Post-Second World War migrants’ children from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan sat on their own outside the assembly hall each morning while I would mime along to the hymns. I thought they were being punished through the daily exclusion until I discovered that they were ‘in detention’ at the request of their parents on religious grounds. Despite disliking sitting cross-legged on the cold hard wooden floor and listening to the headmaster waffle on piously, I didn’t envy them because if one desired anything at that age it was not to stand out.
I left home at 18 and migrated to London in 1982, leaving behind the Yorkshire stone buildings in the city of Bradford for a street row of fired London red brick where I was placed in a rented accommodation along with the only other student from the north of England, a boy from Newcastle. I thought at first that it was only when we spoke that we stood out: his was a thick Geordie accent, and mine was a broad and mumbled dialect which was always met with ‘What?’, so I had to keep repeating myself. Yet it was more than the way we sounded; we acted and responded to things differently, possibly a little more naively through our regional differences and working-class upbringing. 1
So in 2015 when I was introduced to the ‘Coolitude’ philosophy of Khal Torabully and an archive of photographs of Indian migrants to Mauritius, I was not entirely on unfamiliar ground. The present musings represent my reactions as a screen-printer, and a habitual writer of theatre skits, to my encounters with the semiology of Coolitude and the visual imagery of this othered group of historical migrants.
Despite their origin in an oppressive colonial regime focused on policing and immobilizing its immigrant labour force, the 19th-century photographs of Indian migrants were technically remarkable, both achingly beautiful and profound. Some were photographed in profile while others looked straight at the camera (I later discovered that these were experimental methods designed to test which representation best enabled identification).
I selected a number of these small late 19th-century photographs and decided to submit them to my ‘rock star’ treatment. I had produced large limited-edition screen-prints of well-known international rock stars and film directors taken from the photographic archives of Derek Ridgers. Each two-colour print involved an experimental approach within the layout, using typography overprinted on the portraits. The over-typing could be subtly blended in or starkly branded right over the subjects’ faces. Overprinted fractured elements of official documents were used to underscore keywords that exemplified the decisions being made on these people’s lives, and in one or two cases, lines extracted from the Coolitude poetics of Khal Torabully (honest words equivalent to a punch in the belly).
One print approach worked very well with these photographs – reversed or inverted onto a black stock and printed with a light gold powder that was brushed over the water-based ink, forcing it to anchor to both the image and an overlay of typewritten words while the ink was still wet.
In the process of screen-printing this historical photographic work, I began to contemplate the injection of aesthetic paraphernalia that surrounds and offers some fractured narrative to the particular subjects’ lives. I thought about the irony of these people being crowded together on ships and moving over great distances across the vast ocean only to have to sit alone in inert stillness in case their movements caused their features to blur while the camera’s aperture took in the light, while they sat and waited for their so-called identities to be captured (and numbered), their eyes transfixed either towards the camera or off to one side, all partaking in the same process, but each in varying states of being – the uncertainty of the young, the visibly sad and broken men, the weariness and even madness of some, the dignified defiance of the women, all looking off in the distance from a distance.
Why had I chosen certain individuals from the scores of photographs available in the archive and how did I imagine their lives? I was drawn to the portraits of youthful migrants. Today we would consider them children, but in the 19th-century colony of Mauritius they were already at work in the cane fields, or in the bazaars and docks of the port city.
