Toufann and Translations: presenting Virahsawmy's play in London

(Article originally published in “Rencontres, The Journal of Mauritian Studies”, 2000)

By Nisha and Michael Walling

The authors translated Dev Virahsawmy's “Toufann” into English.

Click here to buy their translation.

The English version was performed by Border Crossings at London's Africa Centre in November / December 1999, directed by Michael Walling.


In translating, or carrying across, Dev Virahsawmy's Toufann from Morisien to English, and from a Mauritian to a London performance context, we were continuing an ongoing process of dramatic evolution. Virahsawmy's play is, on one level, a deliberate recreation of Shakespeare's Tempest in the context of post-colonial Mauritius: although it goes far beyond the fairly straight approach to translation in his other Shakespearean pieces like Zil Sezar or Trazedji Makbess. It was because of Toufann's (many) departures from The Tempest that it became important and exciting to present the play in London; to carry across a play originally addressed to a Mauritian audience, and re-interpret it again for today's multicultural Britain.

Performing the play in 1999, it was amazing to think that it had been written as long ago as 1991, in a country which Western people are prone to dismiss as belonging to something called “the developing world”. Toufann is so emphatically about issues which are global today: issues which have actually resulted from that very desire to “develop” the world economically, technologically, and commercially; whatever the cost in human and ecological terms. At the centre of this process of “development” are the new technologies of computer power and electronic media. As Kate Millett so clearly shows, in a despotic regime these media become the means of social control, just as religion has often been in the past. If Shakespeare's Prospero acquired his god-like status through an alchemical magic, Virahsawmy's aspires to deification through his mastery of video projection and computer technology.

In saying this is a global issue, we are not simply talking in terms of ongoing neo-colonial relationships between the Western powers and other countries. The governments of the West are themselves using the power of technology increasingly to dominate and delude their own subjects in precisely the way Millett describes for more overtly despotic states. Contemporary Britain is governed almost entirely through advertisement and manipulation of the media. Performing Toufann in London was not therefore a case of meeting some strange “other” in Mauritian culture, but of allowing the fresh viewpoint of the other to illuminate our own lives.

In our production, four video monitors dominated the traverse space. Ranging between his elevated desk and the wider performance area, Shaun Chawdhary's Prospero controlled them with that most potent of contemporary power symbols, the object that still permits fathers to dominate their families, a television's remote control unit. When he was watching his victims, we used pre-recorded black and white video footage to show them imprisoned in virtual realities. For the scenes with King Lir and his crew, we used live camera relays of model ships, miniature ponds and deserts in fish-tanks to create these artificial environments. The sega dancer and the banquet were projected images, invading Edmon's mind through technology. As Prospero spoke inside Edmon's head, we showed him whispering into a microphone, and amplified his voice massively. The entire theatre space became his control room, a technological playground, and a potent political metaphor.

There is nothing new about any of this, of course. Theatre has always inter-acted with technology, reflecting and exposing the technological theatricality of power structures. Shakespeare's Tempest is actually a very good example of this. Featuring more stage directions than any other play in the First Folio, The Tempest shows very strongly the influence of the Stuart court's theatre of power and propaganda, the masque. Central to the masque was the idea of transformation, which was accomplished by stage technology (like the famous “quaint device” by which the banquet vanishes under Ariel's wings as the descending Harpy). In the masque, the King was made to appear god-like through the court's mastery of the latest technological innovations: an idea very close to magic.

This is not to say that Shakespeare (never mind Virahsawmy) in any way pays lip service to the state's manipulation of technology- far from it. The joy of using technology in a theatrical context is that it acknowledges the fiction of what is being done, whereas masque and sound-bite alike require their audience to believe that they are genuine. What is democratic about theatre as a medium is that it requires its audience to invest imagination in the creation of theatrical magic - “rough magic”, as Shakespeare's Prospero so aptly describes it. Real theatrical magic is not to do with “Oh, how clever - I wonder how they did that” - real theatrical magic happens when the audience understand exactly how something is done, and need their imaginations to make it into magic. That was why the use of video in Toufann was such a success: our audience understood the technology of video; they had it in their front rooms and used it daily. This meant that it could be “played” with, in every sense of the word. In the opening scene, for example, Prospero “played” with a toy boat in a fish tank, onto which Kalibann trained a video camera. The resulting image, relayed onto the monitors, interacted with the performers staggering around the balcony which surrounds the Africa Centre space, and which here became a ship's deck above the audience's heads. Such playfulness in the theatre empowers the audience, making them active participants in the event rather than passive recipients of a pre-conceived “message”. It critiques technology even as it exploits it, questioning whatever medium is employed by its use in a context which is overtly artificial. This is essentially what Brecht (another writer whom Virahsawmy has translated) meant by Verfremdung: by showing something familiar in an unfamiliar context, one questions it and demonstrates its strangeness.

