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Granmoun Lele, the Great Witchdoctor, the "dynamite father" of the music of Réunion Island is back - at the head of his family group - with boundless energy, his powerful voice, his flamboyant chorus, his explosive drum section, his inimitable groove…
Dances, trances, nostalgia, colors and emotion - the Maloya of Réunion Island shining like a supernova...
Photograph : Philippe Dupuich.
Julien Phileas was born one February 28, 1930 in Saint-Benoît, on the east coast of Reunion Island. It is due to the fact that at afternoon snack time, his mother always used to cry out "Julien, lé lait!" (Julien, the milk!), that he acquired the surname of "Lélé". Malabar-Kaffir father, Bata-Madagascan mother, four brothers and four sisters, he follows the paternal path at the Beaufonds "létablisseman" (establishment), sugar plantation and factory, where he becomes a day laborer, then metal worker, "head cook", up until retirement "at 56 years, 3 months and medals". The harsh environment of sugarcane workers is indicated by Saturday's pay. That which allows the purchase of rum and to continue a rhythmic party until dawn using crude instruments. It's during these "kabarés" (1) off limits to noisy children that after adolescence he begins to sing, inspired by his uncle, Arsène Madia. Bitten by the music bug, he goes as far as to buy an accordion, "from Lyon, weighing 19 kilos". And with his friend Tonga Lafa, he develops, as the gatherings progress, a manifest notoriety. This is because his "foutan" maloya and his compositions stretch beyond the limits of Saint-Benoît (2). To the point that, on December 23, 1977, he declares his own troupe at the prefecture, a sort of familial conservatory, in which his thirteen children will in turn evolve (eight still belong). And to the point that he records four titles on a 45¯, a vinyl which is to be one of the first of its kind, alongside that of Firmin Viry of Saint-Pierre.
To situate the "maloya" within the culture of Reunion Island, one must keep in mind that the island (2,512 square kilometers, currently close to 600,000 inhabitants), first inhabited over 350 years ago, has become a mixed cocktail of ethnicities over the centuries, an amazing interweaving of diverse ethnic groups which culturally intermingle. Today there are 180,000 people of mixed ethnicity, descendants of Africans, Europeans, Indians, farm workers or small landowners; 120,000 Malabars or Tamils ("Malbars" in Creole) originating from Southern India, workers in sugar factories or state employees; 100,000 whites born on the island, distinguished into two groups, the "Big Whites" ("Gro-Blan") comprised of the land-owning families, and the "Little Whites" ("Ti-Blan"), living meagerly off agriculture or as employees; 40,000 Kaffirs ("Kaf"), descendants of slaves from Madagascar and the African coast; 15,000 Chinese from Canton who have a quasi-monopoly on the food trade; 10,000 Muslim Indians from Gujarat ("Zarab") who dominate the textile and appliance markets; not to mention the 10,000 metropolitan French people (the infamous "Zorey"). Other than the strictly Muslim "Zarab", the population of Reunion Island is Catholic. And while it is true that most "Malbars" are practicing Catholics, they nevertheless continue to perform Tamil rituals. The Tamil religion, a variation of Hinduism, endures in the form of firewalking, animal sacrifices, abstinence, and magic. In what concerns the "Kaffirs", they perform rituals of Madagascan or African origin that are called services ("sevis malgas" or "sevis kabars"). Thus there exists an interculture: loss of reference points, major crossroads of filiation, and a notion of mixed ethnicity that gives way to a plethora of interpretations. One must also remember that the initial development of the former Bourbon Island was made possible, from the middle of the 17th century until the treaty's abolition in 1830, thanks to an enslaved labor force. And this historical fact, even if obscured, is central in the collective unconsciousness of the people of Reunion Island.
The plantation society engendered a dual social reality that can be found in the music. Thus, the current sega is perhaps a hybrid of the primitive sega and the quadrille of 18th-century white colonists. Other types of music accompanied the contemporary migratory flux, when the maloya rooted itself in Oedipal fashion in the culture of slaves and of the "nägres marrons", those rebels who escaped and sought refuge in the volcanic heights of the island (3). A fracture that helps to explain the belated recognition of a maloya that had long been confined to the working-class neighbourhoods established precisely in those areas where the plantation culture developed.
