A very young literature
Did Barthélemy Huet de Froberville foresee, when he financed the printing of his epistolary novel Sidner ou les dangers de l'imagination in 1803, that it would make a lasting mark on world literary history? He succeeded in doing just that, not for the questionable quality of his romantic drama (which he dedicated to Goethe, whose response lends itself to every possible interpretation, from mockery to indulgence), but for being the first author to publish in the southern hemisphere. A perfect representative of the colonists who settled on the island, then known as "de France", the captain also worked to promote the cultures he had discovered on his travels, writing a Malagasy dictionary, for example. Born in Romorant in 1761, he has been buried in the Port-Louis cemetery since 1835, and will also have lived through the transition that Mauritius underwent in 1810: the British seizure of power ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1814. Until then, the territory had been occupied without much passion by the Dutch, who had been visiting from time to time since 1598, hunting the mythical dodo for its eggs and - strangely enough - importing deer, which acclimatized particularly well, but it was above all under the French occupation - from 1715 onwards - that Mauritian literature really began to emerge.
Three axes have been explored, marking the milestones of future developments. The first is the creation of a founding myth, written by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre under the world-famous title Paul et Virginie. During one of his many travels, the Frenchman visited the island in 1768, noting the ravages of abusive deforestation, about which he was already alarmed. Twenty years later, he would turn this realization and his attachment to nature into one of the elements of his best-known novel, depicting the sadness of a lost paradise, to which he naturally added an unhappy love story.
The second is that the island has been a mosaic of influences and cultures since it was first settled. As early as 1722, the French brought in slaves from neighboring Madagascar and West Africa. The patchwork of languages became Mauritian Creole, which in turn became literature under the pen of Jean-François Chrestien (1767-1846), who published Les Essais d'un bobre africain in 1822, initiating with this collection of poems, popular songs and adaptations of La Fontaine's Fables , an inventory of local languages, a model that would soon be echoed throughout the Indian Ocean, particularly on Réunion Island.
Third, and by no means least, is the adoption of French as a literary language, intimately linked to Mauritius. This early attachment can be seen in the emergence of literary societies - at least La Table ovale and the Société d'Émulation intellectuelle should be mentioned - and the proliferation of magazines and other publications dedicated to literature, whose abundance was sometimes equalled only by their transience, although some, such as L'Essor published by the Cercle Littéraire de Port-Louis from 1919 to 1956, had a notable influence in a country that didn't see the birth of its first real publishing house until 1975. For the time being, when the British took over the island, and much to their chagrin, they encountered one difficulty: imposing their language. Although English was declared the national language in 1844, the natives continued to sing the Marseillaise after God save the King, and refused to be taught in any language other than French (which they eventually obtained). An additional difficulty was the fact that the Indians and Chinese whom the British had encouraged to immigrate out of a need for labor - slavery having been abolished in 1835 - were playing on the communitarianism principle and were reluctant to abandon their culture and language of origin. The result has been the continuation of Mauritian literature in French, which has never faltered to date, and a mix of idioms that would be a great shame not to see as a unique cultural asset.
Creole and coolness
From then on, it's safe to say that production never ceased to grow, rapidly rivaling the nineteen texts published between 1800 and 1839. Theater, stories, short stories and, above all, poetry, all genres were used to seduce readers, who were becoming more and more numerous thanks to the intensification of education. The second half of the 19thcentury saw the birth of a new generation of authors, including their eldest, Charles Baissac (1831-1892), for his remarkable work in collecting local folklore. Jean Blaize (1860-1937), the future novelist, left his native island at an early age, regretting it for the rest of his life, while Raymonde de Kevern (1899-1973) devoted herself to poetry, for which she was awarded the Prix de l'Académie Française at the dawn of her maturity, Malcom de Chazal (1902-1981) quietly worked his way through the words and aphorisms that would eventually and somewhat unwillingly make him a Surrealist icon. His Sens-Plastique (Gallimard, 1948) is long out of print, but the fact that he influenced André Breton, Georges Bataille and Francis Ponge is a testament to his great talent.