The same could be said of the way Virahsawmy uses language. Before he wrote Li in 1977, there had been no playtexts at all in Morisien (or Kreol - the main spoken language of Mauritius, although not yet an official language of the country). In a way, Virahsawmy's use of Shakespearean models for translation and adaptation is similar to the late President Julius Nyerere's translation of Julius Caesar into Ki-Swahili: it is a statement of the value of the language, its ability to be measured against the colossus of the Western canon. But Virahsawmy's writing in Morisien goes much further than that. The language is a comparatively new one, and it is also a very dynamic one. New words are constantly being invented, or imported into the language from the many other tongues to be heard in modern Mauritius. To give just one example: “toufann” is not the usual word for “storm” in Morisien (that would be “siklonn”), but a word drawn from Hindi via Bhojpuri. By using this word, Prospero makes a point about his identity within his language, as well as lending a certain special aura to his electronic storm.

People opposed to granting Morisien the status of an official language often cite this receptivity to words from elsewhere as evidence that it is not a “real” language in its own right, but simply “a manufactured language” (Jacques K. Lee: Mauritius: Its Creole Language London, Nautilus, 1999). This is as absurd as the Academie Francaise's entrenched battle against such new French words as “le parking”. The reality of language and the cultures it expresses, is that to be alive it has to be open to new influences, to alternative views, to otherness, to the possibility of change. Because Mauritius is a particularly multicultural space, its language is particularly dynamic and fluid. It is by embracing this rich diversity that Virahsawmy's Morisien becomes so potent a dramatic force, punning and poetic, earthy and inspiring.

Virahsawmy's Morisien is, with a pleasing neatness, actually very close to Shakespeare's English. Like modern Mauritius, Renaissance London was an open space, into which a great many new cultural influences were pouring: from the north and west of England, from Ireland, Scotland, France, the Netherlands. This is why the English language of the period is so inventive, so creative, so playful and exciting. If you don't believe us, just think how much of Shakespeare is French: French mispronounced, distorted and chewed up - in a word, Creolized. To give just one example: when we did Macbeth in Mauritius, Nisha (who was playing Lady Macbeth) had problems understanding the word “parley” until we realized that it was actually “parler”. Shakespearean English takes a Fench word and makes it English, just as Morisien takes foreign words, adapts and adopts them as its own. But nobody would ever dream of saying that Shakespeare didn't write real English, would they?

Of course, this linguistic vitality makes the translation of Virahsawmy's plays into languages other than Morisien extremely difficult. Puns and wordplay are, by their nature, impossible to render into different languages: poetry is notoriously so. Our English version of Toufann (to be published by James Currey Press, Oxford in African Theatre: Playwrights and Politics in September 2000) was an attempt to create a version of the play which would work theatrically for an English audience. This sometimes meant that we had to create new jokes where Virahsawmy had written an untranslatable pun. For example, Virahsawmy's

which could hardly be described as literal, but certainly had the required “groan effect”!

When he is deposed and going mildly barmy, King Lir exclaims:

This line is packed with multiple meanings, most of them sexual innuendos. As well as meaning “Don't shake me”, “Pa soukay mwa” hints at “koy” meaning “balls”. This leads on to the idea of “grene” - seeds - as he says that, like a tree, he's already been shaken and his seeds have fallen off. And so on. Our solution was to translate the line with another (English) innuendo, and a Shakespearean reference thrown in for good measure:

In two cases, we elected to keep an original Morisien word; not because there was no English equivalent, but because of the emotional resonance of the original. One of these was the word “toufann” itself, a choice of word which displays Prospero's sense of his inheritance and of his own importance. At the opening of the play, we “explained” this by having Prospero say “Today I am the one who controls Toufann, I control the tempest, I am the one who decides, I am the one who controls everything”. The explicit use of the word “tempest” is a way of clarifying the title and the reference for an English audience.

The other word left in Morisien was "batar". Morisien (in common with a number of other languages, for example Ki-Swahili), uses the same word for “person of mixed race” and “illegitimate child”. There is a clear political standpoint contained within the language here. The mixture of races is condemned by implication, and the children of such marriages bastardized by the culture. In so multi-cultural a society as Mauritius, the existence of a word with this dual meaning suggests a political rejection of that very misegenation which gives the island and the language its particular identity. In having Prospero apply the word to Kalibann (and in having Kordelia cut him off as he splutters “bat-” in the final scene), Virahsawmy demonstrates the tendency of many Mauritians to seek an identity in their distant racial origins, rather than in the mixed reality of contemporary island life, culture and language. Virahsawmy's most recent book of poetry is deliberately and provocatively titled “Testamen enn metchiss” (Rose-Hill, Boukie Banane 1999).

