Francophonie is orphaned, with the poet Edouard Maunick missing. The Mauritian bard leaves behind an enormous poetic work, imbued with nostalgia for its native island and lively with militant humanism. His poetry is also rich in lexical inventions and baroque inspiration.
“… the sea can not die
no totem is ash
ILE got us
to experience other loneliness
than those where we are alone … “
Great cantor of Mauritius and the sea, Edouard Maunick died on Saturday, April 10, 2021 in Paris after a long illness. He was one of the greatest French-speaking poets, a companion and heir to Senghor and Césaire. Author of a large work consisting of about twenty collections of poems, he had received many awards and accolades, including the Grand Prix de la Francophonie for his work.
The man was tired. Until the age of weight (he was 89 years old) the grief was placed on his beloved wife who died in 2007, a death from which he had never really recovered. She had inspired him to some of his most beautiful lines: “Snow with the body of fire / Snow with spice / Snow when the wind blows.” She embodied the ideal woman whose love, the poet hoped, could ward off her fear of death.
Maunick hated death. Did he not also have the title of one of his collections of poems, his last: 50 quatrains to mock death? “We were not born to live, we were born to die one day and that makes me rebel, always made me rebel,” he liked to repeat. Undeterred by the question of death, he had asked his friend Senghor what he would do to survive on his own. “You have children or you are writing a work,” the poet president would have replied. An answer that confirmed the choice Mauritian had made long ago to devote his life to poetry.
The island, the sea and the discovery of poetry
Joseph Marc Davy Maunick, whose real name was, was born on September 23, 1931 in Flacq, Port-Louis, into a Métis family. This last precision is important, due to wealth and misfortune with miscegenation, the poet has made the mark for his literary work. The place is also important because the island is an important source of inspiration for the poet who liked that “the island fertilizes me” even when he was physically far from it. Moreover, even in exile, the poet was never really far from the sea: “The exorcised exile / the sea is not here / and yet I do not know / why I hear waves / to the attack on sleep.”
If the poet heard the waves even in his Parisian exile, the explanation lies in his childhood and his youth on the island. Life was punctured by the roar of the sea in Port-Louis, where the Maunick family had settled when the eldest of their boys, who at the age of 5 had changed “Joseph Marc” – his christening name a bit prosaic – to a more royal first name, borrowed from Prince Edward of England who had impressed much of the Mauritians during their visit to the island in the 1930s.
The future poet will also make his debut in the 1930s. Its teachers recited poems throughout the class to awaken its students to the beauty of the world and its existence. But it is not poetry learned by his teacher’s mouth that led the young Mauritian to become aware of his poetic calling. “It came to me personally as a dazzling discovery,” says the author of Ensoleillé vive and the words to pay the sea.
For the anecdote, it is in the cinema of the families in Port-Louis, that the young Maunick was often visited, that his first face-to-face with the poetry mouse took place. The spectacle of the mad ride from a silent Western hero through the rain had led the poet in shorts – he was in third place – to scribble his first line on the back of a movie ticket: “The white horses of the rain …”. Since then, he has never stopped writing.
The first Mauritian poems published in local newspapers date from 1948, but it was six years later, in 1954, that the young man published his very first collection of poems, Ces Oiseaux, which he sang on behalf of an author. At the same time he worked as a teacher, then chief librarian in the main library in the Mauritian capital. This work interested him only moderately because it moved him away from his ambition to exercise his poetic talent in Paris. He felt cramped on his island and hoped to continue his career in the brilliant capital of French letters.
“Taxi drivers talk about Valéry”
At the age of 29, Maunick finally landed a ticket to France, the country he had dreamed of so much, especially by reading the “until his eyes wear out” poems in the “Poets of Today” collection. Had he not predicted a Parisian fate? “One day, you poet, you have to go to Paris. Do you think it will be extraordinary for you, you will walk on the same sidewalk, as Baudelaire and Apollinaire will have walked on. Taxi drivers talk about Valéry. “
It will not be … Parisian taxi drivers did not let poetry do! Landed from his remote island, with no money in his pocket, he had to live on odd jobs for a long time, surviving in anticipation of better days. He did freelance work on French radio and television (RFI, Antenne 2), visited the French facility Présence Africaine which, under the leadership of its founder, the Senegalese Aljoner Diop, had the wind in the 1960s and 1970s. The headquarters in the heart of the Latin Quarter for the publishers of the black world, at 25 bis rue des Ecoles, was then the meeting place of the Afro-Caribbean intelligence and the left of the Paris elite.
