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In La Reunion, Firmin is known as the man who came to the rescue of Maloya, the traditional Creole music, whose survival was seriously menaced by a heavy and partisan assimilation by the state, as, incidentally, for the other oral traditions. Firmin has conserved the total instrumental transmission: we come across the “rouleur”, the “bobre”, the “triangle”, the “kayamb”.
Firmin believes in “maloya la case, maloya la kour”. Family and friends gather to sing and dance. The past, lightness, chronicles of work and time going by are cultivated.
Photograph : All Rights Reserved.
Maloya, its rhythms, its instruments, and above all its roles, are descended directly from slavery. This “dance of the Blacks” marked the observers of the time by its unsettling blend of “melancholy, lasciviousness and the anguish of a lost country”.
Maloya is the profane face of a sacred and confidential rite: “kabaré” or the cult of ancestors, that the slaves rebuilt almost entirely in secret. For these uprooted men, deprived of their origins, this ritual was fundamental to stay in communion with the spirits and with their elders. As well as being a retrieval of ancestrality “kabaré” was also the time for the healers to intervene in order to heal both spirits and bodies. In the second part of the “Kabaré” was maloya, the time for dancing after the symbolic sacrifice.
Firmin’s maloya is at the heart of this heritage.
Go to :
Granmoun Lélé ; 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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