Category Archives: Idea

Colombia, Innocence, journey, Pacific, Tahiti

Tahiti – Time to eat time!

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Around 1,000 years after Tahiti was first settled by Polynesians, the English sailor Samuel Wallis arrived to claim the territory as ‘King George the Third’s Island‘. The Tahitians attempted to repulse the intruders, but the superior weaponry of the English made an unequal match. When the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville arrived the following year, in 1768, he was given a much friendlier reception. In response, he claimed the territory for France as ‘New Cythera’. In his 1771 publication, Voyage autour du monde, Bougainville depicted the island as an earthly paradise, far from the corruption of civilisation.

imageBougainville’s report had a strong effect on the French enlightenment, inspiring the utopianism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, Denis Diderot uses the Tahitian figure Ohou as a foil for critiquing Western civilisation. Ohou explains the readiness of Tahitian men to share their womenfolk with the Europeans as a long-term strategy to appropriate all the best of their civilisation into their own culture. Diderot reflects, ‘Savage life is so simple and our societies are such complicated mechanisms. The Tahitien is near the origin of the world, the European near its old age.’ While the idea of South as a child is often presented negatively, particularly in a developmental paradigm, in this case it indicates an innocence with more future than the jaded Old World.

Following two visits by James Cook, Tahiti was chosen by the English as a source of breadfruit to be used as cheap food for slaves in the West Indies. In 1789, the captain of the ship commissioned for this purpose was deposed by rebellious sailors who turned their backs on civilisation and resigned themselves to die in the antipodes. The ‘mutiny on the bounty’ reflects the conflict in expanding English empire between the force of order located in the cold dark North and the temptations that seemed on offer in the warm verdant South.

image The spirit of Fletcher Christian continues. While playing the rebel in the 1961 film version, Marlon Brando turned his back on America, married his Tahitian lead and purchased the island first chosen by Bligh’s deserters as an escape. This came to a violent denouement when his first son called Christian murdered his Tahitian daughter’s native husband. The real Fletcher Christian’s men settled on Pitcairn Island, burnt the Bounty, and created an English-Tahitian hybrid micro-society, which is still alive today in Norfolk Island. As is usual, the only news coming from this world is of sexual abuse and murder. We hear little of the thriving artistic and literary life on the islands.

Norfolk Island fibre artist Margarita Sampson ‘Welcome/Greetings’ (2006) recycled books & ink. 6ft x4 ft wide. Photo: Alex Kovoskali, shown at Craft Victoria along with Dar Plait fe Ucklun Norfolk Island Weaving for Common Goods. image

Bounty Chocolate Bar, produced by Mars, used the idyllic image of the Pacific island as a fantasy for consumers to indulge while eating a ‘taste of paradise’.

image One enduring legacy of these first visits is the tattoo. In a society without capital, the tattoo was a principle means by which power and status could be acquired. All it needed was the capacity of the individual to endure great pain. After recovering from the ordeal, proof of their strength was available for all to see. The European sailors who acquired tattoos for themselves then introduced this skin economy into the West, where it still flourishes today, particularly among those who do not have access to other forms of capital. The tattoo is one of the most visible ways in which the South has imprinted itself on the rest of the world.

In 1842, Queen Pomare signed a treaty that made Tahiti a French Protectorate. Etablissements français d’Oceanie became a space for artists to position themselves against the conventional order. In 1891, Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti seeking escape from the modern world. Having grown up in Peru, Gauguin shared with van Gogh a love of ‘primitive cultures’ such as the Brittany peasant. His journal Noa Noa documents Gauguin’s journey away from civilisation into the full life of nature. After joining vigorous work with natives, Gauguin can finally claim to be one of them:

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This cruel assault was the supreme farewell to civilization, to evil. This last evidence of the depraved instincts which sleep at the bottom of all decadent souls, by very contrast exalted the healthy simplicity of the life at which I had already made a beginning into a feeling of inexpressible happiness. By the trial within my soul mastery had been won. Avidly I inhaled the splendid purity of the light. I was, indeed, a new man; from now on I was a true savage, a real Maori.

imageGauguin’s paintings have become a universal symbol of Tahiti as a world of classical beauty. This has become ever more commodified through tourism and consumerism. In 1913, the first postage stamp from this region contained a dusky beauty with a hibiscus flower behind her ear. It was only a matter of time before Club Med set up shop.

In 1963, as France anticipated Algerian independence, Charles de Gaulle chose the Pacific territories as the new site for nuclear testing. The assumption was that the atolls and their surrounding waters were empty. Tensions rose during the course of atomic explosions on Moruroa. In 1977, the Polynesian Liberation Front was formed by Oscar Temaru, who is now president of the local parliament. In 1992, during the ‘day of the waters’, PLF leaders gathered in Salzburg to articulate their position. Myron Mataoa stated, ‘Now this island of Moruroa — you know what Moruroa means? Moruroa means “the land of secret”. The land of secret. And today that land is really a land of secret where we don’t get any information from the French administration on how bad was their testings since 1966.’

