Jessica Falconi and Giulia Spinuzza

8 Fishing for stories: Audiovisual narratives of the

Indian Ocean: Goa, Mozambique and East Timor

In this chapter, we shall deal with a set of audiovisual narratives centred

on territories of the Indian Ocean, namely Goa, Mozambique and East
Timor, with the aim of exploring some of the elements that unite and
divide this area. In this itinerary, we will be guided by Michael Pearson’s
reflection on littoral societies, allowing us to undertake a reading in
counterpoint of these narratives.
The narratives selected for the analysis have in common the topic of
fishing, an activity that develops its own characteristics and has important
social and cultural meanings in each of the territories under scrutiny. This
topic allows us to explore historical, social, environmental dynamics, etc.,
and themes related to preservation and safeguarding, while their audiovisual
representation provides the opportunity to address the coasts, islands and
oceans –​in this case the Indian Ocean –​as spaces for imaginaries and aes-
thetic creation (Samuelson, 2017; Verne & Verne, 2017). In fact, there is a
long tradition of documentaries about fishing that goes back to the classics
of documentary cinema, from films like Drifters (1929) by John Grierson
and Man of Aran (1934) by Flaherty up to the creation of the Festival des
Pêcheurs du Monde, which has been held in Lorient1 since 2008 and which
screened Sonia Filinto’s documentary, which we will discuss below.
In the first part of the chapter, Jessica Falconi traces the theoretical
framework deriving from the concept of littoral society, and tackles the
documentaries Shifting Sand by Sonia Filinto and Why are they here?
Chinese stories in Africa, by Yara Costa, while in the second part Giulia

1 The Festival reached its 11th edition in 2019. For more information, see <https://​
www.pech​eurs​dumo​nde.org/​>
190 falconi and spinuzza

Spinuzza focuses on the documentary Wawata Topu –​Sereias de Timor-​

Leste by David Palazón and Enrique Alonso and presents final consider-
ations about the topics discussed.

Constructing the Indian Ocean: The littoral societies

The town of Calangute in Goa, India; the Island of Mozambique, on the

east coast of Africa, Mozambique; and the village of Adara, on Atauro
Island, East Timor, are the locations under consideration, respectively, in
the audiovisual narratives considered in this chapter. These places belong
to territories formerly colonized by Portugal and part of the circuit of
exchanges and circulations of the Indian Ocean, the seats of ancient lit-
toral societies that underwent significant changes down the ages. It is pre-
cisely the concept of littoral societies, formulated by Michael Pearson,
that allows us to establish a dialogue between the visual representations
of fishing in these places, so as to reflect characteristics, imaginaries and
narratives of these shores of the Indian Ocean so far removed from one
another.
Because of the strength of their connection, this concept has become
one of the structuring elements of the Indian Ocean as an analytical unit,
on which Pearson worked for three decades and which today represents
an unsurpassable legacy for studies in this area. As Edward Alpers (2018)
illustrates, Pearson addressed this concept in various publications and con-
ference papers, among which we are selecting for this chapter three seminal
articles, namely, ‘Littoral Society: The Case for the Coast’ (Pearson, 1985) in
which the first formulation of the concept appears; ‘Littoral Societies: The
Concept and the Problem’, published in 2006, where the main character-
istics of littoral societies are systematized; and the more recent ‘Places in
the Indian Ocean’ (2017), where the authors ask about the present and
future of littoral societies.2

2 The 2017 article was translated into Portuguese and included in Leite, Brugioni and
Falconi (2019).
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 191

