareness of your égard. shared humanity.
But this injustice has been the only for me Mais cette injustice n’a été pour moi qu’une raison de a reason to take on, in a free country, the plus pour prendre, dans un pays libre, la défense de la freedom of men. I know you will never liberté des hommes. Je sais que vous ne connoîtrez know of this work, and that I will always be jamais cet Ouvrage, & que la douceur d’être béni par denied the pleasure of being blessed by vous me sera toujours refusée. Mais j’aurai satisfait you. But I my heart is torn by the spectacle mon cœur déchiré par le spectacle de vos maux, of your ills, and worsened by the insolence soulevé par l’insolence absurde des sophismes de vos of the absurd fallacies of your tyrants. I tyrans. Je n’emploierai point l’éloquence, mais la will not employ the point eloquently, but raison, je parlerai, non des intérêts du commerce, the reason I will speak, not the interests of mais des loix de la justice. trade, but the laws of justice.
Vos tyrans me reprocheront de ne dire que des choses Your tyrants reproach me for saying the communes, & de n’avoir que des idées chimériques ; obvious, and for fanciful thinking; in fact, en effet, rien n’est plus commun que les maximes de nothing is more common than the maxims l’humanité & de la justice; rien n’est plus chimérique of humanity & justice, nothing is more que de proposer aux hommes d’y conformer leur fanciful than to suggest that men conform. conduite.
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Préface des éditeurs
M. SCHWARTZ nous ayant envoyé son manuscrit, nous l’avons communiqué à M. le Pasteur B*******, l’un de nos associés, qui nous a répondu que cet Ouvrage ne Editors’ Preface contenoit que des choses communes, écrites d’un style peu correct, froid et sans élévation ; qu’on ne le vendroit pas, et qu’il ne convertiroit personne.
Nous avons fait part de ces observations à M. SCHWARTZ, qui nous a honorés de la lettre suivante.
"Messieurs, « Messieurs, I am neither a Parisian with claims to the Je ne suis ni un bel esprit Parisien, qui prétend à French academy, nor an English politician, l’académie françoise, ni un politique Anglois, qui fait who writes pamphlets hoping to be elected des pamphlets, dans l’espérance d’être élu membre de to the House of Commons, and be bought la chambre des Communes, & de se faire acheter, par by the Court at the first revolution of the la Cour, à la première révolution du ministere. Je ne Ministry. I am a good man, who likes to suis qu’un bon homme, qui aime à dire franchement speak his opinion frankly to the world, so it son avis à l’univers, & qui trouve fort bon que is very good that the universe does not l’univers ne l’écoute pas. Je sais bien que je ne dis rien listen. I know I say nothing new to de neuf pour les gens éclairés, mais il n’en est pas enlighten readers, but it is nonetheless moins vrai que, si les vérités qui se trouvent dans mon true that if the truths found in my work Ouvrage étoient si triviales pour le commun des were so trivial for the average of the François ou des Anglois, &c. l’esclavage des Negres ne French or English, & c. Negro slavery might pourroit subsiter. persist.
It is quite possible, however, that these Il est très-possible cependant que ces réflexions ne reflections are no more useful to mankind soient pas plus utiles au genre humain que les than the sermons I preached for twenty Sermons que je prêche depuis vingt ans, ne sont utiles years in my parish, but that will not stop à ma paroisse, j’en conviens, & cela ne m’empêchera me from preaching or writing as long as I pas de prêcher & d’écrire tant qu’il me restera une have a drop of ink or a thin voice. Nor do I goutte d’encre & un filet de voix. Je ne prétends point pretend that you will be able to sell my d’ailleurs vous vendre mon manuscrit. Je n’ai besoin manuscript. de rien, je restitue même à mes paroissiens les I do not need anything, I even send my appointemens de Ministre que l’État me paye. On dit parishioners the Minister’s salary that the que c’est aussi l’usage que font de leur revenu tous les State pays me. They also say that, since Archevêques & Évêques du clergé de France, depuis 1750, the use to which all of the l’année 1750, où ils ont déclaré solemnellement à la Archbishops & Bishops in France put their face de l’Europe, que leur bien étoit le bien des income, as they solemnly declare across pauvres. Europe, was good for the poor.
J’ai l’honneur d’être avec respect, &c.
Signé Joachim SCHWARTZ, avec paraphe. » Honored by the respect I pay, & c. Cette lettre nous a paru d’un si bon homme, que nous avons pris le parti d’imprimer son ouvrage. Nous en Signed Joachim Schwartz, with a flourish. “ serons pour nos frais typographiques, ou les lecteurs pour quelques heures d’ennui.
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NOTES
1. With the support of the Academie des Sciences, d’Après de Mannevillette published in Paris in 1745 a number of charts for a hydrographic atlas under the title “Le Neptune Oriental” which featured 25 maps. For the following three decades, with the help of his friend and eminent British hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple, Mannevillette revised his charts for a second enlarged edition. This comprehensive atlas was used on all French and by some foreign ships navigating the Indian Ocean. It replaced the “English Pilot” published by John Thornton in 1700 and the charts of the van Keulens, the hydrographers of the Dutch East India Company. See https://www.swaen.com/neptune-oriental.php/ 2. The French entered the stage in 1691 with the most famous of the early inhabitants, Francois Leguat and his small band of Protestant refugees. Many Huguenots were escaping from Catholic France under persecution from Louis XIV. Henri Duquesne, the son of a famous Admiral had a plan to establish a republic of Protestant refugee on a distant island. He publicised his campaign and called his proposed colony Eden. After having spent a fortune on the scheme, Duquesne and most of his fleet had to stay behind to fight against the Dutch. Only eight colonists sailed on L’Hirondelle with instructions to take possession of Rodrigues and wait for an opportunity to colonize Reunion. Leguat and seven young companions spent over two years on Rodrigues, living on the left bank of the river running to the east of Port Mathurin. They spent their time cultivating their gardens, building huts, fishing and playing chess. They did not have much success with their own crops, but there was an abundance of tortoises, turtles, birds, fish and other sea food. Within 50 years, the entire population of 200,000 tortoises had been wiped out and removed. The last reference of tortoises seen alive was by Marragon in 1795 where he had come across a few in the most inaccessible ravines. Leguat was a keen observer of nature and as an older man was very happy with the life on Rodrigues. Using wood from a shipwreck and tortoise oil as caulking, they built a six metre boat to make the voyage to Mauritius. However, it was to be three long years before they would find the company of women. Mauritius was occupied by the Dutch, and as they were still at war with France the unlucky colonists were imprisoned as spies for two and a half more years. By this time, two had drowned and one had died of dysentery. The remaining group had to serve a further year in the army before returning home to Flushing in 1698. Leguat’s book became a bestseller, but some of his stories were dismissed as fantasy. http://iocp.potomitan.info/rodrigues/rodrigues.htm, Accessed June 29, 2019. 3. “The French East India Company for decades was content to produce provisions only for its own needs and those of any passing ships. This changed when coffee was introduced (1715). Coffee quickly became the island’s principal cash crop which fundamentally changed the economy. The French enslaved more Africans to carry out the intensive labour required for growing and harvesting coffee. The French also introduced other cash crops (cereal grains, spices and cotton).” The Indian Ocean and East African Slave Trade: Ethiopia. http://histclo.com/act/ work/slave/ast/io/cou/sc-eth.html. 4. “Le Jour Et la Vüe de la terre qui avoient un Peu Diminuer nos frayeurs n’avoient rien otér à la mer de Ses Fureurs, Plusieurs Personnes Se Jetterent à la mer avec Une Ligne pour Tacher de gagner La Terre Et Etablir Un Va-Et-Vient Inutillement, quelqu’uns gagnerent Sans Pouvoir rien Porter, Il falloit haller les autres Sur Les Debris, où Ils Se Seroient Noyez, Enfin Effrayé de ce que Le derriere Sur le Costé duquel nous Etions Souvroit Et fermoit a chaque Instant qui à coupé en deux Plusieurs”. 5. Benoit Hopquin, Le Monde, 2 May 2009. http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/04/30/ archeologie-sur-les-traces-des-robinson-noirs_1187426_3244.html 6. Marie Jean de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-94) published a powerful pamphlet attacking slavery in 1781, under a pseudonym. This nobleman described the slave system as a
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crime and demanded its abolition. He associated the abolition of slavery with other reforms like civil rights for Protestants, the elimination of the last vestiges of serfdom and the rights of women. In 1788, Condorcet helped to found a French Society of the Friends of the Blacks based on earlier groups. Affiliated with the Girondins, he was executed during the Terror for opposing the growing power of the state: Marie Jean de Caritat, “Reflections on Negro Slavery,” in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, ed. and trans. by Lynn Hunt (Boston: Bedford, 1996), 55-57.
ABSTRACTS
The account of the shipwreck of the French East India Company vessel, the Utile, in 1761 and the ordeal of the marooned slaves provide a specific perspective on the economics, geopolitics, science, ideology and ethics prevailing in the late 18th century. The background to the tragedy of the marooned slaves underlines the role and status of the ports of calls European trading companies occupied to ensure their safe passage to India, ranging from basic havens to settlements or factories. Their economic role on the trade routes was vital as a source of food and water crews needed to get fresh supplies and cure their sick. They were also politically essential and constituted a source of rivalry between the Dutch, Portuguese, English, and French. Ideologically, they reflected the relation with local populations and exploitation of natural resources — the demise of the dodo on Mauritius being a case in point, as well as the transplantation of precious spices to Mauritius by the French naturalist Poivre from the well- protected Dutch factories in Indonesia. Utopian schemes were sometimes enacted on these tiny islands picked randomly or used as safe havens after shipwrecks or again selected as spaces where societies would be born anew for new pilgrims and outcasts. A large body of literature, be it travel accounts, logbooks or fiction, emerged on those topics both in France and Britain foregrounding revolutionary ideas in 18th century Europe.
Le récit du naufrage en 1761 de L’Utile, vaisseau de la Compagnie Française des Indes Orientales, et l’épreuve des esclaves naufragés présentent une grille de lecture sur l’économie, la géopolitique, la science, l’idéologie dominante en cette fin du XVIIIe siècle. Cet article inscrit la tragédie dans le contexte des ports d’escale que les compagnies de commerce européennes avaient occupé pour assurer la sécurité de leurs voyages vers l’Inde, qu’il s’agisse de havres naturels, d’établissements commerciaux ou de simples comptoirs. Leur rôle économique sur les routes commerciales était vital car les équipages des navires avaient besoin de nourriture et d’eau et devaient soigner leurs malades. Politiquement, ils étaient également indispensables et source de rivalité entre les Hollandais, les Portugais, les Anglais et les Français. Idéologiquement, ils reflètent la relation avec les populations locales et l’exploitation des ressources naturelles, la disparition du dodo sur l’Ile Maurice étant un cas d’école ainsi que la transplantation par le naturaliste français Poivre sur cette même île d’épices précieuses prélevées dans les comptoirs hollandais jalousement protégées en Indonésie. Des schémas utopiques ont parfois été mis en œuvre sur ces petites îles choisies au hasard ou identifiées comme refuges après les naufrages, ou encore sélectionnées comme des espaces où les sociétés renaîtraient pour abriter des nouveaux pèlerins et des exclus. Une littérature abondante, qu’il s’agisse de journaux de voyage, de journaux de bord, ou de récits fictionnels, a émergé sur ces sujets, en France et en Grande- Bretagne, annonçant des idées révolutionnaires de l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle.
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INDEX
Keywords: Tromelin Island, utopia, dystopia, spice trade, slavery, Condorcet, Anglo-French rivalry, 18th century Mots-clés: Île Tromelin, utopie, dystopie, commerce des épices, esclavage, Condorcet, rivalité anglo-française, XVIIIe siècle
AUTHOR
JOËLLE WEEKS Joëlle Weeks is Honorary Associate Professor of English at Université Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne. She is the author of Représentations européennes de l’Inde du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Harmattan, 2010), and has co-edited La terre, Question vitale au XXIe siècle (Harmattan, 2012). Contact: joelle.weeks[at]univ-paris1.fr
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Salman Rushdie’s Sea World: Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Ludmila Volná
1 Salman Rushdie’s style of writing is more often than not classified as magic realism, a term used since the 1920s to refer to works which combine realistic depictions with elements of fantasy, supernatural and magic. When the term was first used in 1956 in a wider post-colonial context by Jacques Stephen Alexis, it was in an attempt to reconcile the arguments of post-war, radical intellectuals in favour of social realism as a tool for revolutionary social representation, with a recognition that in many post-colonial societies a peasant pre-industrial population had its imaginative life rooted in a living tradition of the mythic, the legendary and the magical. (Ashcroft et al. [2000] 2007: 131)
2 Rushdie’s narrative tools are multiple and varied with regards to the elements of the imaginative life of Indian culture, and the mythic, the legendary and the magical are somehow always part and parcel of all his works. Despite previous studies on the magical elements in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1991, hereafter referred to as H), especially those referring to fairy tale (Gonzalez, Teverson), the manner in which the mythic and the legendary are woven into the fabric of the text deserves further scrutiny. This essay argues that Rushdie creates his story world by drawing on a theoretical conceptualization of story grounded in Indian cultural perceptions and that notions of stories and storytelling point, as does the Hindu mythology dealing with water/the sea, to the psychology of the “I” as an interaction between different realities. We will see how accessing the unconscious symbolised by water and its transformative power is what makes it possible to overcome a difficult situation and to retrieve an identity that has resisted a totalitarian situation. Here, the “pursuit of folk narrative tradition” becomes related to “a dynamic part of contemporary political struggle” the function of which is “[quoting Fanon] ‘to bring conflicts up to date and to modernise the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke’” (Teverson 2013: 74; Fanon 1994: 49, 47).
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Stories
3 As Rushdie wrote Haroun for his 11-year-old son Zafar Haroun, he chose the fairy tale as his narrative framework. On a superficial level, the work can be labelled simply a children’s story, one told or read to children to amuse and educate them while interacting with and reinforcing their imagination. The book has significant features of a fairy tale, i.e., as Bruno Bettelheim suggests, a “mundane and simple beginning” developing into “fantastic events” and where at the end “the hero returns to reality — a happy reality, but one devoid of magic” (Bettelheim 2010: 63). With this fairy tale framework in mind, Rushdie wrote to help his son and other children be “better able to meet the tasks of reality [in the same way as the hero, and to be] much better able to master life” (Bettelheim 2010: 63).
Figure 1. Illustration by Angie Brown on Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
Source: https://galacticbloom.wordpress.com/2016/03/28/book-haroun-the-sea-of-stories
4 In order to reinforce the children’s imagination, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, as well as Luka and the Fire of Life (hereafter referred to as L), which Rushdie wrote for his son Milan in 2010, the author uses language that ingeniously imitates children’s parlance or thinking, with examples such as “Process Too Complicated To Explain,” or “Grand Comptroller” (H 57), “Rathouse,” “Bear the dog and Dog the bear,” or “Level One to Level Nine” (L 34, 72, 180). The in-betweenness of languages, registers of language and the language of video games found in both works can also be understood as strategies to inscribe children’s lightness of being in the reality of an adult world. The latter seems more likely when one remembers Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things which offers examples such as “Locusts Stand I”, “Prer NUN sea ayshun,” etc. (Roy 1997: 36, 57) — Roy’s novel, however, has nothing to do with fairy tales.
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5 Haroun’s world is constructed around the idea of a story and Rushdie’s story and storytelling device is multiple. The book is a story about story and storytelling: there is Rashid Kalifa, a storyteller and father of the protagonist, the child Haroun (Rushdie’s son’s namesake), both names being a clear allusion to Harun al-Rashid, the Caliph represented in One Thousand and One Nights. Rashid is also an obvious anagram of Rushdie’s name (pronounced as [rashdi]), which points to Rushdie as a storyteller. The oceanic world of stories into which Haroun ventures is the moon called Kahani, meaning ‘story’ in Urdu/Hindi, and as applied to two locations is an evident reference to the Indian world.
6 While speaking of magic realism within the postcolonial context, Ashcroft et al. call story in the Indian cultural space a “distinctive feature of [the] local and national culture” (Ashcroft et al. [2000] 2007: 131). While resisting an “exclusive reliance on European narrative forms and European modes of perception,” Andrew Teverson notices Rushdie draws on the “tradition in Indian storytelling that derives from Indic, Persian or Arabic oral and literary sources,” which goes, nevertheless, far beyond what the critic classifies as a use of singular “plots and motifs” (Teverson 2001: 454-5). As Rushdie spent his formative years in India, one cannot overestimate the importance of the Indian imaginary world in his narrative. He remembers his father telling him bedtime stories that ranged from One Thousand and One Nights (generally believed to have come into existence since before the 8th century CE) to Panchatantra (3rd century BCE) and Kathasaritsagara (11th century CE). The latter was translated as “Ocean of the Streams of Story,” “the immense story-lake created in Kashmir where his [Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s alias] ancestors had been born” (Rushdie 2013: 19). Kathasaritsagara no doubt inspired the writer in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. A significant feature of the multifaceted culture in which Rushdie grew up as a boy is the fact that myths in the form of stories are narrated to Indian children from a tender age. This practice is thus crucial to the formation of their inner world.
7 In order to understand the role and the character of the Rushdie’s world of stories, it is necessary to turn to the Indian theoretical context referring to story and storytelling. Sudhir Kakar suggests that unlike in the West where history, philosophy and other human concerns were extracted from narratives and are present as refined and isolated within social sciences, “the preferred medium of instruction and transmission of psychological, metaphysical, and social thought in India continues to be the story” (Kakar 1990: 1). Stories as a way of thinking convey “what the world is like or ought to be like,” and are “a perfectly adequate guide to the causal structure of reality” (2). A story in the form of myth, “in its basic sense as an explanation for natural and cultural phenomena, as an organizer of experience, is verily at the heart of the matter” (Doniger 1975: 11-2).
8 Story in Indian culture, closely related, interacting or identifying with myth, is thus both an organizing and a pedagogic tool for reality and life at an unconscious level, which is intrinsically inscribed in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. When commenting on Luka and the Fire of Life, Rushdie explained the interrelation of reality, imagination and storytelling while touching on the unconscious: The relationship of imagination to reality is central: How does the world we make up relate to the world we live in? The imagined world impacts the real world: everything has to be imagined before it can be invented. The border between the world of fantasy, dream, imagination and the real world is fluid. This book is about
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crossing that border. The telling and receiving of stories is part of human nature. The story instinct is hardwired in our DNA. We’re storytelling animals. (Patel 2010)
9 Reality of life and that of the “I” (as an interaction of the conscious part of the mind and the unconscious), is thus part and parcel of the concept of story in an Indian worldview, which prompts a psychological aspect related to the imagery of the sea of stories, and pointing to the unconscious.
10 Haroun’s journey to another world is one in which he is engaged in preserving ‘the supply’ of stories by saving their source, while he is craving for the return of his mother. In order to reach the sea world where the source is to be found, Haroun and Rashid first stop in the valley of K. which they access through the tunnel of “I.” This alludes to what Madelena Gonzalez calls an “awareness of self and its shakiness,” typical of Haroun’s fictional world (Gonzalez 2005: 58). As the sound “I” is represented in some Central and Eastern European languages through the letter “J”, the discrepancy between letters and sounds makes space for wordplay. In a letter to Georges Izambard dated 13 May 1871, French poet Arthur Rimbaud famously claimed “ Je est un autre” (‘I is another’). In Haroun, Rushdie plays with a foreigner’s pronunciation of “Frenj”/French to indicate a different configuration of communication, or a different state of mind (H 34). In the “I”, two complementary sides or aspects of one’s identifying state of mind join each other: consciousness, on the one hand, and the unconscious, the dream-world of a person, on the other. The valley of K. is thus identified as either “Kache-Mer” or “Kosh-Mar,” homophones, respectively, of the French “cache-mer,” “the place that hides a Sea”, and “cauchemar,” “a nightmare” (H 38, 40). The Dull Lake in the valley of K. where Haroun and his father embark for their trip is a clear allusion to Dal Lake in Kashmir. Contrary to its name, however, it is found to be beautiful and interesting in the same way in which the apparently ‘dull’ state of unconsciousness in sleep actually has an inner colourful life of its own. Rushdie’s puns are textual pointers to the clash between ‘the poetic reality’ of the unconscious and the harsh outer reality.
Myths
11 Given the Indian cultural context, and that the sea of the Kahani moon consists of stories, one must discuss Indian imagery that deals with water and the sea. As we shall see, Hindu myths involving water emphasize the questions of reality and the unconscious. These are directly related to Haroun’s adventurous trip, a voyage that will help him overcome the distressing situation of the family triggered by the departure of his mother, the book being “a novel of crisis” (Teverson 2013: 77). As myth is used “as a structural device […] in the works of many post-colonial writers” (Innes 127), it is worthwhile to look into the theory of myths from a cultural point of view before focusing on the imagery of the relevant myths themselves. As Heinrich Zimmer explains, Indian myths “resist intellectualization” and, unlike the mythology in the West that were “re-fashioned by poetic master-minds” (e.g. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), “in the myths of India we are brought the intuitive collective wisdom of an ageless, anonymous, and many-sided civilization.[…] Details […] strange to the Western reader must be explained” (Zimmer 1992: 41).
12 The retelling of myths as stories to children, a characteristic trait of Indian culture, thus doubles on the role of storytelling. As Kakar remarks, “[t]he role of myths […] in defining and integrating the traditional elements and the common features of identity
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and society […] cannot be over-estimated” (Kakar 1981: 5-6). The myths of a given culture, as Kakar further explains, allow an outsider to gain a psychological insight into the culture’s unconscious, as they are, “in one sense […] individual psychology projected onto the outside world; they let what is actually going on ‘inside’ happen ‘outside’” (4). Kakar refers to Robert Goldman, who suggests that “through the aesthetic power of […] verse” myths become “more rather than less real than life” (3). In brief, myths and stories told to the young Salman Rushdie formed his unconscious in terms of culture; they were then reworked by his imagination and found expression in his work as a storyteller, emphasizing storytelling itself and its function. Rushdie’s work is thus highly self-referential, especially in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The author’s inner world (rooted in the unconscious part of the mind of a child) was formed by the ways in which the Indian culture perceives and emphasizes story and storytelling, as well as by the contents of the actual stories/myths told to him as a child. The adult Rushdie became a storyteller himself and skilfully inscribes these essentials in his book.
13 The story, the unconscious, and water, and significantly water from the sea/ocean, are closely interrelated in Hindu myths. The Indian celebration of narrative owes much to the concept of higher reality (Kakar 1990:3). The Matsya Purana presents stories of a semi-divine ascetic Narada, who asked the god Vishnu to teach him the secret of Maya. In one story Vishnu lets Narada dive into a pond, and in another, to have a drink of water. In each, Narada experiences a life of a completely different being (Zimmer 1992:1). Another holy man, Markandeya, is said to be wandering inside the body of god Vishnu, perceiving and living that world’s reality when he inadvertently slips out of the giant’s mouth and plunges into the utterly dark and silent cosmic ocean. In despair, he ponders and asks himself whether he is dreaming, or under the spell of an illusion. The world as he had known was entirely different from this new reality, and Markandeya assumes it must have been produced by his imagination (Zimmer 1992: 38-9).
14 Zimmer explains the Hindu concept Maya as related to the enigma of life: “In the symbolism of the myths, to dive into water means to delve into the mystery of the Maya, to quest after the ultimate secret of life” (Zimmer 1992: 34), Maya thus encompassing “the world, the life, the ego, to which we cling” (26). Both Narada and Markandeya were, through waters, introduced to “a totally different aspect,” to “the other side.” Being open to various interpretations while referring to the other, these myths can be read as dealing with different realities, apparent realities and the higher reality, different worlds, and thus, with the “unconscious side of [one’s] own being” (45), the parts of the self hidden in the depths of the psyche: The imagery of the Hindu myths allows for a cautious, intuitive reading in terms of psychology — the psychology of the conscious and unconscious. Among other interpretations this approach is indeed demanded, for Maya is as much psychological as a cosmic term. (Zimmer 1992: 45) Haroun’s story warrants this approach.
15 On the cosmic level, a large number of Hindu myths and their variations deal both with the cycle of worlds and that of individual lives. A world, such as we know it, comes into existence at the dawn of Brahma’s day. Brahma emerges from a lotus which stems out of the navel of Vishnu, and that world with all its spheres and creatures perishes at the end of Brahma’s day. Here, water, in its appearance of the sea, plays a primordial role: Vishnu is represented as a giant reposing on the cosmic ocean, or in the guise of cosmic waters themselves. When a universe ends, it is devoured by the annihilating blaze of
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fire. Its debris is washed away into the cosmic ocean. Only afterwards can a new world be born out of waters again (Zimmer 1992: 35).
Figure 2. Vishnu in Anantashayan, Paata Painting on Canvas representing Vishnu, Lakshmi, Brahma and Narada
Source: Orissa State Museum, Bhubaneswar
16 In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a world of the everyday (apparent) reality can first be identified. Sadness has imprisoned Haroun’s city, and in its inability to identify itself, Haroun’s storyteller father can no longer tell stories. The city is typically positioned in the sea and in the country of Alifbay, a name composed of the first two letters of the Arabic-based Urdu alphabet referring to a sea bay as well as to a (new) beginning. With the loss of identity and a loss of Self (“I”), a search for retrieval begins.
17 Rushdie takes his son “on a trip into a wondrous world” (Bettelheim 2010: 63; see also Rollason 2011) by making Rashid take Haroun on a trip to the great Story Sea, which reflects the Hindu imagery of the sea in more than one respect. Departing from the apparent reality (that corresponds to the conscious condition) through the tunnel of “I” and arriving into the oceanic world, the unconscious part of the mind (a counterpart to the conscious state) is accessed — a prerequisite to successfully cope with a tormenting situation and to retrieve a healthy identity. Haroun’s experience as he lives it in Kahani’s (story) sea world echoes those of Narada and Markandeya, as well as the Vishnu/Brahma myth. Haroun undertakes a voyage to “the other side” and reveals a “totally different aspect” to him and through waters an entirely new world is introduced to him. For Teverson, “[b]oth [Haroun and Luka] are fantasies that involve quests to alternative realities” (Teverson 2013: 77).