Tourism is a dominant force in contemporary Tahiti. The German-born sculptor Andreas Dettloff has produced a series of work in the mode of ‘reverse primitivism’, depicting forms like shrunken skulls but with Western iconography such as Coca-Cola. One of his most successful series were skulls supposedly of Gauguin. A resident for twenty years, Dettloff’s work is disliked by tourist operators, but enjoyed by native Tahitians.

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Gauguin in his last décor (Andreas Dettloff, 2008)

image A major force in Tahitian cultural revival was the poet Henri Hiro, who called on his people to recover their lost culture. His called on Tahitians to ‘Eat the time! It is necessary to eat time! You must eat the time lost by your past!’ The Tahitian concept of time and space is opposite to the Western: Tahitians look forward to the past, while their backs are turned to the future. To eat the time is to devour the process of Westernisation that has alienated Tahitians from their culture. Like the Brazilian concept of anthropofagi, it evokes cannibalism as a cultural response to the outside world.

Hiro has been followed by a number of women writers whose writing has been described as a form of ‘ancestral realism’ in which previous generations are considered an active presence in daily life.

From the Western perspective, Tahiti represents the idea of South as a prelapsarian world from which an attack can be mounted on the dominant order. Tahiti was first used by bourgeois French intellectuals to critique the over-civilised Ancien Régime, and continues to be used as a satire on the contemporary global order by those at its periphery.

And where do the Tahitians themselves stand in this. Are they mere extras in cinematic Western fantasies? Recent Tahitian voices seem to revert back to the hostility they showed their first English visitor, Wallis. Perhaps that is the legacy of innocence. Cast as children, Tahitians are positioned beyond the law, without adult forms of exchange. Violence might seem the only way to assert identity. The situation appears similar to the myth of El Dorado in Colombia.

This duality of innocence/violence seems an important dimension to Western ideas of South. It’s interesting to understand its dynamics and whether the same applies to ideas of South from other directions.

References

  • Greg Dening Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on Bounty Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992
  • Denis Diderot Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (1772)
  • Rod Edmond Representing The South Pacific: Colonial Discourse From Cook To Gauguin New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997
  • Paul Gauguin Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal (trans. O.F. Theis) New York: Dover, 1985 (orig. 1919)
  • Miriam Kahn ‘Tahiti: The Ripples of a Myth on the Shores of the Imagination’ History and Anthropology (2003) 14: 4, pp. 307-326
  • Dan Taulapapa McMullin “The fire that devours me’: Tahitian spirituality and activism in the poetry of Henri Hiro’ International Journal of Francophone Studies (2005) 8: 3, pp. 341-357
  • Robert Nicole ‘Resisting orientalism: Pacific literature in French’, in (ed. Vilsoni Hereniko, Rob Wilson) Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific : Rowman & Littlefield, 1999
  • Robert Nicole The Word, The Pen, And The Pistol: Literature And Power In Tahiti Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001
  • Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West edited by Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole and Bronwen Douglas London: Reaktion, 2005

Thanks to Margarita Sampson and Andreas Dettloff.

The Idea of South explores how the world was divided into a top and bottom.
Italy, Lawless

Italy – Who wants to be South?

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Archimedes_lever_(Small)Sicily has long been a place for imagining the wider world.

In 3rd century BC, Archimedes developed the magic of levers to the point where he could speculate, ‘Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.’

In 12th century Palermo, the court of King Roger II brought together the finest scholars of all religions. Under his patronage, the Arab philosopher Al-Adrisi created an atlas that represented the height of knowledge about the world. Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi’khtirdq al-Afaq (‘the delight of the yearner for the piercing of the horizons’) incorporated knowledge of Africa, Europe and Asia. Besides the absence of the Americas and Oceania, the major difference was the orientation of South. South was placed on top, rather would become the convention.

Sicily was a theatre for the struggle to define Europe. Initially part of Greater Greece, Sicily has been alternatively part of the Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Norman and Spanish empires. The French historian Jules Michelet saw the Punic Wars fought on its soil as a fateful battle between the Indo-Germanic and Semitic families of nations: the victory of the former enabled the West to emerge.

