Any language belongs to anyone when one is free to use it as a means of expression': Khal Torabully

Khal Torabully is a Mauritian poet, essayist, filmmaker and semiologist known for coining and popularising the term "coolitude". It is a poetic and political entry point into the histories of the coolie trade and indentured labour, which are central to his literary output.

Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude – American poet-translator Nancy Naomi Carlson's translation of Torabully's book Cale d'étoiles-Coolitude from French into English – is now on the shortlist for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2022. This prize is awarded for "book-length literary translations into English from any living European language", with the winner announced on June 11, at St. Anne's College, Oxford.

We reached out to Torabully for his thoughts on Carlson's translation, which was published by Seagull Books in 2021, and to understand the subversive work that he is doing with the French language — using it, while drawing attention to the oppression that it has been party to.

How did you feel as you witnessed your book in French being translated/transformed into Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude? What feedback did you have?

This has been a long process. At first, when Nancy Carlson contacted me, I thought she was rushing to a pile of difficulties, given the multiple layers of sounds and meanings the book contains. In fact, I wrote a single poem in Cale d'étoiles-coolitude, organised as a triptych. Even if the poems work autonomously as a whole, I wanted them to resonate with the others in a polyphony. A complex encoding was already in my poetic intentions. Therefore, I reflected poetologically, deconstructing terms and concepts. I used polysemy as a means of deconstructing language from which the coolie or indentured person was excluded.

This "knot" of possible meanings, connotations and webs of voices relate in a Bakhtinian configuration of carnivalisation. This was, for me, one of the main challenges of the task of translating. There was much to translate between the lines. The sound structure resonated also with the fragmentary, yet, related pieces of the book, working both in word creation, neologisms and elements of poetic fulgurance.

There is something else: the three-fold structure of the book. The triptych gives indication to the reader as to the constitutive spaces of the coolie voyage — the book of departure, the book of the sea voyage and the book of arrival. The book can also be read in both ways, from beginning to the end and vice versa. We have two books in one, to sum up. The structure reflecting cyclical history in the margins of the Empire, of the global South, questioned the linear vision of Eurocentric history. The book, as an innovation, ushered the oceanic centrality in a forgotten narrative, and all this took me almost two years to be articulated. Therefore, all these elements were weighing on my decision to accept Nancy's proposal. After quite a few exchanges, I knew she was very open to discuss these issues with me, before engaging further with the translation itself. With time, the confidence grew. And I knew she was the right person to translate this foundational book of indenture. This process of building confidence, through regular exchanges, was fundamental to me. This took some four years. Steadily, the translated poems drizzled to me, as this is the normal process in a translation, specially of poetry. When the author/poet is alive, I believe that this process is natural. Nancy was excellent in this, conducting the work with patience and passion, and we ultimately became very close, even if I have never met her in person.

Nancy has described your language as "a new French" that is a blend of "Mauritian Creole, old Scandinavian, old French, mariners' language, Hindi, Bhojpuri, Urdu, and neologisms." Did you set out to cultivate it as a stylistic choice, or as a political one?

Is it possible for you to separate the two? This is a question I really like, as I wanted to "create" a new language, un langage, out of my langues or tongues, one that would foray the ones that colonial History has brought to me. I said in the book that ultimately, "poetry is my mother tongue". This means, on the literal level, that I had to set a new gaze on the French language, specially the one that was standard in francophone literature in the '80s. It was rather a certain use of a standard French that was meted out to French-speaking writers that I questioned, from the margins of former empires. In my approach, I could not give voice to those downtrodden of History, the voiceless of the Global South, without questioning the "master's" language, which worded codes of oppression and exploitation. I had to divest this language of its rigidity and hierarchy. Therefore, I built a language made of other languages, specially, those who were nearly forgotten, etymologically. This was both an attempt to subvert diglossia with polyglossia and polyphonic constructions, questioning set signifieds both with a multilayered signifiance and polysemy. This is obviously both a poetic and political choice, the first dictating the second and not vice versa, though. Accordingly, I defined poetry as poiesis, as an act (un faire, in French) and as a vision of the world, a poetics. This also meant reflecting on a poetics of location in a complex way, so as to encode in a pluringual, polysemic way. Therefore, the play on idioms, sometime "making love with each other" in a love/hate relation, conveys the sense that even if I was born in a linguistic environment with set linguistic rules from postcoloniality, as a writer, I chose the freedom to question the set forms that were encoded for the locutor of the South from a political vision of French language.

