La Compagnie des Indes

Symposium at Port Louis

Drifting ashore on a salt-cracked book-box,

Buoyed up with Byron and Shakespeare,

Once again we ship Coles' Notes

To Newcastle. No home these days

For obsolete litterateurs,

Only temporary anchorage

Deep in the southern hemisphere.

Safe for now in the cyclone's eye,

With scribbled notes on a borrowed page

And winging it like Hannay, 

It seems our task is to discover whether

Concordia et Progressio can

Ever be more than contraries

Yoked by violence together.   ...

The beginning of a poem from Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book (2007), a poem both formidable and annoying, and these two responses can't be separated, they are both part of the poem's meaning. 

It's a highly literary fabric. Those opening lines brush against John Masefield's "Cargoes", like neighbouring boats in a harbour.  (It's a poem that's mentioned later; its celebration of the glory days of empire and colonialism was already a little clouded in 1903).  

Port Louis is the capital city of Mauritius. It was named in 1736, in honour of Louis XV. This was when Mauritius was named l'Isle de France ("l'Île" in modern spelling). When the island became British in 1814, the orginal Dutch name was restored. 

The motto of the city is Concordia et Progressio (Harmony and Progress). The motto reminds the visiting litterateur of discordia concors in Johnson's divagation on the wit of the metaphysical poets, and hence of "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions..." . But after all it helps him to frame the poem's question; about the symposium, and about Port Louis too. 

(I have no idea why or which Hannay appears here.)

If the poem laughs at the author's own ridiculous position in showing up at a Mauritius symposium, it casts the same disrespectful eye at the Mauritian end too. There's a "centenarian entrepreneur" who still sees EngLit in terms of Chesterton and Masefield. Shakuntala Hawoldar (b. 1944) is "Mrs Hawoldar": not so much a fellow poet as an exotic ceremonial presence (she was President of the Mauritian Writers Association):

Till Mrs Hawoldar decides

To fire the sunset gun and bring

Proceedings to a close.

And immediately afterwards, there are those funny French names picked out of the list of Mayors of Port Louis:

The names of former mayors

Are allegorical in spades:

Monsieur Charon, Messrs Forget,

Tranquille and Martial.  ...

It's a drop-in visitor's private amusement at sights he's rapidly passing by, people he'll never meet again.  But that inevitable cultural mismatch is part of what the poem is about.

And as the allegorical names hint, the cultural isolation keeps pulling him towards thoughts of death; a melancholy but somehow entrancing kind of death, in whose light the complications of history and multiculturalism can be set aside as irrelevant. The poem at the end is no longer laughing or snidy or uncomfortable, but beautiful:

Let poison run back up the leaf,

The will resume its inoocence, and all

Before they go join hands downstage

To take the sea's applause and look

Once more at how the waves come in

As ever, faithful to the shore

And yet asleep

As soundly as the drowned men in the deeps

Beyond the coral shelf,

To whom the upper world

Is sealed, as firmly

As the mind of God himself. 

*

I'm reading "Symposium at Port Louis" as (in part) a poem about the hopeless inadequacy of poetry. 

As it happens that theme is also sounded in my sample poem by Shakuntala Hawoldar:

Birth of Bangladesh

I can only stand

And watch the profiles of grief pass by,

Having known just greasepaint and glycerine tears,

I cannot pretend to the agony twisting in her groins against her will,

Having known only the sweets of self-surrender;

I cannot play the child who scrapes the bin for grains

from leftovers of leftovers,

I cannot be the mother collecting remnants

Of what had once churned in her womb --

Or simulate the naked face of want

Staring from rich pools of misery;

My posturing and my words

Are mere celluloid projections

Of the raw corpses littered beneath the Bangla Sun,

And my silence a betrayal of my kind. 

[Source: "Three Poets: Thwaite, Hawoldar, Pernia", India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 3 (July 1979), pp. 237-251. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23001613 . The poem is about the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. Lines 4-5 refer to the genocidal rapes carried out by soldiers.]

*

That restorative vision at the end of "Symposium at Port Louis" arose from the island setting recalling The Tempest. (A few lines earlier we had A Midsummer Night's Dream, too.)

One literary work that doesn't get alluded to in "Symposium at Port Louis", so far as I know, is Paul et Virginie, the 1788 bestseller by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737 - 1814). The story takes place in a paradisal Mauritian valley, close to Port Louis.