Around 1848, date of the abolition of slavery, 58,000 slaves, i.e. 60% of the island's population, are freed. But their reality and their culture are to be denied, as much by the descendants of the "newly freed", who prefer to shrug off this cursed moment in history with a post-abolitionist uneasiness, as by the local "elites", who judge obscurantist any reference to this painful period of the past. The French Departmentalisation in 1946 is to reinforce the phenomenon, continuing in a Jacobin vision of the culture stamped by assimilation of which the effect is to be to further marginalize the original culture. As proof, the changes in the Creole language. For a long time the latter is presented at worst as a novelty in "doudouiste" terms (word that connotes a simplistic French view of African culture), at best as a form of rural slang. And it is only in stages and with the political drive of intellectuals that it is to obtain a status and a title. The founding article of the linguistic demand for recognition appeared in the Creole student magazine "Le Rideau de Cannes" and dates from 1961. The first phonological written form and the first consciously Creole poem by Jean-Claude Legros are published the following year. The publication, from 1969 to 1976, of the "Illustrated Lexicon of the Creole Language" in the daily "Temoignages" instigated by Boris Gamalaya constitutes a decisive step forward, as do the later work of "Lortograf 77" (common phonological speller), of the magazine "Sobatkoz", of Ginette Ramassamy (Creole syntax), and the publication of Creole-French dictionaries. If it is important to call attention to this difficult progression of linguistic exigencies - an elementary school inspector did he not declare yet in 1970: "the Creole language should be shot" - it is because the maloya, Kaffir dance that it was, has always in its essence been at the heart of this quest for a linguistic, but also economic and social, identity (4). A coincidence then if, from 1956 to 1962, the maloya is prohibited by the Perreau-Pradier government, forcing it into a quasi-clandestine existence precisely among the sugarcane choppers and the rejected of the "heights". So much so that even well before the battle for the Creole written form took shape, "the music of the ancestors" revealed itself to be the privileged vehicle of the Reunion people's anthropologically unspoken.
The island's political history is to testify to that. In the mid-sixties, the P.C.R. (Reunion Communist Party) popularises the maloya in the celebrations of its newspaper, "Temoignages", in accordance with its battle in favor of autonomy. Firmin Viry's and Granmoun Lele's first albums are incidentally produced at their instigation. A period during which the maloya musicians are transported in covered trucks toward concert locations like sulphurous personalities!
But the force of the maloya surpasses considerably the political struggles in favor of a renewed status of the island. This is because its memorial ballistics aim much farther, as Julien Phileas defines it: "d'un cìte kär gros, de l'autre kär joyeux; apräs il faut mettre sur la balance. Quand nous pense zancàtres comment lele, nous le käs gros; mais nou kär le joyeux quand nou pense zot la gagne la liberte" (on one side a heavy heart, on the other, a joyful heart; afterwards they must be weighed. When we think of our ancestors and how their lives were, we have a heavy heart; but we have a joyful heart when we think that they obtained their freedom). The spirit of the maloya exists indeed in this space between nostalgia and hope, blues and outrage, a stolen humanity and the possibility of happiness. Its words, its poetics, and its melodies in minor keys not only allude to the era of slavery, but are also the pieces of an identity puzzle, of a broken mirror (5). Its qualities are piercing voices that support rural instruments: the "rouleur" (bass horse-drum that one straddles, born of a shortened barrel covered with a goat skin that is stretched on the fire); the "bobre" (musical bow secured to a dried calabash); the "caãambre", box made of cane flower stems containing grains that one shakes lying flat, this movement giving birth to the 6-8 rhythm, rhythmic signature of the maloya. And more still, the "fer-blanc" (dented milk can), the Indian "tablas" and "ravan", the triangle... The maloya, finally, in its original configuration is of a ritual order, which helps to distinguish a maloya that is "pile" (pounded) (that is to say accessible to all, conceived for dancing, festive, conveying themes of day-to-day life) from a maloya that is "roule" (rolled), linked to ritual practices of Madagascan or Tamil influence, which are conducted neither on stage nor in performances. This intimate maloya connected with the fasting periods - when the families invite relatives and friends to share in the preparation, prayers, offering to the gods, meditation - is the network of celebrations favorable to the exchange of legends, stories, "sirandanes" (traditional riddles), occasionally during which certain "enter into communication with the other world" through the phenomenon of trance. It is to be understood that this particular maloya takes place on specific days and specific hours, according to codes that are rather secretive.
Granmoun Lele, through his origins, was familiarised very early with the Madagascan and Tamil rites. Thus, the musician is even known on the island as a sculptor-renovator of the "bondies" (gods) which the practicing install in their little temples, or of the masks that one dons during the Malbar balls. A very specific type of work which is subject to strict rules: from the choice of the wood (only lilac, margosier, or camphor) to refraining from meat and sexual relations during the work, and including an eight- to ten-day fast before the sculpting.
