in one country
The people of R,union form a world of ethnic combinations in one country. Shaun de Waal attended the arts festival on the island which attempts to reflect this cultural intermingling
Flying over the island of R,union in a helicopter, the old catchline of the South African tourist board comes to mind: “The whole world in one country.” Here, it can seem like the whole world has been squashed into an island barely 100km long.
At its centre are the cirques, high-lying valleys between the cliffs and peaks of what was once a cluster of volcanoes. One of them, Mafate, is still only accessible by foot or by air. The others, Cilaos and Salazie, can be reached by narrow, winding roads that snake their way up to the little lentil- farming towns founded in places where escaped slaves once hid.
To the east of those old and now partially eroded volcanoes lies Piton de la Fournaise, the Furnace, the more recent volcanic area. There, a vast crater rises out of what looks like the landscape of another planet – all dark-brown rock, melted or exploded. No erosion has yet taken place, let alone the growth of any greenery. The crater is curiously unimpressive from the air, but to walk to and up it – to inhabit for a while that alien amphitheatre – is an unforgettable experience.
Beneath the main crater, on the slope facing eastwards to the sea, is the smaller volcano that is still active. It spewed fire in March this year, and the lava is still hot under a solidified crust. You have to get out early to see it, before the clouds form round midday, but you can also drive around the coast on the road that circles the island and see the coagulated waves of black rock that came rolling down to meet the sea.
>From the helicopter, R,union’s 20km or so of beaches make an astounding sight. You can see exactly how the coral reefs a few hundred metres out to sea form a breakwater, leaving a calm, shallow lagoon- like area with rock and coral patterns visible beneath its surface.
On the ground, these beaches make for excellent, safe swimming. And, of course, for those really seeking what the French call the touristique, there is snorkelling, big-game fishing, paragliding and so forth. A town like Saint-Gilles is devoted to such pursuits, and many a wealthy French family has an impressive holiday home in the area.
All the world (and a bit of another planet) in one country … But that phrase resonates with more than the landscape, or the vegetation, which is tropical in one place (breeding orchids and vanilla), savannah-like in others, even an apparently close relative of Cape fynbos in the mist- washed mountains around La Fournaise. The people of R,union also seem to form a world of ethnic combinations in one country – African, European, mixed-race, Indian, Chinese.
Along with journalists from Zimbabwe, Namibia and France, we were there to visit the Festival d’Art M,tis, and the key word of its title, the one we didn’t understand – m,tis – gave us our first real scent of this place and its history.
M,tissage is miscegenation, cross-breeding, intermingling, hybridisation. In the grounds of the Fond Regional d’Art Contemporain (Regional Fund for Contemporary Art) in Saint-Paul, part of a work called Eloge du M,tissage – Eulogy to M,tissage – has been erected billboard- style, facing the road. The work of the Chinese France-based artist Yan Pei Ming, it is made up of 21 portraits of local Creole children. Its counterpart, depicting 21 South African children, stands at the Hector Petersen memorial in Soweto, where it was made. Ming is now working on the third and final section in Paris, completing a work that elegantly links black Africa and white Europe via the hybrid island of R,union.
A m,tis(se) person is someone of mixed blood – the batar or bastard of Creole slang. M,tis art, as in the festival’s title, is both the art of such people and an art that is itself a hybrid, a kind of cultural miscegenation. The political point of such work is hard to miss. After all, this is a society largely made up of the descendants of slaves – and their masters.
Some 600km west of Madagascar, and a d,partement of France since 1948, R,union is a young island – geologically as well as historically. The volcanic eruptions that formed the island took place just three million or so years ago, mere minutes in geological time.
Except for a few dodos, who got eaten like jumbo-turkeys (though their image survives as the emblem of a local beer), the island was uninhabited until it was colonised by the French in the 1660s. They used it as a layover station for ships plying the Indian Ocean trade routes, just as the Dutch did in the Cape.
Soon, however, coffee and sugar plantations were started on the island to feed Europe’s appetite for these recently acquired tastes, and slaves were imported from Madagascar and the eastern seaboard of Africa to work them. The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery will be celebrated in R,union next month, but the legacy of the traffic in human beings still haunts the island, still shapes its consciousness.