In the first article on the subject, Pearson proposed the concept of the
littoral society as a tool for going beyond the limitations of three main fields
of study, all interrelated: (1) Maritime historiography, which in Pearson’s
view, appears too centred on the nautical aspect of human activities in the
oceans, dealing mainly with types of ships, shipwrecks or naval battles;
(2) Studies of the port cities which, in his opinion, were more concerned
with the dynamics proper to the interior than those related to life in the
sea; (3) Historiography of the colonial empires, which focuses mostly on
the impact of the Europeans on the oceans, as a historical rupture. In all
of these fields, according to Pearson, there lacked a true ‘whiff of ozone’,
referring, with this expression, to a more in-​depth and somehow tangible
treatment of human experiences of life at sea. Thus, the concept of lit-
toral society emerged as a tool to surpass the limitations pointed out, and
then, introduce this ‘whiff ’ into the historiography of the Indian Ocean,
strengthening it as a historiographical paradigm and specific field of study
(Alpers, 2018: 15). For Pearson, dealing with the littoral means focusing on
‘the continuum between land and sea activities, with the strip of littoral
in the middle, acting as a hinge or mediator’(Pearson, 1985: 4). Seeking to
narrow down the definition of this object of study, Pearson points out what
would be the limit of the littoral society, that is, a frontier that cannot be
fixed like a point on the map, but rather an ideal demarcation line beyond
which human activities remain outside the sphere of influence of those
activities related to the sea:
It is always a matter of interaction between the affairs of land and sea. This inter-
action will never cease at sea, for no one lives totally on the water and completely
uninfluenced by the land. The land frontier is porous, elastic: all we can say is that
when a land activity is in no way influenced by the sea, then we are not interested.
This then is the land frontier, the end of the littoral. (Pearson, 1985: 6)

The littoral is thus characterized by being a permeable porous, flexible

and transitional area, constituting a continuum between land and sea,
whose relationship is founded on the complementarity between coast
and interior. In the final part of the article, Pearson points to some char-
acteristics that define the littoral societies, that he would take further in
successive reflections: the pluralistic nature of these societies, due to the
192 falconi and spinuzza

presence of traders and foreigners and other social and ethnic groups,
etc.; the greater consumption of fish in relation to the interior; the pe-
culiar impact of the monsoon on the littoral zones; other cultural and
religious differences (Pearson, 1985: 7). These aspects are taken up again
and reworked in the 2006 article, in which the central hypothesis is that
despite the different land influences, the societies of the littoral zones
have more in common with other littoral societies than with their own
neighbours in the interior. The connective and comparative potential of
this concept emerges more clearly in this hypothesis, able to build bridges
between different and distant communities, on the basis of observation
of their interactions with the sea.
As for the characteristics common to these societies, Pearson explores
three main categories: location, occupation and culture, recognizing that
if the first is generally evident, the last is more problematic. Regarding
the location, Pearson defines what he understands by littoral: ‘the coastal
sea zone, the beach, and some indeterminate frontier on land’, clarifying,
however, that ‘The place I am thinking of is not only the beach, for this is
a very narrow zone and has no permanent people’ (2006: 354). Pearson
also singles out the islands as privileged places for observing the presence of
littoral societies; some islands are ‘purely littoral’ (358). It is littoral peoples
who inhabit the coastal zone, whose lives are intimately linked to the sea
and influenced by it, but they also maintain links with the land. The littoral
communities live on the coast between land and sea. The fisherfolk’s fam-
ilies are perfect examples of the interconnection between land and sea: in
the majority of cases, both the demands of the interior and of distant places
overseas condition their lives and activities. For Pearson, recurring models
and elements in common emerge in the littoral communities that relate
to the material cultural, dietary habits, religion, gender relations, and a
more general condition of risk and precariousness linked to the nature of
the activities at sea in comparison with the ones on land. More recently,
different littoral societies have been facing the impact of international
tourism, technological innovations, changes in the practices of global con-
sumption and environmental pollution. In the historian’s opinion, the
littoral societies continue to exist but their characteristics are affected by
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 193

