Indian Ocean literature - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and...

is home to many literary texts, from Greco-Roman times to the Thousand and One nights, the matrix of many narratives, which portrays Sinbad

Sinbad

Sinbad or Sindbad may refer to:* Sinbad the Sailor, from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights* Sinbad the Sailor, an alias of Edmond Dantes in the novel The Count of Monte Cristo...

the Merchant, through a fantastic

Fantastic

The Fantastic is a literary term that describes a quality of other literary genres, and, in some cases, is used as a genre in and of itself, although in this case it is often conflated with the Supernatural. The term was originated in the structuralist theory of critic Tzvetan Todorov in his work...

and popular twist of the mind, however based on real details of navigation in this first ocean of globalisation. Indeed, combining Indian and Chinese literatures, among the oldest on the planet, it can be characterized as the most fictionalized ocean, having been the backbone of many tales, novels and poetic work.

This was further enhanced when Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope

Cape of Good Hope

The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula, South Africa.There is a misconception that the Cape of Good Hope is the southern tip of Africa, because it was once believed to be the dividing point between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In fact, the...

in 1488, paving the way for Vasco da Gama

Vasco da Gama

Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira was a Portuguese explorer, one of the most successful in the Age of Discovery and the commander of the first ships to sail directly from Europe to India...

, who reached Malindi

Malindi

Malindi is a town on Malindi Bay at the mouth of the Galana River, lying on the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya. It is 120 kilometres northeast of Mombasa. The population of Malindi is 117,735 . It is the capital of the Malindi District.Tourism is the major industry in Malindi. The city is...

, before being guided to Calicut, the desired port of spices, by a mualim or regional pilot. The Portuguese poet Camoens then wrote his famous Luciads.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...

sejourned there. So did Bernardin de Saint Pierre, who invented the naturalist novel with Paul and Virginie, an idyllic and tragic novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

under the tropics

Tropics

The tropics is a region of the Earth surrounding the Equator. It is limited in latitude by the Tropic of Cancer in the northern hemisphere at approximately N and the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere at S; these latitudes correspond to the axial tilt of the Earth...

, in Mauritius

Mauritius

Mauritius , officially the Republic of Mauritius is an island nation off the southeast coast of the African continent in the southwest Indian Ocean, about east of Madagascar...

. Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...

also carried his spleen there, experimenting the correspondences and falling in love with Creole

Creole peoples

The term Creole and its cognates in other languages — such as crioulo, criollo, créole, kriolu, criol, kreyol, kreol, kriulo, kriol, krio, etc. — have been applied to people in different countries and epochs, with rather different meanings...

and India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n ladies, as expressed in his poems "La dame créole" or "A une malabaraise". In La Réunion, Rouget Leconte de Lisle is foremost, with symbolist poetry.
Many more poets went to the Mascarene islands, like Paul-Jean Toulet

Paul-Jean Toulet

Paul-Jean Toulet was a French poet, novelist and feuilleton writer.- Life and works :Paul-Jean Toulet was a descendant of Charlotte Corday, and son of a wealthy man living in Mauritius...

Colonial era

In the colonial era, writers like Rabemananjara and Rabearivelo took French to new horizons, combining their original languages and cultures with the colonist's idiom. In Réunion

Réunion

Réunion is a French island with a population of about 800,000 located in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar, about south west of Mauritius, the nearest island.Administratively, Réunion is one of the overseas departments of France...

, Marius and Ary Leblond developed the colonial novel, and in Mauritius

Mauritius

Mauritius , officially the Republic of Mauritius is an island nation off the southeast coast of the African continent in the southwest Indian Ocean, about east of Madagascar...

, Clément Charoux and Léoville L'Homme

L'Homme

L'Homme. Revue française d'anthropologie, is a French anthropological journal established in 1961 by Emile Benveniste, Pierre Gourou, and Claude Lévi-Strauss at the École pratique des hautes études, as a French counterpart to Man and American Anthropologist.In 1996 the editorship passed from Jean...

expressed the contradictions of cultures and colours in a colonial environment.
Preceding the independence period, Mauritian writers like Marcel Cabon, Jean-Georges Prosper, Edouard Maunick

Edouard Maunick

Edouard Joseph Marc Maunick is a Mauritian, African poet, critic, and translator.Maunick is a métis or mulatto, and as such was the subject of discrimination from both blacks and whites. He worked briefly as a librarian in Port-Louis before going to Paris in 1960, where he wrote, lectured, and...

, Robert Edward-Hart, René Noyau and Emmanuel Juste were to espouse négritude

Négritude

Négritude is a literary and ideological movement, developed by francophone black intellectuals, writers, and politiciansin France in the 1930s by a group that included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and the Guianan Léon Damas.The Négritude...

or more Mauritian themes.

Postcolonial era

In the 1970s, more "sociological" writers such Marie-Thérèse Humbert expressed the duality of multiculturalism

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...

.

Recent Mauritian writers include Ananda Devi, Natacha Appanah, Carl de Souza, Shenaz Patel, Barlen Pyamootoo and Khal Torabully

Khal Torabully

Khal Torabully is a Mauritian and French poet, who has coined the concept of "coolitude." Born in Mauritius in 1956, in the capital city Port Louis, his father was a Trinidadian sailor and his mother was a descendant of migrants from India and Malaysia....

Colonial era

Postcolonial era

See also