As Goethe witnessed on arriving in 1787, ‘Sicily points me toward Asia and Africa, and it is no trivial thing to stand in person on the remarkable spot that had been the focus of so much of the world’s history.’ For northerners, Sicily was an opportunity to clarify the cultural superiority of the West. In 1771, Baron Hermann von Riedesel noted in Sicily traits of ‘effeminacy, voluptuousness, and cunning, which is found to increase in more southerly countries’.

venice For many writers, this difference characterised Italy as a whole. John Ruskin’s essay on the Gothic begins with a panoramic journey from north to south, contrasting the ‘prickly independence ‘ represented in Northern ornament against the priestly mystification of Southern culture. The experience of the Grand Tour, from Dover to Naples, testified to the opposition between the sensible North and corrupt South.

This European fault line was internalised within Italy itself. Rather than contest this prejudice, the response was to scapegoat the Southern region. In 1898, a Sicilian criminologist Aliredo Niceforo published L’Italia barbara contemporanea (Contemporary barbarous Italy) which argued a phrenological difference between Northern and Southern Italians, based on the contrast between Aryan and Mediterranean types. The Northerner had greater capacity for social organisation, whereas the Southerner possessed a more perverse genius. Niceforo’s aim was to find ways of civilising the South.

250px-Giuseppe_Garibaldi_(1866)The eventual unification of Italy began in Sicily, with the successful campaign of Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1860. Garibaldi developed his revolutionary skills in Latin America. He had been head of the Uruguay Navy and joined in marriage to the valiant soldier, the Brazilian Ana Ribeiro da Silva. Know as the Mezzogiorno after the hot midday sun, Garibaldi saw the Kingdom of Two Sicilies as critical to the future constitution of the Italian nation.

Following Garibaldi’s campaign, a movement emerged to challenge the cultural prejudice towards the South. The school of meridionalismo included writings about the dire poverty of the south, such as Pasquale Villari’s Southern Letters (1875) which focused on the scandal of Neapolitan life. Rather than point the blame at the moral character of Southerners, writers like Villari accused the Southern elites of having little regard for their own people.

The communist Gramsci placed this on the international stage with his essay the Southern Question (1926), written in prison. Gramsci tried to create solidarity between Turin workers and Southern peasants. He argued that the lowly status of Southerners is due to bourgeois propagandists, who argue that ‘if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with Nature.’

RoccoFratelliPoster Elements of post-war Italian culture proved more sympathetic to the South. In cinema, Neorealism emphasised the life of ordinary people. Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers (1960) depicted the plight of Southern immigrants in the industrial Milan. In visual arts, Arte Povera introduced by Germano Celant in 1967 also provided a space for representing the pre-Industrial Italy in the use of found materials.

While there was a place for the South in the culture of the North, the dominant response in the South itself was to isolate itself from the North. Sicilianismo is a term use to describe a stubborn resistance to innovation, associated with a suspicion of more powerful neighbours. It manifests itself most famously in the mafia, of Arabic origin, which operates as a secret hierarchy in opposition to the state.

M~ prv030499scan01 In the 20th century, the mafia put Sicily on the global stage. Hollywood directors of Italian descent such as Martin Scorsese drew on the Sicilian experience to depict the lives of immigrants in America. In the Godfather series, Francis Ford Coppola used Sicily as a narrative kernel to underpin the violence of the mafia in the US. From Sicily comes the code of honour on which drives revenge and sacrifice.

It’s been noted that the Godfather series presents a distorted view of Sicilian life as exclusively patriarchal. The normal intense relationship between the Sicilian mother and son is completely absent. It could be argued that the Godfather films address a contradiction in American culture, between the modernising challenge to hierarchy and the celebration of male power in military and sporting life. Rather than locating patriarchy in the early fathers of the American Revolution, it is symbolically situated in far away Sicily. Al Pacino becomes the imaginary hero for ambitious men in board rooms and hard-headed sales meetings.

Sopranos story Eventually the modernising wins. The Sopranos series had an ironic relationship to patriarchy. The second season episode ‘Commeditori’ starts with the gang excited by their forthcoming trip to Naples to make a deal in stolen cars. They discuss their plans while  trying to watch a bootleg copy of Godfather II. When they eventually arrive in the Italian South, the gap between the two cultures proves insurmountable and Tony has difficulties dealing with the woman who is in charge of local mafia business. Meanwhile, at home, the wives are carving up their husbands personalities.

In modern Italy, the north-south divide has been exacerbated by the rise of the Lega Nord, representing the interests of northern Italians from regions such as Piedmont and Lombardy. They consider the South to be a drain on the national resources. Their catchcry has been ‘Africa starts at Rome.’ The Berlusconi phenomenon is partly due to the support of the Lega Nord, though the target of Southern scapegoating has changed.

In the Berlusconi’s recent re-election, Lega Nord’s campaigned on a platform of anti-immigration. The spotlight is on the island of Lampedusa where refugees from Libya and Ghana arrive, eventually to find piece work on the farms, harvesting tomatoes for export to countries like Australia.