18 The psychological interpretation of the imagery of Maya related to water is appropriate because Water represents the element of the deeper unconscious and contains everything — tendencies, attitudes — which the conscious personality […] has ignored and pushed aside. [Water] represents the indiscriminate, comprehensive potentiality of
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life and nature present in the individual, though split off from the perceived, realized, consciously enacted character. (Zimmer 1992:45)
19 Haroun’s endeavour is not an easy task, however, because the two counterpart zones into which the Kahani moon is divided represent respectively a story-friendly world and one which negates the story, the Kingdom of Gup (a Hindi/Urdu word for ‘gossip,’ ‘nonsense,’ or ‘fib’), a zone of eternal light, and Chup (‘quiet’), immersed in perpetual darkness and ruled by the totalitarian commander Khattam-Shud, a representation of Mr Sengupta, a clerk who hates stories, with whom Haroun’s mother eloped in the apparently ‘real’ world (the one from which Haroun originally departs). The division alludes again to storytelling, the two parts being divided by a Twilight Strip and a Chattergy Wall — Chattergy being an allusion to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, believed to be the author of the first Indian novel. Chattergy is also a bilingual pun, playing with chatter in English and the honorific ji in Hindi. Apart from story and speech as such, the realm of Gup is associated with light, brightness, colourfulness and warmth, contrary to the world of their adversaries, the Chupwallas, a world of shadow, darkness, dull discipline, silence and frost. Kahani’s ocean is an Ocean of Stories consisting of warm streams of water: He [Haroun] looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff [a Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. (H 72)
Figure 3. Andy Myer: Voyage to the streams of stories
Source: http://www.andymyer.com/illustration
20 The rule of Khattam-Shud, under which the Chupwallas are trying their best to poison the Ocean of Stories by fabricating anti-stories and a huge Plug to close the Source of
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Stories, a set of circumstances which Jean-Pierre Durix reads as “an allegory of Rushdie’s personal situation,” presents significant features of a totalitarian regime, in which “a writer [is] silenced by enemies of books and of the imagination” (Durix 1994: 345), by enemies of the stories. In connection with Butt the Hoopoe, a mechanical bird which carries Haroun to the Ocean of Stories, Teverson recalls the case of Farid ud-Din Attar, a poet and Sufi accused of heresy by the Persian authorities (late 12th – early 13th century CE), who in his Manteq at-Tair (The Conference of the Birds) introduced a hoopoe, a bird character who guides his fellow birds while telling them stories (Teverson 2001: 444-50).
Totalitarianism
21 The ways in which totalitarian regimes relate to stories are aptly analysed by the writer, philosopher, and theoretician of totalitarianism Václav Havel in his ground- breaking essay “Stories and Totalitarianism” (1987). Havel argues that because totalitarian ideology’s grasp on the world is all-encompassing, totalitarianism denies and is directed against the mystery of life and the world and the urge to incessantly strive for disclosure and discovery. It is precisely this unending discovery that makes a story possible, a story of human life (Havel 1987).
Figure 4. Portrait of Václav Havel
Source: https://www.prague.eu/fr/objet/lieux/2121/bibliotheque-vaclav-havel-knihovna-vaclava-havla
22 The totalitarian ideology has discovered its Truth, which becomes the only truth, easy to control. Against this stands eclecticism. For Teverson, “Eclecticism implicit in any uncensored grouping of stories, along with the expansiveness and ambiguity of any one narrative, undermine the lust for closure and finitude,” and these are, in Haroun and the
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Sea of Stories, a “threat to Khattam-Shud’s power” (Teverson 2001: 450), whose name means ‘finished,’ ‘done-for,’ ‘the end’: The world is for Controlling […] Your world, my world, all worlds […] They are all there to be Ruled. And inside every single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a storyworld, that I cannot Rule at all. And that is the reason why [I hate stories so much]. (H 161)
23 In a totalitarian regime, uniqueness and specificity of imagination have no place. Bureaucratic structure and order together with empty rituals replace the natural disorder of life, and thus life itself and its stories are negated and, indeed, annihilated (Havel 1987).
24 Khattam-Shud, also appropriately called Cultmaster, and the destructive activities related to his poisonous anti-stories and to the story-source to be shut up by the Plug, are typically accompanied by routine machine-like and clerical work (H 152-6), the life of the Chupwallas and their Shadows being one of pretension: “They put on opposite acts, so nobody knows what they really feel” (H 135). The war between Gup and Chup “was a war between Love (of the Ocean, or the Princess) and Death (which was what Cultmaster Khattam-Shud had in mind for the Ocean, and for the Princess, too)” (H 125).
25 As Rushdie suggests, in order to be able to overcome a stressful or traumatic situation it is necessary to move a world — the world of one’s own “I ” — which Haroun eventually does while moving the Kahani moon. The ice and shadow of Chup disappear under the Sun’s warm rays. As the totalitarian rule is abolished, both parts of the moon are (re-)united, a possible allusion to the (re-)unification of Germany in 1989 (as well as to other events, as noted by Teverson [2013: 76]). The kidnapped Princess restored to her family may symbolize the return to a harmonious state of affairs, echoed by Haroun’s family reunited in the ‘real’ world. There is a reversal with Khattam-Shud, as his lot now becomes what he intended for Chup and the story: he is now ‘finished,’ ‘done-for’, and has reached ‘the end.’
26 Rushdie’s flight of fancy and the construction of an imaginary world are quite naturally read, as has been suggested, as his creative response to the stressful situation caused by the fatwa. His imagination, like Tolkien’s, is mythopoetic in that he not only borrows from existing myths but also invents postcolonial myths, such as the myth of free speech in the person of the Shah of Blah.
27 Mr. Sengupta’s initial question, “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” (H 20), a question with which Haroun has been obsessed during his whole journey, can be precisely found answered by the words of Kakar and Goldman mentioned earlier. While using myth as an “organizer of [Haroun’s] experience” (Doniger 1975: 11-2) Rushdie skillfully plays with his child protagonist’s “individual psychology as projected onto the outside world” (Kakar 1981: 4). In his story, what is going on “inside” happens “outside.” In this way, the stories prove “more rather than less real than life” (Kakar 1990: 3). The sadness and totalitarianism disappear from the life of Haroun and his family as well as from the lives of the inhabitants of the city as they laugh and smile and talk… and finally recall the city’s name: Kahani. The rain washes away the smoke of the sadness factories (H 21), and the water that had made the journey “to the other side” possible is again present and the city, flooded with the sea water, welcomes its heroes back.
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Truths
28 In stories as well as dreams, “truths that the truth cannot tell can become felt and known” as Rushdie points out (Rushdie 2013: 19). The author had always been concerned with the interaction of the conscious mind and the unconscious. Rushdie uses water imagery and especially sea imagery as convenient tools to drive his point home. In psychology, a passage towards the Other is often represented by a dream or a dreamlike passage in which there is a voyage through a body of water, frequently a sea, as in Midnight’s Children (1981) or The Satanic Verses (1988). According to Sudhir Kakar, “psychoanalysis is essentially a telling and retelling a story of a particular life” and the “understanding of the person in India, especially the untold tale of his fears and wishes — his fantasies — requires an understanding of the significance of his stories” (Kakar 1990: 2, 4).
29 Before Rushdie, West Indian author Wilson Harris was known for his magical use of space to represent alternative realities. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin claim that he “had a profound belief in the possibilities of (individual and communal) psychic regeneration through catastrophe. By the transforming powers of the imagination, what appears to have been irretrievably lost may be recuperated” (Harris 1985: 127 qtd by Ashcroft et al. 1989. 2001: 150). As has been argued, totalitarianism is directed against story. The intention to plug the sea source of stories is an attempt to destroy the imagination as such, together with the power of transformation represented by the sea. Haroun’s chances of getting over the loss of his mother with the help of the healing powers awakened in his unconscious would thus be forever compromised and his psychic regeneration made impossible.
30 In his magical story, enclosed within the fairy tale frame of a mundane beginning and realistic ending, intended to prepare his son and other children “to better master life” (Bettelheim 2010: 68), Rushdie makes the protagonist Haroun experience what is perhaps the child’s most acute trauma, i.e. the loss of his mother. Gonzalez aptly points to the relation between fairy tales and psyche, mentioning “the process of maturation encoded within fairy tales, alluded to by Bettelheim, making of the tale an encounter with the psyche” (Gonzalez 2005: 61). This is true for Haroun’s home city too: the trip to the Kahani sea world, the Other, makes it possible for its identity, which represents the complete identity of the Self, to be revealed and defined as Kahani, story. This unites the two components of the Self, the conscious and the unconscious. Rushdie’s self- referential story points to the capacity of imagination which, by retrieving to the conscious part of the mind the elements hidden before in the unconscious, helps the child protagonist grapple with the hitherto hidden reality. To paraphrase Rushdie, his protagonists are swallowers of not just one world (Rushdie 1981: 382), but of worlds as different and varied as all the elements of individual lives, realities, truths and creative geniuses. “Our dreams are the real truths — our fancies, the knowledge of our hearts” (L 157). Our dream-world, which can be accessed by symbolically passing through water, and especially sea water, is our home-world.
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Goldman, Robert. “The Serpent and the Rope on Stage: Popular, Literary, and Philosophical Representations of Reality in Traditional India.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 14.4 (1986): 349-369. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23445491
Gonzalez, Madelena. “Haroun and the Sea of Stories: ‘The Uses of Enchantment.’” In Gonzalez, Madelena. Fiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2005. 53-72.
Havel, Václav. “Příběh a totalita.” Revolver Revue. 1987. http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/ showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=77_clanky.html&typ=HTML
Trans. Paul Wilson, “Stories and Totalitarianism.”
Harris, Wilson. “Adversarial contexts and creativity.” New Left Review 1/154 (November- December), 1985: 124-8. https://newleftreview.org/issues/I154/articles/wilson-harris- adversarial-contexts-and-creativity
Innes, C. L. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.
Kakar, Sudhir. Indian Identity. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2007.
Kakar, Sudhir. Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. New Delhi: Penguin Books, [1989] 1990.
Kakar, Sudhir. The Inner World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.
Kakar, Sudhir and Katharina Kakar. The Indians: Portrait of a People. Delhi: Viking Penguin, 1997.
Patel, Vibhuti. “Salman Rushdie and His Mythic Legacy”. Wall Street Journal. November 27, 2010. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704638304575636763279031150.html
Rollason, Christopher. “An Unsurprising World of Magic? – Review of Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life.” 2011. http://yatrarollason.info/files/RushdieLuka.pdf
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo, 1997.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Picador, [1981] 1982.
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988.
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Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta Books, 1991. Referred to as H.
Rushdie, Salman. Luka and the Fire of Life. London: Vintage, [2010] 2011. Referred to as L.
Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton. New York: Random House, [2012] 2013.
Teverson, Andrew S. “Fairy Tale Politics: Free Speech and Multiculturalism in Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” Twentieth-Century Literature 47.4 (Winter 2001): 444-466. DOI: 10.2307/3175990
Teverson, Andrew S. “Salman Rushdie’s Post-Nationalist Fairy Tales: Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life. In Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan, eds. Salman Rushdie. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 72-85.
Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
ABSTRACTS
As in works by other Indian writers, water as a symbol plays a crucial role in several novels by Salman Rushdie, the imagery being rooted in the Hindu worldview. Protagonists who find themselves immersed in bodies of water, be it in Midnight’s Children (1981) or The Satanic Verses (1988), are not the same people when they come out of them (if they do). This is true also for Rushdie’s two works for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1991) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010). In the former, the author introduces different worlds that are nevertheless interconnected, each with a reality of its own. Haroun, the child protagonist, travels from the world of apparent everyday reality (represented by planet Earth) to a Moon world called Kahani. The journey to, and on, the sea waters that cover a large portion of Kahani depicts an entirely different dimension of reality. Stories and dreams occurring in this land of fiction symbolize the healing power of the imaginary. This article proposes an analysis of this literary material using the Hindu worldview as a point of departure and elaborating on the different aspects of Rushdie's representation of the sea.
Comme pour d’autres auteurs indiens, l’eau comme symbole joue un rôle crucial dans plusieurs romans de Salman Rushdie, l’imagerie aquatique étant enracinée dans une vision du monde hindoue. Les protagonistes immergés dans des masses d’eau, que ce soit dans les Enfants de Minuit (1981) ou Les Versets sataniques (1988), ne sont pas les mêmes lorsqu’ils en ressortent (s'ils y parviennent). Cela est vrai aussi pour les deux livres pour enfants de Rushdie, Haroun et la Mer des histoires (1991) et Luka et le feu de la vie (2010). Dans le premier, l’auteur présente des mondes différents et néanmoins liés, chacun avec une réalité propre. Haroun, l’enfant protagoniste, se déplace du monde de la réalité quotidienne apparente (représentée par la planète Terre) pour aller vers un monde lunaire appelé Kahani. Le voyage aux sources et à travers les eaux de la mer qui couvrent la majeure partie de Kahani représente une dimension entièrement différente de la réalité. Les histoires et les rêves qui ont lieu sur cette terre de fiction symbolisent le pouvoir guérisseur de l'imaginaire. Cet article propose d’analyser ce matériel littéraire, utilisant la vision du monde hindoue comme point de départ pour étudier les différents aspects de la représentation de la mer chez Rushdie.
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INDEX
Keywords: sea, story, storytelling, I/self, Hindu cosmology, totalitarianism, Rushdie Salman, India, water, literature, children’s literature Mots-clés: mer, histoire, narration, Je/soi, cosmologie hindoue, totalitarisme, Rushdie Salman, eau, Inde, littérature, littérature pour enfants
AUTHOR
LUDMILA VOLNÁ Ludmila Volná is Lecturer in English at Charles University, Prague, and associate member of ERIAC, Université de Rouen Normandie, and IMAGER, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée. She teaches M.A. courses on Indian writing in English and her research includes Indian and Czech literatures and cultures. She has several co-edited volumes to her credit, e.g. Children of Midnight: Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Pencraft International, 2012) and Education et Sécularisme : Perspectives africaines et asiatiques (L’Harmattan Paris, 2013), as well as a number of papers published in anthologies and peer-reviewed journals and presented as invited lectures and conference papers in Europe, Africa, North America and Asia. A member of several academic associations including SARI, of which she is currently a Vice-President, and the non-India membership representative at IACLALS (Delhi), Ludmila Volná is also active on editorial and advisory boards of several academic journals. Contact: ludmila.volna[at]free.fr
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Graphic Interlude: Reinventing the Sea
Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Ludmila Volná, Walter Raleigh, Aristide Maillol, Joni Sternbach and David Cox
AUTHOR'S NOTE
With Anonymous artist
Figure 1. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Map of the Indian Ocean in The History of the World, London
Printed for Walter Burre, 1614, p. 128-9. Source: https://archive.org/details/historyofworld00rale/page/n12/mode/2up
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Figure 2. Marina Beach Peasant Statues
Credit: Geetha Ganapathy-Doré
Figure 3. Muddy footsteps
Credit: Ludmila Volná
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Figure 4. The churning of the milk ocean (Rsagara manthana)
Source: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/s3wypcze
Figure 5. Aristide Maillol, La vague, c. 1898
Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris. Source: http://parismuseescollections.paris.fr/ fr/petit-palais/oeuvres/la-vague
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Figure 6. Joni Sternbach. 99.09.18 #11, from the series “Ocean Details”, 1999
Source: https://www.slam.org/collection/objects/44065
Figure 7. Cover of The Ocean Ferry, January 1934
Source: https://dams.antwerpen.be/asset/A1xalXNIMZKbCnTupbZ1dkzy/ I2TaCCHuUhq5gmqGSWzDSo0v
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Figure 8. Two Dragons among Clouds and Waves, Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644
Credit: https://www.slam.org/collection/objects/32680
Figure 9. Cuban Boat, c. 1895-1920
Credit: https://www.loc.gov/item/89708755
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Figure 10. David Cox (1783-1859). Brig and fishing boats at sea; choppy sea with boats sailing right
s.d. Courtesy of the British Museum (item 1878,1228.57)
ABSTRACTS
This graphic interlude features pictures illustrating this issue’s topic: the sea as symbol, metaphor and unit of analysis.
Cet interlude graphique est composé d’images qui illustrent le thème de ce numéro : la mer comme symbole, métaphore et unité d’analyse.
INDEX
Mots-clés: mer, océan, Océan Indien, mythologie, cartographie, bateaux Keywords: sea, ocean, Indian Ocean, mythology, cartography, boats
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(Re)inventing a People on the Sea: Instances of Creolization in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
Ahmed Mulla
1 For a significant amount of time, Creole only sparked the interest of linguists. As early as 1885, Hugo Schuchardt was one of the first philologists to study creole languages and claim that they descended from Western European tongues (Holm 2000: 3). Most of the writings on the subject had long focused on the New World and what is known as Atlantic creoles. However, later works by Carayol and Chaudenson, among others, drew attention to the existence of other creole languages in the former European colonies of the Indian Ocean, notably in La Réunion and Mauritius. However, such studies dealt only with the linguistic aspects of these societies — the sociological and cultural dimensions of creole have only been taken into account more recently. The concept of “creoleness” (créolité) which encompasses these features appeared in the 1980s in the writings of French Caribbean writers Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant; it is a cultural construct whose first foundations were laid at the time of the arrival of the first slaves in these colonies. In the case of Mauritius, the actual settlement started in 1715 (Domingue 1971: 9). In the decades that followed, the island experienced an important “immigration from Africa, Asia, and Europe” (Kuczynski 1948-49: 758). In patterns similar to those observed in the Caribbean, arrivals from different continents contributed to the emergence of a “plural society” (Benedict quoted by Domingue 1971: 7), which in turn furthered the constitution of a creole culture in the Indian Ocean and most specifically in Mauritius.
2 Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 novel Sea of Poppies is set in a time frame that comes more than a century later.1 Its main action, which consists in an oceanic crossing, takes place in the year 1838, at the exact time when Indian indentured laborers started to be “imported” to Mauritius (Domingue 1971: 10). The island occupies but a very small space in the story, as Amitav Ghosh devotes a large part of his novel to the voyage across the Indian Ocean. The narrative of Sea of Poppies sets in motion a band of desperate individuals whose peregrinations and dispersion form the crux of Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, the Ibis being
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the name of the ship linking different spots of human exploitation around the Indian Ocean.
3 For people who are unaccustomed to its influence, the marine element becomes an incommensurable presence, both literally and metaphorically. Anupama Arora explains that “[a]lmost all the characters feel the effects of the ocean on their lives in one way or another” (2012: 21). Owing to the fear that takes hold of the indentured travelers in the first days, there exists an undeniable belief that no one will remain intact after the disruptive ocean crossing. Arora adds that “the Indian Ocean is a palimpsest for Ghosh, and in his evocative mapping of this place and time, it becomes a rich archive where he reads layers upon layers of stories of power and violence, exchange, resistance, and survival” (22). As Ghosh’s characters belong to different social communities and castes, their interactions are bound to be intensified and renegotiated. Such reconfigurations go hand in hand with loss, dismantlement and the necessity to create a common and new medium to make space for communication and coexistence.
4 In their pioneering study devoted to the birth and development of creole in the Mascarene islands, Michel Carayol and Robert Chaudenson claim that sugarcane plantations and camps devoted to slaves and indentured workers were the sites where creole was born (Carayol and Chaudenson 1984). Édouard Glissant argues that it is “within the Plantation that the meeting of cultures took shape with the most directly observable acuteness” (1990: 88, my translation).2 Without denying this reality, Ghosh’s novel suggests that this ‘meeting of cultures’ which contributed to the emergence of creoleness actually took place during the sea-crossing itself.
5 This makes us wonder how, even before the actual cohabitation that led to the birth of creole societies on colonial plantations, Ghosh, following the footsteps of Paul Gilroy’s idea of the ‘Black Atlantic’, theorizes the emergence of phenomena of social and cultural creolization at the very time of the ocean crossing. In an approach that replicates Glissant’s dismissal of the négritude movement, Gilroy states that the belief in “tradition” and “Afrocentricity” offers no adequate definition of the Black experience today (Gilroy 1993: 191). His theory of the Black Atlantic claims that Black identity can in no way be limited by national paradigms, for it was born through a diasporic process and as such is transnational in essence. The analogies that can be found between slave trade and indenture economy warrant a reading of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies with the help of Gilroy's theoretical apparatus.
6 In spite of the dissimilarities between slavery and the system of indenture contracts, research points to the fact that, in the Sea of Poppies, Ghosh purposefully creates strong links between these two types of human exploitation. Ghosh himself states that “the truth is that India was to the late 19th century what Africa was to the 18th — a huge pool of expendable labour” (Ghosh and Chakrabarty 2002: 160). For Jacob Crane, the Ibis that transports indentured workers in Ghosh’s novel is in fact a vessel that had served in the slave trade prior to its new assignment. In doing so, “Ghosh locates his novel within a burgeoning transnational Atlanticist discourse” (Crane 2011: 3). Crane also illustrates this idea by showing the importance of Ghosh’s interest for slavery, an interest made clear in the allusion to the American abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass (5-8). Douglass himself compared slavery and the indenture system: “This Coolie Trade — this cheap labor trade, as now called and carried on — is marked by all the horrible and infernal characteristics of the slave trade” (Douglass 1955: 263). In line with Crane’s reading, Sneharika Roy argues that “the histories of these oceans intersect through the
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co-presence aboard the Ibis of Zachary, a product of the Black Atlantic, and the indentured labourers bound for Mauritius, who will become part of the Indian Ocean World” (Roy 2017: 53). This emphasis on intersection leads us to study how patterns of the Kala Pani, which defines the ancestral fear of Ocean crossing shared by many characters in the Sea of Poppies, can be related to the theories of the Black Atlantic.
7 Indentured workers, also known as “girmitiyas”, play a prominent role in Ghosh’s narrative. They were hired from many geographical areas of the Indian subcontinent to provide for the economy of sugarcane colonies following the abolition of slavery in 1833 (Crane 2011: 1). Only economic considerations were taken into account while forming groups of girmitiyas and there was no particular concern from organizers of this trade to acknowledge social and caste divisions inherent to Indian society. This explains why this “plantation diaspora”, as Omendra Kumar Singh names it (2012: 51), was very diverse (Parekh 1993: 110), especially in terms of caste. My argument is mainly based on this idea of a new diversity and the need to examine how this unaccustomed challenge triggered social and cultural negotiations to conceive a common modus vivendi often used as the defining term for creole societies.
8 The implementation of the indenture system represents the logical outcome of the combined efforts of colonialism and capitalism. As manufacturers of opium, British sahibs imposed poppy as the unique culture in many parts of North-East India (SP 29).3 This culture was expensive and ruined farmers (SP 29-30; 94) in such proportions that many impoverished peasants had no choice but to sell their sons and “send them off to Mareech”, i.e. the Mauritius Islands (SP 155). Others had to abandon everything and accept to work as indentured labourers abroad. Theirs was a forced exile and Jacob Crane rightly uses the expression “narrative of survival” to define Ghosh’s work (Crane 2011: 1). The uprooting occasioned by the ocean crossing instills the trope of separation in the lives of these people who had inhabited the same place from time immemorial. The obligation to go abroad represents a definitive rupture in the lives of many indentured migrants: cut-off from their lands, languages, cultures and families, the identities of these indentured laborers are dislocated, both in terms of time and space. Cultural exchanges are also at work in the ocean crossing phenomenon as advanced by Paul Gilroy in his discourse about the Black Atlantic: “Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, […] on the circulation of ideas and activities, as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts” (4). Ghosh’s narrative details those phenomena and shows how the sea journey radically transforms the cultural, political and religious foundations of the community of indentured travelers.
9 Other factors than economic deprivation can also drive individuals to such extremes that they are forced to leave their countries. Deeti, one of the main protagonists of the novel, lives near the small town of Ghazipur, in the area of Bihar (SP 3). When her spouse dies, her brother-in-law and other villagers want her to undergo a sati ceremony, sacrificing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. Deeti is saved at the last moment by Kalua (SP 177-8), a man who lives in a nearby and isolated hamlet and who is called the Chamar-basti due to his inferior caste and to his occupation as a leather- maker (SP 27, 53-4). As transgressors, they have to flee a society they cannot fit in and which condemns them to an inevitable death (SP 224). This hopeless situation leads Deeti and Kalua to give in to Ramsaran-ji’s proposal to join the girmitiyas on their way to Mareech (SP 204-5, 225). The only option offered to such desperate people by the
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British colonizers and their Indian agents is to go and seek new beginnings across the ocean.
10 Even before the sea journey, the long march and the travel across the river on the subcontinent constitute a preliminary experience of uprooting. Each halt during the trip undertaken by the girmitiyas is an occasion to be confronted with differences. Though they are not meant to stay permanently in the places they go through, these travelers can only notice what makes people around them perfect strangers. “[T]he women would sit on deck, watching the townsfolk and laughing at the evermore- outlandish accents in which they spoke” (SP 240). Later on, “the pulwar [a light river boat] crossed an invisible boundary, taking them into a […] land where the people spoke an incomprehensible tongue” (SP 246). Many migrants like Deeti are, in fact, Bhojpuri speakers (SP 8; 400). “[T]hey could no longer understand what the spectators were saying, for their jeers and taunts were in Bengali” (SP 246). In this scene, Ghosh focuses on the migrants’ point of view. The latter become conscious of their inability to cope with the world surrounding them as they do not possess the linguistic codes that could have allowed them to interact and communicate with others. As such, they are in a situation of inferiority and disempowerment. Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant argue that such an acute feeling of “exteriority” and alienation constitutes the first mental step towards creoleness (Bernabé et al. 80, 82).
11 After the journey on the river, the girmitiyas are taken to the newly-built camp where they are supposed to stay until the arrival of the Ibis (SP 281). This is the second transitory space migrants occupy after the pulwar that brought them to Calcutta, and it is again a place of disempowerment. As soon as they reach this camp, an Englishman, who is also a member of the ship’s crew, proceeds with their registration. Phonetic misunderstandings lead him to alter their names; a character whose name is Madhu Kalua finds himself renamed “Maddow Colver” (SP 284). The misspelling is never corrected, and decades later this “hallowed nam[e] […] occurred frequently among [Kalua’s] descendants” (SP 284-5). The migrants “are literally translated” (Lauret 2011: 56). There is a kind of translation of names that finds no resistance at the moment it happens, since the people concerned are in no position to reestablish the authenticity of their identities. In a genuine translation, a linguistic object passes from one language to another. Here, names whose validity was obtained from their use, their prevalence and even their signification in the tradition of a country on one side are transcribed into an approximate echo of sounds with neither a linguistic nor a symbolic meaning. What happens with the transformation of names here bears some similarities with the process of creolization. In many cases, creole words are formed through a process of appropriation of the colonizer’s language; phonetic similarities can be found but, in the end, a whole new language is created. But the change of names described in the novel is in no way an appropriation as in creole; rather, it is an irreversible alienation. An individual’s name is an essential component of his/her identity. It cannot be translated. Any transformation of a name impacts the person’s sense of his identity. The dissociation between two denominations of a unique individual is typical of the “cultural schizophrenia” that characterizes the colonial situation (Dahlet 2010: 33, my translation), a neurosis that creoleness endeavors to overcome and heal.