Such issues, of course, also have powerful resonances in modern London. Two days ago, the election addresses of London's mayoral candidates dropped through our letter-box. Remarkably prominent among them (and on the streets) was the candidate of the British National Party. This organization justifies itself on the grounds that “We ask for our culture, freedoms, and our traditions to be respected, and for the majority to have the right to run the country as they wish”, calls for education authorities to end “multicultural indoctrination”, and proclaims its “opposition to mass immigration”. Such neo-fascism is not really a viable political force here, but it demonstrates clearly the cast of mind which led to such appalling events as the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and the catalogue of police failure in its investigation. Until modern London understands that it is, and has to be, a genuinely pluralistic, mixed, open space; it will continue to be a place of fear and of irrational violence. Here again, Virahsawmy's Toufann carried across to England to teach its audience.

The sort of prejudice we are discussing here has its roots in a fear of change, and so in a fear of “otherness”. Within Mauritius, these tensions have been particularly acute in recent years. Mauritian identities have tended to be exclusive rather than inclusive, based on ethnic and religious groupings rather than the reality of the social and political space. When Virahsawmy's Prospero tells his daughter that “you weren't born here. You were born in a palace”, he is expressing the nostalgia many migrant peoples naturally feel for their place of origin and cultural roots. In our production, he showed her images of an Indian palace, of his wife dressed in a sari, and himself in traditional clothes at their Hindu wedding. The problem arises from his expectation that, because of her inheritance, Kordelia will marry somebody “of royal blood”, and not somebody who happens to exist in the same contemporary space. Kordelia's rejection of “royal blood” in favour of “human blood” is a plea for an inclusive politics which overturns the concept of the “batar”. Kordelia, Kalibann, Ferdjinan and Aryel all reject the doctrine of inheritance in favour of a new pluralism.

Kordelia's pairing with Kalibann and Ferdjinan's with Aryel look like setting up a happy ending for the play. But Virahsawmy, like Shakespeare, doesn't quite tie up all the loose ends in his comedy. In the final scene, Kalibann has been made King. Kaspalto, the African drunk, and his Asian junkie friend Dammarro appear in rebellion. If Kalibann can be made King, why not them? But Kordelia tells them “You've arrived on the scene too late. The story's finishing. Can't you see that?”

For us, these final moments brought together the whole process of carrying this play across into an English context. Throughout the play, we'd made considerable use of two pairs of sunglasses. Originally worn by Edmon and Yago, they had been transferred to Kaspalto and Dammarro when Aryel hypnotises them. With military clothing, these glasses gave a classic image of post-colonial military dictatorship. In the final scene, however, they were worn by Kordelia and Kalibann. Kalibann had also inherited a naval jacket, originally worn by Lir, and then by Edmon as King. The other characters, surrounding them, were relaxing with cocktails, newspapers and sun-tan lotion on beach towels and deck-chairs. What were these sunglasses now: a symbol of military dictatorship, or of affluent relaxation? As this group of contented tourists laughed Kaspalto and Dammarro's rebellion off the stage, the horrible truth dawned - that the two are actually aspects of the same thing.

This was something achieved in the London production which would probably not be possible in Mauritius itself. A Mauritian audience would already have an awareness of the social realities of its own country. To a London audience, Mauritius is simply a holiday Paradise of sandy beaches and incredibly expensive hotels. They believe this because the electronic media tell them so (and omit to tell them about the very real poverty in which many Mauritians live, about the poor conditions of many Fillipino workers in Mauritian textile factories, about the riots which followed the death of Kaya and the tensions which have continued since). This conspiracy of silence, deliberately exploiting the island for commercial gain, is a form of oppression by media which is, in a very real sense, responsible for the continued exclusion of Kaspalto and Dammarro from their own society. The new colonialism of the media and the international corporations is all too powerful in Mauritius. The rebellion of Kaspalto and Dammarro cannot cope with it, because they rebel in ignorance. After the death of Kaya, the main focus of the riots were shops selling electronic goods. Even rebellion can sometimes paradoxically buy into the system of oppression.

The ending of the London Toufann was disturbing for its audience because they saw themselves. Theatre can do this. It cannot effect change, but at least it can ask people to think and feel more deeply.

Michael & Nisha Walling

London. April 2000.