radical transformations of the symbiotic relationship between land and

sea typical of the coastal bands.
In ‘Studying the Indian Ocean World. Problems and Opportunities’
(2007), Pearson flags up an aspect that will lead him to a different view of
the actual condition of the littoral societies; this is the so-​called ‘territori-
alization’ of seas and oceans that have been transformed into graves for
the extraction of resources, requiring as a consequence the regulation and
delineation of frontiers by States and international platforms. For Pearson
this is a phenomenon that began two centuries ago, through which the land
ecotone had imposed itself on the maritime, having a profound impact
on the current configuration of the littoral societies. In fact, in the article
‘Places in the Indian Ocean’, through the concept of the ecotone, Pearson
reconsiders the existence of littoral societies, stating that we are witnessing
the end of the ecotone of the coast. Before this end, the littoral societies
lived in an essentially amphibious dimension; the fisherfolk simultaneously
practised fishing and agricultural activities, and the sailors lived for long
periods at sea maintaining strong connections to the land perpetuating
this amphibious culture through family transmission. Pearson does not
go so far as to openly declare the disappearance of littoral societies but he
does invite us to reflect on this process of territorialization of the littoral
in order to illustrate the spatial and temporal dynamics that impact on the
Indian Ocean also as a unit of analysis, in a problematizing attitude that
has never ceased to test the scope and limits of this same category.
Thus, Pearson’s concept of littoral society provides a solid framework
for us to analyse audiovisual narratives about fishing in Goa, Timor and
Mozambique, with the aim of evaluating elements in common and differ-
ences and reflecting on the existence and the current configurations of the
littorals, the people who inhabit them and, above all, of the representations
and narratives that depict them.
194 falconi and spinuzza

First shore: Calangute, Goa

Shifting Sands (29’, 2013) is Sonia Filinto’s first short film,3 and, as the
opening credit indicates, it focuses on the little town of Calangute, lo-
cated on the tourist coast of Goa,4 and the fishing community that lives
there. The topic of fishing is broached exclusively in the oral testimony of
the members of this community who represent the only source of infor-
mation accessible to the public. If, on the one hand, this option reveals the
intention to explore the personal stories and perceptions of the subjects
involved, on the other hand, they are the ones who inform about the
fishing situation based on their own lived experience, while the camera
captures ‘movements’ and ‘directions’ of a world undergoing a profound
transformation.
Tourism, emigration, the industrialization of fishing and
intergenerational family relationships stand out in the testimony as the
main factors that impact on the actual configuration of this community.
In particular, the modernization of small-​scale artisanal fishing, as well
as the introduction of the great trawlers are phenomena that crossed the
Indian Ocean from shore to shore, affecting the littorals and their commu-
nities. As Robert Newman emphasizes, after the integration of Goa into
the Indian Union, both the government and the international aid pro-
grammes incentivised the mechanization of fishing and the importation
of huge trawlers, which linked this sector more and more to the interests
of the global market (Newman, 1984).

3 The documentary was shown in Dubai; in the Festival International de Films

Pêcheurs du Monde 2015 in Lorient; in various places in Goa, and more recently in
the Fundação Oriente in Lisbon.
4 Bathed by the Arabian sea, with a population of approximately 14,000 inhabit­
ants, Calangute is called ‘Queen of the Beaches’, constituting an established do-
mestic and international tourist destination. Since the end of the 1960s, the tourism
market in Goa has been facing great changes and diversification, which has caused
impacts and reactions in the local populations in general, and the coastal commu-
nities in particular (Sreekumar et al., 1995: 4).
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 195

The testimony of the Calangute fisherfolk focuses on these aspects,

referring to the conflict with the agents of the great trawlers, as well as
their impact on the crisis in artisanal fishing, and the consequent choice
to dedicate themselves to other activities, linked to trade and tourism. The
people interviewed also mention that the ambition of the young people and
the current opportunities for education and access to other jobs have led
to the abandonment of fishing and/​or emigration to other places, which
has caused increasingly greater importation of labour from other Indian
states. These circumstances have significantly altered the structure of the
community which has in fact been opening up more and more to the inter-
ests and dynamics of the global economy (Rubinoff, 1999).
As for environmental questions, the fisherfolk also mention the
phenomena of coastal erosion and loss of beach, which deprives them
of the possibility of drying their nets, affecting the activity carried out
on a small scale. To this must be added the progressive emptying of the
coastal strip caused by the trawlers and the frequent destruction of the
nets of the local fishermen, who see their activities severely impoverished
(Pearson, 2006).
These topics are addressed in the documentary according to a struc-
turing in thematic micro-​blocks of varying duration, indicated by inter-​titles
in the frame, which do not coincide with closed narrative units, privileging
a linear segmentation of the testimonies, some of which take up more than
one block. The inter-​titles of each micro-​block allude to the topic to be
addressed but does so in a connotative way, sometimes poetic, sometimes
ironic, making use of the lexical and syntagmatic polysemy and suggesting
other meanings. Besides the more denotative inter-​titles like The NRI
Gulf ’s Story, which introduces the topic of the emigration of Goans to
the Persian Gulf, in other words, a contemporaneous transit in the Indian
Ocean, one example of poetic usage is that of the first micro-​block, Labour
of love, which introduces a set of takes of a boat preparing to go out to sea.
An example of ironic use is the inter-​title The Big Fish, which introduces
the fisherman talking about the conflicts with the great trawlers. This use
of inter-​titles helps define the voice and tone of the documentary, marked
196 falconi and spinuzza