12 The sea travel imposed and organized by members of the British commercial powers constitutes another manifestation of colonial domination. The deportation not only has psychological consequences on the migrants, it also deprives them of a fundamental
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aspect of their social being. Most of the girmitiyas presented in Sea of Poppies belong to the Hindu community. As such, each is a member of a specific caste, depending on his/ her birth. In an individual’s interactions with others, caste is at the forefront as it determines both his/her place and role within society. “For several millennia, caste constituted the core of social and religious life in India” (Singh 2012: 49). One of the worst outcomes that can occur to someone embedded into this system is to lose his/her caste.
13 According to popular beliefs, such an eventuality can happen when one crosses the ocean, that is to say the Kala Pani, or the Black Water (SP 215). The ocean inspires fear in the people of that time. It represents an unknown territory. Even at the psychological level, the sea is a deserted place. The characters of Sea of Poppies are inheritors of a culture and folklore that simply ignore the ocean. In Hindu mythology, the island of Lanka is peopled by “Ravana and his demon-legions” (SP 72). What lies beyond this island is considered as the cause of absolute damnation and whoever crosses the ocean is condemned to an irremediable exclusion from society as he becomes an “outcaste” forever (SP 72). “According to Hindu belief, the traversing of large expanses of water was associated with contamination and cultural defilement as the crossings led to loss of tradition, caste, class and a generally ‘purified’ ideal of Hinduness” (Mehta 2010: 1). Such tropes of ‘purity’ and ‘contamination’ surface often while examining the processes of the formation of creole societies. As far as creole is concerned, a sense of transgression is at work leaving ancestral cultural modes behind to respond to the urgency of the situation and the need to adapt to the diversity of the new social environment.
14 As the predicament of the poor farmers is so unbearable, they accept to relinquish even the most sacred aspect of their personalities in spite of their fears of becoming “outcastes”. The perspective of being sent away across the ocean is perceived as one of the worst forms of punishment, not only in the matters of caste, but also in judicial cases. When Raja Neel Rattan Halder, a respected zemindar, or landowner, is condemned by a British judge in a case of forgery (SP 235), he is sentenced to be “transported to the penal settlement on the Mauritius Islands” (SP 240). He is told by a senior convict that “the sentence you have been given will tear you forever from the ties that bind others” (SP 314). The crossing of the Kala Pani represents a symbolic as well as an actual fall that transcends the hierarchy that exists within the caste system. Migrants and deportees are considered as people who have reached the lowest possible condition, and are thus rejected by those who can afford to stay on firm ground.
15 This situation of exclusion, of forced exteriority, is the prelude to a heightened phenomenon of creolization. People who migrate through maritime routes lose their castes, that is to say their original positions within society. However, this does not signify they are actually free from the caste system. According to Omendra Kumar Singh, “traditional caste hierarchy […] continued to exist in some form” even long after settlement (Singh 2012: 49). This is what is implied in the prediction made to Neel Rattan Halder: “When you step on that ship, to go across the Black Water, you and your fellow transportees will become a brotherhood of your own: you will be your own village, your own family, your own caste” (SP 314). The trope of caste remains in the minds of those who do not migrate for they cannot conceive a human society without the presence of this hierarchical system. The difference remains that in this particular situation they envision the creation of a unique caste that regroups all sea migrants
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irrespective of their very different origins. However, the creation of an artificial group of human beings on the Ibis does not imply the advent of a uniform and peaceful society.
16 At first, a vivid competition is visible at the time of boarding the pulwar that brings the girmitiyas from the countryside to Calcutta. Everyone tries to get the best places aboard the little boat: “the migrants began to disrupt the careful circle of their mats, scuffling and shouting as they fought for space” (SP 370). In the same way, the absence of a real cohesion among the travelers encourages conflicts: “here there were no elders to settle disputes, and no tribes of kinsfolk to hold a man back from going for another’s throat” (SP 397). In the indenture trade, former communities are dissolved and each individual becomes a man on his own, with all the chances and possibilities contained in this condition of loneliness.
17 Even in these early moments of their shared lives, in spite of the disruptive forces that take hold of the company, one can witness the birth of relationships of a different kind, principally based on solidarity. Some eminent characters of the novel make their best to integrate others who seem to belong to the margins. Among the women, Deeti is the one who endeavors to implement this connection when she inquires about her travel companions. Most of them are miserable and desperate women who belong to prejudiced castes as compared to her own. In an unprecedented step towards them, she hides her own identity and adopts her husband’s caste. She tells others that she is a “Chamar”, that she belongs to the caste of leather-makers (SP 234). The women who travel on the same pulwar are more eager to show her their “sympathy” when she pretends to have lost her daughter than to inquire about her caste: “How does all that matter any more? We’re all sisters now, aren’t we?” (SP 235).
18 Paul Gilroy argues that a ship works as “a micro-political system in motion” (1993: 4). Though Gilroy's view is specific to slave ships crossing the Atlantic, it can also apply to vessels transporting indentured workers across the Indian Ocean. Sneharika Roy, for instance, highlights the similarities and “the continuities between these transnational, maritime spaces” (2017: 53). While Roy uses Orlando Patterson’s theory of “social death” in relation to the concept of the Kala Pani to define the collapse of the indentured workers' identities prior to and during their sea travel, she also insists on the possibility of counteraction and renewal when she refers to “Ghosh’s poetics of karmic rebirth” (52-3). Keeping in mind Gilroy’s comment on the political nature of traveling societies or microcosms, one can indeed posit that Ghosh conceives his indentured characters not as passive travelers, but as political actors. In the novelist’s view, the former hierarchical organization of this assembly of women into castes is to a certain extent abolished, or rather suspended. And this also concerns other members of the indentured community.
19 Bhikhu Parekh explains that solidarity was a social necessity for indentured travelers. “The migratory experience […] generated the spirit of solidarity and weakened the sense of hierarchy. Most of the indentured Hindus belonged to low castes and had every reason to efface all traces of their social origin” (Parekh 1993: 126). Apart from this consideration, it seems likely that the symbolic abolition of caste forms part of Ghosh’s poetic agenda in the sense that progressive minds have dismissed this discriminatory system. Within this perspective, renunciation of differentiation aboard the ship comes as a redeeming political act. A parallel can be made with Martin Robison Delany's novel, Blake; or the Huts of America (1859, 1861-62), where a Cuban assumes
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various identities while undertaking the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from North America to the African continent and then back to the New World again. As in what happens with Ghosh's characters, “Blake imagines escaping that history [of transnational racism] through a vision of black redemption” (McGann 2016: 81). This reminds us of Gilroy’s comments on Delany’s novel where he emphasizes the birth of a new and common subjectivity: “The version of black solidarity Blake advances is explicitly antiethnic and opposes narrow African-American exceptionalism in the name of a truly pan-African, diaspora sensibility” (Gilroy 1993: 27). If ocean crossing is seen as a cause of “social death”, the ignoring of traditional discriminatory practices and the coming together of people from different social backgrounds can represent a survival strategy.
20 Aboard the pulwar, the only woman who is not actually concerned by questions of castes is Paulette Lambert, whom everyone believes to be an Indian going by the name of Putleshwari (SP 355-6). This young woman who was born in India to French parents finds herself among the community of travelers as she has reached a deadlock. She is fleeing sexual harassment and is as desperate as the indentured workers aboard the pulwar.4 Paulette explains that she is traveling as a pilgrim and for this precise reason she cannot lose her caste (SP 356). She furthermore proclaims that all those who are traveling together now form a companionship of brothers and sisters. “From now on, and forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings — jaház-bhais and jaház-bahens — to each other. There’ll be no differences between us” (SP 356). Deeti is stunned by the revolutionary aspect of this assertion and soon advocates the same idea: “In the glow of the moment, she did something she would never have done otherwise: she reached out to take the stranger’s hand in her own. Instantly, in emulation of her gesture, every other woman reached out too, to share in this communion of touch” (SP 356). Social relationships are thus redefined and migrants are eager to form a community, if only during the time of their sea travel.
21 A good example of this relatively harmonious understanding takes shape in the celebrations of a wedding. Heeru is a woman who has “lost her firstborn and only child” some time before being abandoned by her husband (SP 242; 431). On the Ibis, she is noticed by “Ecka Nack, the leader of [a] group of hillsmen”, who wants “to set up house with [her] when [they] reach Mareech” (SP 430). When Heeru accepts his proposal (SP 441), all the women take part in the wedding preparations. The frenzy is such that everyone agrees to ignore the “inconceiva[bility]” of this alliance between persons of very different backgrounds (SP 431), and, as can be supposed, of different castes. They organize the event on the ship in the shortest time span (SP 448).
22 On the eve of the wedding, every girmitiya symbolically becomes a member of either the groom’s or the bride’s family (SP 460). When Heeru and Ecka Nack perform the most important ritual of their wedding, circling a sacred fire seven times, they have to be protected from the dangerous rolling of the ship. Many traveling companions voluntarily “came forward to surround the bride and groom with a webbing of shoulders and arms, holding them upright […] Soon it was as if the whole dabusa [cabin] were being united in a sacramental circle of matrimony” (ibid. 467). The circular structure symbolizes a society coming together, assembling for a common purpose. In the present case, everyone comes forward in support of a new couple which, in itself, is a symbol of life and hope in the future. As we have pointed out earlier, the girmitiyas
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leave aside their former differences to become a family of sorts, notwithstanding the scale of the phenomena at work.
23 Omendra Kumar Singh observes that “caste lost much of its hierarchical nature on the ship and later, on the plantation colonies, yet it did not disappear altogether” (Singh 2012: 8). However, Heeru’s wedding to Ecka Nack shows that inter-caste alliances were made possible by the coming together of people from different backgrounds. This advent of métissage is only the first in a series of weddings that would take place over centuries. From the moment the caste barrier is transgressed, it is possible to infer that the notion of caste itself cannot remain unaffected. There is something irreversible that happens on the Ibis in terms of religious practices. While the community of girtmitiyas remains attached to rituals associated with a traditional Hindu wedding, it is more tolerant towards the idea of an inter-caste union. The persistence of some rituals and the relinquishing of other practices related to the home country create a culture of compromises and negotiations that can define the notion of ‘Coolitude’ as theorized by Marina Carter and Khal Torabully. “The chief characteristics of Coolitude are, to sum up, the redefining of ‘India’, of the relation to India, to other cultures, in the setting of their adoptive homelands. A crosscultural vagabondage (cultural vagrancy) is at its hearts” (Carter and Torabully 2002: 194). If the idea of remaining faithful to one’s traditions is still present in the wedding ceremonies, the notion of vagrancy, i.e., the ability to drift away from one’s roots, becomes inevitable due to the decentering that takes place along the indenture travel. Véronique Bragard elaborates: “By making the crossing central, Coolitude avoids any essentialism and connection with an idealized Mother India, which is clearly left behind” (Bragard 2008: 15). For simple phenomena, as well as for important rites of passage, the Ibis becomes the stage of an initiatory cultural syncretism and paves the way for a creole society.
24 Jacob Crane states that ships are “the vehicles of diaspora” (Crane 2011: 2). The isolating power of the sea can only encourage travelers to cooperate in order to go on and even to preserve their cultures in their diversity. The maritime journey between Calcutta and Mauritius is a matter of many weeks. It is enough to make strangers coexist and share a common spirit, as shown in Ghosh’s narrative. A similar phenomenon exists among members of the ship’s crew. In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh puts the focus on a type of boatmen specifically associated with the Indian Ocean. The lascars, as they are called, came from places that were far apart, and had nothing in common except the Indian Ocean; among them were Chinese and East Africans, Arabs and Malays, Bengalis and Goans, Tamils and Arakanese. (SP 13)
25 Yet, the lascars who work on the Ibis are “from one part or another of the [Indian] subcontinent” (SP 188). Though they are “varied” in their cultural and religious traditions, many among them “didn’t even know where their origins lay, having been sold off as children to the ghat-serangs who supplied lascars to ocean-going vessels” (SP 188). Their stolen childhood and the lack of a clear consciousness of their cultural belongings make them sea-workers essentially defined by their functions on board.
26 However, this lack of a past that can be precisely mapped is psychologically compensated by each one’s endeavors to create his self-portrait. Whenever they are left to themselves, the lascars “sing, drink and pass around a few chillums” (SP 188). In this inebriated state, these men either give an account of who they think they are or assume identities of their own fabrication (SP 188-90). The anecdotes they tell about
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themselves are nevertheless so improbable that they seem to be an adaptation and an appropriation of stories heard from European or Western navigators. There is always an extraordinary dimension attached to their narratives as if each one of them did actually go through a feat of sorts, either as a person of high caste or as someone who has already traveled around the world (SP 189) or even as one who participated in the Battle of Trafalgar (SP 190). The fact remains that all those stories bear a mythological dimension, as if by inventing such narratives these seamen could pride themselves on living a life of substance.
27 The ocean opens up a void for these sea-workers. They are plucked up from their original places in a more dramatic way than what happens to the girmitiyas because the trauma of separation with the land occurs so early on in their lives that they are unable to have even a vague memory of their pasts. The only strategy left to them is to invent fantasy lives. Moreover, being on the sea constitutes a lifelong experience for the lascars. For this very reason, they invest much of their imaginative efforts in this geographical territory. This seascape is not so much a cultural space in-between their diverse destinations but represents the moving center of their lives. As such, the lascars are open to the various sources of influence they come into contact with.
28 The ports and countries where they stop have a slight influence on the lascars as evidenced in the case of Serang Ali, the head of the group on the Ibis, who has a good command of Chinese (SP 188). But the lascars’ identities actually take shape more frequently aboard the ship. Anupama Arora states that lascars are “the ultimate border- crossers” (Arora 2012: 27). Zachary Reid, the American carpenter hired on the Ibis (SP 16), gets an idea of the lascar culture through their particular language. “[H]e had to memorize a new shipboard vocabulary, which sounded a bit like English and yet not” (SP 15). In fact, most of the time, the lascars understand the customary commands made in English, whereas most specific orders have to be translated to them by their leader (SP 258). The latter’s way of speaking a creolized English influenced by Chinese syntax and intonation “startle[s]” Zachary Reid (SP 16). Besides, the leader’s uses of the English idiom are many, even when it comes to give an almost correct English grammatical turn to the rudest Indian swearing expressions (SP 184).5 In fact, lascars own a language of their own, the Laskari—that motley tongue, spoken nowhere but on the water, [is] […] an anarchic medley of Portuguese […] and Kerala [language] […] , Arab[ic] […] and Bengal[i] […], Malay […] and Tamil […], Hindusthani […] and English […]” (SP 104)
29 It is, in short, an idiom to which every speaker and actor contributes, a tongue open to all influences. The term “motley tongue” mentioned in the narrative conveys the idea of a juxtaposition of multiple languages that, though foreign to each other, are sufficiently practised in common to be understood within a defined social group. It is precisely the prolonged proximity between speakers of different languages that has produced creole idioms. However, while established creoles have developed around a dominant colonial tongue, there seems to be no particular hierarchy between the languages that coexist within the Laskari. The tongue created and practised by these mariners of the Indian Ocean can be viewed as one of the most accomplished forms of creole.
30 Creole is a term that defines a language, a people and a culture. Creoleness, for its part, stands for a socio-cultural process particular to former colonies where different influences merged to form a composite and hybrid culture. Most academic studies tend
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to argue that the mixing of cultures happened on the cotton as well as sugarcane plantations in the colonies. In his novel, Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh seems to implement Paul Gilroy’s theory on the “Black Atlantic” in the sense that his characters go through a multi-dimensional mutation during their trip to the colonial island of Mauritius. In the context of indenture migration, sea-crossing can be seen as the main factor of these changes.
31 Indentured migrants have to overcome their apprehensions of the sea itself and of their prospective lives on the island. They also have to cope with the loss of their castes and traditions and with the need to coexist and cooperate with their diverse companions. The characters of Ghosh’s narrative go through life-changing experiences and take revolutionary decisions in the space of a few weeks. They get rid of ancient customs and beliefs and, through gradual, mostly instinctive adjustments, invent a way to live together, which is the main feature of creole societies.
32 The sea appears to be a transitory and preparatory space that enables indentured migrants to encounter a foreign society that is already creole with a spirit open to compromises, but also with the will to carry on with some of their own cultural traditions. Though at first the ocean symbolizes separation and human exploitation in the name of economic globalization, the revolution operated in Amitav Ghosh’s narrative emphasizes the idea that the uprooting of people can also result in the willful and collective establishment of a fraternal mankind transcending all types of partisan loyalties that generally tend to separate a human being from another.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arora, Anupama. “‘The Sea is History’: Opium, Colonialism, and Migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.” Ariel 42 (3.4) July-October 2011: 21-42. https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ ariel/article/view/35321
Benedict, Burton. “Stratification in plural societies.” American Anthropologist 64 (6) 1962: 1235-46. doi: 10.1525/aa.1962.64.6.02a00070
Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la Créolité — In Praise of Creoleness. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Trans. M.B. Taleb Khyar. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
Bragard, Véronique. Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures. Bruxelles: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes/Peter Lang, 2008.
Carayol, Michel and Robert Chaudenson. Linguistique et anthropologie des aires créolophones océan Indien et zone américano-caraïbe. Université de La Réunion/Université de Provence, 1984.
Carter, Marina and Torabully, Khal. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London: Wimbledon Publishing, 2002.
Crane, Jacob. “Beyond the Cape: Amitav Ghosh, Frederick Douglass and the Limits of the Black Atlantic”. Postcolonial Text 6(4) 2011: 1-16. https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/ view/1301
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Dahlet, Patrick. “Déterritorialiser les identités: créolisation, créolité et plurilinguismes.” Synergies Brésil (1) 2010: 31-40. https://gerflint.fr/Base/BresilSPECIAL1/dahlet.pdf
Delaney, Martin Robison. Blake; or the Huts of America (1859, 1861-62). Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
Domingue, Nicole Marie Zuber. Bhojpuri and Creole in Mauritius: A Study of Linguistic Interference and its Consequences in Regard to Synchronic Variation and Language Change. Austin: The University of Texas at Austin, PhD Dissertation in Language, Literature and Linguistics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 1971.
Douglass, Frederick. “The Coolie Trade”, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Philip S. Foner ed. New York: International Publishers, 1955, vol. IV.
Ghosh, Amitav and Dipesh Chakrabarty. “A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe”. Radical History Review 83 (2002): 145-172. doi: 10.1215/01636545-2002-83-146
Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2008.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic - Modernity and Double Consciousness. London/New York: Verso, 1993.
Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la Relation, Poétique III. Paris: Gallimard 1990.
Holm, John. An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Kuczinski, Robert René. A Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, Oxford: Oxford UP. 1948-49.
Lauret, Sabine. “Re-Mapping the Indian Ocean in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies”. Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 34(1) Autumn 2011: 55-65.
McGann, Jerome. “Rethinking Delany’s Blake”. Callaloo 39 (1) Winter 2016: 80-95. doi: 10.1353/cal. 2016.0024
Mehta, Brinda. “Indianités Francophones : Kala Pani Narratives”. L’esprit créateur 50(2) Summer 2010: 1-11. doi: 10.1353/esp.0.0229
Mulla, Ahmed. “Au-delà de l’intersectionnalité : l’ombre et la proie dans Sea of Poppies d’Amitav Ghosh”. In Ludivine Royer ed., “Violence and Intersectionality”. Alizés – Revue Angliciste de La Réunion 42 (December 2017): 69-88.
Parekh, Bhikhu. “Some Reflections on the Indian Diaspora”. Journal of Contemporary Thought 3 (1993): 105-151.
Roy, Sneharika. “Facets of Freedom: Social Death and Karmic Rebirth in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies”. Indi@logs 4 (2017): 51-61. doi: 10.5565/rev/indialogs.74
Singh, Omendra Kumar. “Reinventing Caste: Indian Diaspora in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies”. Asiatic 6(1) June 2012: 47-62. https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/AJELL/article/ view/401
NOTES
1. All page references to the novel are prefixed SP. 2. “[C’est] dans la Plantation que la rencontre des cultures s’est manifestée avec le plus d’acuité directement observable”. 3. Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2008). All subsequent references are to this edition.
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4. See, for instance, our article on intersectional violence and what we call “altersectional identity” in Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (Mulla 2017). 5. Sabine Lauret uses the notion of “linguistic migration” to explain the process through which many characters “try to bend foreign words to fit English grammar” (Lauret 2011: 60-1).
ABSTRACTS
While the East India Company made huge profits from the opium trade between its Indian dominion and China in the 1830s, many people in the colony, Indians and Europeans alike, felt their future was hopeless. Ruined by the compulsory cultivation of opium to the detriment of traditional agriculture that guaranteed self-reliance, or condemned by social prejudice, men and women were left with no other option than to seek a future elsewhere. Forced to share a confined place during a lengthy boat trip to an unknown destination in the Indian Ocean, people of opposed social and cultural backgrounds had to adjust to the unwritten laws of a community formed by chance. The characters of Amitav Ghosh's historical novel, Sea of Poppies, belong to the early waves of indentured workers that traveled throughout the Indian Ocean in the hope of a less arduous future. Notwithstanding their individual fate, Ghosh’s narrative shows that the ship constitutes a transitory “society” where each one has to re-negotiate his or her relationship to diversity.
Alors que la Compagnie des Indes Orientales réalisait d'énormes profits grâce au commerce de l’opium entre sa colonie indienne et la Chine dans les années 1830, de nombreux habitants de la colonie, Indiens comme Européens, estimaient que leur avenir était sans espoir. Ruinés par la culture obligatoire de l’opium, établie au détriment d’une agriculture traditionnelle qui permettait l’autosuffisance, ou condamnés par les préjugés sociaux, les hommes et les femmes n’avaient pas d’autre alternative que de chercher un avenir ailleurs. Forcés de partager un endroit confiné pendant un long voyage en bateau vers une destination inconnue dans l'océan Indien, es passagers d’origines sociales et culturelles diverses ont dû s’adapter aux lois implicites d’une communauté formée par le hasard. Les personnages du roman historique d’Amitav Ghosh, Un Océan de pavots, font partie des premières vagues de travailleurs sous contrat qui ont traversé l’océan Indien en quête d’un avenir moins sombre. Indépendamment de leur destinée individuelle, le récit de Ghosh montre comment le navire incarne une « société » transitoire où chacun doit renégocier sa relation à la diversité.
INDEX
Mots-clés: engagisme, pouvoir, colonisation, migration, diaspora, identité, diversité, hybridité, créolité, mer, Ghosh Amitav Keywords: indenture system, power, colonization, migration, diaspora, identity, diversity, hybridity, creolization, Ghosh Amitav, sea
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AUTHOR
AHMED MULLA Associate Professor of English at Université de Guyane and a member of the MINEA research center (Migration, Interculturality and Education in the Amazon region), Ahmed Mulla holds a PhD in postcolonial Anglophone literature from the Université de La Réunion. He gave seminars on new literatures, Indian civilization and postcolonial theory for M.A.-level students within the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of the same university. His dissertation dealt with the theme of identity conflicts in the works of Jhumpa Lahiri, and his main research interests have so far concerned questions of gender, identity and diaspora within the works of Amitav Ghosh and Jhumpa Lahiri. Contact: ahmed.al_mulla[at]yahoo.fr
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A Sea of Violence and Love: Precarity, Eco-Fiction and the American Factor in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru
AUTHOR'S NOTE
While writing this paper I benefited from the UEFISCDI-funded project PN-II-RU-TE 2014-4-0609, Representations of Violence in Contemporary American Popular Culture at the University of Bucharest and from an associate membership at the CEERES Center of the University of Chicago, which granted me access to the University of Chicago library, an invaluable source of bibliographical and background information.
1 Eco-fiction is environment-oriented fiction, usually looking at the increasingly fraught relationship between man and nature in the period of time that we call the Anthropocene. It focuses on the dangers coming from nature, which, in the current era of climate change, have continuously increased, going as far as imagining possible apocalyptic endings. Nature, placed under threat by human forces whose consumerism has become excessive, asserts its own self-defensive and even aggressive force. The human being, ambiguously positioned between the status of an ally and that of an enemy of nature, is confronted with more and more credible apocalyptic scenarios. Science and technology, celebrated as the glorious products of human reason, prove useless when confronted with the unleashed forces of nature. Whilst conflict is an important component of the current interest in ecology manifested in fiction, all this is part of a wider discussion about the increasingly blurred border between nature and culture.
2 Reading almost any of Amitav Ghosh’s recent writings from the perspective of the many connections that can be found between precarity and the sea opens up an
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interesting discussion about the author’s long-term interest in engaging with the complex recent debate between nature and culture. His awareness of the unavoidable and multifaceted hybridization of the two in recent times points to the fact that much of his work could be read as a fictional enactment of a philosophy based around ambivalent concepts such as Donna Haraway’s “natureculture”. In The Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway builds an argument about the ethical necessity of granting humans and animals equal rights starting from showing how dogs are important as companions to humans: The Companion Species Manifesto is, thus, about the implosion of nature and culture in the relentlessly historically specific, joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in significant otherness. Many are interpellated into that story, and the tale is instructive also for those who try to keep a hygienic distance. I want to convince my readers that inhabitants of technoculture become who we are in the symbiogenetic tissues of naturecultures, in story and in fact. (Haraway 2003: 16-7)
3 Bonds between humans and animals, of which the archetypally strongest is the one between humans and dogs, fluidify boundaries that, in the tradition of Enlightenment thought, used to be deemed unbreakable. Concepts such as Haraway’s “natureculture” or Rosi Braidotti’s “becoming animal” in Transpositions (2006) (which redefine the allegedly unquestionable rational superiority of the human through the permeability of the boundaries between it and other, presumably irrational, forms of life) emerge from theoretical explorations of the validity of the human/non-human divide that exposes its cultural constructedness. Otherness and othering, on which centuries of inter- human discrimination and oppression are based, are redefined across species boundaries. The non-human is brought as a kind of reconciling middle factor in the difficult opposition between the same and the other that has been at the centre of colonial conflicts. The intertwining between the natural and the cultural at a time when technological advancement and consumerism have led to an almost critical control of nature should actually be situated in a much wider context of blurring of all boundaries.
