Khal Torabully - biography, career, poetry
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Khal Torabully |
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Khal Torabully is a Mauritian and French poet, who has coined the concept of "coolitude." 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 Malaysia.
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. 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, steadily explored the virtualities of the Encounter between cultures, histories and imaginaries.
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 Michel Cusin. 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 esperience 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 gainst 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."
Poetry
Fausse-île I. Port-Louis: Babel, 1981.
Fausse-île II. Lyon: Université Lumière (Lyon II), 1986.
Appels d’archipels, ou le livre des miroirs. Port-Louis: Babel, 1987.
Le Printemps des ombres (Azalées éditions, 1991)
Petite Anthologie de la poésie mauricienne (Poésie-Rencontres, 1991)
Cale d’étoiles-Coolitude (Azalées éditions, 1992), avec des toiles de S.H. Raza.
Kot sa parol la? Rode parole (Le Printemps, 1995), poèmes en créole, traduction française.
Du code au codex (Éditions Thierry Lambert, 1996)
Palabre à parole, préface de Werner Lambersy, (Le Bruit des autres, 1996)
Dialogue de l’eau et du sel (Le Bruit des autres, 1998) ISBN 2909468623
L’Ombre rouge des gazelles (Paroles d’Aube, 1998)
Chair corail: fragments coolies, préface de Raphaël Confiant, (Ibis rouge, 1999)
Roulis sur le Malecon, carnet de voyage cubain (L’Harmattan, 1999) ISBN 2738481949
Paroles entre une mère et son enfant fusillé (Les éditions du mont Popey, 2002)
La cendre des mots: Après l’incendie de la bibliothèque de Bagdad, textes sur l’indicible (ouvrage collectif, L’Harmattan 2003)
Mes Afriques, mes ivoires, préface de Tanella Boni, (L’Harmattan, 2004) ISBN 2747564134
Arbres et Anabase (Ibis rouge, 2005)
About the author:
http://www.wikipedia.org
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