It seems that the only way to move beyond the North-South divide is to shift it somewhere else. Sicily no longer seems to far South as Libya. But there is an alchemy in Italian culture that can occasionally reverses this effect.

20236199 Recent attempts to build a bridge between the Sicily and the rest of Italy have been abandoned. The Straits of Messina continue to keep the two cultures different. These waters are also the scene for the mysterious Fata Morgana, an illusion of separate floating worlds, sometimes upside down.

The South can look back.

References

  • John A. Agnew Place And Politics In Modern Italy University of Chicago Press, 2002
  • Geoff Andrews Not a normal country: Italy after Berlusconi London: Pluto Press, 2006
  • Tommaso Astarita Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy W. W. Norton & Company, 2006
  • Timothy Brennan ‘Literary Criticism and the Southern Question’ Cultural Critique (1988) 11, pp. 87-114
  • Richard Drake ‘Meridionalismo, the Crisis of Liberalism, and the Advent of Marxism in Post-Risorgimento Naples’ The European Literacy (2004) 9: 4, pp. 481-5020
  • J.W. Goethe Italian Journey (trans. Robert R. Heitner) New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994 (orig. 1786)
  • Michel Huysseune Modernity And Secession: The Social Sciences And The Political Discourse Of The Lega Nord In Italy Berghahn Books, 2006
  • Nelson Moe The View From Vesuvius: Italian Culture And The Southern Question Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002
  • Martha P. Nochimson ‘Waddaya Lookin’ at?: Re-Reading the Gangster Genre through “The Sopranos”’ Film Quarterly 2002, 56: 2, pp. 2-13
  • John Ruskin Stones of Venice New York: Da Capo Press, 1960 (orig. 1853)
  • Fred Gardaphé Re-Inventing Sicily in Italian American Writing and Film MELUS 2003, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 55-71
  • See also a film about Gramsci introduced by Edward Said, describing the Middle East as a ‘North-South question’.
The Idea of South explores how the world was divided into a top and bottom.
language, Mauritius, Mistake

Mauritius: Mistakes galore

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The Mauritian writer Lindsay Collen has responded to the story of Mauritius as ‘an island of mistakes’ with a critical analysis of colonial myths. In particular, she critiques the way Mauritius is reduced, in terms of space and language. It’s a long piece, but worth presenting in full for the issues it raises more generally about the ‘small’ nations of the South.  

Mauritius keeps on being a place for mistakes. After the most valuable stamp because of a typo, and after being a home to the mistaken creature the dodo, people, even the most sophisticated, even the most erudite, continue to make mistakes when they talk about Mauritius. Often real howlers. And the mistakes are often interesting, in that they are a bit like a social version of Freudian slips of the tongue. They unveil something hidden in the collective unconscious. Something awful. If we take a look at a few of these ‘mistakes’, we’ll find that they mask hidden political secrets and buried social pathologies. And we’ll also find that these secrets and pathologies are not hidden innocently. The hiding plays right into the hands of oppressors. The mistake then becomes a form of ‘identifying oneself with the oppressor’ or ingratiating oneself with him (usually a ‘him’). Let me explain by way of two or three examples.

‘Mauritius is a Small Island … ?’

People, even Mauritians, invariably start conversations about Mauritius by saying ‘Mauritius is a small island …’

Mistake.

A very widespread mistake, too. I did a little exercise with 112 A-level students at the country’s supposedly second-most-sought-after girls’ secondary school a couple of years ago when I was a guest speaker. I asked them to write a paragraph about their country for a visiting Martian or Venusian, differentiating it from other States. Over 90% began with the dratted phrase. ‘Mauritius is a small island …’

Mauritius, the country, is, in fact, made up of many islands: the Islands of Mauritius, Rodrigues, Agalega, St. Brandon, for a start, and if we pretend Mauritius is one island only, we are denying the existence of the human beings on the other Islands. Strange, cruel chauvinism. But there’s more to come. Mauritius consists of yet other Islands still. Tromelin, for example. It is occupied illegally by France. The Mitterrand political programme of 1982 before his first election promised the return of Tromelin to Mauritius. The promise stayed a mere promise. The Island itself is now hidden in our talk of ‘Mauritius is a small island …’

And stranger still. One hundred and twenty-four Chagos Islands were illegally excised from the Mauritian State by Britain in the run-up to Independence, and are occupied by Britain until today. This is against the United Nations Charter. But there you go. ‘Mauritius is a small island …’ . Stranger still, the main Chagos Islands called Diego Garcia is now the geographical location for a huge United States military base, the very base from which B-52’s take off to bomb, say, a marriage party on a road between two villages in Afghanistan, or a market-place in Iraq. But Diego Garcia is nowhere. It is not part of Mauritius. ‘Mauritius is a small island …’