4 This focus on dynamic becoming, on the continuum of life, has been the preoccupation of postcolonial ecocriticism for some time (see Huggan and Tiffin 2010). The need for an ecological opening in postcolonial theory and criticism is considered by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin as a logical prolongation of centuries of colonial rule that, among other things, had, through exploitation, a significantly damaging effect upon the colonized countries. There is, in Huggan and Tiffin’s opinion, a need for what Dominic Head calls the “fundamental social restructuring associated with ‘deep ecology’ over the ‘provisional management strateg[ies]’ of environmentalism” (Head 1999: 27, quoted in Huggan and Tiffin 2007: 5). Huggan and Tiffin go on to cite Lawrence Buell’s (now classical) belief that “environmental crises and Western thought are intrinsically interwoven”: “Western metaphysics and ethics need revision before we can address today’s environmental problems” (Buell 1995: 2, quoted in Huggan and Tiffin 2007: 5).
5 In the climate of political and environmental damage in which we live, one cannot pretend not to notice that these two components can no longer be separated, as their histories have also long been intertwined. Indeed, recent human history has increasingly made its connection to climate change explicit, as Dipesh Chakrabarty points out in his article “The Climate of History” as he attempts to give “some responses to the contemporary crisis from a historian’s point of view” (Chakrabarty
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2009: 198). For him, history is living proof that nature and culture should go hand in hand: “natural history should not be separated from human history” (Chakrabarty 2009: 201), which is a prolongation of the New Historicist assumption that history is actually made not so much of what happens at the centre, but more of the marginal, apparently unimportant occurrences in human (and, we discover now, also non- human) lives.
6 Such histories written from the “environmental” margins of human culture are not free from the usual violence and precarity of history. Precarity as a given is also an increasingly present condition of today’s life. A theoretical landmark on precarity, Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004), written after September 11, theorizes the condition of life as permanently threatened by conflict that occasionally becomes acute. For Butler, precarity is related to war and, more generally, to the cataclysmic events that befall humans most often at the hands of other humans. Annamma Joy, Russell Belk and Rishi Bhardwaj comment on Butler’s use of gender performativity in relation to precarity in direct connection to violence against women and to women’s exile from power in India (Joy, Belk and Bhardwaj 2015: 1739). This is a line of inquiry that is particularly relevant to Nilima’s social work to protect the disadvantaged women of Lusibari in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004). This, however, will not constitute my main focus here. For Ghosh, precarity is related rather to weather and climate change and, more generally, to the violence with which nature, to whom humans have done violence, is now responding to humans. It is a different form of conflict, the outcome of a prolongation of the human into the non-human, on which Ghosh elaborates in a variety of ways in the novel, as he puts to work the rich symbolism of the dynamic land-sea symbiosis, always on the move and in a whole process of redefining its boundaries that one encounters in the Sundarbans.
7 Ghosh has had a lasting interest in asking questions about the ways in which nature is becoming more than just “the environment”. His treatment of nature in his work (be it fictional or nonfictional) conceptualizes it as a real “other” in the broad sense in which Haraway talks about the understanding of otherness we have learned “from taking dog- human relationships seriously” (Haraway 2003: 3). Considering the disastrous human impact on nature in recent times, Ghosh’s writing places an important emphasis on nature, in its fascinating fluidity. Nature takes part in the balance of a global world based on mutual respect and equality, which forms the basis of the author’s own version of a postcolonial ecology.
8 Ghosh’s recent essay book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) provides a literary reading of nature and climate change. Its very structure in three parts (Stories, History and Politics) betrays an intention to build an inductive argument starting from the narrative knowledge provided by concrete events, continuing with the wider framework of a domesticated history, in which nature plays an important part, and concluding with politics as a kind of theoretical musing on the importance of narratives and history. This book-length essay on ecology and its relevance to the human depicts a universe that throbs with life. In chapter 1, planets have lives of their own, betraying the never-ending cycles of death and rebirth of which the universe is made. Landscape is full of a life that makes it hard to grasp and map out: “This is a landscape so dynamic that its very changeability leads to innumerable moments of recognition” (Ghosh 2016: 6).
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9 Ghosh traces a history of ecology, of which the human and the non-human are equal parts, which goes far back in time before the term was invented: “My ancestors were ecological refugees long before the term was invented” (Ghosh 2016: 3). Among other references to his novels, The Great Derangement abounds in references to The Hungry Tide. Talking about “the insistence with which the landscape of Bengal forces itself on the artists, writers and filmmakers of the region”, Ghosh expands on “translating these perceptions into the medium of my imaginative life — into fiction, that is” and finds himself confronted with challenges of a very different order from those that I had dealt with in my earlier work. Back then, those challenges seemed to be particular to the book I was writing, The Hungry Tide; but now, many years later, at a moment when the accelerating impacts of global warming have begun to threaten the very existence of low-lying areas like the Sundarbans, it seems to me that those problems have far wider implications. I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older; that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth. (Ghosh 2016: 6-7)
10 Whereas he acknowledges that climate change is usually relegated to the realm of science fiction, Ghosh atypically uses it to read the present and even the past. He is interested in exploring the impact of climate change on the balance of the world, but also in relation to it, on the shape and manners of writing fiction.
11 The precarity of the planet is allegorically embodied by the fluid landscape of the Sundarbans. Since this is human-induced, the connections between climate change and culture are placed under direct scrutiny, since “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (Ghosh 2016: 9). An important part of the essay is dedicated to the idea of climate disasters such as tornadoes, with concrete reference to a highly impactful tornado in Delhi in 1978 (Ghosh 2016: 11-24). For Ghosh, the Sundarbans (a sea-land hybrid of precarity and uncertainty, “nothing like the forests that usually figure in literature” [Ghosh 2016: 28]) are a vantage point from which he looks at the world around to assess its own levels of precarity. Precarity is faced with what should be its opposite, predictability. In reality, the opposition between the two is weak, due to increasing levels of relativization in a world in which most things — the weather featuring high among them — are becoming increasingly hard to predict.
12 While discussing all these instances of precarity, Ghosh exposes the unreliability of presumably authoritative sources of information such as the National Research Council of the United States on predictability, with concrete reference to the radical unpredictability of Hurricane Sandy that hit the East Coast in 2012. In doing so, he implicitly questions America’s position as a world superpower that is never wrong and goes as far as denying climate change (Ghosh 2016: 26). According to Ghosh, literature cannot assume “that nature was moderate and orderly” (22) as in the 19th century because this is no longer the case. Consequently, there is a need for culture to emerge out of the traditional opposition with nature, and to take nature much more seriously (in tune with Haraway’s above-mentioned concept of “natureculture”). All the more so as even the most allegedly unquestionable political power, the United States, becomes vulnerable when faced with the powerful unpredictability of natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. This exposure of the vulnerability of America under the impact of a natural disaster that is not only unpredictable, but also extremely powerful, challenges
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the aesthetic boundaries of realism by being both “astoundingly real” and “urgently compelling” and also provides instances of “the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the non-human” (Ghosh 2016: 33).
13 In The Hungry Tide, from the hauteur of her initial American superiority complex (which Kanai criticizes as soon as he meets her — “Does anybody have a choice when they are dealing with Americans these days?” [Ghosh 2004: 10]), Piya comes to question the American factor as presumably civilizing, and even to challenge American exceptionalism. The superiority complex that she borrows from American exceptionalism comes from an unquestionable assumption that she must know better since she comes from the United States, with its advanced level of science and technology, as well as a certain assumed confidence associated to American progress. All these, however, are contrasted to the locals’ ancient repositories of a different kind of knowledge, transmitted across generations, whose depth makes Piya’s science shy away: “Perhaps she was judging these men too harshly? Perhaps they really did possess great funds of local knowledge?” (Ghosh 2004: 32). At the end of the novel, it is thus true that her little GPS device is able to preserve all the water routes revealed to Piya by Fokir which are crucial to her research, but, at the same time, without the latter’s knowledge, the GPS device might have proved useless.
14 In terms of Haraway’s concept of “natureculture” (2003) which preceded the publication of The Hungry Tide (2004), Piya is culture, Fokir is nature, and Kanai is the translator/mediator between them. All three are key to the development of the plot and, symbolically, stand for three pillars of knowledge of sorts. One cannot help drawing a parallel with Salman Rushdie’s short story “The Firebird’s Nest”, written for the June 23rd and 30th 1997 issue of The New Yorker dedicated to the celebration of 50 years since India became independent from the British rule. The issue draws multiple parallels between the emergence of Indian literature as an alternative literature in English in its own right and the similar emergence of American literature 50 years after its own independence from Britain in 1776. In Rushdie’s story, an unnamed American woman marries an Indian man from an impoverished noble background, significantly called Mr Maharaj, then moves to India with him and is received as a source of new energy in his land consumed by drought, where rain-bringing rituals have been performed in vain for ages. As their relationship fails, she leaves just as the drought is dramatically ended by a flood that claims the lives of many people, among which Mr Maharaj himself. We contemplate her flying over the ocean, pregnant, carrying the child of a hybrid couple that will change the global world we live in, as he will stand both for the traditions of India and the new energies of America.
15 The encounter between land and sea in the Sundarbans is violent, with the “hungry tide” always claiming its right over the terra ferma and with climate change performing even more violence on the land. The village of Lusibari, where most of the plot is set, lives a life of precarity par excellence, as it is literally situated in-between sea and land, an isolated island exposed to numberless perils — multiple forms of violence coming from the uncertainties of its condition and caused by both humans and nature: Lusibari was about two kilometers long from end to end, and was shaped somewhat like a conch shell. It was the most southerly of the inhabited islands of the tide country — in the thirty miles of mangrove that separated it from the open sea, there was no other settlement to be found. Although there were many other islands nearby, Lusibari was cut off from these by four encircling rivers. Of these rivers, two were of medium size, while the third was so modest as to almost melt into the
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mud at low tide. But the pointed end of the island — the narrowest spiral of the conch — jutted into a river that was one of the mightiest in the tide country, the Raimangal. (Ghosh 2004: 36)
16 Perpetual violence threatens life on the island, trapped as it is between land and water, where the very existence of certain areas of land (and of the life on them) depends on the mercy of the ebbing and flowing waters: “But Kanai knew that once the tide turned everything would disappear. […] Depending on the level of the tide, he remembered, the view was either exhilarating or terrifying” (Ghosh 2004: 36). Yet, as Nilima tells him, people come to populate this land of dreams that are more beautiful than the reality even from more secure parts of the Sundarbans, lured by the desire to own land, which was freely available to them (51). The value of land seems even higher as it has to be negotiated in a perpetual conflict with the water.
17 Many events in the novel happen on water which holds secrets about people who live and die in its territory. Nilima tells Kanai stories about the past he missed while he was away (Kusum died, leaving her son Fokir behind to be brought up by a relative). Nilima and Nirmal’s own story sounds half submerged in legend, like the whole history of this place: Nirmal and Nilima first came to Lusibari in search of a safe haven. This was in 1950 and they had been married less than a year. Nirmal was originally from Dhaka but had come to Calcutta as a student and then history interfered with their life: every major Asian uprising — the Vietnamese insurrection, the Malayan insurgency, the Red Flag Rebellion in Burma and much else. (Ghosh 2004: 76)
18 Faithful to her husband’s memory, Nilima is still there, having founded a hospital in Lusibari and having espoused the fluid safety of this land of water, inhabited by fishermen who are at home even in the most entangled water labyrinths. Boatmen and fishermen such as Mej-da or Fokir hold the key to this fluid, floating universe, as they know its rules and rhythms and are prepared for its inconsistencies. Fishermen live precariously, in a complex symbiosis with nature, occasionally interrupted by guards who chase them when they fish in off-limits areas, ready to fine them unless bribed. The title of chapters, most of which focus on a single character (but also on “Crabs” and “Travels”), are like episodes in a collective history of the Sundarbans made up of converging individual human stories. These are, importantly, intertwined with those of nature and with the flashbacks of the past offered by Nirmal’s notebook (which Kanai reads carefully and then reconstitutes from memory when the notebook is lost in the flood), and which, from a point on, regularly alternate with stories about the present.
19 Like these fishermen, Piya, the intruder who slowly comes to feel at home in this place where she doesn’t even speak the language of the locals, also spends a lot of time on water, but her scrutiny is different from theirs — or at least so she thinks. Details are given about her research which almost develops a narrative of its own, revealing Ghosh’s interest in the stories that can be told through every kind of language, including the language of science, as well as his own scientific preoccupations. Stories are of many kinds, revealing a faith in a narrative way of expressing knowledge about the world, as well as personal thoughts and feelings. Kanai declares his love to Piya in a letter, in which he tells her a story (which, he thinks, is a gift nobody else could have given her), whereas Fokir, a more elemental man who is also attracted to Piya, saves her life dramatically like an epic hero, sheltering her in the flood with his body, first alive, then lifeless, until she is rescued.
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20 Piya goes through many stages in her understanding of this place. At first, she doesn’t fit in at all. Not even her eating preferences coincide with the local customs, despite her Bengali origins, as they are slightly westernized and do not agree with Indian cuisine (“A Pilgrimage”). Yet, the Sundarbans, for all their looming dangers, are welcoming to her and offer her shelter, mainly through the protection offered by the two men, Kanai and Fokir. Among the many impending threats of this insecure territory, love can be of many types, but the one that dominates them and survives beyond death, leading to Piya’s bold and innovative conservation project, is the attraction between the Indian-American marine biologist, and Fokir, the illiterate Bengali boatman. They stand for the nature/culture opposition (or, as they become a couple of sorts, for Haraway’s “natureculture”), yet the implications of this opposition are not exactly the ones which we can immediately expect. Between the two knowledges the two of them represent, it is actually Fokir that proves superior in terms of understanding the depths of the world of the Sundarbans and of its dolphins, of their ecology and raison d’être, even if Piya knows more about the dolphins’ anatomy and scientifically-proven behaviors.
21 Ghosh’s project, as expressed in his fiction and non-fiction books, seems to be to achieve equality among all living beings across all divides as the ultimate goal of postcolonialism, which is why non-human living beings play a crucial part in his fictional world. They are even invested with an agency which, were it to be recognized, would change the world for the better. The author thus reconsiders the function of postcolonialism (a formerly progressive discourse which is now considered somewhat dated, but which he thinks can be pushed to further, still profitable limits). In The Great Derangement, he asks a critical question: What would have happened if decolonization had occurred earlier (after WWI)? Would the economies of mainland Asia have accelerated sooner? Did imperialism delay the onset of the climate crisis by retarding the expansion of Asian and African economies? (Ghosh 2016: 109)
22 As he worries about carbon dioxide emissions in the Sundarbans, Ghosh points out that imperialism was not the only obstacle in Asia’s path to industrialization and demands for climate reparations in a complex activist manner. His critical activist thoughts are supported by his fiction (all the more powerful through the value of individual — even if fictional — agency). Climate change is the unintended consequence of the very existence of human beings as a species. The solution Ghosh proposes is a radical reconsideration of human moral principles. In Part III of The Great Derangement, for example, he discusses the ways in which climate change threatens freedom. Freedom has traditionally been defined in terms of human constraints, but now that non-human forces have arisen, how are we to rethink those conceptions of history and agency? How are Piya and Fokir to redefine their responsibility to the human species, as well as to the natural balance of the world of which they are both a part, but which Piya had left behind for a while in her desire to excel scientifically by belonging as fully as possible to the western world? As she redefines herself in her space of origin, it turns out that many answers she had been looking for in the West were back in the East, as revealed by her fieldwork in the Sundarbans, but also by the human encounters she experiences there, which reconnect her to the natural balance of the universe.
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23 This becomes a discussion about thinking human values outside human boundaries. In The Hungry Tide, in a chapter entitled “An Epiphany”, Piya realizes the whole point of her work as a field biologist: She had never had high aspirations for herself as a scientist. Although she liked cetaceans and felt an affinity for them, she knew it was not just for the animals that she did what she did. As with many of her peers, she had been drawn to field biology […] because it allowed her to be on her own, to have no fixed address, to be far from the familiar while still being part of a loyal, but loose-knit community. (Ghosh 2004: 126)
24 For Piya, being a cetologist and thus living “with no fixed address” is a way of testing the boundaries of her own freedom and, further, of her own beliefs. It is, ultimately, her way to find out a lot more about herself than about the world around her.
25 When she first appears in the novel, Piya is proud of her Americanness, which feels like an advantage over the people living in the tide land, with its aura of legend, but also its technological and even cultural backwardness. Like Mr Maharaj’s American bride in Rushdie’s story “The Firebird’s Nest”, whose role seems to be to bring fertility (in the shape of her American dollars) to India, Piya thinks she is there to save the eco-climate of the Sundarbans. She even tries (unsuccessfully) to disturb the ancient ritual order of the place in the chapter entitled “A Killing”, when a tiger which had killed many humans and animals is caught and set on fire by the villagers (Ghosh 2004: 294). And yet, eventually, it is this microclimate that ends up saving her. As the plot advances, there are times when she even perceives her Americanness as a lack, as is the case when she confesses to Nilima that her parents never taught her Bengali because they were rather without roots themselves, and they wanted her to fit within American society. Things are further complicated by the fact that, as her parents stop talking to each other, she becomes an intermediary between them, a role which reveals a childhood trauma that brings tears to Nilima’s eyes (Ghosh 2004: 250) and which Piya is able to overcome only in the Sundarbans. It is in the Sundarbans that she is about to lose her life twice, and it is twice that she is saved by Fokir, the boatman, the second time at the cost of his life. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh comments on this scene in The Hungry Tide as an example of the extent to which human life is overpowered by the forces of nature. However, even though the gigantic storm surge in the Sundarbans kills Fokir, he has managed to save Piya through the force of his attachment to her.
26 At the end, Piya learns something much more important about her own vulnerabilities as an American: the knowledge we need to keep the world going is much more complex than the world power struggles in which America takes the lead. Against the violence of nature and human lack of understanding, we need the loving lessons we learn from both people and nature to find out who we truly are. In the two books discussed in this contribution, Ghosh uses ecology as an overarching discourse meant to pass implicit judgment on the futility of all forms of human power, be they political or otherwise.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge & Malden, MA: Polity, 2006.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.
Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation”. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26(2) 2012: 134-151. DOI: 10.5325/jspecphil.26.2.0134
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2004.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses”. Critical Inquiry 35(2) Winter 2009: 197-222. DOI: 10.1086/596640.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories 37 Winter 1992: 1-26. DOI: 10.2307/2928652.
Dixon, Robert. “‘Travelling in the West’: The Writing of Amitav Ghosh.” In Tabish Khair (ed.), Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. 9-35.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. London: HarperCollins, 2004.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.
Head, Dominic. “The (im)possibility of ecocriticism”. In R. Kerridge and N. Sammells (eds), Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. London: Zed Books, 1999. 27-39.
Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge, 2010.
Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. “Green Postcolonialism”. Interventions 9(1) 2007: 1-11. DOI: 10.1080/13698010601173783.
Joy, Annamma, Russell Belk and Rishi Bhardwaj. “Commentary. Judith Butler on performativity and precarity: exploratory thoughts on gender and violence in India”. Journal of Marketing Management 31(15-16) 2015: 1739-1745. DOI: 10.1080/0267257X.2015.1076873.
Rushdie, Salman. “The Firebird’s Nest”. The New Yorker, June 23 & 30 1997: 122-7. https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/06/23/the-firebirds-nest
ABSTRACTS
This paper will interrogate a set of popular tropes and clichés that have become characteristic of the emerging genre of eco-fiction (eg. an impending threat such as an ecological disaster; endangered nature as a force in its own right which protects and threatens the human being; the uselessness of science and technology against the unleashed forces of nature) in a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide. I will examine the novel’s use of such tropes with hindsight, in the light of Ghosh’s 2016 non-fiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, where the author’s interest in ecology, global warming and the agency of fiction
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with respect to ensuing threats to human civilization becomes manifest. Using Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s concept of “green postcolonialism”, I will argue that the two books share a deep concern with the ways in which the relationship between nature and culture, which has changed dramatically in the recent decades, mirrors a change in the relationship between the “West” and the “East”. Thus, if colonialism functioned on the basis of an assumption of superiority with respect to non-European civilizations, it is now non-European forms of knowledge, formerly considered “primitive”, that prevail over Western knowledge when it comes to facing nature’s revolt against various kinds of prolonged human aggression.
Cet article interrogera un ensemble de tropes populaires et de clichés qui sont devenus caractéristiques du genre émergent de l’éco-fiction (dans lesquels on trouve les thèmes comme la menace imminente de catastrophe écologique, la nature en voie de disparition ou vue comme une force à part entière qui protège et menace l’être humain, ou encore où l’on voit l’inutilité de la science et de la technologie confrontés à une nature déchaînée). Nous proposons une lecture du roman d’Amitav Ghosh paru en 2004, Le pays des marées pour voir l’utilisation de ces tropes à la lumière du livre de non-fiction de Ghosh paru en 2016, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, où l’auteur manifeste clairement son intérêt pour l’écologie, le changement climatique et le pouvoir de la fiction face aux forces qui menacent la civilisation humaine. En utilisant le concept de « postcolonialisme vert » de Graham Huggan et Helen Tiffin, nous affirmons que les deux livres partagent l’idée que la relation entre la nature et la culture, qui a considérablement changé au cours des dernières décennies, reflète un changement dans les relations entre l’« Ouest » et l’« Est ». Ainsi, si le colonialisme fonctionnait sur la base d’une supériorité supposée par rapport aux civilisations non-européennes, ce sont maintenant des formes de connaissance non-européennes, anciennement considérées comme « primitives », qui prévalent sur la connaissance occidentale quand il s’agit de faire face à la révolte de la nature contre divers types d’agressions humaines prolongées.
INDEX
Mots-clés: facteur américain, éco-fiction, amour, précarité, mer, violence Keywords: American factor, eco-fiction, love, precarity, sea, violence
AUTHOR
MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Bucharest and, since 2015, an associate researcher at CEERES, the University of Chicago. Her research interests include: contemporary Indian fiction in English and its mythical rewritings, interactions between narrative and performance in contemporary global literatures in English, ethnic American literatures, minority cultures in the media, postcolonialism and postcommunism, gender studies. She has published articles in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Perspectives, The European Journal of American Culture etc. She has authored and co-edited books, notably: The Postmodern Condition: Towards an Aesthetic of Cultural Identities (University of Bucharest Press, 2003); Identity Performance in Contemporary Non-WASP American Fiction (University of Bucharest Press, 2008); Between History and Personal Narrative: East-European Women’s Stories of Transnational Relocation (co-edited; Vienna and Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2013); Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2015). Contact: sabina.draga.alexandru[at]lls.unibuc.ro
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Three Tsunami Narratives Sonali Deraniyagala's ‘Wave’ (2013), Philippa Hawley's ‘There’s No Sea in Salford’ (2013) and Minoli Salgado's ‘A Little Dust in the Eyes’ (2014)
Geetha Ganapathy-Doré
1 Ancient literature has recorded natural catastrophes, human response to them and the various coping mechanisms mobilized individually and collectively by people. The modern world, in its self-absorption, has forgotten to revisit these stories and learn to enhance its awareness and preparedness. While the ancient Tamil epic Silappatikaram mentions the flourishing portal city of Puhar, another epic, Manimekalai, reports the engulfing of Puhar by the sea after the curse of a goddess. A Chola king, mourning his son's death, had forgotten to celebrate the annual spring festival and this incurred the deity's wrath. The Sri Lankan chronicles Thupavamsa and Mahavamsa speak of a killer wave that was to have swallowed the kingdom of Kelani Tissa. By sacrificing herself, the brave princess, Vihara Mahadevi, appeased the anger of nature that was intended for her father who had ill-treated a Buddhist monk. She was sent in a boat as an offering to the sea. But the sea returned her to safety. What is at stake in both these narratives is human responsibility for the respect of Nature and fellow human beings, and the consubstantial connection between the environment and humankind. Representing Postcolonial Disaster, a research project led by the late Anthony Carrigon at Leeds University, tried to show that “effective disaster mitigation in global contexts depends on thinking through vulnerability in relation to colonial legacies and contemporary neocolonial practices […] by addressing how postcolonial literature and film can add cultural and historical depth to understandings of catastrophe” (Carrigon 2014: 3-13).
2 The three contemporary narratives on Tsunami in Sri Lanka dealt with in this article share common characteristics: they were all written by women authors; and all three feature a shuttling back and forth between England and Sri Lanka, showing the persistence of the colonial nostalgia for the exotic, on the one hand, and the magnetic force of metropolitan centres, on the other. However, we are witnesses to a postcolonial landscape of complex human relations. In all the three narratives, the critical moment of the tsunami provokes irreparable loss and inevitable change prompting everyone to meditate on the precarity of life on earth.
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3 As Bonie Roos and Alex Hunt observe in their introduction “Narratives of Survival, Sustainability and Justice” to Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (2010:1), the undersea earthquake that caused the tsunami in South Asia in 2004 cannot be imputed to global warming. The three narratives under scrutiny are thus primarily stories of human attempts to survive in the face of a natural catastrophe. The biographical element is therefore prominent in the authors' accounts of the coping strategies of the self. While Sonali Deraniyagala has recourse to an autobiographical narrative, Philippa Hawley fictionalizes the biography of an immigrant woman from Sri Lanka. Minoli Salgado, on the other hand, writes an autobiographical novel. Postcolonial fiction biographies, autobiographies, autobiographical novels and autofiction of the 20th century have grappled with the identity crisis at the end of the empires and the conquest of English as the last step in the process of liberation. In the three 21st-century narratives studied in this article, physical vulnerability and bodily integrity are at stake. The first theoretical issue arises from the tension between zoe and bio in a context of precarity. Based on the Greek concepts of zoe (natural life) and bio (a particular form of life), Giorgio Agamben defined the concept of “bare life” as "life exposed to death" (1998: 88). Using Agamben's concept of “bare life”, Judith Butler developed the idea of "precarious life", observing the fact that all life “can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed” (2009: 25). Natural disasters like tsunami and personal upheavals like disease and migratory uprooting are situations which lay bare the precarity of lives, especially women's lives, as attested by the narrative corpus selected for review. The women protagonists wonder how they can retrieve a life worthy of living after it has been transformed by grief.