I would add that writing in any language is not an innocent act, as it entails all the history linked to the use of one language, sometimes, at the expense of the other.

In Mauritius, my lingua franca is Creole, with all those oriental languages resonating in me. I therefore had to be true to myself and not fall prey to a silent but real censorship of my plurivocal self. This meant that even the non-standard oriental languages, are convoked in this text aimed at revoicing the coolie, the last among the last in literature and History.

His or her voice, therefore, could not be expressed by making linguistic abstractions of his/her diversities and ontological self.

Besides Hindi, the dominant language of the diasporic indentured populations, for example, I included Bhojpuri, Urdu, Tamil, Woloff in the text, to create a "strangeness of language", which is the essential objective of poetry. This strange, recreated language was also the condition for me to give a voice in keeping with the diversities of the indentured voyage.

For instance, the reference to Scandinavian or sailors' languages was to challenge the terracentric perspective of historiography, and engage the indentured narrative with a thalassography, that isn't writing History from the sea. I wanted to give fluidity to my erased history, porosity to my imaginaries between India and the Indias, as locations one sails to and never reaches, referencing those Indes of Colombus, for instance…

This type of miscegenated francophone language was not in fashion in those days. I met with rebuke. But I kept going on.

At the last Goncourt Prize, won by Mohamed Sarr this year, this type of miscegenated language is very much accepted. It is now celebrated as giving diverse inflections to the French standard language. Times have changed. I am glad I did this type of innovation in Cale d'étoiles-coolitude, and Nancy knows this is part of the difficulty of translating the text. And she addressed the challenge deftly.

Based on your experience, would you say that French has ceased to be a European language and it belongs as much to Africa, Asia, and the Indian Ocean?

 I believe we, writers, knew this before the policy makers of francophonie, who were set on defending one vision of the French language in their own diplomacy and idea of cultural prevalence. I had written three books prior to Cale d'étoiles — Fausse-île I, Fausse-île II and Appel d'Archipels. Constantly, I wrote so as to infuse the centralised French with our own realities and this is not an innocent act, it was an act of creation first, but ultimately, it was a political act as I was investing an imperial language to bow it to my own poetics of location and coolie phenomenology. As I said earlier, this was not much in fashion these days. I remember that when Cale d'étoiles-coolitude was selected for the Henri Queffelec Award in Brittany, one of the members of the jury said that he had the feeling that Torabully was insulting the French language. I was aghast. The fact was I did not win the award, but I made a friend in the person of vice admiral Bellec, who, as a navigator and director of the Maritime Museum of Paris, understood that languages always travelled and never get petrified and fixed in the politician's narrow vision of the world. I believe any language belongs to anyone when one is free to use it as a means of expression. It all depends on the poetics that precedes it, what is infused in it. As a matter of fact, in 2007, I wrote the first egalitarian dictionary of the francophonie, with the help of the Ministry of Culture of France, the DGLFLF, so as to install French as a language among other French languages, on par with them. That was a revolutionary act. After this, the mainstream Robert and Larousse, instead of regrouping francophone words in a separate pink catalogue, now regroups them in the nomenclatura of the dictionary. In a way, what the poetry of Cale d'étoiles-coolitude could not achieve, the dictionary did. And I still use French, Creole and English with the archipelagic imaginary that is mine, as a poetics of location which needs no imprimatur from the centre.

How would you introduce the concept of "coolitude" to someone who has not encountered it before? Would you mind sharing how it relates to your own life?

To start with, this is a complex concept. It is evolutive also, as it addresses the past, the present and the future, therefore, constantly adding layer upon layer in relation to indentured and diasporic realities.

In short, I sprang from the colonial slur coolie to rob it from the mouth of the offender and invest it with a sense of dignity and respect. But basically, coolie existed before it was defamed in the colonial vocabulary.

This negative colonial definition of coolie as "beast of burden" only, divested of its polysemy, was deconstructed in the neologism coolitude, in a creative way. Then, it gave birth to a humanism of diversity, as the coolie voyage entailed a negotiation of languages and identities with the humanities, in a fluid way and on an egalitarian basis, namely in creolisation.