So, when you say ‘Mauritius is a small island …’ you are covering up the illegal occupation of much of Mauritius’ territory by colonial powers, as well as masking who it is exactly who is, democratically speaking, responsible for allowing Diego Garcia to be a major trampoline for war and mass murder. And who is responsible for putting an end to the illegal renderings that Gordon Brown has confessed go on there? The British people? Why, they hardly knew the stolen islands existed until a few years ago when the displaced people began winning High Court cases against the British State in London. The American people? They may know about it if they have brothers or sisters, sons or daughters who are in the armed forces and have been stationed at Diego Garcia, or ‘DG’ as they call it, intuitively hiding its real name. Otherwise, Americans in general do not know that they are, democratically speaking, at least partly responsible for what goes on there. Mauritians know, but we, as you know by now, are a small island … There can’t very well be another island inside the first one, let alone an archipelago. And, so small we are that we don’t count. See the damage done to our minds! In this little phrase ‘Mauritius is a small island’.

If Mauritius is ‘a small island’, then who bears responsibility for having forced the Mauritians living on Diego Garcia off their home Islands, since by pure grammar, Diego Garcia cannot be in Mauritius? If Mauritius is ‘a small island’, clearly it’s not important that Mauritians mobilize to force our Government to put in a case for an Advisory Opinion before the United Nations International Court of Justice at The Hague, in the process of re-uniting Mauritius. How could you re-unite it? It is and always has been ‘a small Island’. So, if Mauritius is one small Island, it wouldn’t be our responsibility, democratically speaking, to get the base closed down forever.

So, the mistake is not an innocent one. It perpetuates the mysterious silence of the world on one of the major crimes of Britain and the United States. It covers them up. Behind words that look, to all intents and purposes, like ‘a mistake’.

Smallness also means insignificance. A country is its land area and sea area. Mauritius is a huge country if judged by its territorial waters. Nearly as big as India, according to the Indian army! But so long as we believe we are so very ‘small’, then how can we kick the huge British and huger still Americans out of Diego Garcia?

‘Mauritius is Francophone … ?’

The second sentence I’ll take as an example of a common ‘mistake’ is when people say, and this is even in the first page of the South site I’m writing this for: ‘Mauritius is a Francophone Island’. France says this in its Government propaganda, and France has a Ministry of ‘la Francophonie’, so they should know what they are talking about. However, the truth is that 3.2% of the Mauritian people claim (French is very high status so the figure is, if anything, an exaggeration) that they usually speak French at home. This is according to the last door-to-door census in 2000. If you say that ‘Mauritius is a Francophone country’, this false statement then must somehow mean that the Mauritian languages, Kreol and Bhojpuri, spoken by 92% of the people, are perhaps not really languages at all. And if a human society does not have language, or its languages don’t count, then there is an assumption that the people in that society are somehow sub-human.

‘Mauritian Kreol is derived from French …?’

Following on from this, when people finally give up on the ‘Mauritius is a Francophone Island …’ line, they then say Mauritians speak a Creole ‘derived from’ French. Fortunately most people have stopped saying Mauritian Kreol is a ‘patois’, ‘broken French’, ‘a composite of different languages’, ‘gutter French’, a ‘baragouin’ or ‘charabia’.

But the ‘derived from’ expression is still used by people who should know better. It is used even by academics – in all departments at Universities except for the theoretical linguistics departments. Even a socio-linguistics department may have academics in it that say Mauritian Kreol is ‘derived from’ French. Meanwhile, for over 50 years now, the 80 of so Creole languages that exist in the world have been known to have been born from a break, not from a gradual evolution like other languages. (Most Creole languages, by the way, exist in relation to English, which is also a little known fact, and then also to French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Arabic). Creole languages are the 80 languages out of the world’s 9,000 that are most clearly not ‘derived from’ another or other languages. Creole languages, including Mauritian Kreol, are born from a historical fracture. The ‘fracture’ which is covered up, hidden from view, by the euphemism ‘Mauritian Kreol is derived from French …’ is slavery. The process by which a new language is born quite suddenly, as Creole languages are, is that, as one generation of children grows up amongst adults speaking often dozens of different mother-tongues – having been thrown together by a holocaust like slavery – they use the innate human ‘language capacity’ that we all have and, within one generation, generate a brand-new, absolutely perfect language from the detritus around them, after this social holocaust called slavery. Such is the power of our shared human language capacity. When we say ‘language’ we are referring essentially to the grammatical structures of language (predication, syntax, etc).