4 The overcoming of bodily injury and the risk to life recounted in these 21st-century narratives constructed around the 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of South and South-East Asia warrants comparison with the trauma narratives of the 20th century. At the end of the Second World War, survivors of the Holocaust resorted to writing about the humiliation, isolation, and deprivation they were victims of in order to overcome their trauma. Cathy Caruth (1996), Ruth Leys (2000), Didier Fassin, Richard Rechtman & Rachel Gomme (2007), and Roger Luckhurst (2008) have proposed theoretical approaches of the trauma narrative, one that helps victims make sense of their painful experience through jumbled but remembered sounds, colours and emotions. One of the issues dealt with in such narratives is the question of survivor’s guilt — the guilt associated with being alive when others have died, the guilt of having failed the others, and the guilt of what one did in order not to die (Bettelheim 1980: 297-8). Another aspect of trauma narratives is memorialization and the duty to remember, which is both individual and collective (Blustein 2017: 351-362). Depending upon the cause of the trauma, which is either inflicted by nature or mankind, the texts studied do not treat survivor’s guilt and the duty of memory in the same way.
5 The end of wars and empires have been the occasion to voice human and humanitarian concerns about the right to life, freedom from slavery and torture and protection of the vulnerable like women, children and the aged. The distinction between the trauma narrative and the humanitarian narrative — in which the representation of suffering is central to “the mobilization of sympathy for humans in severe distress” (Libal & Martinez 2011:162) — needs to be made using the idea of compassion as a touchstone.
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6 Natural catastrophes are contexts in which social, gender, and racial hierarchies put in place by patriarchy, colonialism, and nationalism are jostled and power struggles resurface. The three narratives are test cases to see how these issues play out locally and globally and how writing — memoirs, letters, theses, records of human rights — is chosen as the preferred mode of subaltern agency.
7 Natural disasters induce environmental change. Sometimes it is environmental change that provokes natural disasters. Whatever the event, symbolic national boundaries collapse to reveal humanity's search for safety and security. When the environment is incorporated in the narrative not as a mere setting but as a force to reckon with, the postcolonial focus on the meaning of home backslides to the idea of habitat. The three texts serve as testimonies to the realization that the fixedness of a place to live can no longer be taken for granted. They attest to the shift from a psychological to an ecological orientation of reality in the contemporary world.
8 With these theoretical and overall considerations in the background, the article aims to provide an individual and close reading of the three tsunami narratives to analyze what they tell us about gender, family, ethnic, and race relations in times of personal, political and natural turmoil and explore how a pathway to peace is found across the geography of pain in these intimations of mortality.
The Hour of Lead Outlived and Remembered – Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave
9 Sonali Deraniyagala’s récit has all the trappings of a trauma narrative.1 As Cathy Caruth points out, “trauma is not locatable in the simple original or violent event in an individual's past but rather in the way that its unassimilated nature […] returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 1996: 4). Deraniyagala’s American psychotherapist, Mark Epstein, persuaded her to write. With Epstein’s combination of Buddha’s and Freud’s approaches to trauma in his treatment of Deraniyagala (Epstein 2013), she presents her life story as a contemporary fable about the limits to the regularity and predictability of life on earth.
10 The daughter of a Sri Lankan lawyer, Deraniyagala meets Steve Lissenburgh, who comes from an East London working class family of Dutch origin, in Cambridge in 1984. They marry in 1988, have two children, Vikram and Nikhil, and live in Sri Lanka for two years where Steve teaches economics in a school. They return to England to complete their PhDs and set up their home there, making bi-annual trips to the island. The whole family is fond of the wildlife of the earthly paradise that is Sri Lanka. During one such three-week visit to the Yala national park during Christmas in 2004, the family tries to escape the incoming sea in a jeep not knowing it is a tidal wave. The jeep is tilted by the force of the wave and when Deraniyagala comes back to herself hours later, she finds herself in a shattered landscape. Her husband, sons, parents and friend are all gone. For Sonali, it is a descent unto hell, the beginning of self-alienation.
11 Published in 2013, the narrative is organized into 9 chapters covering the 9-year period between 2004, the year of her loss, and 2012, the year of reconciliation with the loss with flashbacks to the Sri Lanka of the 1970s and the England of the 1980s.The book’s opaque black cover symbolizes both the kala pani2 as well as mourning. The minimal, two-syllable title of the book tries to highlight the life-altering and overwhelming
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nature of a brief but brutal moment.3 The way the four letters of the title change colours and brighten shows the slow passage from darkness to light that any recovery implies (see Figure 1). Sonali Deraniyagala has admitted that her process has been to gradually open up the wounds. “I wrote for a long time purely for myself […] The writing was my survival actually. […] It was my way of being with them. The more I wrote, the more real they became to me.” (quoted in Barber 2013)
Figure 1. Cover of Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave (2013)
12 The narrative starts with the description of the tidal wave (W3).4 The progressive invasion of land by the sea is suggested in the text by what E. A. Gamini Fonseka has identified as “melodic truth,” borrowing the concept from Milan Kundera (Fonseka 2017:146). The foam turned into waves. Waves leaping over the ridge where the beach ended. This was not normal. The sea never came this far in. Waves not receding or dissolving. Closer now. Brown and gray. Brown or gray. Waves rushing past the conifers and coming close to our room. All these waves now, charging, churning. Suddenly furious. Suddenly menacing. (W5)
13 Deraniyagala is swept inwards and outwards by the water but manages to hold on to the branch of a tree. She is in a daze when she is rescued. It is only at the end of the narrative that her friend tells her how her rescuers found her spinning, as if she were in a mystic trance. This again confirms Caruth’s observation that victims of trauma unwittingly reenact the traumatic event that they are not able to leave behind (Caruth 1996: 2).
14 Deraniyagala is not able to make a break between before and after the crisis, and wants to stay suspended in time. According to Boris Cyrulnik (2012), disturbance of the sense of time is a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. The failure of the self to cope with disruption, discontinuity and absence is worsened by survivor’s guilt. Deraniyagala
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blames herself for not having warned her parents about the impending danger, for not having been able to protect her children, and for hurting Steve’s family and friends by bringing him and the children to Sri Lanka and exposing them to danger. In recent times, the idea of survivor’s guilt in Holocaust narratives has been challenged because it involves the victim's unconscious identification with the perpetrator and collusion with power (Leys 2007: 5). In a natural catastrophe, where there is no human agency inflicting pain, what predominates is a sense of shame and loss of dignity. Deraniyagala adopts a strategy of avoidance as she refuses to identify the dead bodies at the hotel and postpones her looking for her near and dear — she is in denial. Submerged by rage, she cannot even grieve.
15 She first attributes her personal tragedy to her hubris, taking the good things in life for granted. Then she is overcome with a sense of culturally-inherited guilt, i.e., the Buddhist belief in the idea of Karma, which makes her think that her survival in such circumstances is a punishment, an invitation to cleanse her past sins by undergoing this bitter experience (or dukkha in Buddhism). However, when the London Evening Standard rubs salt in the wound by reporting that Dr Sonali Deraniyagala, a 40-year-old academic, watched in horror as her husband Dr Steve Lissenburgh and two sons were engulfed by the water as they tried to flee in the family’s holiday car. (David and Gilligan: 2005)
16 she becomes aware of the subaltern status to which she has been relegated. To say that she “watched in horror” is to disassociate her from the critical scene and give her agency where she did not have any means to act, and responsibility for the death of her English husband in her native Sri Lanka. This othering process, which may be read as a sign of resurgence of colonial prejudices, overwriting her point of view with the journalists’ narrative, allows them to not recognize her as a victim too, albeit one who survived the tsunami.
17 In the early stages, tossed between the need to remember and the necessity to forget, Deraniyagala is in a state of stupor, bangs her head, smashes things, inflicts wounds upon her body, burns herself with cigarette stubs, gets drunk, takes drugs in the hope of committing suicide. Haunted by the sights, sounds and memories of her loved ones, she wants to become a specter herself and harasses the people who had rented her parents’ house in Colombo. In the light of recent scholarship, such self-destructive behavior can be interpreted as a trauma victim’s “embodied expression of pain” (Gurung 2018: 32).
18 Loving relatives look after her and keep her physically alive. But trauma is a mental wound which has not only temporal but also spatial implications. Dylan Trigg has argued that “the place of trauma and the subject of trauma form a structurally parallel unity” (2009: 88). The different journeys Deraniyagala’s in-laws and friends make to Sri Lanka, the ritual of memorial services, the identification of the bodies, the retrieval of parts of objects that belonged to her lost ones from the site of the tragedy, the different journeys that she herself makes to England, avoiding her home at first, only setting foot there after almost four years, the remembering of the departed ones in concentric circles — first her children, then her husband, and then the parents — help her spiral her way out of grief and accept the reality of death. Only in the desolate icy landscape of sub-arctic Sweden, far removed from the place, site and scene of her traumatic experience, is she able to find some peace and tranquility. Similarly, the sight of two “otherworldly blue whales” (W186) she watches along the Mirissa coast in Sri Lanka
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finally heals her. It is thanks to her “nature connectedness” (Lumber et al. 2018) that Deraniyagala is able to reconnect with her livable life.
19 When Deraniyagala moves to the US to take up research, this third space helps her set up the right distance from both England and Sri Lanka and start the work of redefining herself. She is now willing to reconcile herself with the children’s storybook identity her younger son Malli had attributed to her, “Mummy Lissenburgh” and which she, as a feminist, had found objectionable. While accepting the PEN/Ackerly Prize for her book in 2014, Deraniyagala remarked: “There is a beauty in struggle and a resting place in the eyes of others […] I have found myself a writer, another identity in the ongoing bewildering journey of my life.” (Quoted by Travis 2018) In a trauma narrative, compassion from others works essentially as a pathway to self-compassion.
20 Deraniyagala qualifies her story telling as a “coming out” (W105) which shows us how a person who has survived an immense danger and unimaginable loss internalizes herself as a totally scarred person capable of frightening others by the monstrosity of her suffering. According to Caruth, it is in the very nature of the trauma narrative to defy and demand our witness. […] [It] tells us of a reality or truth that is not always available. This truth in its delayed appearance and belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and language. (Caruth 1996: 4)
21 Writing a memoir can be seen as Deranyagala’s speech act during which her self- disclosure as a victim liberates her from shame and self-imposed isolation. The empathetic reader understands the anger, the feeling of powerlessness and the impulse to destroy that are conveyed in the words of insult not proffered but inwardly pronounced by Deranyagala in the text and forgives her. It is this secular redemption that she seeks by daring to tell the untellable to a variety of listeners. When her husband Steve was alive, he was fascinated by the statue of the Sri Lankan Buddhist Goddess Tara in the British Museum (Figure 2) and the varadamudra of her right hand (gesture of giving). The benevolent Goddess Tara does not protect him in the moment of crisis. It is his wife who carries centuries of unconscious knowledge of the land embedded in her who survives. Her very survival makes her transcend her human condition and acquire an almost mythical dimension.
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Figure 2. Statue of Tara in the British Museum
Source: https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/ 2014_10/1_6/68b2cd63_7ab2_4aa7_930a_a3b7006954bd/mid_00031550_001.jpg
22 Malli, the author’s 5-year-old son, concocts a story about his true family in America. It consists of his mother Sue, Father Tees and Sister Nelly. They all die eaten by a lion in an African jungle (W138). Malli’s invention of an alternative family in a third country might have been prompted by his postcolonial parents’ telling him that he has two homes (W151), one in England and one in Sri Lanka, and his fantasy of a fixed place of his own that he desires as a cross-cultural child. Deraniyagala uses her son’s story to illustrate the power of stories to help human beings face the unknown and the uncertain. While she is receptive to the cognitive function of storytelling, her mother pays more attention to its potential to penetrate the supernatural. She thinks that Malli is remembering his past life and wants to perform an occult ceremony to moor him to this life.
23 The tremendous interest generated by Wave cannot be explained by the simple human psychology of a few miserable people wanting to feel good by comparing their lot with the harsher one of others, or by the attention provoked by global media coverage. It is an indication of how contemporary human psyche has been sensitized to the deterioration of the environment as an immediate, real and universal menace to life on earth. Deraniyagala’s narrative is akin to a Greek tragedy in that it validates the role of the inexorable force of the non-human in the conduct of human lives, in this case with the primordial form of a wave. The narrative’s aesthetics of ruin and silence contributes to its elegiac tone. Deraniyagala’s real-life wedding to British actress Fiona Shaw in March 2019 provides closure to this story of self-transfiguration by grief.
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There’s No Sea in Salford – The Humanitarian Narrative
24 There’s No Sea in Salford (2013) is a self-published first novel by Philippa Hawley, a retired general medical practitioner from Essex. In 1978, she worked in Sri Lanka for three months and developed a love for the land. Her novel, comprising fifty short chapters, is a plain but gripping narrative written in the third person that incorporates some flashbacks. Its form is hybrid, with elements of a memoir in which the author’s fictional double called Penny opens a personal diary and recalls her three months’ stint in Sri Lanka as a medical student with her friend Jean, combined with the fictional biography of Kiri de Souza, a Sri Lankan medical assistant who migrated to the UK as the legal wife of an Indian Tamil surgeon, the epistolary novel and a profession-based fiction of healing after catastrophes, personal and natural. Thanks to the transnational concerns it encodes, this novel clearly falls within the emerging genre of the humanitarian narrative. It takes for granted what Didier Fassin calls the “humanitarian reason”, in other words, “moral sentiments” that direct our attention to the suffering of others and make us want to remedy them (Fassin 2012: 1). While the trauma narrative is keyed to the empathetic component of compassion, the humanitarian narrative rests on its sympathetic component.
Figure 3. Cover of There’s No Sea in Salford by Philippa Hawley
25 The tsunami that struck the island along with Southern India and Indonesia on Boxing Day 2004 is the event that helps both Penny and Kiri to contact each other and reconnect with Sri Lanka. The title of the novel comes from a remark that Kiri de Souza makes to her brother-in-law about her dead husband’s ashes. “There are no sacred rivers […] There isn't even any sea in Salford” (S136)5 to disperse them, showing the extent to which Kiri has imbibed and internalized both the maritime geography of her
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childhood in Batticaloa and her husband’s Hindu culture which holds waterbodies sacred.
26 The novel opens with the depiction of Kiri de Souza's extremely disturbed physical state when she hears about the tsunami on the radio and worries about her lone mother’s safety. It is as if the ripples of the killer wave had come as far away as Salford to touch her. Parallel to this indoor scene, Hawley paints the outdoor picture of Penny learning about the tsunami in a motorway while driving to Northampton for Christmas celebrations. Her husband Clive stops the car as if to suspend time in order to help his wife, who had been nursing a desire to return to Sri Lanka for 27 years, recollect herself. Penny telephones her friend Jean and they decide to locate Kiri who had accompanied them during their sight-seeing trips in Sri Lanka. They knew she had settled in England but had lost touch with her.
27 Despite the fact that, during the civil war on the island, the Sinhalese majority tried to contain the Tamil minority, in England it is the Sinhalese Kiri who remains an extremely vulnerable woman, locked in an unhappy marriage to a Tamil, Raja Coomaraswamy. Raja abuses her, treats her like a slave and keeps her isolated, virtually in house arrest. What is more, she is a betrayed wife as her husband had hidden that he had an official fiancée before the marriage and later kept a mistress and even fathered a son. She is also a bereaved mother who lost her baby after an 18-week pregnancy which left her sterile. She is, to boot, a cancer patient who lost one breast to the disease and, with it, her confidence as a woman. She embodies the syndrome of “a poor woman and a stranger” because her husband would not let her take a job and confiscated her passport and thus her freedom. In other words, Kiri is an allegory of precarious life.
28 The novel draws a subtle comparison between the tsunami, which is a natural catastrophe, and the physical and social catastrophes that affect Kiri: disease and a failed marriage. Kiri fights back and recovers from the disease, but she is not able to emancipate herself from her husband's clutches. It is his lack of humanity after the tsunami, refusing to take Kiri to see her surviving mother, refusing to send her the money that he promised to send, which prompts Kiri’s rebellion. She chooses to break the walls of her prison by writing letters to her mother and Penny. Though intended as a therapeutic exercise, writing letters in a confessional mode is what enables Kiri to recover her agency. When she gathers the courage to tell her story to Shelley, the social worker, it is as if a dam was broken and the flood of suffering was unleashed. As Penny and Jean come to her rescue through a common doctor friend, Raja retreats from violence like a receding tide.
29 Relief comes to Kiri in the form of the accidental death of her husband. With the help of all the institutional actors in the English system (doctors, nurses, social workers, policemen, coroners, funeral service providers, solicitors, charity volunteers) and their commitment, she is able to cremate her husband, liquidate his estate and return to Batticaloa to see her mother. Kiri's duty of memory towards her community helps her sublimate her necessity to forget a husband who had tormented her. She sets up a charity called “Pearls across the Sea” to help orphaned and damaged children who study at St. Mary’s Mission School where her aged mother, Lali de Souza, works as a cook. This enterprise changes Kiri’s status from a pathetic to a heroic victim.
30 The hovering presence of death haunts the novel: Pauline, Kiri’s friend and cancer patient whom she meets at the hospital, dies a dignified death; each time Kiri goes for a consultation about a tumour, she expects a death sentence; Sam, the friendly
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entrepreneur, who helps Kiri build the nursery school for the charity, loses his elder son to the civil war and his wife to the tsunami; Raja is killed in an accident. But, as a doctor, Hawley takes care to articulate a discourse of healing by showing that Kiri’s return to Sri Lanka signals her rebirth. Kiri is reunited with her mother after both of them have withstood crises of their own. When her mother realizes the extent of trauma that her daughter has gone through, she forgives Kiri for her rebellious marriage and her abandoning her family and home country. This moment of transgenerational reconciliation serves as a stepping-stone for reconstruction — of their lives, the school as well as their country. As a survivor of tragedy, the aged Lali symbolizes resilience. The parallel constructed by the author between her and the strong banyan tree near the school, which was not uprooted by the tsunami and which stands as an immovable sign of continuity and comfort (S189), makes Nature the good mother. Kiri learns resilience from both Nature and her mother when she has to recover from physical exhaustion and failure, and accept the love of Sam to start her life anew.
31 The novel ends with the staging of female solidarity and celebration of the cause of education that cuts across the boundaries of geography, race and class. Kiri, her husband’s former lover, Charmina Patel, to whom he had left some money in his will, Penny, Jean, Shelley and the headmistress of St. Mary’s school, all join hands to inaugurate the new dormitory and nursery of the “Pearls across the Sea” charity. They testify to the triumph of the humanitarian instinct over personal or political considerations. Hawley offers some saving grace in Raja by evoking the discrimination he had faced in his professional life as a migrant in England, compared to his more successful brother Rupesh who settled as a dentist in Canada. It is Rupesh who acts as an instrument of social justice by agreeing to pay a stipend for Raja’s child from his inheritance of the third part of his brother's estate.
32 Readers might find Hawley’s picture-postcard Sri Lanka and the sense of middle class comfort that shows through in her narrative rather ambivalent and her “emergency imaginary”, i.e. believing and portraying the possibility of effective and ameliorative action (Calhoun 2006), rather uncritical. Readers might be tempted to label her work as part of the spectacle of “Suffering at distance” denounced by Luc Boltanski (1999). They might even dismiss it as a rehashed patient’s case history. But Hawley’s is by no means an interventionist gesture. The fact that she has published a second novel on disability and adoption in 2015, How They Met Themselves (named after a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) shows Hawley's writing practice to be “glocal” and a sign of empowerment of women rather than a mere pastime.
Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust in the Eye — A Memorial Narrative of Postponed Mourning
33 Though Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust in the Eye (2014) is the latest of the three narratives from a chronological point of view, it ends with the tsunami scene. The evocation of the post-tsunami landscape remains rather brief. In spite its being a third-person narrative, the focalization on Savi, one of the two female protagonists, a Sri Lankan academic in England like the author, makes the novel almost autobiographical. The other protagonist is Savi’s cousin Renu who, because she has Saturn in her seventh
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house of marriage, chooses to remain single and becomes involved in rehabilitation work on the island.
Figure 4. Cover of A Little Dust in the Eye by Minoli Salgado
34 The title of the novel is a quote of Buddha’s words, cited by Pankaj Mishra is his part- travel, part-philosophical memoir Buddha, An End to Suffering (Mishra 2004: 214), which refers to people whose gaze is somewhat perturbed. The embedded intertextual model is a Holocaust narrative by Jona Oberski entitled Childhood (2014) that Savi carries all the way to Sri Lanka. As the quintessential trauma of recent human history, the Holocaust experience has shaped many of our understandings of personal and collective trauma, as Anna Hunter observes ( 2018: 66-82). The symbolic presence of the Holocaust narrative in Salgado’s novel is a pointer to something unspeakable that the narrator is going to reveal later, i.e. the destruction of childhood and forced disappearances as “human wrongs” (Spivak 2004: 523). It is Natalie, the child of Savi’s friend Hannah, who tells her to go back to Sri Lanka while they are relaxing on the beach at Brighthelm. Natalie can thus be seen as a shadow of Savi’s memory of herself as a child.
35 The strategy of using two protagonists helps the narrator articulate a stereoscopic vision. The several layers that build this complex memorial novel of postponed mourning are: 1. The story of the two Rodrigo brothers — Renu’s father Edward, who marries Fiona, an English woman, and runs a hotel; and Savi's father Dominic, a lawyer who marries a local woman. Dominic is considered as a traitor because he defended the Tamils during the civil war. 2. The story of Savi’s childhood trauma, with her mother dying of illness, her expatriation to England, and her father’s disguised suicide.
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3. The story of Savi’s several journeys to Sri Lanka: on the occasion of her father’s death, during a visit with her husband Rob, and during a family visit to attend her cousin’s marriage and reclaim her heritage. 4. The story of Savi’s writing a thesis in England on the folktales of Sri Lanka, especially The Manticore's Tale. 5. The story of Renu’s unfulfilled love for Kitsiri, her brother’s friend, a soldier in the Sri Lankan army, and her subsequent metamorphosis into a human rights activist and writer. 6. The vendetta of Bradley Sirisena whose trade unionist father is abducted and killed by Kitsiri. 7. The construction of archives by the human rights activist Navin Ranatunga.
36 The narrative also contains some metanarrative remarks about how remembering by writing keeps life going. This self-conscious narrative, therefore, does not fall into the category of literature of compassion. The frame story giving the title of Renu’s book, A Postscript to the Years of Terror, is an invitation to read Salgado’s novel as a subversive political text underscoring the tension between humanitarianism (compassion in the short term) and human rights (ethical practice in the long term).
37 Throughout the novel, the recurring textual strategy is one of syncope. At several crucial points in the novel, speech fails and meaning fades, because the characters fall asleep, are jet-lagged or paralyzed by fear, or washed away by the tide. The frustrating blank felt by the reader sensitizes him/her to the danger of political amnesia by re- enacting the rupture in the continuity of ordinary lives caused by forced disappearances. Of all the three narratives studied in this article, Salgado’s is the most political. Savi quotes from her ongoing PhD thesis in the narrative. In an interview granted to Liam O'Loughlin (2015), Salgado discusses the relationship between creative and scholarly writing, adding that she has taken issue with cultural nationalism in her book on Writing Sri Lanka (2006). Her imaginary ego in the novel, Savi, argues that “the history of Sri Lanka is one of generative violence, of stories that when repeated cause violence again and again" (LDE137).6 The narrative does not shy away from mentioning LTTE activism (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), extra judicial killings during the JVP revolt in 1987-9 (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People's Liberation Front), the farce of democracy in postcolonial Sri Lanka, and human rights abuses. The novel also depicts transitional justice via the attempts made by the rehabilitation centres for families of the disappeared to help survivors.
38 Interwoven into the narrative is the postcolonial issue of home and belonging. Savi is sent not only to a place far away from home, but also to the almost jail-like space of her boarding school. She tells Renu that she will always be a foreigner in England, and not exactly at home in Sri Lanka (LDE174-5). It is no wonder she later falls out with her husband Rob who, during his visit to Sri Lanka, cannot refrain from continually taking photographs, falling a prey to the touristic fever of exotization. Savi extols Thanikama, i.e. being alone and self-possessed like an island. But Rob keeps going back to Sri Lanka even after their divorce, and Rob’s mother organizes her own remarriage in Sri Lanka. The two islands are thus shown to be permanently linked by language and history.
39 Salgado’s narrative is ultimately about forced migration which equates death to the former self. This is symbolized in the novel by the letting go of the child who clings to Savi during the tsunami and whose detached weight unsettles the adult woman and drowns her as well. Talk about a “mobile sense of belonging” makes sense only in closed seminar rooms as the narrator ironically remarks (LDE82). Savi had glimpsed an
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unknown body floating in the river while visiting Sri Lanka upon her father's death. As a child, she did not explore the truth of it. As an adult, when she associates a name (that of Sirisena’s father) with the dead body, she realizes how she too has been unwittingly part of the violence that had engulfed the island. For a migrant, retrieving lost childhood is always already a risky task. When the tremendous force of time has flooded the murky waters of memory, both the body and self are erased.
40 Contrary to Renu, who looks for a good story among muddled facts, the narrator of A Little Dust in the Eyes gives detailed facts about the tsunami (LDE208) among multiple and intertwined stories. The energy released by the tsunami was equivalent to 23,000 atomic bombs. The narrative camera pauses on two physical memorials built to remember the victims. One, containing white steel crescents, is deemed poetic and polysemic by Renu as it performs the duty of memory regarding all the victims. The other, commemorating a capsized train, contains inscriptions in English that are “meant for foreigners” (LDE226). Renu’s decision to write her own version of the country’s human rights record may be viewed as her way to counter the hijacking of the duty of memory by the country’s political elite who perpetuate colonial dependence.
