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by Prof. Chantal Zabus
If Mauritius is a « Rainbow nation, » after Jean Georges Prosper’s poem title (i), then signification may be said to rainbowhaze across the colour spectrum in Dev Virahsawmy’s play. As colours fade into each other, Kalibann, the ‘half-bred batar’ raises in his ‘very disturbing genetic make-up’ the Mauritian bugaboo of miscegenation. This bogey pops up again at the end of the play when the two victims of Prosper-ity, Kalibann and Kordelia are proclaimed King and Queen. While Kalibann inherits Prospero’s computer magic, he is also given the prerogative of peopling ‘this isle with [ mulatto] Calibans’ (Shakespeare - 1.2. 350). In an alternative Epilogue, Prospero throws away the key that switches off all radars and computer-imaging devices that had conjured up this Mauritian Truman Show, complete with, in Michael Walling’s English adaptation, an end-of-millennium computer crash for the finale in anticipation of Y2K. The key, however, especially opens the door to Mauritian history since the Red Key was the symbol of the Labour Party headed by Ramgoolam, who led Mauritius to independence.
If Virahsawmy has keyboarded all necessary data to make this into a subversive rewriting of The Tempest, there is one key, which he somehow failed to hit hard enough in this incremental backup of Shakespeare’s original and which Walling has kept pressed down with his left pinkie. It is what one might call the Pink Key.
One of the most radical aspects of this Tempest rewrite is the unprecedented characterization of Ferdjinan and Aryel. Robby the robot in Wilcox’ Forbidden Planet (1956) looks like a pot-bellied stove, compared to Walling’s statuesque, blue-eyed, intellectually arrogant Aryel, the ‘robot who is not a robot, a human who is not a human’. In his cyber-postmodern make-up, Aryel does look like a throwback to Derek Jarman’s Ariel, the anxious boiler-suited worker in Tempest (1979). Programmed not to ‘understand human emotion,’ Aryel, however, contrives to make himself ‘visible to Prince Ferdjinan’ ‘to console him’. This turn of events clearly does not fit in Prospero’s three-phase plan which does not allow for any improvisation nor any ‘rewrite [ of] a scene’. It is against this postmodern canvas that Ferdjinan and Aryel’s homosexual encounter is sketched.
Yet, the queerness of their relationship is put under erasure. While Aryel acknowledges that ‘physical contact’, after Ferdjinan has thrown his arms around his neck, ‘disrupts the balance of his chips’, Virahsawmy censors himself. They are called ‘twin brothers’ and their homosexuality is sanitized. The audience is assured that Aryel is ‘without sex’-,‘peyna sex’- and Ferdjinan is impotent-‘sexual pleasure means nothing to me’. In an article praising Virahsawmy for his linguistic and ideological subversiveness, Roshmi Mooneram speaks of the ‘lovely couple’ as engaged in ‘an alternative relationship’ (ii). And Shawkat Toorawa refers to our two ‘strange bedfellows’ as ‘companions’ (iii). Nowhere is the word ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ mentioned. Also, the portrayal of Aryel as blond and blue-eyed seems to intimate that homosexuality is an Aryan phenomenon which is not likely yet to contaminate ‘wholesome’ Mauritian society.
Toufann forces a cyclonic collision between the postcolonial and the cyber-postmodern but is still too shy to make the postcolonial and the queer collide, as in Philip Osment’s Tempest-centred play, This Island’s Mine (1988), performed at the London Gay Sweatshop at precisely the time when the British Conservative Government had issued anti-lesbian-and-gay laws. Section 28 laid down that a local authority shall not ‘(a) promote homosexuality or publish material for the promotion of homosexuality ; (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship by the publication of such material or otherwise.’ Walling gets quite explicit in the scene where Aryel climbs into the bath above a supine Ferdjinan and is about to kiss him when they are interrupted by the jesters’ shouts (iv). Almost but not quite. By ostensibly hitting the Pink Key, Walling engages with Section 28 directed against the ‘pretended family relationship’ which the Aryel-Ferdjinan couple embryonically represents in turn-of-the-millennium London.
Michael Warner in Fear of a Queer Planet (1993) and Alan Sinfield have observed that gay individuals are not diasporic subjects in the sense that ‘instead of dispersing, (they) assemble. … And at least we can’t be told to go back to where we came from, as happens to racial minorities in Britain (v)’. Although this is debatable, Toufann, through its muffled denunciation of heteropatriarchy-‘getting married and breeding’ -, conflates the idea of the Mauritian diasporic, postcolonial subject with that of the queer subject. It, albeit hesitatingly, recognizes that colonialism and myths of masculinity have not yet been surpassed but have been conveniently contained in a postcolonial or a postmodern that still has to host the queer. Admittedly, this conflation still lies at the end of the Mauritian Rainbow.
Notes:
i Jean Georges Prosper, "The Rainbow Nation," in Ron Butlin, ed., Mauritian Voices: New Writing in English (New Castle upon Tyne: Flambard Press, 1997), pp. 147-148.
ii Roshmi Mooneram, ‘Prospero’s Island Revisited: Dev Virahsawmy’s Toufann,’ Kunapipi, 21:1 (1999), 17-21, p. 19.
iii Shawkat M. Toorawa, ‘"Strange Bedfellows"? Mauritian Writers and Shakespeare,’ Wasafiri, 30 (Autumn 1999), 27-31, p. 28.
iv Warm thanks go to Michael Walling and Peter Jenkins of the Africa Centre (Covent Garden, London) for discussing this scene with me.
v Alan Sinfield, ‘Diaspora and Hybridity: Queer Identities and the Ethnicity Model,’ Textual Practice, 10:2 (1996), 271-293, p. 280 & p. 281.
Chantal Zabus
Université Catholique de Louvain
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