But, since most people confuse language and think of it as lexical items, like beads that get strung together as if on a necklace, which it isn’t, let us look at the lexical items, anyway. Even the vocabulary is not ‘derived’ in any direct way from the colonial language, which the particular Creole language exists in relation to. ‘Get’ in Mauritian Kreol means to ‘look’, and people are very quick to take it as being ‘derived from’ the French ‘guetter’ which is ‘to lie in wait for’ or the marine expression ‘to be on the watch’. In French ‘regarde’ means to ‘look’, whereas in Kreol ‘regard’ is used uniquely in the negative meaning mind your own business. It’s hard to call this ‘derived from’, but it could be ‘in relation to’. In any case, to assume that ‘get’ comes from ‘guetter’ when one does not know the other 20 or more languages that were spoken by adults at the time of the genesis of Mauritian Kreol is clearly nothing but colonial presumption. Even educated people assume that ‘kurpa’ (‘snail’ in Kreol, which in French is ‘escargot’) going now into mythical attributes of snails must then come from the French ‘courts pas’ (short paces) or ‘court pas’ (doesn’t run), while they are unaware that there is a kind of snail in Mozambique called ‘kurupa’. The fruit in Kreol called ‘mason’ is assumed to be linked to the French meaning ‘mason’, when in Malawi people call the same fruit ‘masao’ (sounding just like nasalized ‘mason’ in Kreol).

The word ‘bann’ before a noun in Mauritian Kreol, has a function similar to the plural marker – a bit like an ‘s’ added on to a word is for English. So, all the colonial minds chant in unison: ‘This is derived from the French ‘une bande de’ meaning ‘a band of, or a troop’’. Maybe there is some vague and indirect connection, who knows? What we can say is that in good Mauritian Kreol, the plural marker is often assumed from the context and not expressed at all. Now that’s a fracture. In French you absolutely have to specify. That’s the most important point about the word ‘bann’, it exists in its suppression most of the time. Secondly, there is a plural marker in Nguni African languages that sounds just like ‘bann’ – but of course the universities in France are not full of people who know these languages. Many people may not know that ‘a person’, for example, in the Xhosa language is ‘umntu’ (pronounced nearer ‘mtu’), while the plural ‘people’ is ‘abantu’ pronounced quite near ‘bantu’ (hence in apartheid the word ‘bantustan’). Umntwana (pronounced near to ’mtwana) in the plural is ‘abantwana’ (pronounced near to ’bantwana). So, there are at least two ways to explain the choice of that sound as a plural marker, one rather more convincing than the other.

What is important about this particular mistake that Kreol is ‘derived from’ French is that as long as the Kreol language is considered somehow adulterated French, or ‘derived from’ French, it is easier to oppress it. In Mauritius the mother tongues spoken by 92% of the people are banned in written form in almost all schools until today. Recently Government subsidized pre-vocational schools have been permitted to use written Kreol, which is excellent, but note that it is so far only used … for the children who have ‘failed’. Thus re-enforcing the prejudice, in a way.

So, the mistakes continue. Until we stop them.

Just as we see that Mauritius was known, as well as for the erroneous stamp and the extinct dodo, for its sugar monoculture. Now that was a mistake for the people. And we feel it right now, as Mauritius plunges into an organic crisis, as sugar fails under new World Trade Organization rules. See LALIT’s website for details on this www.lalitmauritius.org

And today Mauritius’ economy is increasingly reliant on tourism. Another mistake.

Until we change it.

Meanwhile, the tourism ‘branding’ of Mauritius (like animals were branded long ago, and slaves, too) can teach us a thing or two about the power of the advertising industry to control our minds. Mauritius used — until about 1980 — to be seen from outside of the country as a generally filthy little overpopulated hell-hole of ‘an island’, Francophone, of course. It was considered smelly, too. All this was completely believed. At a time when Mauritius’ natural beauty was more stunning than now, of course. If you want to be reminded of the general impression people had of the place, you can read an eternalized version of it in the VS Naipaul short story, ‘The Overcrowded Baracoon’. But once the advertising boys (I think of them as men, which is unfair, but it is such a patriarchal, controlling profession) got their ‘magic system’ going to sell hotels, they have transformed the entire country into a paradise. A honeymoon paradise. A total paradise. Where the grass is rich lush green, but it never rains. Where there are no people, only stage props for the fantasies of tourists. Where everyone is happily living in multi-cultural harmony. Where there is no violence. Where there are no foul smells either.

And this is just as false, of course, as the ‘hell-hole’ view. One mistake has been traded for the 180 degrees opposite mistake.

Until we can share ideas and change it.

So, do read up about Mauritius beyond the tourist lies. The best history book to start with might be Daniel North-Coombes Studies in the Political Economy of Mauritius (Mahatma Gandhi Institute 2000) which is devoid of the prevailing prejudices. And there are lovely novels in French, Hindi and English as well as in Kreol.