41 A Little Dust in the Eyes is also the only tsunami narrative where the story of Vihara Mahadevi is beautifully retold from the subaltern point of view by the domestic help Josilin. Vihara Mahadevi is the selfless daughter, a counter figure to Sinhabahu,7 the lion-father who punished his son and paved the way for the latter-day Sinhala nationalism (Figure 5). The novel ends with a picture of the surviving Renu writing and reenchanting the world. The embedding of the folktale of Vihara Mahadevi (Figures 6 and 7) in the novelistic text allows Salgado to simultaneously contest the dominant and founding myth of the nation tainted by violence, to empower the female storyteller, and to propose an anti-patriarchal and alternative national myth in which resilience is upheld, rather than violence. Salgado offers a narrative remedy to the political ills of a nation where human rights are in peril.
Figure 5. Flag of Sri Lanka featuring Sinhabahu, the legendary king
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Sri_Lanka.svg
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Figure 6. Representation of the mythical figure of Viharamahadevi (as a princess) near the Dagoba in Tissamaharama
Source: http://www.willgoto.com/images/Size3/ Sri_Lanka_Tissa_P1020391_a10b68bdb856433495d2bd3ddb13a71c.JPG
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Figure 7. Representation of Viharamahadevi almost as a female Buddha in Colombo, Viharamahadevi Park
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viharamahadevi#/media/File:Queen_Viharamahadevi.jpg
Nature and Gender
42 In all three narratives, nature is represented in its nourishing and sustaining role as well as a terrifying force of havoc and death. The very same wilderness of Nature in Sri Lanka that fascinates metropolitan visitors from England becomes a wasteland because of the dark and demonic power of the wave. The description of the debris in all three narratives gives a glimpse of what awaits humanity if humans forget the place of nature in their lives. However, nature’s power to revive and rejuvenate is visible in the fresh green shoots that sprout in the jungle and the birth of birds. It is mirrored in the strength of women, their resilience, their capacity to rebuild their lives and tell their stories.
43 While Salgado’s narrative is overtly feminist, the other two texts discussed in this essay adopt a more balanced approach to gender. The family unit, whether nuclear, extended or recomposed, comes off as fundamental for peace and happiness. The superhuman dimension of the tsunami helps both the insiders and outsiders to look beyond ethnic fratricide and tense race relations. Whether it is through a commitment to ecology, Christian charity or Buddhist detachment, a path to peace, however provisional it may be, is found in all three narratives because, in the words of Shakespeare in Cymbeline, “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers come to dust.”
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NOTES
1. The excellence of Deraniyagala’s well-charted academic itinerary given at the end of her autobiographical narrative of loss and survival contrasts sharply with the unbearable shock and the difficult and slow process of recovery that her book recounts. “Sonali Deraniyagala has an undergraduate degree in economics from Cambridge University and a doctorate in economics from the University of Oxford. She is on the faculty of the Department of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and is a research scholar at Columbia University.” (Deraniyagala 2013: 213). 2. According to the ancient Sanskrit text of the Dharma Sutra, crossing the black waters of the ocean makes Hindus lose their social respectability and cultural roots. 3. As a piece of women’s writing, the novel’s title also indirectly alludes to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931).
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4. All references to Wave are indicated as follows: Wx, where x is the page number. 5. All references to There is No Sea in Salford are indicated as follows: Sx, where x is the page number. 6. All references to A Little Dust in the Eyes are indicated as follows: LDEx, where x is the page number. 7. According to the founding myth of Sri Lanka, a Bengali princess married a lion. Out of this union was born Sinhabahu (who kills his own father) and his sister Sinhasivali. Their incestuous union gave birth to Vijaya, who was exiled to Lanka and had to build a new civilization. In 1961, the acclaimed Sri Lankan writer Ediriweera Sarachchandra wrote a play entitled Sinhabahu.
ABSTRACTS
The ancient Tamil epic Silappatikaram describes the flourishing portal city of Puhar and Manimekalai tells the story of how it was engulfed by the sea. The Sri Lankan chronicles Thupavamsa and Mahavamsa speak of another tsunami that was to have swallowed the kingdom of Kelani Tissa. The brave princess Vihara Mahadevi appeased the anger of nature that was intended for her father who had ill-treated a Buddhist monk by sacrificing herself. Surprisingly she survived. Almost two thousand years later, a daughter of the Island survives the tsunami of 2004 while tragically losing her parents, her husband and two sons in Wave (2013) by Sonali Deraniyagala. Deraniyagala’s story about coping with loss and grief and surviving shuttles between two Islands – England and Sri Lanka. The love of Sri Lanka surfaces in the humanitarian approach of Dr. Philippa Hawley, a British physician who had performed her internship in Sri Lanka and published There’s No Sea in Salford in 2013. The doctor-narrator Penny tries to re- establish contact with Kiri de Souza who was working as a nurse in the hospital where she did her internship in Sri Lanka and had married a Tamil doctor and settled in England. A story of liberation from cancer and domestic violence ensues that is enlarged and translated into a story of solidarity with the vulnerable in Sri Lanka. Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust in the Eyes (2014) evokes the close relationship between Renu and Savi, two cousins separated by civil war. During the trip to Sri Lanka from England undertaken to come to grips with her childhood, Savi is not able to retrieve anything but is helplessly swept away in the fatal swell of the sea. The aim of this paper is to first identify the type of narratives that insiders and outsiders choose to write when addressing the tsunami, then analyze what these tsunami narratives tell us about gender, family, ethnic, and race relations in times of personal, political and natural catastrophes. This paper finally explores how a pathway to peace is found across the geography of pain in these intimations of mortality.
L'ancienne épopée tamoule Silappatikaram évoque la ville portuaire prospère de Puhar et Manimekalai mentionne la vague mortelle qui l'avait engloutie. Les chroniques sri lankaises Thupavamsa et Mahavamsa parlent d'une autre vague qui devait avaler le royaume de Kelani Tissa. La brave princesse Vihara Mahadevi apaisât la colère de la nature destinée à son père qui avait maltraité un moine bouddhiste en se sacrifiant. Étonnamment, elle a survécu. Près de deux mille ans plus tard, une fille de l'île survit au tsunami de 2004 alors qu'elle perdait tragiquement ses parents, son mari et ses deux fils dans Wave (2013), un récit de Sonali Deraniyagala, où l’auteur raconte comment elle tente de faire face à la perte, au deuil et au vent-et-vient entre deux îles - Angleterre et Sri Lanka – et de survivre. L'amour du Sri Lanka transparaît dans l'approche
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humanitaire du Dr Philippa Hawley, un médecin qui a effectué son stage au Sri Lanka, dans son roman There’s No Sea in Salford (2013). La médecin-narratrice Penny essaie de rétablir le contact avec Kiri de Souza qui travaillait comme infirmière à l'hôpital où elle avait fait son stage, qui a ensuite épousé un médecin tamoul et s'est installée en Angleterre. Une histoire de libération du cancer et de la violence domestique s'ensuit et se traduit par un récit de solidarité avec les personnes vulnérables au Sri Lanka. A Little Dust in the Eyes de Minoli Salgado (2014) évoque la relation étroite entre Renu et Savi, deux cousines séparées par la guerre civile. Au cours de ce voyage au Sri Lanka entrepris en vue de se réconcilier avec son enfance, Savi n'est pas en mesure de récupérer quoi que ce soit et est balayée dans la houle mortifère de la mer. L'objectif de cette étude est d'abord d'identifier le type de récit que choisissent les auteures pour écrire le tsunami (avec un point de vue interne ou externe), puis d'analyser ce que ces récits du tsunami nous enseignent sur le genre, la famille, le groupe ethnique et les relations raciales en période de catastrophes personnelles, politiques et naturelles, et enfin de voir comment un chemin vers la paix se dessine à travers la géographie de la douleur dans ces intimations de la mortalité.
INDEX
Keywords: tsunami, narrative, trauma, survival, solidarity, childhood, migration, death, Sri Lanka, Deraniyagala Sonali, Hawley Philippa, Salgado Minoli Mots-clés: tsunami, récit, trauma, survie, solidarité, enfance, migration, mort, Sri Lanka, Deraniyagala Sonali, Hawley Philippa, Salgado Minoli
AUTHOR
GEETHA GANAPATHY-DORÉ Geetha Ganapathy-Doré is a Research Accredited Associate Professor of English at the Faculty of Law, Political and Social Sciences, University of Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité. She is an active member of the CREA research centre at Nanterre University. She is the author of The Postcolonial Indian Novel in English (2011). She has coedited several books among which On the Move, The Journey of Refugees in New Literatures in English (2012) and Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema (2017), published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Comme la pluie qui tombe sur la terre rouge is the title of her translation of some ancient Tamil poems published by Po&Psy (2016). Her recent research revolves around India EU relations, Human Rights issues and Postcolonial cinema. She is the current President of SARI. Contact: geetha.dore[at]univ-paris13.fr
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The Sea as Metaphor in Alec Derwent Hope’s “Man Friday” and Christopher Brennan’s “Each Day I See the Long Ships Coming into Port”
Malati Mathur
1 The sea beckons to the artistic and creative consciousness and countless writers have made it a significant part of their works either as a geographical entity or, even more frequently, as a symbol and a metaphor, a vehicle for their ideas. “Literature and hymnology are replete with such reflection, rendering the sea a symbolic and metaphorical narrative device rather than a real place” (Mack 2011: 17). J. A.Tillman declares that its surrounding the entire substance of the world, its agelessness, its ‘undefinability’, and at the same time its pervasive, elementary materiality make the sea the widest possible metaphor of existence (2012:11).
2 Spanning across continents, eras and cultures, the sea has beckoned to the human imagination in ways that few other forces have.
3 The ancient Vedantic scriptures compare the awakening of the consciousness to a wave rising from the sea and the sea itself is likened to the vastness of the universal nature: just as there are individual waves which rise and fall but remain one with the ocean, the individual nature of people may be separate but remains a part of the fundamental essence of the whole. For Nietzsche, the frequently used image of the sea symbolized uncharted moral waters on which he exhorted people to set sail. Walt Whitman in some of his poems offers us the sea as a metaphor for immortality while the ship is a metaphor for the human passage of life from birth to death. Another of his contemporaries, Henry David Thoreau saw the sea as a metaphor for the enhancement of the human mind as well as the boundless nature and reach of capability.
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4 Water has come to symbolize birth or renewal or at any rate, an experience that may suggest some sort of transformation. One could even say that the metaphor of the sea seems to bracket our lives, with its associations with our pre-natal origins and the ultimate flow to death. The amniotic fluid that cushions a baby in the womb for months before it is born is saline, like the sea. At the same time, in the river’s eventual merger with the vastness of the ocean lies the metaphor of death, of the individual soul becoming one with the Infinite, the Oversoul.
5 The ocean has very often been seen as a metaphor for consciousness and in the realm of psychology, dreams about or related to the ocean may be seen to represent the unconscious that is at times calm and, at others, turbulent.
6 In the two poems taken up for discussion in this article, the sea is fraught with multiple meanings; poets Alec Derwent Hope and Christopher Brennan both play with the ideas of journey by sea, exile, isolation and home in vastly different ways, and the poems poignantly embody the notions of loss and regaining. Whereas Hope’s poem deals at length with the life that Daniel Defoe’s Man Friday leads after he reaches the shores of England, Brennan imagines the thoughts and feelings that course through the travellers’ minds when their ship touches the shores of Australia.
Revisiting and Reframing of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in A.D. Hope’s “Man Friday”
7 A. D. Hope’s poem “Man Friday” (1972: 122), originally published in 1958, begins where Daniel Defoe leaves off his tale, and takes up the story of Man Friday after Robinson Crusoe “by all his years of exile undeterred,/ Took into exile Friday and the bird.” The revising, rewriting and reframing of texts that have long been considered as classics is a way of presenting a counterpoint to the prevailing canonical voice. They can thus be said to be new ways of reading and interpreting texts. The telling of a story from another point of view can be seen as an attempt to explore, and perhaps bridge, the spaces and silences in a text in order to give voice to the hitherto ignored. If writing is regarded as a strong form of control — culturally and morally —,the rewriting and reframing of texts that featured (often male) superiority at their core can be viewed as an act of liberation for those who were depicted as subordinate or inferior. The text, so revised and rewritten, is inevitably oppositional; it questions and regenerates the established text; it fleshes out, extends and gives an added dimension to certain characters that have been portrayed as inferior or have been relegated to a position of neglect; it challenges the authority of the prevailing text.
8 The revisiting of canonical texts (e.g. Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre in Jean Rhys’s 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea, the Mahabharata in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s 2008 The Palace of Illusions) which are often radical re-interpretations of the original, have been both the cause and the consequence of much work in the area of cultural studies. They specially relate to marginalised sections of society such as women, ‘lower’ races and castes, tribal and aboriginal communities, and so on. The reframing has been made based on the recognition that the earlier narratives were told from the perspective of the mainstream culture with all its attendant attitudes and values, and this most often resulted in a neglect and/or oppression of those who were not considered as part of the mainstream.
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9 In A. D. Hope’s poem, Crusoe, rescued through Providence and now, “no less providential”, takes Friday along with him to live in “England’s Desert Island” without a thought for what that voyage would entail for Friday. Hope makes it clear that the decision was entirely Crusoe’s. His decision to take Friday away to England is similar to the forced transportation of slaves from Africa. The completely alien culture that Friday now encounters requires a massive readjustment of his mental and spiritual compass and the sea runs like an undercurrent through the entire poem even though it is not mentioned in so many words.
10 Hope views the sea as metaphor in other poems as well. In “The End of a Journey” for instance, he refers to Ulysses “grimly” watching “his enemy, the sea” ringing his kingdom as an old man returned from his adventures, “a castaway on so cruel a shore!” (1972: 1). This line echoes in the reader’s mind and Friday, uprooted from his native island, is then perceived to be as much a castaway as Ulysses on a “cruel shore”.
11 It is a mirror image of what Crusoe had to undergo as a survivor on Friday’s island where he had to contrive ways and means to stay alive: to pick stuff off the wreck — biscuits and nails and his “firestick” — and endeavour to build, bake and brew, stitch a coat or cobble a shoe. But for Friday, it is not so much food, shelter and warmth for his body that he has to arrange but “shelter for the solitary mind” and ways to “warm his wits and keep the heart alive.” It is not enough to nourish the body for the mind has to develop ways of dealing with loneliness and alienation and to “protect among the cultured, […] the natural man.” Whereas Crusoe had to make clothes to cover his nakedness, conversely, Friday has to “labour to invent his nakedness”, to return to a state of elemental being like the elemental force of the sea on the shore of which he had been born and raised. There is also a reference to cannibal practices associated with “island feasts” and which is echoed in a different context later on in the poem.
12 Afraid that the strange customs of the land of his exile may swallow him up without a trace — like a ship sunk into the depths of the sea — Friday has to keep his legends and language alive by repeating them to himself every night. Memories swirl around his brain as he goes over and over his life on his island where everything revolved around the sea — “[…] wet canoes nosing the still lagoon”, the “spicy mess of yam and fish” and the “island feasts”.
13 Edouard Glissant says that, in the context of the transport of black slaves — of people who were forcibly carried away from their homes over the sea and pressed into bondage —, the sight and very notion of the sea during their voyage to an unknown destination appears as: […] a pale murmur; you do not know if it is a storm cloud, rain or drizzle, or smoke from a comforting fire. The banks of the river have vanished on both sides of the boat. What kind of river, then, has no middle? Is nothing there but straight ahead? Is this boat sailing into eternity toward the edges of a non-world that no ancestor will haunt? Paralleling this mass of water, the third metamorphosis of the abyss thus projects a reverse image of all that had been left behind, not to be regained for generations except — more and more threadbare — in the blue savannas of memory or imagination (1997: 6-7).
14 For Glissant, since the sea carries the dreadful cargo of humans destined to be slaves in exile, it is to be viewed as an accomplice to the crime that is being committed on its waters. The same can be said of Hope’s poem as Crusoe carries Friday away over the sea into exile.
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15 For all Friday’s efforts to pile “memories against his need”, he finds that the past gradually recedes as he gets more and more pulled into his new life with all its strange customs. The past does not vanish in one go, naturally. It “recedes” like the shore of his island home must have — dropping away down the horizon as the ship carrying Friday away moved out into deeper waters until finally the island could no longer be glimpsed at all. The journey away from home is “the rupture with the matrix […] the beginning of the uprooted memory” and the attempt to hold on to the memories is akin to “a sea to be crossed, between real and memory. […] The sea is in you. You have to reach it, above oblivion.” (Glissant 1969: 188-9, quoted by Bonnet 2002: 15).
16 In the years that follow, Friday is transformed into “an upper servant” who learns how to dress, eat, speak and conduct himself in accordance with his position. And when “his master, thoughtful for his need”, arranges to get a wife for him and gives “him leave to breed” (the irony is unmistakeable), Friday manages to set up a household and soon becomes a family man, although his “mulatto” wife thinks she is too good for the likes of him — “a low native Indian from the wood”.
17 Where are the gods that Friday once worshipped? Having been “brushed, barbered, hatted, trousered and baptized”, Friday now looks “civilized”, a manservant who knows his place and performs all his valet tasks to perfection. The gradual acceptance of the way of life that is thrust upon Friday, his transformation (and quiet resignation) into a menial well versed in domestic chores, his subsequent marriage and children, take him farther and farther away from his memories of home and encase him within an artificial persona adrift on a pitiless sea. England has appeared to devour him completely like a “Cannibal Island” or like the sea that swallows entire ships and keeps them concealed in its depths. The sea then has deconstructed the person that Friday was before he was carried off by Crusoe and then reconstructed him again as he takes up a new life in England under the training of his master. The cannibalistic practices associated with Friday’s native island are now evoked ironically to signify England, the land of his exile which has swallowed up the man that he once was.
18 And so, Friday takes “root in England” and earns a good reputation for himself in his circles. The plant that was uprooted from its native shore has been carried by the sea waves to establish itself on another beach much like the waves are wont to do with various sea grasses. And yet, in spite of all the outward accoutrements of the ‘”civilized man” and the fact that he appeared to be “resigned” and then “content”, vestiges of his former (real?) life still gleam in his eyes or in his speech — “some colouring of speech, some glint of pride”. Like the sea which may appear outwardly serene but conceals in its depths the currents of an approaching storm, Friday’s demeanour masks a turbulence as is revealed towards the end of the poem.
19 One day, Friday accompanies his master to a seaport and hears the ocean’s beckoning roar for the first time in many years. The ancient sound of wild wind and tide beating against the shore does not allow him to fall into slumber that night — unlike Crusoe who, unmoved by the crashing of the waves on the beach, soon falls asleep. Friday, on the other hand, lies sleepless on his bed all night, listening to the primordial music and regular rhythm of the breakers. The sounds of the sea fill his entire being, dredging up perhaps long-forgotten memories rising up like the mammoths of the sea that were thought to have become extinct.
20 The hypnotic reverberation of the most elemental forces of nature, “that tremendous voice so long unheard” is like the sirens’ song that drew many a sailor to their doom. In
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Homer’s epic, Ulysses had himself roped to the mast to escape from the sirens. In Hope’s “The End of a Journey”, the man ruefully muses after his return to his kingdom: “To have heard the sirens sing and yet have fled” only to return as an old man to sleep “with his housekeeper”. Friday does not — cannot — resist the call of the ocean however, and finally feels compelled to make his way down to the seashore as dawn breaks.
21 The pale light of the pre-sunrise moments reveals the dunes, the rocks and the beach stretching away for miles; wet sand is freshly brought in by the ever-incoming waves into the bay as plumes of foam rise like smoke from the crests of the billows that beat against the shore in exactly the same way they did in his long-lost island home. As Friday surveys the scene assailed by who knows what upsurges of memory and nostalgia, he sees, in a heart-stopping moment, the imprint of a bare foot on the sand.
22 Friday recognizes that the indentation in the sand had been made by someone who had never worn a shoe and could not be an European but only such a one as he who, at an earlier time, lost in the mists of the sea spray, could identify certainly the tribe of the person the print belonged to as well as the purpose of the journey. With a stab of remembrance, he realizes that he had made such prints too so very long ago and that his eyes were not mistaken in identifying it for what it was now. It seems entirely probable that Hope had the indigenous Australians in mind when he wrote this poem and the mention of a bare footprint on the beach brings up a number of connotations — the indigenous peoples’ imprint on the sands of time, for instance, with their ancient songs, beliefs and way of life completely attuned to nature pitted against the imposition of the coloniser’s alien practices.
23 As Friday stands looking out at the “grey German Ocean’s flood”, the sight of his home flashes upon him suddenly as though he had been transported in a moment to the shore where “Orinoco pours into the main” and hears the cries of “spirits silent now for many a day”. And, like a snake sloughing off its skin, “all his years of exile fell away.” The song of the ocean, the rush of memory and Friday’s response to the call of the sea crystallize in the ending of the poem.
24 The lonely years of exile spent away from the sounds and sights of all that he had grown up with are all subsumed into that one moment when he discards all the accoutrements of ‘civilization’ as he takes off his European clothing and rushes to meet the waves and be submerged in them. Drowning in the sea waters is far, far better than to remain in a state of artificial limbo pretending to be what he was not and could never be. The isolation that the sea symbolises appears less terrifying than the isolation of the inauthentic life on shore and it throws up existential questions related to concepts of liberty and free will.
25 When Crusoe comes looking for his faithful servant at noon, he follows the footprints on the beach, finds Friday’s clothes and shoes abandoned on the sand and grieves as he guesses that he has drowned. However, when the sea returns Friday’s body to the shore later in the day, Crusoe does not realize that “Friday had been rescued and gone home.”
26 From a certain perspective, Friday’s choice of death by drowning might suggest both surrender and empowerment. Being compelled to live a life such as Hope describes in his poem, Friday is ultimately drawn towards the unceasingly murmuring sea that subtly holds out an invitation to meander through its chasms of solitude. When he allows himself to be submerged in a final gesture which symbolises a giving up of the
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new man and the alien life that he leads, as well as a regaining of his old self, it is as if the wave has finally reached its shore.
27 What can be said about someone preferring to embrace death rather than continue with a life that, to all intents and purposes, was a ‘comfortable’ one? To make assumptions on someone else’s behalf without ever pausing to think or ask them what their ideas or wishes are; to make life-altering decisions arbitrarily for someone else; to infer, from the outward serenity of the person that they are content with what has been provided to them — are all egoistic and offensive. And yet this has always been the practice of the powerful. Similarly, to conclude that one’s own culture and customs are superior and that the ‘others’ require to be ‘educated’ out of their own beliefs and drawn into a foreign way of life has been the way of colonizers throughout the ages.
28 A.D. Hope’s poem not only raises issues of choice, ‘savagery’ versus ‘civilization’ and the arrogation of power over the lives of those who are not as strong and are painfully vulnerable, it also envisions the sea as both a dividing barrier leading to exile and a welcoming bosom into the embrace of which to return is to go ‘home’. Hope infuses the narrative with the resonances of forced transportation, exile, barriers, division and finally, home. Seen through the postcolonial lens, Hope’s narrative of the story of Man Friday is a re-telling from a hitherto ignored perspective which turns Defoe’s classic inside out and offers a critical view of the power of European imperial superiority and whiteness which, as Delys Bird says in the context of the ‘settling’ of Australia and the consequent naming and mapping of it in the English language, were naturalised as normative standards in English (1998: 23). By revisiting and reframing the canon, Hope gives voice to a character who has been silenced and lives in our collective consciousness only as the symbol of a faithful slave.
The Shaping of Australia by the Migrant Experience in Christopher Brennan’s “Each Day I See the Long Ships Coming Into Port”
29 Brennan’s poem “Each Day I See the Long Ships Coming Into Port” (1913) may be seen as addressing the very core of the Australian experience — the waves of migration from the farthest points of the earth which have shaped the culture and ethos of the continent of Australia in myriad ways. While it is part of the cycle of 14 poems in “The Wanderer”, in which many critics see the figure of the poet himself, the poem can be interpreted in terms that are broader than the theme of personal quests. And, although H. M. Green does not entirely subscribe to the view of “The Wanderer” being an ‘Australian’ poem “except (for) the birth and residence of its author; and also because it is too large to be tied down by purely Australian comparisons” (1961: 522), emerging as it does, from the pen of an Australian poet, it may not be too out of place to see it as reflections on the migrant experience, even if this is not openly mentioned in the poem. Further, the theme of spiritual exile has an undeniably Australian resonance.
30 In spite of popular misconceptions — even among the educated — it is historically inaccurate to believe that the early travellers to Australia were only convicts. The first fleet of convicts went to Australia in 1788 and, in 1793, the first free emigrants came ashore. Migrants from England, Ireland and later from other parts of Europe came to Australia, attracted by dreams of a better life. Dickens and Trollope, for instance, would
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send their sons to Australia. Many upper-class sons were shipped off to Australia if they didn’t do well academically or were embroiled in a scandal. In 1831, the British government funded migration to Australia. The discovery of gold in 1851 furthered the influx of migrants. Australia rather rapidly (in 72 years) was transformed from a penal colony into a democracy, beginning with the establishment of legislative assemblies in 1855-1856. The migrants departed their homelands in fear and hope — fear of what they might encounter, the novelty of the unknown continent, and hope that they would have a future that would be in many ways better than what they could have looked forward to in the home country.
31 When we look at “The Wanderer” as a whole, while there is the motif of the quest, it does not appear to offer a specific goal sought by the wanderer. There is the implication of a personal sense of loss, an impulse that keeps the wanderer moving; or the wanderer is perhaps someone who does not feel at home anywhere, who can rest for only very short periods before embarking on his next journey. In the Latin epigraph, the wanderer tells us that his yearning for the "hidden heart", has made him become one with the "viewless winds” — strongly invoking in our mind’s eye, the figure conjured up by Pablo Neruda, who declares that he needs the sea because it teaches him and that, even when he sleeps, he moves “in the university of waves” and the “the still power, out there, resolute,” impels him to dedicate himself to the vibrancy of kinetic energy, to give his “commitment to its pure movement” (2003: 3).
32 Brennan refers to the sea in some of the other Wanderer set of poems, viewing it as “the ever-restless, ever-complaining sea” for instance; or he laments that his “mind drifts wide / where the blessing is shed for naught on the salt waste of the sea”. He addresses the restless waters of the ocean: “0 waves of all the seas, would I could give you peace / and find my peace again” (where the poet appears to seek oblivion in the sea), and in his evoking of “white delirious crests”, he seems to suggest a rapturous and wild involvement in life while at the same time the association with death is paradoxically brought in by the phrase "black maw of hunger" which, as it opens wide just as each wave thunderously meets the shore, is heavy with the idea of death, exile and a dark despondency.
