literary critic writes, in a book published in 1930, that Creole “est la langue du peuple, la langue des serviteurs, des ouvriers et, malheureusement de presque tous les jeunes enfants; par l’influence néfaste des bonnes qui les élèvent, une fois que les enfants ont adopté le mauvais pli, il faut souvent combattre des années avant de réussir à extirper de leur cerveau le vocable grossier qui doit faire place à la langue française!” [“is the language of the people, the language of the servants, the workers, and, unfortunately of all our young children; by the dangerous influence of the nannies who bring them up, once the children have adopted this bad habit, it is often the task of years of struggle before we can manage to banish from their minds the vulgar expressions that must give way to the French language”] (Ithier, qtd. in Prabhu 2007, 31).2 At this time, before large changes in the education system in British Mauritius would alter the linguistic landscape there, the relationship of French and Creole was comparable across the two islands. Keeping in mind this history of the denigration of Creole as a legitimate language (not dissimilar to how it plays out in the Caribbean), the 1980s appears as a period of flourishing literary production in Creole, with the Mauritian playwright Dev Virahsawmy and Réunion’s novelist and poet Axel Gauvin emerging as significant writers well beyond their respective islands.
Virahsawmy, who had been active as a student, a participant in the nationalist movement, and a member of the MMM (Mouvement Militant Mauricien), is a poet and playwright with an impressive body of work, including about two dozen plays (with several recreations of Shakespeare) and about the same number of collections of poetry in Creole – some in bilingual or even trilingual editions. He can be credited with being instrumental in constructing a credible script for Creole, for expanding its idiom, and both recording and developing it across the range of his work. He might be best known for Toufann (1991), a recreation of Shakespeare’s Tempest, and christened by its author as a “fantasy.” The play was translated into English and directed and staged in London in 1999 by Michael Walling.
Axel Gauvin’s defense of Creole language, the manifesto Du creole opprimé au créole libéré (From oppressed Creole to liberated Creole, 1977), which precedes the more notorious one from Martinique, Eloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness, by more than a decade, was based in a questioning of literacy and how measurement of proficiency in French disadvantaged individuals whose command of French was far inferior to that of their command of Creole. Gauvin’s novels in French and Creole, his essays, translations into Creole, and Creole poetry put him on the map as an important artist and intellectual whose project related to the emancipation of the oppressed of his island. The multi‐genre writer Jean‐François Samlong, and the poet Boris Gamaleya, along with Gauvin, Alain Armand, Patrice Treuthard, Danye Waro, and others, made their mark by bringing attention via France to a community of writers and intellectuals whose commitment to a Creole culture was forever complementary to and conflicted with French culture. They worked in close association with the active academic Carpanin Marimoutou, whose rich and long career at the University of Réunion has supported and drawn from these writers. In fact, for a French reader, a study of Marimoutou’s numerous scholarly books, edited volumes, and articles (he is also an accomplished poet) can trace out postcolonial Réunionese literature in Creole and French, and give a sense of the engagement of the island’s literature with urgent issues in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty‐first. Marimoutou’s early collaboration with the maloya style band, Ziskakan, and the latter’s use of the Mauritian Virahsawmy’s poetry signal a fruitful period for Creole language and culture across the islands.
Mauritius, for its part, had debates on a similar configuration of literacy through Creole, while its critics feared that this language (if they would consider it one), which was everything but prestigious in their eyes, would isolate the island and block its participation in the world at large. Jean‐Georges Prosper and Jean‐Louis Joubert are scholars who have done the most extensive work of gathering and critically presenting the literature of the twentieth century for Mauritius while Vicram Ramharai and Kumari Issur have contributed to a solid critical apparatus. Françoise Lionnet, whose career has been in the United States, brought substantial attention to Mauritius through her numerous articles and chapters in the larger framework of her work, and more recently her books, which delve into the specificity of her native Mauritian Creole culture and history. Lionnet’s career has consisted of innumerable gestures that aim to link Creole culture, Creole history, and creolizing processes to theoretical ideas in the fields of cultural studies, French studies, and postcolonial studies. Her use of the anthropological concept of “logiques métisses” and “métissage” itself through an understanding of processes of creolization that she draws from Mauritius complements her study of Caribbean and other creolizations. Throughout her career, and most notably in her two recent books that link cosmopolitanism and creolization, Lionnet decisively puts Indian Ocean (and particularly Mauritian) history and culture on the map of western theory. Indeed, Lionnet has made important interruptions to western theorization by questioning a particular form of omission that obscures the centrality of these islands to colonial history and of their cultures in globalizing theory. Carpanin Marimoutou and Françoise Vergès published a substantial essay in 2012 in the journal Portal, which deals specifically with Réunionese creolization processes as the latter become entwined with globalization. Their essay highlights the inventiveness of the Réunionese as Creole peoples who have had to undergo multiple, and often rapid, transformations in a history that is itself based in heterogeneity.
Through a range of writing in Creole language, Indian Ocean writers attempted to make it a formal home to philosophizing, reflection, politics, everyday life, and emotions. Creole’s capacity for universality, testified to by the fact that it was spoken universally on both islands, also destabilized a rigid language‐ethnic conception of the population, more prevalent in Mauritius through the policies of the British administration. Robert Chaudenson’s extensive work on Creole language in Réunion and in the Mascarenes provides historical evidence and cultural context to Creole’s constant growth and its undeniable importance to literacy, identity, and literature. Réunion, as a French DOM (Département d’outre‐mer), was recuperated into French assimilatory administration at all levels. The island’s identity had to be negotiated via French nationhood. Writers in French from both islands valorized creoleness, Creole culture, and Creole language in a variety of ways through techniques in writing, choice of milieu, and the situation of their protagonists, for example, while beyond their art, their personal engagements, presence in the popular press and media, and social commitment reaffirmed their belief in the strength and value of the local. It goes without saying that the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature awarded to J. M. G. Le Clézio, who spent his childhood in Mauritius, brought attention to the literature of the region and revealed it to be an extremely complex node of histories. Le Clézio’s own work returned more explicitly to Mauritius, particularly since his 1985 Chercheur d’or (The Prospector, 1993). Alma (2017) is an indictment of the sugar colony, which destroyed the natural environment of the pristine island.
Mauritius’ aspiration to maintain French (despite being a British colony since 1810 and then an independent nation since 1968) is a curious one. Nostalgia for Frenchness is not only the domain of the small (less than 3 percent) population of Franco‐Mauritians. Note that the accepted idea of Franco‐Mauritians, in common understanding, but also in social circles that form through generations, is linked to whiteness. The much larger portion of mixed‐race individuals (primarily white/French and black/African) are categorized as Creoles. While in certain situations descendants of the Indian indentured laborers, the largest part of the population (over 70 percent today), might reclaim English or other Indian languages, French remains the language of prestige. Réunion’s Frenchness is, of course, less ambiguous. The sharp difference between these islands occurs once British rule in Mauritius enters into the administrative machinery. Perhaps the most formative move by the British was their categorization of the population for the purposes of representation. Indians might be Hindus or Muslims for this purpose, while their ethnicity is also registered (Tamil, Bhojpuri, Telugu, for example, leading also to an association with language); Chinese are a category of their own; then comes the “general population,” which