As in so many places on the map of the international slave trade, the black and white of slave and master have mingled over the centuries. Most of the island’s population is m,tis, and there are significant Indian and Chinese groups, but there are still extremes of whiteness and blackness. At one pole lie the French z’oreilles, often first or second generation; on the other stand the cafres – the darkest people, bearing an Arabic name familiar to South Africans, though, apparently, less insulting in R,union.
Between those extremes are R,union’s Creole people. They speak their own language, one that developed out of the Fanagalo French of the plantations and its collision with African and other tongues. That language, however, is not afforded any official recognition. In what is ostensibly a little piece of France, a holiday destination with beaches to rival the C”te d’Azur, French is taught in schools from day one. French is the language of hegemony, Creole the language of the other.
The cultural problem that this engenders is clear, as pointed out by Carpanin Marimoutou, a R,unionnais poet of Indian descent, who determinedly writes and publishes in Creole. For the m,tis majority, there is a deep sense of alienation, a feeling of inferiority about their language and culture, whether they articulate it or not. They are told they are French, but are they French in the same way as white, metropolitan French people? Obviously not. And whether they are welcome in the motherland, “la mSre patrie”, is another thing altogether.
This island is a d,partement of France like any of that country’s provinces, but it seems to be in what is essentially a colonial position – not even a neo-colonial one. As Marimoutou outlined to us at his small house overlooking the sea, the movement for independence was once driven by the island’s communist party. But it petered out when that party (of which his father was a co-founder) took the reins of power in the wake of Franois Mitterand’s election in France in 1981.
France doles out generous social security to the R,unionnais, and there is no dire poverty, but the flipside of that is a reluctance to work, a sense that education and self-improvement are a waste of time. Many feel they have no future, says Marimoutou, on this island where they are “prisoners of the sea”. Young Creole people rioted in Le Port, the chief harbour, in the week of the festival. They burnt cars for reasons never really explained in the local media – but the roots of such a sudden conflagration must go deep. Unemployment is high. Yet, ironically, the island hosts some 50 000 metropolitan French people imported to fill the jobs gap.
R,union has to form new relationships, says Marimoutou, to change the one-way axis with France. It has to begin to see itself in relation to Africa, to the Indian Ocean rim; as part of the south – and in dialogue with other lands of the south – and not just a misplaced piece of the north.
Such issues are part of what an event like the Festival d’Art M,tis is grappling with, what it is trying to tease out in the artworks it places on its stages. The festival takes place every two years at an old sugar refinery that has been converted into a performance and administrative complex. The transformation, which leaves parts of the refinery in attractive semi- decay, has been done with exemplary taste and with a deep awareness of its history – “This festival is an exorcism,” says its director. The area is not huge, but with its central outdoor stage for free concerts, performance spaces in the former rum distillery and the one-time stables, an exhibition space in another old building, along with a bonfire and a food tent, it made a convivial arena for a festival.
The site is the home of Th,tre Talipot, a R,unionnais company whose muscular, mesmerising dance-drama The Water Carriers came to South Africa (Grahamstown and Johannesburg) earlier this year, besides touring many another country. It was heading for its 150th performance when it played to packed, ecstatic houses at the festival, and is booked for shows until 2002.
For Philippe Pelen, Talipot’s director and the creator of The Water Carriers, the dance-drama is an example of how he sees m,tissage working in the arts, becoming a positive value of reconciliation and transnational bonding. In R,union, says Pelen, everyone is a descendant of someone who came from somewhere else; yet individual and family histories were erased by slavery and colonialism. Work like that of Th,tre Talipot is, in part, a recovery or reconstruction of that history.
“If our consciousness has no memory of the past,” says Pelen in his quasi-mystic way, “we can ask our bodies. All my work is to ask actors to ask their bodies: `What is your history?’ Everybody has in himself all the universe.”
The festival’s theme this year was “The Liberated Body”, and The Water Carriers, with its perpetual flow of movement using four male bodies to generate a dream-like narrative, demonstrates its potential. Choreographed by an Indian woman, Savitry Nair, it uses sounds and gestures from varyious cultures to create an abstract, ritualised fable that muses on the theme of thirst. “What is the thirst of all of life?” asks one; “Love,” answers the other.