33 At another point, the contradictory nature of his longing is again expressed — when he is shut inside, crouching over the hearth, he longs for the freedom of the waste; but when he is battling the elements alone, he longs for the warmth of a home. The Wanderer poems have an unmistakeable underlying thread of restlessness and melancholia running through them and they convey a mood of restlessness — “I would spread the sail to any wandering wind of the air this night / when waves are hard and rain blots out the land” — and the figure of the Wanderer evokes the Nomads described by A. D. Hope: Where ever they chance to stop, the roads go on, To nowhere, to anywhere. For them the one Despair is a fixed roof, a permanent stay. (1975: 5)
34 In “Each Day I See the Long Ships Coming Into Port”, there is a strong sense of having reached the end of a quest, to a place which might offer succour and the travellers are pictured as filled with hope and gladness at the sight of land. While it is possible to trace the metaphor of the sea in Brennan’s Wanderer poems and connect it with the wanderer motif, the focus, for the purposes of this particular paper, is on drawing out
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the implications of the references to the sea, ships and travellers and relate them to the other poem under consideration — A. D. Hope’s “Man Friday”.
35 The poet muses as he looks at the ships sailing into the port with people crowding the rail, glad to be in sight of land at last, that it is because they have been so long out on the waters, “to have been alone with the sea”, away from firm land and the daily commerce of the world, “not to have known / of anything happening in any crowded way.” The first glimpse of land after they have been tossed on the sea waves for months at a time erases in a moment all the hardships and loneliness that they may have felt when surrounded by the expanse of the sea seemingly stretching away to infinity. The reader wonders: what were their hopes and fears as the waves rocked their vessel — a microscopic speck amongst the rolling crests? Did the past revolve in their minds and did the future seem to be one holding out promise? What did the waves prophesy?
36 In the midst of their trepidation and anticipation, one effect that the voice of “the crooning” sea has had is to charm “away the old rancours”. The often monotonous sound of the waves and the force of the wind “have search’d and swept their hearts” of all their old grudges and bitterness — brushed the slate clean as it were, so that they are now in a position to make a fresh start in a new land. Steinberg recalls “the complexity of the ocean as a mobile space whose very essence is constituted by its fluidity and that thereby is central to the flows of modern society” (2013: 160).
37 The people who crowd to the deck in Brennan’s poem appear to be ready to have the pages that have been scrubbed clean by the voyage over the sea filled up with new stories, fresh experiences, different songs, other relationships. In this sense, they are different from Hope’s Friday as he was transported over the sea not by choice but by compulsion and had no idea what identity he would be forced to assume.
38 In a lecture to a group of architects in 1967, Michael Foucault called the ship at sea the “heterotopia par excellence”, a space of alternate social ordering (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986: 27). This is where boundaries are blurred and finally eliminated altogether till the only social order that exists is that of ‘humanhood’, as it were. To link the ship to the sea needs no explanation, given their close and inextricable connection. And it is the ship which conveys the travellers over the sea to either a life of exile or one of burgeoning promise.
39 To the travellers, it is perhaps of not much significance that they have come to an alien land — a country that might require a great deal of adaptation before it will finally seem like ‘home’. This could refer to the settlers and colonialists’ first gaze on the environment, with undertones of how they perceived the Australian landscape, harsh and inhospitable, and how taming the land was a prerequisite to settlement. The long voyage with nothing but the sound of the waves and the sight of the sea to keep them company must have been fraught with anxiety and loneliness so that any land that can be glimpsed is welcome — “to their freshen’d gaze, each land smiles a good home” — and the prospect of landing on terra firma once more, walking with other human beings again, is a thrilling one. While they may have left their native lands with hearts bitter at their fellow humans’ perfidy or the sorrow of persecution of all kinds, the disappointment that they may have felt is now swept away by the sea and the wind. All the negative feelings are no more than the foam on the waves as they find themselves at the rail of the ship longing to take up life afresh from where they had temporarily left it off.
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40 The isolation and loneliness that can be inferred here could also be interpreted in the context of Australia’s isolated status in terms of European culture and the fine arts, as well as its spiritual isolation. As Clive James comments, “No Australian poet before Christopher Brennan was fully conscious of the artistic problem posed by isolation from Europe” (1980: 6). The sea could be viewed as a ring of insulation as well because it was perceived as separating Australia and Europe. While, on the one hand, there were writers like Hope (instrumental in fashioning an Australian national imagination) who bemoaned the fact that creative people in Australia could not rise above their European mindset — they were “second-hand Europeans” to use his memorable phrase —, others like Brennan, in Clive James’s words again, were “fully disabled by it”.
41 A new world — as much as the vast ocean — might be overpoweringly frightening, concealing unknown shoals and reefs. But — and this is what the travellers ultimately would focus on — this world also holds out the promise of liberty which brings with it individual advancement and success leading to happiness.
42 In one sense, there is the acknowledgement that the sea — and by extension, nature — has the power to calm, heal and revive the human spirit by washing away all bitterness and prepare it to face the trials of the world with a renewed faith. The people and the ships could be said to symbolise the essentially restless, searching mind and eternally unsatisfied spirit of human consciousness. The quest and thirst for adventure motivates many to pull up their roots and leave home and hearth for unknown shores and possible dangers — history is full of tales of intrepid explorers and migrants who, by sailing forth on uncharted waters, have mapped and shaped the world as we know it today.
43 The erroneous perception that Australia lacked antiquity (the white colonialists could see no history of the continent before their arrival), saw a number of writers and political figures take up a stance wherein a belief in the future replaced lingering concerns with history. The ship is thus an appropriate metaphor since, viewed in the light of this belief, it can be seen to symbolise prophecy, anticipation and a reaching out to other cultures.
44 As the travellers watch their homeland recede, their identities drift away too. For the wanderers, the sea is the means to escape from the constraints of their previous life; by abandoning their former selves and allowing it to sink into the sea, as it were, they find themselves free to create whole, happy, unfettered selves in the new world. It is a world of shifting, fragmented identities. Like the sea, identity too is fluid and dynamic — assuming new shapes and forms and always open to relocations and repositioning. Friday, on being conveyed over the sea to England, is assigned a new identity. The travellers on the ship that Brennan sees are eager and prepared to forego their previous selves and be driven towards the forging of a new persona.
45 The poet/narrator feels a twinge of envy as he glimpses the open happiness of the people crowding the rail as they drift closer and closer to the port; he is driven to question this sudden unexpected emotion. Would he like to be in their place, to wander “hither and thither upon the earth and grow weary / with seeing many lands and peoples and the sea”? Would he like to take up the nomadic life of a wanderer, leading a rootless, unsteady sort of life? The question makes him pause to examine his own feelings. Not having thought of this before, he suddenly, in all certainty, feels that if he could be sure of a welcome and a chance to rest his troubled mind somewhere, he too might take the opportunity to spread his sails wide and catch a wandering wind,
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allowing it to take him where it will. Is this a sign that all is not well in the poet/ narrator’s own life? The lines “but if I might, someday, landing I reck not where / have heart to find a welcome and perchance a rest” indicate that it might make no difference where he went because he would carry with him everywhere the same feelings that trouble him now. He needs to come to terms with whatever is troubling him and only then will his heart allow him to find welcome and rest wherever he may be.
46 Macainsh comments that “The poet questions his envy but admits that he ‘would spread the sail to any wandering wind’ if he might find a welcome and rest. This is the aim of wandering, not to see ‘many lands and peoples and the sea’, but to find rest.” (1974: 25) For many, the journey is the objective, regardless of what lies at the end of it. The sheer kinetic energy that informs the sway and power of the waves and winds is a goal to be aspired for in itself.
47 The poet wishes to set sail too, not to see many lands and peoples but to find an abode of repose as the people arriving in the long ships aspire to and may find in this new country. For them, in stark contrast to Friday’s voyage to England, the voyage does not signify exile but a coming home, a land full of promise with the potential for great happiness and peace. Brennan, or the narrator, can be seen as the romantic, isolated observer, and the poem which begins with a wide-angle view narrows down and zooms into the personal space as it travels across the perceived feelings of the travellers to the narrator’s own.
48 The setting of Brennan’s poem is the point where the land meets the sea and the dominant image is of travellers reborn from the sea, washed clean of memories. In this amorphous space which is neither land nor water, there is a negation of the claims of any particular culture to possess absolute or universal truths or the ‘right’ way of life. The ending of Hope’s poem, the climax, is set in this very same space. The movement is away — from the country that Friday wishes to leave behind, the sand that ushers in the entry into the sea and towards the submerging tide — while in Brennan’s poem the action moves in the opposite direction: the ship approaches land and the passengers leave the sea behind and turn their faces and steps towards the new country. For the travellers described by Brennan, the sea is a means of transit, a vehicle that conveys them to a destination. For Friday, on the other hand, the sea itself is the destination, the home into which he finally retreats.
49 If the sea appears in Hope’s poem as a symbol of exile, the recognition of despair, and finally a refuge, Brennan’s sea is one of hope brimming with the promise of new beginnings. In that sense, they may be viewed as offering different perspectives of the sea, but both poems deal with voyages and the changes wrought upon the seafarers thereof, following the journey. For William Boelhower, the sea “leaves no traces. And has no place names, towns or dwelling places; it cannot be possessed.” (2008: 92).
50 No, the sea can never be possessed. It can only possess and possess absolutely.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bird, Delys. “The ‘Settling’ of English”. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss (eds), The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1998.
Boelhower, William. “The Rise of the New Atlantic Studies Matrix.” American Literary History 20 (1-2), March 2008: 83-101. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajm051
Bonnet, Véronique. “Maritime Poetics: the Atlantic, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean Seas in the Work of Saint-John Perse, Edouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott”. Trans. Natalie Schon. Journal of Caribbean Literatures 3:2 “The Caribbean That Is?” (Spring 2002): 13-22. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40986127
Brennan, Christopher. “Each Day I See the Long Ships Coming into Port”. A.R. Chisholm and John Joseph Quinn (eds). The Verse of Christopher Brennan. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1960.
Foucault, Michel and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces”. Diacritics 16 (1) Spring, 1986: 22-7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/464648
Green, H. M. History of Australian Literature. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1961.
Glissant, Edouard. “The Open Boat,” Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Harbor: The U of Michigan P, 1997.
Glissant, Edouard. L’Intention poétique. Paris: Gallimard, coll. L’Imaginaire, 1969.
Hope, A. D. “Man Friday” and “The End of a Journey”. Collected Poems 1930-1970. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972.
Hope, A. D. Unpublished Notebooks: Hope Collection, The National Library of Australia, Books I- XXII [1975].
James, Clive. “Australia’s Nineties. Review of Christopher Brennan: A Critical Biography by Axel Clark.” London Review of Books 4:13 (1982): 6-8. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n13/clive- james/australia-s-nineties
Macainsh, N. L. “Structure and Theme in Brennan’s ‘The Wanderer’”. LINQ 3 (3,4) 1974: 24-33. https://journals.jcu.edu.au/linq/article/view/466
Mack, John. The Sea. A Cultural History. London: Reaction Books, 2011.
Neruda, Pablo. “El Mar”. Translated Alistair Reid. On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea. New York: Rayo, 2003.
Steinberg, PE. “Of Other Seas: Metaphors and Materialities in Maritime Regions.” Atlantic Studies 10:2 (2013): 156-69. Doi: 10.1080/14788810.2013.785192
Tillmann, J.A. “I Have Seen the Sea”. Philologica 4.1 (2012): 5-13.
ABSTRACTS
In both Alec Derwent Hope's and Christopher Brennan's poems, the sea is fraught with multiple meanings. Both poets play with the ideas of journey by sea, exile, isolation and home in vastly different ways. A. D. Hope infuses it with the resonances of exile, barriers, division, and finally, home. The poem begins from where Daniel Defoe leaves off his tale, taking up the story of Man
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Friday after he is brought by Robinson Crusoe to live in ‘England’s Desert Island’. The completely alien culture that Friday now encounters requires a massive readjustment of his mental and spiritual compass and the sea runs like an undercurrent through the entire poem even when it is not mentioned in so many words. The gradual acceptance of the way of life that is thrust upon him, his transformation (and quiet resignation) into an upper class servant and subsequent marriage and children take him farther and farther away from his memories and encase him within an artificial persona — until the day he accompanies his master to a sea port and hears the ocean’s beckoning roar after many years. The song of the ocean, the rush of memory and Friday’s response to the call of the sea crystallize in the ending of the poem. The poem not only raises issues of choice, ‘savagery’ versus ‘civilization’ and the arrogation of power over lives, it also envisions the sea as both a dividing barrier leading to exile and a welcoming bosom into the embrace of which to return is to go ‘home’. Brennan’s poem can be interpreted as addressing the very core of the Australian experience — the waves of migration from the farthest points of the earth which have shaped the culture and ethos of this continent in myriad ways. It is the sea that has conveyed the hopeful migrants hence and is invoked in terms of a cleansing — something that has ‘charmed away the old rancours’ and allowed them to see the new land with a ‘freshen’d gaze’. The poet wishes to set sail too, not to see many lands and peoples but to find a place of rest perhaps, such as what the people arriving in the long ships aspire to and will find in this new country. For them, in stark contrast to Friday’s voyage to England, the voyage does not signify exile but a coming home, a land full of promise with the potential for great happiness and peace.
Aussi bien dans le poème « Vendredi » d’Alec Derwent Hope que dans « Chaque jour, je vois de longs navires accoster » de Christopher Brennan, la mer est chargée de significations multiples. De manière très différente, les deux poètes jouant avec les idées de voyage par mer, de l'exil, de l'isolement et du chez-soi. Le poème d'A.D. Hope commence au moment où Daniel Defoe termine son récit, reprenant l’histoire de Vendredi après qu’il a été emmené en Angleterre par Robinson Crusoé. La culture complètement étrangère que Vendredi rencontre exige un réajustement important de son compas mental et spirituel, et la mer coule comme un courant sous-jacent à travers tout le poème, même si elle n'est pas mentionnée dans des termes concrets. L'acceptation progressive du mode de vie qui lui est imposé, sa transformation (et sa résignation discrète) en un serviteur à la disposition de la classe supérieure et le mariage par la suite et la venue des enfants éloignent Vendredi de ses souvenirs et l'enferment dans un carcan artificiel. Un jour il accompagne son maître dans un port maritime et entend le grondement de l'océan après bien des années. Le chant de l’océan, le flot des souvenirs et la réaction de Vendredi à l’appel de la mer se cristallisent à la fin du poème. Le poème soulève des questions non seulement par rapport aux choix à effectuer, mais aussi par rapport à la « sauvagerie » contre la « civilisation » et à l’appropriation de pouvoir sur les vies. Il envisage la mer à la fois comme une barrière qui mène à l’exil que comme un giron protecteur. Y retourner signifie retrouver sa demeure. Le poème de Brennan peut être lu et interprété comme un texte qui traite du cœur même de l’expérience australienne — les vagues de migration venant des coins les plus reculés de la terre qui ont façonné de multiples façons la culture et l’ethos de ce continent. C’est la mer qui a permis aux migrants porteurs d’espoir d’être transportés ce qui est invoquée en termes de « purification », quelque chose qui a « fait disparaître les vieilles rancunes comme par magie. » C'est encore la mer qui leur a permis de voir la nouvelle terre avec un « regard frais ». Le poète veut aussi prendre le large non pas pour voir beaucoup de pays et des peuples, mais pour trouver un lieu de repos, tout comme les gens qui arrivent dans de longs navires à ce nouveau pays. A la différence du voyage de Vendredi en Angleterre, le voyage ne renvoie pas à l’exil dans ce poème, mais bien à un retour chez-soi, à une terre pleine de promesses et à de possibilités de bonheur et de paix.
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INDEX
Mots-clés: mer, exil, isolement, chez-soi, poésie, Defoe Daniel, Hope Alec Derwent, Brennan Christopher Keywords: sea, exile, isolation, home, poetry, Defoe Daniel, Hope Alec Derwent, Brennan Christopher
AUTHOR
MALATI MATHUR Malati Mathur is Professor of English, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi, India. She has a doctorate in Australian Literature, writes and translates in and between Tamil, Hindi and English and has won three Katha, Katha-British Council awards for translating short stories and novels from Tamil and Hindi into English. She is also passionate about music and has a graduate degree in sitar. Her publications include Merging Meridians: A. D. Hope's Poetic Vision (Criticism), Remembering Amma (translated novel), Ustad Ali Akbar Khan: The Jodhpur Years (Biography) and Affinities (poetry). Contact: malatimathur[at]gmail.com
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Varia
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From “Discourses of Sobriety” to Deadpan Comedy: Christopher Guest’s Musical Trilogy
Charles Holdefer
The idea was, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do a movie where people got this right for a change?” Harry Shearer, aka bass player “Derek Smalls” of Spinal Tap (Muir 2004: 25)
1 The entertainment industry has long been fascinated by the “truth” behind popular music. Indeed, the first feature length talking film, The Jazz Singer (Crosland 1927), starred Al Jolson as Jakie Rabinowitz, a young man struggling to reconcile his Jewish identity to his success at performing in blackface to white audiences. Since then, there has been an endless stream of movies about music. Some are explicitly biographical, with actors cast as iconic musicians: e.g., The Glenn Miller Story (Mann 1954), The Buddy Holly Story (Rash 1978), Ray (Hackford 2004), Walk the Line (Mangold 2005) and Bohemian Rhapsody (Singer 2018). Others, like Elvis Presley’s many fictional but transparently promotional movies, or the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (Lester 1964) and Help! (Lester 1965), show the artists performing their own work.1 These latter examples are not documentaries, but these films are undeniably of documentary interest for anyone trying to learn more about the artists. More conventional documentaries assume the form of concert footage interspersed with interviews and off-stage antics, such as Don’t Look Back (Pennebaker 1967), Woodstock (Wadleigh 1970), The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time! (Brown 1982) or No Direction Home (Scorsese 2005). All these movies, whatever their generic status, are invested in the idea that image can add to the musical experience. For Bill Nichols (1991), the indexical quality of the image and sound recording is less in the unassailable authenticity of the bond between image and referent than in the impression of authenticity it conveys to the viewer. Even if the indexicality is fabricated—as certain trompe l’œil techniques of set design, lighting, and perspective or the computer-based technique of digital sampling can do—the effect or the impression of authenticity can remain just as powerful (150).
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2 The satirical films of Christopher Guest offer an idiosyncratic approach to the question of how to bring music to the screen. Working as writer, director or actor in This is Spinal Tap (1984), Waiting for Guffman (1996), and A Mighty Wind (2003), Guest has created fake documentaries about the music world that put the act of reporting in the foreground.2 More than mere parodies, these films assume a critical distance that goes beyond the immediate fun of spoofing. Sometimes referred to as “mockumentaries” — a term that Guest himself disavows (Muir 2004: 4) — these fake documentaries synthesize a broad spectrum of recent music history. They include folk, rock and community theater traditions, and they illustrate what Nichols described as “the notion of the ‘history lesson’ as a central aspect of documentary” (1991: 29). At the same time, these films are conceived and marketed as comic entertainment, and thus might appear to be at odds with documentary’s supposed affiliation with the “discourses of sobriety” (29) and its implied “strong and direct connection between the cinematic record and ‘reality’” (Roscoe & Hight 2001: 6).3
Figure 1. From left to right: Christopher Guest in This is Spinal Tap (1984), Waiting for Guffman (1996), A Mighty Wind (2003)
Sources, left to right: https://happybday.to/Christopher-Guest?page=2; https://www.tvguide.com/ celebrities/christopher-guest/144775/; http://exclaim.ca/film/article/mighty_wind-christopher_guest.
3 What makes these films pertinent rewritings of music history? Clearly it is more than a matter of conventional research or a piling up of facts, or an exercise of film à clef.4 Guest is obviously very knowledgeable about his subjects but it is arguably the liberty he takes in inserting fiction into a factual context that allows him to reshape received narratives more effectively than a strictly literal approach would allow. He relieves the audience of any burden of thinking that it already knows the history of a particular event or performer — he destabilizes familiar stories about music — and thereby creates an opening for new perspectives. In the process, he also helps redefine the documentary genre. As Roscoe & Hight (2001) have observed, Mock-documentary arguably provides the greatest challenge in terms of what documentary claims to be. It provides a direct contest to the truth claims made by documentary on the basis of the power of the image, and its referentiality. It takes up the ground of the reflexive and performative documentary, furthering the challenge to any assumed fact/fiction dichotomy, and extending the range of representational strategies available to filmmakers. It deliberately raises issues about the nature of representations and the claims which documentaries present (Roscoe & Hight 182).
4 Although this article makes no claim to being exhaustive, it will, after a brief introduction to Guest and his methods, consider several signature aspects of his “musical trilogy.” These include skepticism about the idea of authenticity,5 particularly
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about how the story of music is often dubiously cast in relation to a sense of “home.” This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind depict very different musical worlds, but they are united in their fascination with retelling the past, challenging received ideas and narratives, and reshaping aesthetic boundaries.
5 At first blush, discourses of sobriety might seem antithetical to comic entertainment. But Guest recodes sobriety by adding layers of irony. His characters hold forth in interviews with great earnestness while the camera scrupulously documents absurd or incongruous situations. Of course, straight-faced or “deadpan” humor has a long history in cinema, most famously in Buster Keaton’s films, where jokes or sight-gags need not be explicitly acknowledged — on the contrary, the comedy is enhanced by playing it straight.6 By bringing a similar approach to fake documentary, Guest and his collaborators satisfy a fundamental generic convention, described by Roscoe & Hight (2001), of appearing to show “real people, places and events” in a manner suggesting that “events we see on screen would have happened, as they happened, even if the filmmaker had not been present” (21). Although the validity of this convention can be questioned or contested, Guest chooses to respect it. And, by doing so, he neatly refashions the “discourses of sobriety” into discourses of deadpan. Using humor, he suggests that the survival of folk, rock and community theater traditions will not rely on roots or authenticity. Instead, the artists must engage in a process of reinvention.
Guest and his Methods
6 Christopher Guest is a study in contrasts. Born in New York City in 1948, in his youth he knew folk music circles well, developed a keen interest in bluegrass, and as a teenager played music with Arlo Guthrie. His mother was an American of Russian Jewish origins and his father was a British diplomat who later became Baron Haden-Guest, a title that his son eventually inherited, thus making Guest the first (and almost certainly the last) American “folkie” to have a seat in the House of Lords (Grant 2004).
7 In his early twenties, he began acting and writing comedy and made a name for himself with the National Lampoon Radio Hour and eventually Saturday Night Live. In addition to the musical films under consideration here, he has acted, directed or co-written other films, among the best-known being Best in Show (2000), For Your Consideration (2006) and Mascots (2016), which also use fake documentary techniques.7
8 Of course, Guest did not invent this genre. Fake documentary goes back at least as far as Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes) (1933). Orson Welles famously spliced fake newsreel footage into Citizen Kane (1941). Even at this relatively early stage in film history, directors appropriated formal devices of journalism in order to enhance an entertainment medium with an ersatz facticity. Generic borders were permeable. This was, after all, an era when Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries tested the limits of aestheticized reporting (Sontag 1980: 73-105). The Moffitt Library Archive at the University of California at Berkeley houses more than sixty “Fake and Mock Documentaries: Documentary Parodies, Hoaxes and Appropriations,” and the total grows if one also includes “Shockumentaries, Mondo Films, and Exploitation Ethnography.” It is a subject rich in epistemological nuance, but it is safe to say that Guest is working within a tradition.
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9 As for the specific genre of fake music documentaries, there are several notable precedents. A Hard Day’s Night (Lester 1964) was not about the Beatles so much as about “The Beatles,” a fantasy projection of the group at the height of their fame. This difference is pithily summed up by Ringo Starr’s staged press conference retort, when he was asked if he was a mod or a rocker: “I’m a mocker.” Eric Idle and Gary Weis’ All You Need is Cash (sometimes referred to simply as The Rutles) (1978), pushed the documentary approach much further.8 But the significant difference of This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind is that their targets are not so readily identifiable or reducible to one famous group or another; rather, the films blur or multiply the personalities, and the result is to produce a broader picture, and to tell a larger story of the music.
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10 This is Spinal Tap9 pretends to be a documentary about the American tour of a British rock band promoting their latest album, “Smell the Glove.” The album’s success is thwarted by its misogynistic cover and the record label’s marketing whims. Concerts get cancelled, and the group plays to smaller and smaller venues, endures public humiliations and personal squabbles, till the band totally implodes and the remaining members find themselves sharing the stage at a theme park with a puppet show. Waiting for Guffman shows the making of a small-town musical in the fictional setting of Blaine, Missouri. The show, “Red, White and Blaine,” celebrates the town’s sesquicentennial by retelling highlights of Blaine’s history. Under the influence of the dubiously charismatic director Corky St. Clair, a talentless group of amateurs becomes convinced that they are one step away from taking their musical to Broadway. Lastly, A Mighty Wind tells the story of a folk reunion concert in honor of the recently deceased Irving Steinbloom, erstwhile godfather (à la Harold Leventhal10) to a generation of folk music performers. In recounting the development of three fake groups and their different styles, it shows the tendency of American folk music to mythologize itself even as it gets down to business.11
11 This Is Spinal Tap has been recognized as “a landmark within the mock-documentary form” (Roscoe & Hight 2001: 201) and, in fact, some viewers of its initial screenings did not grasp that it was about a fake musical group (Plantinga 1998: 320). This documentary realism is surely due in part to the film’s improvisational methods, which apply to Guest’s later work, too, and which are atypical in the film industry. In the preparation stage, Guest and his co-writers research his subjects for story arc and produce detailed backgrounds of the characters.12 But, unusually, they do not write in advance what the characters will say. “The final result is a lengthy script that ‘looks like a script,’ according to the actor John Michael Higgins, except that it ‘doesn’t have dialogue in it. There are descriptions of what happens, but no lines are given to the actors’” (Muir 2004: 58). The actual shooting of the film is fairly brief and intense: three to four weeks of actors improvising in front of the camera based on their situation and back-story. Then begins a much longer process, lasting six to nine months, during which Guest edits this raw material. For Waiting for Guffman, for instance, John Kenneth Muir notes that, “more than fifty-eight hours of footage had to be vetted and assembled into a coherent, tight story lasting approximately ninety minutes” (2004: 108). In this respect, Guest’s method mimics to a large degree the process of conventional
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documentary, in which the filmmaker chooses the subjects and sets up the shoots, but depends on others to generate much of the content. The larger meaning of this content, however, is selected and shaped later, in the editing process. “Every edit or cut is a step forward in an argument” (Nichols 1991: 29).