Paul at length descended from the tree, overcome with fatigue and vexation. He looked around in order to make some arrangement for passing the night in that desert; but he could find neither fountain, nor palm-tree, nor even a branch of dry wood fit for kindling a fire. He was then impressed, by experience, with the sense of his own weakness, and began to weep. Virginia said to him,—"Do not weep, my dear brother, or I shall be overwhelmed with grief. I am the cause of all your sorrow, and of all that our mothers are suffering at this moment. I find we ought to do nothing, not even good, without consulting our parents. Oh, I have been very imprudent!"—and she began to shed tears. "Let us pray to God, my dear brother," she again said, "and he will hear us." They had scarcely finished their prayer, when they heard the barking of a dog. "It must be the dog of some hunter," said Paul, "who comes here at night, to lie in wait for the deer." Soon after, the dog began barking again with increased violence. "Surely," said Virginia, "it is Fidele, our own dog: yes,—now I know his bark. Are we then so near home?—at the foot of our own mountain?" A moment after, Fidele was at their feet, barking, howling, moaning, and devouring them with his caresses. Before they could recover from their surprise, they saw Domingo running towards them. At the sight of the good old negro, who wept for joy, they began to weep too, but had not the power to utter a syllable. When Domingo had recovered himself a little,—"Oh, my dear children," said he, "how miserable have you made your mothers! How astonished they were when they returned with me from mass, on not finding you at home. Mary, who was at work at a little distance, could not tell us where you were gone. I ran backwards and forwards in the plantation, not knowing where to look for you. At last I took some of your old clothes, and showing them to Fidele, the poor animal, as if he understood me, immediately began to scent your path; and conducted me, wagging his tail all the while, to the Black River. I there saw a planter, who told me you had brought back a Maroon negro woman, his slave, and that he had pardoned her at your request. But what a pardon! he showed her to me with her feet chained to a block of wood, and an iron collar with three hooks fastened round her neck! After that, Fidele, still on the scent, led me up the steep bank of the Black River, where he again stopped, and barked with all his might. This was on the brink of a spring, near which was a fallen palm-tree, and a fire, still smoking. At last he led me to this very spot. We are now at the foot of the mountain of the Three Breasts, and still a good four leagues from home. Come, eat, and recover your strength." Domingo then presented them with a cake, some fruit, and a large gourd, full of beverage composed of wine, water, lemon-juice, sugar, and nutmeg, which their mothers had prepared to invigorate and refresh them. Virginia sighed at the recollection of the poor slave, and at the uneasiness they had given their mothers. She repeated several times—"Oh, how difficult it is to do good!" While she and Paul were taking refreshment, it being already night, Domingo kindled a fire: and having found among the rocks a particular kind of twisted wood, called bois de ronde, which burns when quite green, and throws out a great blaze, he made a torch of it, which he lighted. But when they prepared to continue their journey, a new difficulty occurred; Paul and Virginia could no longer walk, their feet being violently swollen and inflamed. Domingo knew not what to do; whether to leave them and go in search of help, or remain and pass the night with them on that spot. "There was a time," said he, "when I could carry you both together in my arms! But now you are grown big, and I am grown old." When he was in this perplexity, a troop of Maroon negroes appeared at a short distance from them. The chief of the band, approaching Paul and Virginia, said to them,—"Good little white people, do not be afraid. We saw you pass this morning, with a negro woman of the Black River. You went to ask pardon for her of her wicked master; and we, in return for this, will carry you home upon our shoulders." He then made a sign, and four of the strongest negroes immediately formed a sort of litter with the branches of trees and lianas, and having seated Paul and Virginia on it, carried them upon their shoulders. Domingo marched in front with his lighted torch, and they proceeded amidst the rejoicings of the whole troop, who overwhelmed them with their benedictions. Virginia, affected by this scene, said to Paul, with emotion,—"Oh, my dear brother! God never leaves a good action unrewarded."

[Source: Paul and Virginia, translation by Sarah Jones (I think). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2127/2127-h/2127-h.htm .]

*

Paul et Virginie suffers the ironic fate of books that actually changed our thinking. Seeing it through the wrong end of the telescope we're less likely to be struck by its condemnation of human cruelty than to feel uneasy about its message on slavery falling short. (Compare the way we see Scott's portrayal of Jews in Ivanhoe.) It was a passionate denunciation of western civilisation, an assertion of nature over culture. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, frustrated, stubborn, morose, tender-hearted, a devotee of solitude and nature, stood in the line of Rousseau and Senancour. This is the aspect of the book that influenced the last part of George Sand's Indiana. But as the nineteenth century wore on, Paul et Virginie survived only as a sentimental tale. 

*

Isle de France was part of the colonial enterprise administered by La Compagnie des Indes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (I'm simplifying. There had been various trading companies with different names. The Compagnie des Indes was wound up in 1769, though trade continued until the revolution.)