by expressiveness and affectivity, therefore suggesting the use of the poetic

mode of documentary representation (Nichols, 2001).
The categories used by Pearson to define the littoral societies in the
2006 article –​location, activity, culture, are shown to be useful tools for
the approach of the documentary since they make it possible to set up a dia-
logue between the topic explored and the salient aspects of the staging, as
well as their effects on the representation. Thus, with regard to location and
activity, it should be highlighted in the first instance that despite tourism
being a central aspect of Calangute’s identity, mentioned right away in
the opening title, it is only in the last narrative block (A retired fisherman)
that tourism is focused on in a set of shots that capture the beach full of
sunshades. The position of the semi-​subjective camera, the use of closeups
and the raccord-​gaze suggest that the point of view on the beach is that of
Marceline Fernandes (Figures 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3),5 a key figure in the narrative
of the short film, to which we will return below.

Figures 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 Marceline Fernandes looking at the beach

5 All images from Shifting Sand are taken from <https://​rural​indi​aonl​ine.org/​artic​

les/​shift​ing-​sands-​and-​chang​ing-​tides/​>. ©Sónia Filinto.
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 197

Therefore, the coast and the beach we see throughout the film are staged
into a filmic space dominated mainly by wide shots in which fishermen
and boats appear, suggesting a full identification between the community
and the place. Taking up Pearson’s observation, according to which there
would not be a permanent population, the documentary seems to argue
the opposite, excluding from the field of vision the floating population of
tourists and somehow ‘giving back’ the beach to the fishermen.
If, on the one hand, the testimonies seek to individualize the members
of the community, focusing on memories, trajectories and personal opinions
about fishing, on the other hand, the wide shots on the beach depict the fishing
as a collective and choral activity that transforms the landscape into a natural/​
cultural montage, that is, a composition of nature, objects, men and fish. An
example of this choral dimension of fishing and the resulting visual montages
are given by the shots that portray the placing and removal of the enormous
nets used in traditional fishing methods. This is a montage of human and
nonhuman elements between which relations of affectivity and correspond-
ence are established throughout the documentary. Besides the testimonies,
the individualization and dimension of the affectivity are created by aesthetic
choices that evoke other sensorialities, in addition to vision, mainly the tactile
corporeal sense. Laura Mark defines this sensorial quality of the images as
‘haptic visuality’, flagging up some strategies that produce this effect, including
the focus on the surface of the objects, the emphasis on texture more than on
form (Marks, 2000). It is in this perspective that we can relate the closeups of
Marceline Fernandes (Figure 8.4) and his wife, to the extra big closeup of an
old boat or trunk (Figure 8.5). In these shots, both the faces and the material
and the objects transform the screen into a surface on which are inscribed
touches, memories and affects.

Figure 8.4. Marceline Fernandes Figure 8.5. a detail of a boat

198 falconi and spinuzza

In the long shots and wide shots, the frames are made from different
camera angles and heights, and the composition lines of the picture priv-
ilege the shore as the point of contact between sea and land, between
water and earth, articulated also with the editing technique of shots and
reverse shots which in fact set up a constant dialogue between these two
elements and then, between exterior and interior. In fact, the spatial
homogeneity of the documentary, dominated by the beach and the sea,
is fragmented in the editing through the insertion of shots that focus on
landscapes of the interior, such as fields, streets, markets, the theatre and
the church.
In the wide shots, the montage of human/​nonhuman results in ‘am-
phibious’ images that mix the natural, the biological, the material, config-
uring the coast as a zone of hybrid construction ( Figures 8.6 and 8.7). This
and other shots, as well as the editing choices and the search for multiple
camera angles and positions, seem to profile what Meg Samuelson defines
as the amphibious aesthetic: ‘It is characterized by the perspectival am-
bivalence and optical bifocality that arises from littoral proprioceptivity
in which sensory reception is oriented simultaneously towards land and
sea, interior and exterior, here and there’ (Samuelson, 2012).