The twentieth century is just as promising: the fine diplomatic career of the Métis Édouard J. Maunick, born in 1931 in Flacq, is no match for his remarkable poetic output, sometimes committed, which can be found both at Seghers(50 quatrains pour narguer la mort) and Cherche-Midi(Elle et île : poèmes d'une même passion). Of course, it would be difficult to evoke Mauritian literature without reference to its near-contemporary, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio who, although born in Nice in 1940, never concealed the influence his parents' island had on him, along with his Breton roots. He entered the world of letters at just 23 with Le Procès-verbal, and never left it until he won the ultimate accolade, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, when he had just published Ritournelle de la faim, an autobiographical tribute to his mother. The era was decidedly fertile, and 1941 saw the birth into a rather modest family of the man who would soon earn his nickname "the little Shakespeare of the Indian Ocean". It was independence in 1968 that gave Henri Favory the opportunity to take acting classes, and seven years later, after writing two plays, he decided to adopt Mauritian Creole, the only language he felt reflected the complexity of the national identity. His Tizan Zoli certainly served as a detonator at a time when the language suffered from a certain contempt, but his plays, which increasingly took a political turn, met with success, to such an extent that he agreed, even though he otherwise preferred the force of improvisation, that his most famous, Tras, should be printed. His fight for the recognition of the Creole language, although he would more simply call it a fight for the theater, would be that of a whole generation of playwrights and novelists, notably Dev Virahsawmy, whose Zistoir Ti-Prins would not have been disowned by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. For his part, Alain Gordon Gentil, born in 1952 into a family where culture plays a predominant role, offers Mauritian literature a committed body of work, steeped in journalism and socio-political reflection, which, without ever losing its critical edge, offers a ferocious yet tender view of Mauritian society. In addition to documentaries and numerous novels (some of which have been published in France by Julliard), he has published a delightful ABCDaire de l'île Maurice that goes beyond stereotypes and offers another look at the island, its complexity and contradictions (Pamplemousses Editions, 2019).
In 1992, Khal Torabully coined a neologism that has come to embody a current of thought that is also literary. In his text Cale d'étoiles, the author, born in 1956 in Port-Louis, uses the term coolitude, a declension of the word coolie, by which were designated the workers, often Indian, sometimes Chinese, who replaced slaves in the 19th century and whose lot was hardly more enviable. In this way, Khal Torabully highlights the sometimes distant influences that have given rise to Mauritius's contemporary identity, and aims to create a bridge with the descendants of the first slaves, who for their part have preciously defended the Creole language. In this, he goes even further than Camille de Rauville (1910-1986), who theorized about "indianocéanisme" but, in his desire to bring together and define a literature specific to the Indian Ocean, confined himself to recognizing the predilection for the use of French and the existence of founding myths as the only common denominators. Could it be that a new language, rich in cross-fertilization, is emerging in Mauritian literature?
If the multilingualism of two of its most fervent exponents is anything to go by, the question doesn't seem to have to be asked. Ananda Devi was born in 1957 in the Grand Port district to parents of Indian origin. After studying in London and publishing first in Africa, she now lives in France, where in 2017 she published a trilingual collection in Creole, French and English(Ceux du large, éditions Bruno Doucey). She is also the author of numerous novels, including Eve et ses décombres (Gallimard, 2006), which won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix RFO du Livre, Le Sari vert (Gallimard, 2009) and the essential Les Hommes qui me parlent (Gallimard, 2011). Shenaz Patel, born in Rose-Hill in 1966, makes the most of her bilingualism by translating works as diverse as Tintin albums and Beckett plays. She has also written several novels, including Le Silence des Chagos, published by Editions de l'Olivier in 2005. Last but not least, Natacha Appanah was awarded the Prix Fémina des lycéens in 2016 for Tropique de la violence, a novel in an already prolific body of work that now boasts a dozen publications. The daughter of Indian indentured servicemen, to whom she paid tribute in her first opus Les Rochers de Poudre d'Or, published in 2006 by Gallimard, and thus a true ambassador of coolness, her mother tongue is Mauritian Creole, but she writes in French. In her writing, she never ceases to question her roots and, like Ananda Devi, offers another vision of her native island, far removed from the tourist clichés. Intimate and personal, her latest novel, La mémoire délavée (Mercure de France, 2023), evokes her childhood memories and, through the story of her ancestors, that of the Indian indentured servicemen.