Its base, in S. Brittany (Morbihan) where it was safely out of the way of hostilities with the Dutch and English, was at Lorient, founded in 1664. Across the roadstead was the slightly older Citadelle de Port-Louis. It was built by the Spanish in the 1590s originally, then reconstructed and renamed in 1618-1621. In this case the name referenced Louis XIII. Port-Louis in Guadeloupe (mid 17th century): Louis XIV. Port Louis on East Falkland (1764):  Louis XV. In one way or another all the entries in this particular Wikipedia disambiguation were connected with La Compagnie des Indes. Their biggest trade was with India: muslin, cotton, silk, pepper, coffee, and cowries (for use as currency in Guinea). From China: silk, tea, porcelain, dyes and medicinal plants. From West Africa gold, ivory, spices, gum arabic, and above all slaves, considered indispensable for working in tropical plantations and mines. 

Isle de France/Mauritius was a useful stop for replenishment on the immense sea journeys to Pondichery and Canton, but the island could also be productive in its own right. Sugar plantations, worked by slaves, proved the most profitable industry.  

[Images are from the 1997 guide to the Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, now located within the Citadelle de Port-Louis.]

*

Jean-Marie Gustave (J.M.G.) le Clézio (b. 1940) is a French-Mauritian author (he also has ancestral connections with Morbihan). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2008. Here's an extract from Désert (1980), translated by C. Dickson (2009).

When she enters the room used as a workshop, Lalla hears the sound of weaving looms.  There are twenty of them, maybe more, lined up one behind the other in the milky half-light of the large room where three neon tubes are flickering. In front of the looms, little girls are squatting or sitting on stools.  They work rapidly, pushing the shuttle between the warp threads, taking the small steel scissors, cutting the pile, packing the wool down on the weft.  The oldest must be about fourteen; the youngest is probably not eight.  They aren’t talking, they don’t even look at Lalla when she comes into the workshop with Aamma and the merchant woman.  The merchant’s name is Zora; she is a tall woman dressed in black who always holds a flexible switch in her hands to whip the little girls on the legs and shoulders when they don’t work fast enough or when they talk to their workmates.

‘Has she ever worked?’ she asks, without even glancing at Lalla.

Aama says she’s shown her how people used to weave in the old days.  Zora nods her head.  She seems very pale, maybe because of the black dress, or else because she never leaves the shop.  She walks slowly over to a free loom, upon which there is a large dark red carpet with white spots.

‘She can finish this one,’ she says.

Lalla sits down and starts to work.  She works in the large dim room for several hours, making mechanical gestures with her hands.  At first she has to stop, because her hands get tired, but she can feel the eyes of the tall pale lady on her and starts working again right away.  She knows the pale woman won’t whip her because she is older than the other girls working there.  When their eyes meet, Lalla feels something like a shock deep inside, and a glint of anger flares in her eyes.  But the fat woman dressed in black takes it out on the smaller girls, the skinny ones who cower like she-dogs, daughters of beggars, abandoned girls who live at Zora’s house year-round and who have no money.  The minute their work slows down, or if they exchange a few words in a whisper, the fat pale woman descends on them with surprising agility and lashes their backs with her switch.  But the little girls never cry.  All you can hear is the whistling of the whip and the dull whack on their backs.  Lalla clenches her teeth; she looks down at the ground because she too would like to shout and lash out at Zora.  But she doesn’t say anything because of the money she’s supposed to bring back to the house for Aamma.  To get even, she just ties a few knots the wrong way round in the red carpet.

Still, the following day Lalla just can’t stand it anymore.  When the fat pale woman resumes whipping Minna – a puny, thin little girl of barely ten –  with the switch because she broke a shuttle, Lalla stands up and says coldly, ‘Stop beating her!’

[Source.]

A very comprehensive interview with J.M.G. le Clézio by Maya Jaggi (2010):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/10/le-clezio-nobel-prize-profile .

Here's an extract:

Back in Nice [from Nigeria] aged 10, Le Clézio "knew nothing about school rules or shoes". His parents were first cousins, and "very closed in on themselves. I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France . . . I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture. That gave me this awkwardness that's not solved till now." While his father loved English literature, "my grandmother hated the English, a tradition with the old French Mauritians. I couldn't choose sides." His forebears belonged to the sugar plantocracy, but lost their estate in a family feud and scattered, becoming judges or doctors. The Prospector (1985), which Atlantic will publish in the UK next year, depicts such a family loss in 1890s Mauritius as an expulsion from Eden, yet incorporates myths of the colonial encounter, from Robinson Crusoe to Shaka Zulu. Its tale of a dispossessed son, who finds his idyll with a woman descended from maroons (runaway slaves), links the quest for gold, and the crushing of canecutters' revolts, to the Somme and the war engulfing Europe. Le Clézio's descent from slave-holders shaped his scepticism towards the Enlightenment. "I can understand better than most the contradiction between the idealistic civilisation and religious morals of Europe and what they did with the slaves, because the root of the evil is only two generations away from me," he says. "Maybe this has fed my need to fight against the abuses of modern civilisation. Maybe it's inspired my novels – it's present in my mind."