12 Supporting the improvised interviews and character dialogue is a sophisticated array of documentary visuals, such as fake archival still photos, newspaper clippings and old album covers, all contributing to the “B-roll” effect. Jerky handheld cameras capture supposedly unguarded moments; “old” black-and-white footage is fabricated to refer to non-existent television shows from the past. For This Is Spinal Tap, Peter Smokler, who had worked as a camera man on the Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter (Maysles and Zwerin 1970), was hired as cinematographer in order to achieve a similar atmosphere (Muir 2004: 27). Conversely, A Mighty Wind incorporates real black-and- white archival footage of Greenwich Village folk singers to create verisimilitude. Lastly, it should be noted that Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind both center on the production of a particular musical show, and that in each case, songs were actually performed and filmed, live, in front of an audience. These sequences are tantamount to real documentary footage, but of a fake entertainment event. The traditional fact/ fiction dichotomy is vigorously challenged, and the truth of what is represented exists according to a different code of referentiality, one that does not depend on the historical reality of the performers.13 It is not “authentic” — at least not in a literalist manner that favors fact over fiction. But is Guest pointing to another kind of authenticity?
Never Mind the Authenticity, or the Quest for Home
13 In an essay called “‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells the story of how “the great black jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge once made a wager with the critic Leonard Feather that he could distinguish white musicians from black ones — blindfolded” (1991: 1). Feather accepted the challenge, and they played a game of “drop the needle.” According to Gates, “Feather duly dropped the needle onto a variety of record albums whose titles and soloists were concealed from the trumpeter. More than half the time, Eldridge guessed wrong” (1991: 1). This anecdote reveals how much music is often invested in ideas of authenticity, and how perilous this investment is.14
14 Christopher Guest’s musical trilogy directly confronts the problem by challenging received narratives that place an emphasis on origins. From Cecil Sharp’s (1907) pioneering work in the English folk song revival to Alan Lomax’s field recordings (Szwed 2010) to Georgina Boyes’ (1993) conceptualization of an “imagined village,” the idea of origins, or a sense of home, has influenced understandings of musical authenticity.15 But the origins and homes of Guest’s musical artists, and thus their supposed authentic identities, can be difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain.
15 A title like This Is Spinal Tap seems to promise the answer to the question, “Who is Spinal Tap?” But the film is at pains to show that it is not a simple matter. Despite the sympathetic and serious conversations with their interviewer Marty DiBergi played by director Rob Reiner, in a direct lampoon of Martin Scorsese’s over-earnest on-camera appearances in his rock documentary The Last Waltz (Roscoe & Hight 2001: 129), the truth remains elusive. The not-so-clever members of the group are in fact rendered
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more complicated by their cluelessness, and much of the interest of the story originates in witnessing their protean identities, watching them try on different styles and masks in increasingly desperate efforts to find themselves.16 The history of the band is full of name changes — when David of “The Creatures” joined Nigel of “The Lovely Lads” to form “The Originals” who became “The New Originals” and then “The Thamesmen” before metamorphosing into “Spinal Tap.” The band experiences many personnel changes, too, with a running gag about how drummers seemed destined to die in grisly or mysterious circumstances. Most significantly, the accompanying soundtrack documents their changes in musical styles, from the African-American R & B inflected “Gimme Some Money” to the psychedelic “Listen to the Flower People” to their current heavy metal theme song “Gonna Rock You Tonight,” which is temporarily abandoned in the chaos of the “Smell the Glove” tour, for the Celtic revival of “Stonehenge” or the aimless noodling of “Jazz Odyssey.” Amid this frenetic activity (who is Spinal Tap?), they make a pilgrimage to Elvis Presley’s grave, as if in hope that a dose of rock and roll roots might rub off on them. According to band member David St. Hubbins, however, this visit provides “too much fucking perspective.” Elsewhere, in an interview about their origins, Nigel and David sing a portion of the first song they wrote together when they were children back in Squatney (the pun of the name only reinforces the sense of transience), a train song called, “All the Way Home.” Even then, it seems, they were singing about a quest to return.17 But, as the film makes amply clear, for Spinal Tap, there is no going back.
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16 Waiting for Guffman traces another kind of trajectory. In the literal sense, the residents of Blaine, Missouri, are already home, and their musical production celebrates that fact: the sesquicentennial of the founding of the town and the dramatization of its history, notably its rise as a “stool capital” of America and a visit by extraterrestrials. Their show, “Red, White and Blaine,” is an exercise in entertainment as local boosterism. But, emerging out of this history is another one: the cast members’ collective dream that their performance will impress New York theater impresario Mort Guffman, who will then take the show to Broadway. It is an absurd dream, but it repeats a received narrative of musical theater — the discovery of provincials and their launch on a bigger stage — which has been told countless times, perhaps most famously in the Hollywood adaptation of the musical Babes In Arms (Berkeley 1939), in which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland put on a show in a barn in their home town and are discovered by a big- time producer.
17 Thus, in contrast with Marty DiBergi and Spinal Tap’s dubious quest to go back, these performers are struggling to get out. They are rooted in Blaine, Missouri, but the fake documentary interviews suggest that, in various ways, they do not feel completely at home with the lives that this place offers them, and they believe that a better, truer home awaits them elsewhere.18 Leaving Blaine will be the expression of their most authentic selves. Unfortunately, this faith is unfounded, because Waiting for Guffman makes it abundantly clear that “Red, White and Blaine” is a doomed venture. The performers possess meager talents, and their director Corky (played by Guest himself) is a deluded fabulist. Of course, Guffman does not show up for their show, no more than
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Godot shows up for Vladimir and Estragon. In this rewriting of popular musical theater myth, there is no getting out.
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18 A Mighty Wind takes a more intimate approach, as befits folk music. Of the three genres, folk is the most heavily invested in the idea of authenticity, of celebrating the local, of singing about home or an organic community that everyone can share.19 Often these merge into a generally warm sense of “hominess.” In contrast with This Is Spinal Tap, where a single group donned various styles, A Mighty Wind shows various groups doggedly celebrating a similar style. They are all supposedly at home on the same stage. “The Folksmen” (performed by Guest, McKean and Shearer, who were the core of Spinal Tap) recall the earnest ebullience of The Kingston Trio or the Tripjacks; “The New Main Street Singers” capture the saccharine optimism of Up With People; while “Mitch and Mickey” occupy an ambiguous moody space akin to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, or Peter, Paul and Mary. As in his earlier work, however, Guest avoids direct parody. Instead, he targets the pieties of solidarity and shared values that underpin conventional histories of the genre. The Folksmen, for all their appeal to community, are shown to be petty and smug in their attitude towards The New Main Street Singers who, despite their aggressive wholesomeness, include neglected children and an ex- porn actress. The love story between Mitch and Mickey is revealed to have been disastrous, and nowadays when Mitch sings about “goin’ home,” it is in a motel room next to his prescription bottles, and his only accompaniment is the intrusive sound of anonymous sex next door.
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19 In Guest’s retelling, folk music’s attachment to continuity is depicted as positively paralyzing. The performers in A Mighty Wind forever repeat the same formula, even as the world has left them behind. They embody a wind whose might was spent long ago. The only character who seems to grasp this is the mentally unstable Mitch, who announces, “There’s a deception here.” In comparison, the stylistic promiscuity of Spinal Tap or the naïve dreaming of Blaine’s community theater at least display a readiness to experiment, an openness to alternatives. But the folk mission to preserve is here shown as an exercise in complacency.
20 Thus, in each of these films, Guest challenges key assumptions about musical authenticity. For Spinal Tap, there is no going back. For the Blaine Community Players, there is no getting out. And for the folk performers of A Mighty Wind, there is no standing still.
Life after Authenticity, or the Process of Reinvention
21 So, it could seem, the characters in these fake documentaries are trapped in their own contradictions. The received narratives of authenticity that they have embraced are
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shown to be false. One can ask: after these acts of debunking, what next? Where does Guest leave the viewer?
22 A preliminary answer can be found by returning to Gates’ aforementioned essay, “The Lesson of Little Tree.” Although Gates’ main focus is on the written word, his observations can also be applied to documentary film. The title of his essay refers to a 1976 bestseller, The Education of Little Tree, which was supposedly the memoir of a ten- year-old orphan who learned the ways of his Native American ancestors from his Cherokee grandparents (Carter 1976). It was critically acclaimed by book critics and endorsed by some Native Americans as an inspiring book, attuned to nature and history, and it was recommended for schoolchildren. Oprah Winfrey later touted it on her website. Eventually, though, it was revealed that the contents were actually fiction, and rather inconveniently written by Asa Earl Carter, a former Ku Klux Klan member and rabid anti-Semite, and probable ghostwriter of Alabama Governor George Wallace’s 1963 speech which is now largely remembered for the slogan “Segregation now … segregation tomorrow … segregation forever” (Gates 1991: 27). Seldom have the sentimental excesses related to the concept of authenticity been more starkly exposed.
23 Gates points out, however, that fake works like The Education of Little Tree are not unusual. The history of slave narratives has comparable fakes and these fakes have influenced the real examples, including undisputed classics like the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Far from being disposable material, some fakes might still have something to tell us. Gates concludes with the affirmation: “What, then, of the vexed concept of authenticity? To borrow from Samuel Goldwyn’s theory of sincerity, authenticity remains essential: once you can fake that, you’ve got it made” (30).20
24 I would argue that Christopher Guest’s musical trilogy embraces a similar attitude about fakes. Guest’s films suggest that even if a literalist authenticity is a conceptual dead-end, these fake entertainers still have something to tell us about the survival of their musical genres, by depicting a process of reinvention.
25 Many narratives about “authentic” music have involved an attempt to protect it. As Iain Chambers (1985) observed, “the most arbitrary distinctions [are] rapidly drawn up into fiercely patrolled aesthetic boundaries” (21). Material constraints inevitably come into play, too. Elizabeth Outka (2009) has described a problematic “commodified authentic” which Beth Bloom (2010) has summed up as “the paradox that while the commercialization of authenticity makes it accessible to the masses, its resistance to commodification is precisely what constitutes the authentic’s appeal” (150). Guest’s work shows a keen awareness of these issues as his fake musical groups repeatedly test the limits of aesthetic or material boundaries. In fact, this errancy proves crucial to their survival.
26 Spinal Tap cannot “go back” but This Is Spinal Tap rewrites the received (and sentimentalized) narrative of rock and roll roots with its merciless depiction of the importance of popularity. The group is nowhere if it is not on the charts. Only with an audience can Spinal Tap authenticate itself and, to underline the point, the film ends with a deus ex machina. Just when it seems that the disastrous American tour has destroyed the band, utterly and forever, news arrives that their album is climbing the charts in Japan. Thus, the surprise happy ending, which shows the lads from Squatney pumping out power chords to throngs of enthusiastic Asians. Spinal Tap has found a home — for now — in “Kobe Hall, Tokyo.” More than an unexpected twist or a parting
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joke, it is a lucid telling of the evolution of rock music, its historical resilience and phoenix-like ability to go global.
27 In Waiting for Guffman, although the players cannot “get out” and take their performance to Broadway, there are suggestions that they reinvent themselves in other ways. First of all, the local audience adores the show. According to Roscoe & Hight, who see Guffman as a “docu-soap,” there is “a kind of pathos to the fact that such a terrible show can elicit feelings of excitement and recognition for the people of Blaine” (2001: 126). But a less literal reading might see something more than pathos: for instance, the liberating possibilities of camp. Corky St. Clair’s affected manner is obviously a flaming camp cliché, and on its own a more limited joke, but, arguably, the musical performance of the entire troop might also qualify as camp.21 And this might legitimize their efforts. According to Susan Sontag (1980), In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve (59).
28 Although one can question Sontag’s attachment to the “naïve and pure” (Ross 1999: 316), there are several layers of intentionality here: the Blaine players’ efforts, and Guest’s. “Red White and Blaine” takes itself very seriously indeed, and mixes the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve. If Guffman was only satire, a film viewer’s judgment would be fairly simple — at times, indeed, the ridiculous depictions border on patronizing — but, on the other hand, it is entirely possible for a viewer to enjoy, for instance, the musical number about extraterrestrial visitation, “Nothing Ever Happens On Mars,” for different reasons from the fictional Blaine audience. The goofy lyrics and creaky special effects do not detract from the entertainment: on the contrary, they enhance it, and become a source of camp charm. This strategy allows Guest to negotiate the delicate problem of how to devote so much of his film to a performance that is unambiguously bad. The film’s epilogue, “Three Months Later,” further illustrates the distinction. Although some of the players have managed to get out of Blaine, literally (Corky has opened a shop in Manhattan, the Albertsons have gone to Los Angeles, Dr. Pearl to Miami Beach), they are as hapless as they ever were, but, at the same time, just as hopeful and pursuing their dreams in music. Guest seems to be suggesting that authenticity is less a passive inheritance (who you are) than an active process (what you do). It is performative.
29 In A Mighty Wind, some of the folk musicians manage to escape the ambient paralysis, and authenticate themselves, by acting on another level of interiority. This is an altogether different direction from the means used by Spinal Tap or the Blaine Community Players. At the end of Wind, for instance, Mark Shubb of the Folksmen (Harry Shearer) announces, “I came to a realization that I was, and am, a blonde female folksinger trapped in the body of a bald male folksinger, and I had to let me out or I would die.” Henceforth, he will perform as a woman, a change that the Folksmen must incorporate into their act. The bass-singing, cross-dressing Shubb is obviously another source of deadpan humor, but his transformation also underlines how much the Folksmen can change in order to stay true to who they think they are. The film also includes moments when the music itself effects the change. The old songs, if performed well, still retain the power to entertain and acquire new meanings, and this, in fact, can rescue folk music from irrelevance or complacency. Critic Tim Grierson (2004)
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describes one such moment between Mitch and Mickey, played by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, as they rehearse for the tribute concert. This moment […] is shockingly poignant, natural, and blessedly free of easy laughs. Suddenly, the song takes on a sadness that was missing 35 years before. Rather than going for a potshot, Levy and O’Hara […] approach a melancholy and regret that is truly beautiful. His tentative playing and her nervous singing only bring out the heartache in the tune’s hope of a happily ever after. The song’s very title is a spoof on the hopelessly romantic ideal of most ballads. (And lines like ‘Though an ocean of tears divides us / Let the bridge of our love span the sea’ are priceless in their eye-rolling earnestness.) But the genius of this scene is how those clichéd words now carry so much meaning. When they reach the moment when they used to pause to kiss, there’s real, unexpected feeling (cited in Muir: 185).
30 Thus, the mighty wind actually still moves, sometimes. This sense of possibility is shared by all three films. Though Spinal Tap cannot get back, or the Blaine Community Players get out, or the various folk acts of A Mighty Wind get free of tradition, they manage, nonetheless, to seek a home and authenticate themselves by other means. These entertainers, in their own manner, can be redeemed by performance.22
Conclusion
31 The interest of Christopher Guest’s fake documentaries goes beyond their achievement as comic entertainment. These films engage in an ongoing conversation about music history. As Guest’s collaborator Harry Shearer remarked about the early stages of inventing Spinal Tap, “The idea was, wouldn’t it be fun to do a movie where people got this right for a change?” (Muir 2004: 25). From the beginning, there was always an intention to do more than make jokes about the characters, or simply tweak received narratives about passing fashions. There was an investment in documenting musical history, in “getting it right.”
32 The success of This Is Spinal Tap inspired fake music documentaries by directors like Rusty Cundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat (1994) and Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo (1996), about hip hop and punk, respectively. The afterlife of Guest’s films has broken down the fact/fiction dichotomy in other media, too, most conspicuously in Ricky Gervais’ The Office, in its various international productions. Gervais has described Guest as “the biggest single influence on my work” (Downing 2006). Moreover, the group Spinal Tap (Guest, McKean and Shearer, performing in character) have returned to stage and television to perform real concerts in front of real audiences, released new music that has charted higher in the Billboard ratings than many well-known real artists. They were also the subject of a short, hybrid documentary for television.23 In 2009, 25 years after the release of the first documentary, the band released a new CD,24 and performed live with the Folksmen (also Guest, McKean and Shearer, in character) serving as their incongruous opening act. In a similar, though more limited fashion, the cast of A Mighty Wind performed concerts in character after the film’s release, and the film itself has been credited with re-educating a post 9/11 America about the folk revival (Mitchell 2006: 595).
33 Guest’s work implies a functional approach in which authenticity is less a passive cultural inheritance than an active process of self-invention. He has also helped to expand the possibilities of documentary form, by showing how the pleasures of entertainment and deadpan humor, mixed with music, do not compete with
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documentary’s discourses of sobriety as much as complement them. Just as there are many ways to tell a joke, there are many ways to be serious.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Audiovisual sources
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Cundieff, Rusty, dir. Fear of a Black Hat. ITC Entertainment, 1994.
DiBergi, Jim, dir. The Return of Spinal Tap. Second Sight, DVD, [1993], 2001.
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Dylan, Bob. Bob Dylan. Columbia LP, 1962.
Gervais, Ricky, and Merchant, Stephen, dir. The Office. BBC Home Entertainment, DVD, [2001], 2006.
Guest, Christopher, dir. A Mighty Wind. Warner Home Video, DVD, 2003.
Guest, Christopher. Best in Show. Warner Home Video, DVD, [2000], 2005.
Guest, Christopher. For Your Consideration. Castle Rock, 2006.
Guest, Christopher. Mascots. Netflix, 2016.
Guest, Christopher. Waiting for Guffman. Turner Home Entertainment DVD, 2001.
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Pennebaker, D.A. dir. Don’t Look Back. Criterion Collection DVD, [1967], 2015.
Rash, Steve, dir. The Buddy Holly Story. Columbia, 1978.
Reiner, Rob, dir. This Is Spinal Tap. MGM DVD, [1984], 2000.
Rydell, Mark, dir. The Rose. 20th Century Fox, 1979.
Scorsese, Martin, dir. The Last Waltz. United Artists, 1978.
Scorsese, Martin. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Paramount, 2005.
Singer, Bryan, dir. Bohemian Rhapsody. 20th Century Fox, 2018.
Spinal Tap. Back from the Dead. A2M CD, 2009.
Wadleigh, Michael, dir. Woodstock. Warner Brothers, 1970.
Welles, Orson, dir. Citizen Kane. Mercury Productions, 1941.
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Auslander, Philip. Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2006.
Blum, Beth. “Authenticity Gets a Makeover.” Review of Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism and the Commodified Authentic by Elizabeth Outka. Journal of Modern Literature 33.3 (Spring 2010): 150-2. DOI: 10.2979/jml.2010.33.3.150
Boyes, Georgina. The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993.
Bradtke, Elaine. “[Review of The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival by Georgina Boyes.]” Ethnomusicology 39.3 (Autumn 1995): 500-2. DOI: 10.2307/924636
Carter, Forrest [aka Asa Earl Carter]. The Education of Little Tree. New York: Delacorte Press, 1976.
Chambers, Iain. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1985.
Cleto, Fabio, ed. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti- Slavery Office, 1845.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “‛Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree.” New York Times Book Review 1 (November 24, 1991): 26-30. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/24/books/authenticity-or-the- lesson-of-little-tree.html
Grant, Richard. “Nowt so queer as folk.” The Guardian Weekend, January 10, 2004. https:// www.theguardian.com/film/2004/jan/10/features.weekend
Mitchell, Gillian A.M. “Visions of Diversity: Cultural Pluralism and the Nation in the Folk Music Revival Movement of the United States and Canada, 1958–65.” Journal of American Studies 40(3) 2006: 593–614. doi: 10.1017/S0021875806002143.
Muir, John Kenneth. Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company. New York: Applause Books, 2004.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
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OED Online. March 2018. Oxford UP. http://www.oed.com.ressources.univ-poitiers.fr/view/Entry/ 47677
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NOTES
1. The Beatles’ last film, Let it Be (Lindsay-Hogg 1970), can be considered a more conventional “fly-on-the-wall” documentary. Without fictional characters or interviews, it relies only on footage of the group at work. 2. Rob Reiner directed This Is Spinal Tap, with Guest acting and contributing dialogue and music. For Waiting for Guffman and Like a Mighty Wind, Guest was director, while also acting, contributing music, and sharing writing credits with Eugene Levy. 3. This affiliation is necessarily contested. Nichols refers to viewers navigating “between a recognition of historical reality and their cognition of an argument about it” (28), while Roscoe & Hight (2001) explore epistemological assumptions of documentary tradition and how mock documentary engages in a subversion of factuality. 4. See, for instance, Dreamgirls (Condon 2006), about an imaginary group very much like the Supremes, or The Rose (Rydell 1979), whose fictional heroine resembles Janis Joplin. 5. Specifically a literal-minded authenticity based on facts, origins or purity. This article will rely primarily on Henry Louis Gates’ appreciation of fakery in constructing authenticity (Gates 1991), which will be developed later in the discussion, and shares Georgina Boyes’ view that authenticity is “reproduced and negotiated” (1993: 293). 6. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of “deadpan” (or “dead pan”), in the sense of soberly “playing a rôle” to The New York Times in 1928. 7. These non-musical examples depict the world of competitive dog breeding, film promotion and commercial mascots, respectively. 8. In addition to influencing This Is Spinal Tap, this film is certainly one of the templates for recent comedies like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Kasdan 2007).
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9. The official spelling of the name of the band is Spın̈al Tap, with an odd umlaut over the letter n and a letter i without a dot. The original film title uses this spelling, too. This discussion, like most media on the subject, conventionalizes the spelling. 10. Leventhal managed Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, The Weavers et al. 11. For instance, see the fanciful account of Bob Dylan’s youth that appeared in the liner notes of his debut album Bob Dylan (1962). 12. Co-writing This Is Spinal Tap were Michael McKean, Rob Reiner and Harry Shearer. For Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind, Eugene Levy shares the writing credit with Guest. 13. The critic Philip Auslander describes a performance analysis of popular music which distinguishes between “the real person (the performer as human being) [and] the performance persona (the performer’s self-presentation” (2006: 4). But, in Guest’s films, the real person is replaced by a fictional character. Thus there is an added layer of performance. 14. See Auslander’s excellent discussion of the outrage and confusion caused by folk artist Phil Och’s 1970 performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall in a gold lamé suit, à la Elvis Presley (9-38). 15. Race and gender also figure largely as authenticating markers, as Gates (1991: 26-30) and Auslander (2006:150-226) attest. 16. In much different contexts, Woody Allen’s fake documentary Zelig (1983) addresses similar questions by using the narrative conceit of Leonard Zelig’s mysterious medical condition. 17. “The rockumentary, like most documentary, is an inherently nostalgic genre which posits a retrieval of the pretextual” (Sarchett 1994: 31). 18. Corky St. Clair is the catalyst but unlike Marty DiBergi, his character does not assume a filmmaker’s role; characters address a listener who is off-camera. This more distant, “objective” approach is also used in A Mighty Wind. 19. This community is ultimately, according to Elaine Bradtke (1995), “a fictional place, concocted from nationalist and utopian theories and salted with nostalgia” (500). 20. Ironically, but perhaps fittingly, Gates’ attribution of this theory to Samual Goldwyn is also debatable. It has been variously attributed to Jean Giraudoux, Groucho Marx or George Burns, and remains a matter of dispute. 21. “Camp thus presupposes a collective, ritual and performative existence, in which it is the object itself to be set on a stage, being, in the process of campification, subjected (by the theatricalisation of its ruinous modes of production) and transvested” (Cleto 1999: 25). Cleto’s Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader provides a thorough overview of the history and uses of camp. 22. “We should treasure the famous Wildean invitation—in ‘The Critic as Artist’—to rewrite history” (Cleto 1999: 36). 23. The Return of Spinal Tap (1993), directed by a pseudonymous “Jim DiBergi” in an echo of This is Spinal Tap’s satire of Martin Scorsese as “Marty DiBergi,” was also produced by Guest, and includes a real concert at Royal Albert Hall. 24. Back From the Dead (2009), released by A2M.
ABSTRACTS
Christopher Guest’s fake documentaries about music are marketed as entertainment but they also raise serious questions about music history and the problem of authenticity. Working as a
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collaborative writer, director and actor in This is Spinal Tap (1984), Waiting for Guffman (1996) and A Mighty Wind (2003), Guest has recast the “discourses of sobriety” as deadpan comedy. In the process, he challenges the traditional fact/fiction dichotomy and claims to authenticity. With attention to folk, rock and community theater genres, this article focuses on Guest’s treatment of received narratives about music-making that are preoccupied by a quest for origins and a sense of home. The reality of such narratives is depicted as compromised, while performance, sometimes animated by a camp sensibility, offers a way forward.
Les documentaires fictifs de Christopher Guest sur la musique sont commercialisés comme des divertissements, mais ils soulèvent également de sérieuses questions sur l’histoire de la musique et la question de l’authenticité. Travaillant en tant que scénariste, réalisateur et acteur dans This is Spinal Tap (1984), Waiting for Guffman (1996) et A Mighty Wind (2003), Guest a transformé le « discours de la sobriété » en comédie où le comique est présenté avec le plus grand sérieux. Il remet en question la dichotomie traditionnelle entre réalité et fiction ainsi que les prétentions d’authenticité. Cet article s’intéresse aux poncifs sur les genres du folk, du rock et de la comédie musicale, mais aussi sur la création musicale comme un retour aux sources. Si la vérité de ces récits est présentée par Guest comme étant de façade, la performance, parfois inspirée par une sensibilité burlesque ou « camp », offre peut-être un chemin nouveau.
INDEX
Mots-clés: documentaire, mockumentaire, Guest Christopher, musique, histoire de la musique, authenticité, camp Keywords: documentary, mockumentary, Guest Christopher, music, music history, authenticity, camp
AUTHOR
CHARLES HOLDEFER Charles Holdefer is an associate professor at the University of Poitiers and a member of the research group FoReLLIS. His recent books include George Saunders’ Pastoralia: Bookmarked (essay, 2018), Bring Me the Head of Mr. Boots (novel, 2019) and Agitprop for Bedtime (stories, 2020). He also co-edited, with Thomas Pughe and Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd, Poetics and Politics of Place in Pastoral: International Perspectives (2015). Contact: [email protected].
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