Coolitude resembles négritude in word formation, but it moves away from any essentialism or ethnicity.

Clearly, therefore, coolitude does not mean I am offending the descendants of the coolie, but rather denying the offender the semantic exclusivity of reducing a term of South Asian sociology, meaning daily wage earner in Tamil, into being a second class or servile creature in imperial servitude.

What enables the dominant to reduce one's complex self to a narrow prism of imperial hierarchy? And why should I bend to a term to fit their own prejudice? This capacity to name and rename is part of the colonial prerogative. I clearly challenge this. This is what I questioned from a global South perspective, interrogating language itself as a means of oppression.

This instilled a complex gaze on History, as a means to interrogate set representations. Why should I always fall prey to the definition of the colonial gaze, without having the capacity to rename, to invert the definition? This is basically for the word usage.

This concept, divested of regressive stances, gave rise to a methodology opening coolie trade on slavery, other diasporic paradigms and deconstruction theories. Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude in itself pioneers the kala pani aesthetics, envisaging the sea not as a space of ontological loss but of creation of identities in movement. It also pays homage to the indentured persons who brought their own contributions in altering the cultural anthropology of plantation and post colonial societies, which contain the matrix of transcultural entities traversing the present world.

So coolitude is a dynamic construction engaging with ongoing challenges. The concept that has been evolved from this signifier has given rise to a methodology, namely in diasporic studies, relating with creolisation, complex constructions, articulating with pages of servitude.

UNESCO has used this construction, starting with the deconstruction of the word coolie, as premises to the International Indentured Labour Route Project which coolitude has enabled, preventing memorial competition between slavery and indenture.

In terms of my own history, my father, a Trinidadian sailor, was linked to the coolie trade, as his forebears were indentured in the Caribbean. I was born in Mauritius, the nerve centre of indentureship, which made me grasp the need of a narrative from this location, as early as the eighties. Therefore, I readily looked across my archipelago, to a pan indentured construction.

I was very soon made to develop the theoretical tenets of coolitude, at the behest of UNESCO, in view to avert competition of memories when it enlisted two world heritage sites in Mauritius, the Aapravasi Ghat (for coolie trade) and Le Morne (for resistance to slavery). This paradigm has permeated my word for some 35 years, leading me to pioneer indentured studies in a non binary and complex approach. Coolitude has enabled indenture to move from the margins to mainstream attention.

What are some of the writing projects that you are currently working on?

I have just finished penning two articles on my parents, relating to indenture, one for an anthology of coolitude and another for the UK-based Ameena Gafoor Institute for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies. I am finishing another poetry collection, with a focus on maritime paradigms of indentureship. I am also preparing a log book of coolitude. It is made of analytical texts and a creative approach to the semiology of indenture. I have also finished a novel in French, set in Granada, in 1492, which will be published in Paris soon.

I am writing more articles regarding inclusive indenture and the humanism of diversity that my later theoretical developments have enabled, especially in elaborating a methodology relating slavery and coolie trade. This paradigm has emerged now in academia. Two anthologies are also being prepared, one in French and one in English. A last word: the oceanic centrality of coolitude has engaged me with an interesting artistic project in Holland, besides more events to come, if the COVID pandemic and war situation permit.

Finally, how does it feel to have your book longlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize [editor's note: this interview was conducted before the shortlist was announced]?

I feel honoured and glad, as this takes me back to the original feeling of some 30 years ago. It was when we launched the foundational French book Cale d'étoiles-coolitude in the francophone sphere. Now, with the long list in focus, I believe the same event is magnified in the Anglophone world. It clearly brings wider attention to it. Again, a circular or cyclical memory I treasure is at work here. I thank all those who have supported me in the pioneering process of revoicing the indentured person or coolie or the subaltern in the broader sense. I am thankful to Nancy and Naveen Kishore, who believed that this book needed to meet English-speaking readers. To get it done like this is undoubtedly a magnificent way of making the narrative of the voiceless heard after more than a decade in limbo.

Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, commentator and book reviewer.

https://www.news9live.com/art-culture/books/sahitya-akademi-prize-for-t…

Khal Torabully. Photo by Sophie Crolla.