Dev Virahsawmy: Catching the mood of Mauritius

My introduction to Virahsawmy's work came when he paid a visit to the University of Leeds a good many years ago, and started a long distance friendship and collaboration that has been splendidly punctuated by copies of his various writings - from Li (translated as The Prisoner of Conscience), which won him the first prize in the Radio France Internationale's Concours Theatral Inter-Africain 1981, to the most recent collection of creative translations Testaman enn Metchiss. (A great way to learn Mauritian Creole is to work through Virahsawmy's versions of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, or T.S.Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufock etc.! 'Dan salon laba bann madam piso/ Pé koz-koz Michelangelo'.) But it is the plays that strike home. Li, the first play in Creole, was written when Virahsawmy was imprisoned for political activity and had its skirmishes with the censors. It is a play that articulates protest and does it, significantly, not only through its content but through the language it chooses to use. Virahsawmy's later move to translations and versions of Shakespeare (and, interestingly, one of Brecht: Galileo Gonaz, 1996) puts him alongside a range of other writers from the African continent who have found in Shakespeare a vehicle to represent contemporary concerns and challenges. Perhaps the most distinguished is the late President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Mwalimu, with his two kiswahili versions of Julius Caesar (Julius Caezar, 1963 and Juliasi Kaizari, 1969) and Mabepari was Venisi (The Merchant of Venice), 1969. Nyerere seems to have undertaken his translations initially as a celebration of the richness and beauty of the kiswahili language. Jane Plastow (African Theatre and Politics: the evolution of theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, Amsterdam, 1996) comments that Nyerere undertook the translations as 'a way of disarming detractors of kiswahili who said it could not be the vehicle of science and high culture, and who were opposed to its adoption as a national language ... thus assisting the meteoric rise of literature in kiswahili to its status as a national literature today.' But in addition to Nyerere - and only skimming the surface - we can point to translations/adaptations by Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin in Ethiopia, the Congolese Sony Labou Tansi, Wale Ogunyemi in Nigeria, Thomas Decker in Sierra Leone and, of course, from South Africa the very commercial version of Macbeth, Umabatha. In many cases the motivation for these explorations of Shakespeare in an African context were not only to enjoy the universal commentary and relevance of the plays, but also to celebrate national cultures by measuring them up against the Colossus.

Virahsawmy saw that Creole was 'the most effective language for dramatic experiment', even though until quite recently it was - in his words - 'considered unfit for anything but cheap comic sketches'. It is fascinating to see how often language - its choice and deployment - makes powerful politics, and how troubled the political and cultural establishment can be by the subversive presence of a popular tongue it can't control. Move Shakespeare from English to Creole and you move his audience from a comfy elite minority to a popular majority. Shakespeare is exposed as a political playwright whose ideas are dynamite - the morality of power, the destructive forces of autocracy, the corruption of kings, the blight of civil war. Even the comedies expose the foolishness of petty tyrants and the vanity of man. Wonderful material, then, for a playwright who wishes to forge a cultural bond between the various elements of the Mauritian world whilst at the same time dealing with pertinent contemporary issues. Virahsawmy's versions of Shakespeare sometimes stay creatively close to the original but are on other occasions deliberately loose and re-creative. Examples of the former include Trazedji Makbess (Macbeth, 1997), Zil Cezar (Julius Caesar, 1987) and Enn Ta Senn Dan Vid (Much Ado About Nothing, 1995). but closeness to the original may be more a matter of relative faithfulness to the plot rather than always involving careful word for word translation. Given that my Mauritian Creole is almost non-existent I have to tread warily, but whereas 'En pwagnar? Koumsa djivan mo lizié? '/'Is this a dagger that I see before me?' or 'Mo bann frère, ban kamarad ekout mwa'/'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears' clearly stay close to the original, his treatment of the clowns in Enn Ta Senn Dan Vid takes a splendid and authentically Shakespearean opportunity of using the fools to make contemporary comments. (I am totally indebted to Roshni Mooneeram for this translation.)

Dogberi:	Can we mistrust them?
Verzess:	Absolutely confident, absolutely certainly. Or else I'll suicide them.
Dogberi:	This would be too good a reward if their self-respect has not been soiled because we give them the honour to watch over the house of a great man.
Verzess:	Tell them what to do.
Dogberi:	In your opinion who is most likely to be convicted for organizing a good conspiracy ?
Verzess:	Basdeo Farata [literally, 'fat and lazy'] or Isoop Lamok [ 'failure']. They both failed at the C.P.E. [certificate of primary education]
Dogberi:	Come over here both of you. Do you see. You have to thank God. Even Ministers pass the C.P.E. But to fail the C.RE. you have to be a genius.
Police 1:	Thank you boss!
Dogberi:	You shouldn't become big-headed. I am choosing you for this erotic mission because you are the most incompetent ones, the most extravagant, the biggest flirts...

Various figures of authority are gently lambasted in this comedy through the deliberately fractured language of the clowns. But other adaptations by Virahsawmy are much more free and politically directed. Zeneral Makbef is a good example of this. In Roshni Mooneeram's words its success "relies on the discovery and satirical exploitation of relevant issues for a local public. Makbef, who makes himself Emperor of a Republic, with a lust for power matched only by an unnaturally intense sexual appetite for both men and women, is a satirical comment on leaders such as Bokassa and Idi Amin Dada ... Zeneral Makbef is a satire of those who manipulate the less politically aware through words, revealing political language as a dangerous weapon in the hands of those who know how to use it." The play powerfully illustrates the way in which language can be used to divide and rule and used as an instrument of power. There are interesting parallels in contemporary drama from Africa, including, for instance, Wole Soyinka's A Play of Giants (where, again, Africa's ruling tyrants are satirized) and, again from Nigeria, Oia Rotimi's remarkable plays If.. and Hopes of the Living Dead which show the power of language either to antagonize or empower in the context of political struggle and the imperative of finding one language to unite across barriers of ethnicity, class and culture. This multi-cultural identity through a shared language is also celebrated in Virahsawmy's great popular play Zozef ek so palto larkansiel (his version of the Webber/Rice Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat). In tonight's play - Toufann - so many of the ingredients discussed above are brought together in a fantastic treatment of The Tempest that deals in biological, social and cultural intercommunalism.

Dev Virahsawmy's work is not well known outside Mauritius. His 'market' in terms of the task he has set himself to use the theatre as a vehicle for communal regeneration and cultural awareness is, of course, his own nation, and he will probably be content with that. But this production rightly serves to bring his enterprising and astonishing theatre to a wider audience and to remind us that Virahsawmy ranks alongside the major figures in contemporary African drama.