Lindsey Collen

The Idea of South explores how the world was divided into a top and bottom.
Lawless

From America’s Deep South…

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It’s a quintessential example of south-phobia. Putting aside the issue of death penalty and international law, the magazine cover of this establishment university reinforces the image of the South as a realm beyond the law. You can include with this not only films of the South like Deliverance, but also other nightmares of southern violence such as the Godfather (Sicily) and Last King of Scotland (Uganda).

While there is definitely reason to believe that the subjects of these films are genuinely violent, there is still reason to ask why they are the object of such fascination in the law-abiding North.

The Idea of South explores how the world was divided into a top and bottom.
Colombia, journey, Zero

Colombia – from El Dorado to FARC

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The idea continues its southward journey. We move from an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean to a tropical land which, though part of the Northern Hemisphere, crowns the continent of South America. Not just geographically in the northern half, Colombia is also widely seen as ally to its northern patron, the USA, resisting the ‘pink tide’ that has pushed its southern neighbours to the left. How does Colombia inform our understanding of South?

It should be noted that Colombia is a complex story and this is very much an external viewpoint, related to the ongoing search for south-ness. To help explore a little more deeply, a number of people familiar with the country have been asked to comment on what might be missing in the world if Colombia did not exist. They help us reflect on a country that evokes the violence of gratuity.

It begins with El Dorado…

muisca95 On the shores of Guatavitá, a volcanic lake near present-day Bogatá, the new Zipa is prepared for the ceremony marking his ascension to the throne. He is stripped naked and covered with a sticky layer of balsam gum, on which gold dust is applied. Transformed into a golden figure, he steps on to a raft with other gold objects, including intricate votive figurines, tunjos. Once out in the centre of the lake, priests throw all the golden objects into the water, restoring the divine order of things. Finally, the Zipa plunges into the lake and swims to shore a new chief.

This legend of the ‘gifted one’, El Dorado, soon spread throughout the newly colonised world. When riches ran out in Mexico, Europe turned its attention to the tropics, seeking the valley of wild cinnamon containing untold gold reserves. The brutal colonisation of the northern stretch of South America can be traced directly to the expeditions in search of El Dorado.

The fantasy of El Dorado was based on the hypothesis that there existed a culture in which gold was of no value. Gold in Central America was used only for adornment, rarely currency. The Aztec word for gold was teocuitlatl, or ‘excrement of the gods’. The value of gold was only as it was crafted into precious objects. A Panamanian chief could not understand why the Spanish would melt objects down into featureless ingots.[1] In Candide, Voltaire writes about Cacambo and Candide visiting El Dorado, which is an idyllic isolated valley run on strict communitarian principles. The King treats them with great kindness, but is amused with their love of gold, which he dismisses as ‘yellow mud’. Like the number ‘zero’, El Dorado served as a null state that underpinned the emerging mathematics of global trade.

The dream of untold wealth was not an auspicious beginning.

Fault lines

Colombia emerged as a nation from the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1810, lead by the forces of Simón Bolívar. The Bolivarian dream of a United States of South America came to a cruel end as the Colombian federation was broken up by reactionary forces in Venezuela and Ecuador. The conflict became a ‘war to the death’ (guerra a muerte) where no prisoners were taken. As Eduardo Galeano comments on Bolivar’s demise: ‘Was this, was this history? All grandeur ends up dwarfed. On the neck of every promise crawls betrayal. Great men become voracious landlords. The sons of America destroy each other. ‘[2]

The fault-line of violence continues into the modern era, with today’s three-way conflict between the government and left and right-wing guerrillas. The writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes the atrocities that have become part of everyday life in Colombia as a ‘Biblical Holocaust’. His News of a Kidnapping documents the national obsession with guerrillas, including children’s birthday parties broadcast on national television in the hope that their kidnapped parents may still be alive and encouraged by the happy scenes.

In this context, the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez appears as a kind of imaginary haven from the violence outside. For Marquez, the world of fantastic places like Macondo in 100 Years of Solitude reflects the true nature of Colombian life. As he said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: ‘Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.’

The happy sublime

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Yet rather than succumbing to gloom, Colombia seems to counter violence with festivity. According to the Happy Planet Index, Colombians are among the happiest people on earth, second only to Vanuatu. This certainly reflects on the carnival of cambia, salsa, food and sex that is celebrated at the Colombian way of life. Colombian artists respond to this contradiction between reality and mood in different ways.

The artist Maria Fernando Cardoso has produced a number of exhibitions in Australia, including Zoomorphia in which animals perform baroque feats such as flea circuses. When considering what is unique to Colombia, Cardoso nominates its regional specialisations, ‘…being a particular Lechona (roasted pork) a Ternera a la Llanera, an Ajiaco, a Casuela de Mariscos, Cuajada con Queso, Melcoha, Alfandoque, Chicha, Arepa de Choclo, Pandeyuca, Almohabana, Chocolate Caliente, etc.  Colombia one of the most diverse countries I know, there are differences from town to town’ For Cardoso, Colombia is a nation of artists, including ‘street people, street culture, los recicladores, los vendedores ambulantes.’