Beekano (Figure 1) intrigued me. I imagined that it was his mother who combed his hair in an attempt to make him appear more presentable at the sitting. His fringe is cropped very short, high above his forehead, yet there is a length of hair that is combed over this. There is also a shoulder length of hair that has resisted being flattened down, it tufts up at each side of his ears like bunches. What makes him stand out is the fact that he is positioned to face towards the side, instead of directly at the camera, yet, unlike the other subjects, he is looking towards the camera as if he is facing it directly, and if you look closely, you will notice that he appears wall-eyed. I later learned that he was condemned to spend two years in a juvenile reformatory for the ‘crime’ of absenteeism from work and that his mother had successfully petitioned to secure his release on the ground that he was the sole breadwinner of the family. 2
Doorgana (Figure 2) had a look of uncertainty and abandonment about him. It was hard not to feel pity for him. His hair had been harshly cropped. His dress was plain and appeared coarse, belied by the casual, ruffled scarf around his neck. I decided to stamp across his forehead the abstracted title from an official document and below it the lines of a poem by Khal Torabully. In fact, on further reading, I discovered that Doorgana had migrated as part of an exceptionally large family group, consisting of a father, mother and six children who all boarded the Reigate, a ship from Madras, in 1874. The father, Sunassy, was 40 years old, elderly for an indentured labourer, but his oldest son was 19 and the promise of future work from his family no doubt helped to sway the officials in charge of emigration at the port. The family were Telugus of the Yathe caste and hailed from Thandapa in Vizagapatham. 3
I imagined an encounter between Beekano and Doorgana in Mauritius and a somewhat surreal narrative eventually emerged …
He from whom knowledge was kept
Beekano decided that he would not work this day, and instead walked down to the market where the flat smell from the small dried fish that lay heaped on every stall filled the air. Despite the piece of sackcloth covering his face he recognized his friend Doorgana, who lay asleep on his back. His knees splayed apart made his legs look like a frog’s as they protruded from the end of the parked barrow. This made Beekano smile. ‘I will not wake him because he looks like a King in all this grey dirt’, he thought to himself, and walked on by. He liked escaping the closeness of things in the city and the people that surrounded him. He headed to the foot trails that led up to the mountains where nothing was deliberate.
‘I will climb up there and look at the view’, he said, and began the journey up where the pathway led through the bushes, pleased that he had decided to wear the shoes he had been given by a friend after the sole of his sandals had worn so thin that small stones could be felt through them. When he reached the top he looked at the view, narrowing his eyes. To the side of where he stood he noticed a cut piece of sugar cane a few feet in length. It pointed out over the coastline of the island like a small cannon. He walked over to it and placing both feet flatly across its width he made as if to keep his balance and began to roll the tubular shape from side to side until the tip of his shoes touched the stone and then back until his heels stopped it again. Suddenly the cane launched forward and off the face of the rock carrying him with it until he was moving independently of the surface and suspended in the air. His heart began to quicken and he could feel it begin to pound heavily in his chest as he soared high above the trees on the slope that was beneath him. He heard birds at the wrong speed that sounded like machine metal and began gently to traverse through the bare landscape that lay before him like a surfer. He looked down at the earth. I have never seen such patterns he thought to himself and hoped the ground had not changed forever, fearing he would not be able to recognize it once he was able to walk upon it again. The warm breeze at first felt pleasant and soothed the skin of his face and this began to calm him, which he liked very much as he journeyed further outward until he was over the Indian Ocean itself, masterfully directing the cane in whichever direction he pleased by applying a slight pressure through the arch of his right foot to force the cane to roll and twist his direction either to the left or to the right. As his confidence grew he leaned forward to maintain a straight line and moved faster until the air began to whistle in his ears. He felt small particles sting his face as the air turned into an opposition of wind and very soon he was inside a cyclone, through the blurred turbulence of which he could no longer see. He felt no panic only a sense of heightened excitement. A force stripped him of his skin and caused his blood to fall away, a faint red flat curtain of red rain streaking behind him. The onrushing air was now a steady stream of flame which baked his flesh onto his bones as they began to break apart. Finally, he had no need to breathe. It was at this point he experienced release.
When he stepped off the cane stalk, he began to wonder how it had come to be there. Why would someone cut and bring a piece of sugar cane all the way up here only to discard it? There was nothing else around after all. Curious to learn more about it he decided to kick and roll it over again. It was then that he discovered hidden underneath, dark grey dome-like bugs scuttling around in their exposure while others, partially crushed with their insides now visible, clung to the surface of the stone, unable to move. Beekano felt full of remorse as he made his way back down the hillside, where he met Doorgana, who was now awake and was walking on one of the roads parallel to the market. ‘Come along with me if you want to eat’, said Doorgana. ‘We are all ready to eat.’ And the two of them went inside one of the huts to eat a soup made of fish flakes and spices.
In the dryness of the forest sat a Tenrec. A few days earlier it had suffered an injury and now it had been too long since it had eaten so it sat still as the night air fell in temperature. It sensed something that it would have no control over but did not know anything more. At the top of the island in the oncoming coolness Lamellicorn beetles emerged from under the sugar cane to clamber around on the stone surface and in the safety of darkness they searched for food. One by one each located the thick gluey bodies of the other crushed beetles and began feasting.