Khal Torabully

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

Early life[]

As Mauritian History was made of various migratory waves, Torabully was soon immersed in Creole, English, French, and to a lesser degree, in Bhojpuri, Urdu, Arabic and Chinese languages^{[citation needed]}. The cultural mosaic prevalent on the island accounts for his interest in diversity and the discourse of identity in history, as no nation was existent in this country made of several communities. Torabully started writing poetry at a very early age,^{[citation needed]} steadily explored the virtualities of the encounter between cultures, histories and imaginaries. Branching from coolie trade or indenture, the semiologist started his articulations by exploring and moving beyond créolité or creoleness, antillanité, indianity or indignity and posited his work between those theories and creolization.^[1]

Work[]

Khal Torabully left for Lyon in 1976, to study at the University of Lyon II. Here he explored language with a need to reinterpret if profoundly, mixing exile with a desire to reconcile peoples across borders, through a "coral imaginary". After studies in Comparative Literature, Torabully wrote a PhD thesis in Semiology of Poetics with . He was highly interested in T. S. Eliot, Jacques Lacan, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, among others he met in his doctoral researches on intertextuality.

His poetry was to bear the imprint of those various theories, though it remained sensual, espousing the inner rhythms of the sea and the vision of meeting others akin to the "aesthetic shock" experimented by Victor Segalen. The poet framed many of his poetic texts with a distance from exotic views in which many encapsulated their experience of otherness. In his early Fausse-île I and II, Torabully made a work of reinterpretation and started a quest for a poetic language mixing the music of various languages in an idiom imagined as "fossils of language".

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

Khal Torabully has won several literary awards, among which [Lettres-Frontière] (Switzerland), [Prix du Salon du Livre Insulaire] (France) and [Prix Missives] (France).

Films[]

• Pic Pic, Nomade d’une île,1996.
• La traboule des vagues, multibroadcast Tele Lyon Metropole.
• Malcolm de Chazal, (52’), portrait of an artist, with France Telecom.
• Portraits de Mémoire en Gironde, France, 2010.
• The Maritime Memory of the Arabs, Oman TV, Chamarel Films, France 2001.

References[]