 

Nadin Ospina

The artist Nadín Ospina created a series of work that reflected on the penetration of capitalism into Colombian identity. He commissioned objects from artisans who forged pre-Colombian artefacts and so produced objects incorporating Western icons like Mickey Mouse and Bart Simpson. His most recent work Colombialan uses the style of a children’s Lego game to reflect on the unreality of guerrilla violence. Ospina is critical of the escapist culture of Colombia; he says, ‘A society used to its pain and its violence is a society incapable of finding a solution to its conflicts.’

Oscar Muños gives expression to the fraught progress of Colombian politics with a series of portraits that require active participation in order to remain visible. Breath requires the viewer to breathe on steel plates to see the face, while in Project for a Memorial the face evaporates as it is drawn. The work evokes an anxiety about the lack of political progress.

What if Colombia did not exist?

Gabriela Salgado (curator, Tate Modern) sees Colombia as the projection of global anxieties:

Colombia is larger than the imagination and more positive than its media profile, which always associates the country with war, violence and drug production. If it did not exist, the ignorance- propagation machine of the global media would invent another Colombia to fulfil the need for gore and negativity with which invests selected parts of the world. On the other hand, if it did not exist, I would have not seen one of the most beautiful natural sanctuaries in the planet, and we would be missing a great deal of high quality contemporary art, literature, film, music, and intellectual production.

Jeff Browit (Coordinator of Contemporary Latin America at University of Technology Sydney) located Colombia firmly in the south:

Colombia is geographically ‘north’ of the equator, but philosophically ‘south’ in that it has a legacy of Iberian invasion and the imposition of an Iberian version of Westernisation and Christianity. It has subsequently laboured under neocolonial pressures from the United States and found itself trapped at times in the Cold War logics of the US-Soviet struggle for hearts and minds. In that sense it shares a common experience with many countries deemed part of the ‘south’. Aside from these geopolitical implications, it has an extraordinary diversity of geography, biology and culture and is blessed with a dynamic, hardworking, loving population, in spite of its constant demonisation in the press, in Washington and in Hollywood popular culture.

May Maloney, who has just returned as an exchange student in the region, the world owes an unacknowledged debt to Colombia:

If Colombia were to be missing from the world then all of Latin America would be suffering from a terrible identity crisis. If Colombia just zipped off the face of the Earth or was never there to begin with then we wouldn’t have ‘Pre-Colombian’ history, or Bolivar’s Pan-American dream. Spain wouldn’t have been able to transport (steal?) the all gold and silver of Bolivia without the port of Cartagena and, moreover, Henry Morgan and Francis Drake (along with all other pirates) would not have entered popular folklore if Santa Marta and Cartagena hadn’t been there to be sacked and razed at will. An obvious gap in the world economy would be left without Colombia—the Panama Canal as we know was once part of Colombia. The international drug economy, largely funded by the US, would have to be relocated to another part of the world and The War on Drugs wouldn’t have arrived at a Plan Colombia. Shakira wouldn’t be bringing her Laundry Service to the world, Miami could crumble to the ground and salsa would only be danced in Cuban circles if Cali hadn’t taught us that you can do it in straight lines. And worst of all for most Melbournians here in the South we wouldn’t be sipping at out ‘Italian’ coffee!

Sing as the birds do

The recent conflict between Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela has awakened the ghosts of Bolívar. Chavez is seeking to exhume the remains of Bolivar from his crypt in Caracas in order to discover if he was poisoned by the reactionary forces who then went on to rule Colombia.

Meanwhile, among the FARC guerrillas killed by Colombian forces in Ecuador was the folk singer Julian Conrado, who composed revolutionary songs in the traditional vallenato style, music of troubadours from the valley in north-east Colombia. One of his famous songs was El Canto

When you are going to sing
sing as the birds do
it has to turn out beautiful because it is done free of charge …
he who would pay for happiness,
no happiness will find.

The idea of Colombia is a world without value. Travelling through El Dorado to FARC we experience its sublime imagination and fraught reality. And along the way, we might glimpse a truth about the capitalist empire.

Next, southern Italy…

[1] Heide King ‘Gold in Ancient America’ The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 2002, 59: 4, pp. 5-55

[2] Eduardo Galeano Memory of Fire: II Faces & Masks (trans. Cedric Belfrage) New York: Pantheon, 1987 (orig. 1984), p. 138

The Idea of South explores how the world was divided into a top and bottom.