Pelen bridles a bit when I ask him whether the utopian notion of m,tissage doesn’t erase important cultural specificities. Only white people ask that question, he huffs. I quote a Zulu poet and professor complaining that young Zulus today are losing their language and their culture in a stew of imported Americanisms. How would the concept of m,tissage work in a country like South Africa?
The idea, says Pelen, is not assimilation but integration. All culture, after all, is already mixed, made up of different constituent parts from diverse origins. And it can’t be assumed to be static, eternally unchanging. “If a culture doesn’t travel, it dies.”
Pelen will soon start working on a new production, one drawing on the talents of South Africans Samson Mnisi, who was artist-in- residence at this year’s festival, and Eunice Matlakala, leader of the Amakhono we Sinthu choir, which got a wildly enthusiastic reception whenever it performed.
“Africa is very present at the festival,” Nair observed with pleasure. South African dancer Vincent Manstoe had enraptured the opening night audience with three exquisite solos, juxtaposed with energetic work by Zimbabwe’s Tumbuka Dance. South Africa’s North-West Drama Company presented a vital reading of Woza Albert! and Zimbabwean music-theatre group Savannah Arts provided driving marimba polyrhythms as well as a home-made musical, Mama Africa.
Nair had also presented work of her own, in collaboration with the Indian music master CV Chandrasekar. First they displayed the beauties of traditional Indian dance, performed by Nair’s daughter to the accompaniment of voice, drum and flute, then launched a strikingly new, and distinctly modern, work of Nair’s.
On any given afternoon or evening at the festival it was possible to see a handful of various and arresting events that spoke of old traditions meeting new interpretations, of culture on the move.
One day, for instance, a troupe of six young men, encouraged by no fewer than seven indefatigable drummers, gave a demonstration of la moringue, in which men show off their prowess in stylised encounters. Jumping high, bouncing off each other’s chests in mid-air, or cartwheeling over one another, this sport – seen too in Brazil and the Antilles – looks like a cross between a martial art and a dance.
On more than one evening, Haitian storyteller Mimi Barth,l,my held audiences enthralled with her tales. She mingled personal reminiscences with the distant history of the Caribbean island from which she was exiled 20 years ago, or combined story and song in ribald allegories.
There was some justified high-cultural disdain over the pop group Melanz Nasyon, whose Creole name speaks of national blending. But they had audiences screaming with joy as they preened to French music with Creole lyrics, parading their best American-rapper moves.
Still, I think, as far as popular successes go, the Amakhono choir was the hit of the festival. They performed again and again, gospel one night, Zulu traditional the next, collaborating with a R,unionnais choir into the bargain. At the party on the last Saturday night of the festival, as the South Africans prepared to go home the next day, they sang again.
The only music at the seaside villa housing them, the locale of the party, was a little ghetto-blaster. It wouldn’t do. Matlakala summoned her “children”: you’ll have to sing, she said. First the girls, then the boys. Show us what you can do. So they sang, keeping it simple (sample chorus: “Yeah, baby, yeah”) so that everyone could join in and dance to the singing, stomping and clapping – the music we were making ourselves.
After that, the R,unionnais partygoers commandeered a number of drums, bought as souvenirs, and treated us to an impromptu maloya party. That local music is driven by pounding drums and garnished with rhumba- style vocals.
The next morning, a little worse for wear and tear, we headed for the airport. There, the Amakhono choir bade farewell to Matlakala, who was staying in R,union to improve her French and start work with Th,tre Talipot. The airport came to a standstill as the massed voices soared up to its high ceilings. Then we were all asked to hold hands in a long, meandering chain while one chorister prayed, against the gentle crooning of her colleagues, for a safe journey and in thanks for a great festival.
By the time we got on the plane, all the tears had been shed. Drifting in and out of the doze state as we flew over the Indian Ocean, you could hear the odd snatch of harmony drifting from the back of the plane, where the choristers were grouped. They couldn’t help themselves.
And, of course, when we landed in Johannesburg, and before we could even get through immigration, the Amakhono choir stopped, gathered themselves and burst into song one more time.