Granmoun Lele plays therefore the maloya as he breathes. And it's in his Bras-Fusil space that he has composed the crux of his repertory, more than 200 songs that speak of his daily life, his dreams, obtaining the inspiration for his rhythms from his natural environment like the ocean ("the small disorder of the sea, for me, the form of which is like a kind of music"). For these pieces, he needs "a good bargain" (an idea); to see "if it fits or not" and upon an implicit construction each participating family member will add "his/her own dash of salt". His son Marcel Willy, - distributor of rhythms who played with Doudou N'Diaye Rose - playing a decisive role in the dialogue between tradition and modernity, so much so are his father's ears open to innovation and to the world of the youth. The maloya of the Lele clan is thus like a successful "zambroukai", the Creole dish made with rice, smoked meat, dried or ripe grains and spices, in which each element is permeated by the others while at the same time keeping its own particular distinctiveness. This can be heard on this record, which after the album "Namouniman" already full of different flavors, raises it one notch higher. It is that since the beginning of the twenties, the maloya under various accepted forms (pure, crossbreed of the influences of sega, jazz, reggae, rock...via Rwa Kaff, Granmoun Baba, Firmin Viry, Danyel Waro, Ti Fock, Zizkakan, Baster) has witnessed a vast reverberation on Reunion Island as well as abroad. The island asked itself the question of how a music could make claims to universality while at the same time being able to renew itself without renouncing itself. Granmoun Lele, having arrived late on the international scene, could have contented himself with a certain seniority standing, but it is he who revealed himself to be one of the best energizers of the tradition. Listening to his vocal arrangements, the surprising hues which he brings to his big band's percussion work through the addition of new instruments (djembe, apungalachi, sati, bells...), he touches upon a sonorous plenitude. The qualitative leap of the Lele clan's work - themes, syntax, rhythms - should evidently offer some leads to many a musician, jazz musicians in particular.
Frank TENAILLE
Notes :
(1) From the Malagasy word "kabary": assembled, which has given the neologism kabar: convivial concert, a kind of celebration Reunion style.
(2) The term maloya is supposedly, as certain affirm, of Malagasy origin ("maloy aho"). The expression maloy meaning to speak, to rattle on, to say what one has to say. The primitive sega was closely related to the maloya before the emancipated of 1948 combined it with European music. The name "tchega" in Mozambique is related to a dance very close to the Spanish fandango. The Swahili "sega" designates the act of rolling up one's robes, typical gesture of those dancers found in the "ravane" sega on the island of Maurice, in Rodrigues with the drum sega, and in the Seychelles with the "moutia".
(3) Previously, the maloya was adopted by the majority of the disenfranchised poor (Madagascans, Africans, committed Indians and to a lesser degree the poor "little whites").Likewise, it is clear to see that the malbars have played a major role in the preservation of the Maloya. The committed Indians of the 19th century adopted it while those who were its guardians, through a desire for social integration, were abandoning a form of expression judged as associated with the era of slavery.
(4) Representative of this situation is the work of an interdisciplinary group (sociologue, physician, linguist, anthropologue, etc.) who in 1989 published a text entitled "The Hide-and-Seek of a Reduced Culture and the Remnants of a Lost Identity", which focused on a "symbolic dysfunction touching the cultural practices of Reunion Island" linked to an unresolved questioning of identity.
(5) For a long time, the Maloya poetry remained misunderstood and judged as infantile, "disjointed", by the Cartesian upholders of a French ethnocentric view of the world. The island's contemporary poets, Jean Albany, Boris Gamalaya, Axel Gauvin, have since notably dislodged those points of view. The "Facteur Cheval" (i.e. phantasmagorical and yet accessible to all) quality of Granmoun Lele's poetic universe possesses as such all the classical characteristics of the Maloya language, with its metaphors, its allusions, its phantasmagoria, its humor, its linguistic borrowings (from Malagasy, Swahili, imaginary words) to the extent that even the family does not comprehend all of Lele's words, occasionally impossible to transcribe into normal Creole.
Go to :
Firmin Viry ; Zarboutan.
Contacts
Agent
Country: France
Name: Marabi/Christian Mousset
Tel: 0545619320
Fax: 0545618779
E-mail: marabi@wanadoo.fr
Adress: Pépinière Tremplin Sud
1, Bd Jean Moulin
16023 Angoulême
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