At Présence Africaine, Maunick was like a fish in water. He became friends with Senghor and Aimé Césaire, the two most important epigones in the negritude movement. At the initiative of this prestigious duo to which Aljoner Diop could not refuse anything, Présence Africaine will publish several poems by this Mauritian poet that are still unknown to the public. The recognition comes in 1964 with an article by the French poet Alain Bosquet in the magazine Combat, which called on the public to discover Edouard Maunick’s “happy tropics” without delay. A largely isolated tropic that Maunick has erected, from collection to collection, an exceptional monument consisting of words and endless missions.
It is without a doubt Senghor who would have best understood the meaning and cohesion of this poet’s singular approach. Proven by the admirable preface he gave to the collection entitled Ensoleillé vive (1976), which is one of the peaks of baroque and island creativity in Mauritius. Under the title “Métis Negritude”, the poetry president’s preface recalls how Maunick’s poetry extends and renews the idea of negritude by approaching it through the web of interbreeding. More dynamic than neglected, interference is less a way of being than a process at work, which has the advantage of involving all the underprivileged on earth, regardless of skin color.
A multiple work
However central it may be, it would be a mistake to reduce Maunick’s poetry to the poetics of interference. It is a diverse work that draws its power from personal obsessions as well as from the aporias of political and international life. The titles of some of the collections that the poet has published since his first volume published in Mauritius constitute a thematic summary of this production: Les Manèges de la mer (1964), Till Yoruba land (1965), Mascaret ou le book of the sea and death (1966), Shoot me (1970), Sunny bright (1976), In memory of the memorable (1979), Desert archipelago followed by Cantate pïenne pour Jesus rivière (1982), Jump in the arc-enciel (1985) , Mandela dead or alive (1987), Words to pay the sea (1988), She and the island of the same passion (2001), Brûler à vivre / Brûler à survivre (2004), 50 quatrains to mock death, followed by Counter Silence (2006).
These volumes reveal a great humanist, associated with all the great struggles of his time (apartheid, racism, Biafra, Vietnam, imperialism). “I’m not a revolutionary, he liked to say, but a rebel. The nuance is important because the revolution is temporary, unlike the permanent uprising. “
Edouard Maunick’s struggle was also about language. Product of Mauritian Francophonie, he had made French his preferred language of expression, not forgetting to remember that he had come to Voltaire’s language through Creole, lingua franca on his homeland, regardless of social classes and the origin of the speakers. The French practiced by the late poet are nourished by the words and structures of Creole thought, without ever falling into slight exoticism. If his poetry was read, it seems, with the delight of François Mitterrand and others still, it is no doubt that the poet had known how to borrow in his language from the earlier colonizers the taste and impulse of the Mauritian creole. “Creole Orality was both the source and the horizon” of Maunick’s poetry, wrote Jean-Louis Joubert, one of the most important specialists in Mauritian literature.
We cannot conclude this tribute to the deceased poet without remembering that Maunick was not just a poet. He was also an international official at Unesco (1982-1993), a radio journalist and in the written press, especially at Jeune Afrique where he was editor-in-chief between 1994 and 1995, ambassador for his country in South Africa where he had left his duties for Nelson Mandela himself , undoubtedly the politician he most admired. The South African president, who knew this esteemed Mauritian ambassador, would have asked him to settle in his country and make South Africa his “place of creation”. What the poet will do by choosing remains in Pretoria for more than 12 years before returning to Paris in 2009.
Edouard Maunick wanted to die in Mauritius because, as a saying from his home says, “Lai mon dan la lampa” (the mill always dies in the light of the lamp). But the malt Maunick has not had time to find the lights on his home island.
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Selected bibliography
If you had to read a single book by Edouard Maunick, choose his personal anthology (Actes Sud, 1989), a volume in which the poet has compiled his most outstanding works.
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