Desdemona's Book, Lost and Found

Summary

Cultures, or what are known as cultures, do not mix. They encounter each another, mingle, modify each other, reconfigure each other. They cultivate one another; they irrigate or drain each other; they work over and plough through each other, or graft one onto the other.

(Jean-Luc Nancy)

The alternative to separatism is border thinking, the recognition and transformation of the hegemonic imaginary from the perspectives of people in subaltern positions. Border thinking then becomes a ‘tool’ of the project of critical cosmopolitanism.

(Walter Mignolo)

Introduction

Natasha Distiller, in her article ‘Shakespeare and the Coconut: Close Encounters in Post-apartheid South Africa’, argues that Shakespeare continues to be deployed within a framework reliant on ‘a particular display of English literariness understood to exist in a binary relation to a putative Africanness’. Whereas the persistent applicability of the trope of the coconut to the image of Shakespeare is an indication of ongoing hierarchies of social and economic power in the South African context, I explore an alternative way of engaging (with) Shakespeare off the East coast of Africa in the post-colonial context of Mauritius where a putative Africanness is a creolized one. Uninhabited until the end of the sixteenth century, Mauritius underwent several waves of colonization which brought together European settlers, slaves from various parts of the African mainland, Madagascar, India and indentured labourers from various parts of India and China. A Creole language developed in the seventeenth/eighteenth century on the sugar cane plantations during French settlement, partly drawing from the French dialects spoken at that time and based on a different grammatical system, arguably influenced by an African substrate. This lingua franca has by now also acquired a vocabulary drawing from several of the Asian languages spoken in Mauritius and increasingly from English and remains the main spoken language. It is within this context of creolization, which already indicates a practice of border crossing, that I consider the appropriation of Othello by Dev Virahsawmy, linguist, political activist, creative writer and translator who writes exclusively in the local language, Creole. Whereas Shakespeare accessed in English in his traditional associations of Britishness and tradition survives, just about, through an elitist English-medium education system inherited from colonial days in Mauritius, it is as Virahsawmy's Shakespeare deployed to complex multivalent ends that the Bard thrives. If fathoming out the various points where a catalysis may lie in the complex two-way traffic between the source text and Virahsawmy's appropriation were not complex enough, Dev Virahsawmy also moves away, in Prezidan Otelo, from the post-colonial writing back project, itself constrained by the problematic binaries of colonial thinking. In an attempt at charting diffuse and manifold catalyses, which, by definition, operate in the untidy framework that Nancy ascribes to culture, I look at the dynamics of branding in Virahsawmy's works and the development of his theory of Creole cosmopolitics.