Figures 8.6 and 8.7 Fishing activities on the beach

As material objects, the boats and nets play a central role in the audio-
visual representation of the Calangute fishing community; in various
scenes and shots the narrative centres on the entry and departure of the
boats in the sea, as well as the placing and removal of the nets according
to a temporal organization that is neither linear not univocal, suggesting
an almost circular temporality, that is, continuous repetition of the
fishing activity. However, this representation does not seem to convey a
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 199

romanticized or mythical narrative of the fishing but points, on the con-

trary, to the profound changes that affect the rhythm of this activity and
the world related to it. In fact, as told by Josephina Cardoz, member of
a family of fisherfolk, if before they fished just when there was no mon-
soon, soon after the Feast of the Virgin Mary, either to avoid atmospheric
risks, or so that the fish could grow adequately, in the present day they fish
at all times, as long as the weather permits, to meet the demands of the
market and the needs of subsistence.
Josephina Cardoz, Luizinha Silveira and Ursula Luizita Fernandes
bear witness to the role of women in the economic, social and cultural
system protagonized by the fishing community. We look once more to
Pearson and his characterization of the fisher families in the littoral soci-
eties of the Indian Ocean. According to the historian, in the majority of
these societies, the women cure, dry and salt the fish, functioning also as
the link between the littoral and the ‘frontier’ in the interior, in so far as
it is they, generally speaking, who move around in order to sell the fish in
local markets (2006), as is the case of Luizinha Silveira, briefly depicted in
her movements between the church and the market, in the narrative block
entitled Faith’s follower. As we shall see below, the case of East Timor pre-
sents significant differences concerning gender roles in the realm of fishing.
The documentary also tackles the identity and socio-​cultural aspects
of this community, alluding to its identification with the Kharvi com-
munity. This aspect is introduced in the third narrative block, entitled A
matter of identity whose initial shots depict an artistic-​musical performance
about fishing. In particular, in a performance scene, the dialogue between
a man and a fishwife summons up the social prejudice associated with the
Kharvi community. This is a community traditionally placed in an inferior
position in the caste system and marginalized in Goan society because it
is associated with poverty, manual labour and a lack of political influence
(Rubinoff, 1991). In the dialogue, the fishwife reacts to a scornful comment
by the man: ‘Don’t say kharvi, say fishing community!’ The raccord of the
editing connects this statement to the laughter of Josephina Cardoz, who
reflects on this aspect from her kitchen, alleging that the Kharvi identity is
not a question of names, but of origins. Domício Silveira’s testimony points
to the prejudice and social discrimination suffered by the community,
200 falconi and spinuzza

indicating, however, that the situation has been changing as fishermen

have been conforming to the dominant lifestyles because they have more
economic resources.
In addition to the testimonies that refer to the problems faced by the
community, the focus of the camera on the material and technological dif-
ferences of the boats points to the changes and the differentiation underway
in the sector, while the movement of boats and bodies before the camera
refers to a world in transformation whose directions and destinies are mul-
tiple and uncertain. On the other hand, it should be emphasized that in
the first narrative block in which Marceline Fernandes appears, introduced
by the inter-​title It was a different time, the wide shots filmed on the beach
function as representation of the memory of the elderly fisherman who re-
lates –​in voice on and off screen –​his beginnings in the fishing business still
under Portuguese colonial domination. The use of images that document
the present to make visible the narrative of the past points as much to the
strategies of fictionalization used in the documentary as to the intention to
capture continuities and ruptures, between past and present, in the world
of fishing and in the heart of the community.
Marceline Fernandes constitutes a link of continuity and unification,
albeit fragile due to his age, between fragments of time and space in the
construction of the audiovisual narrative. The account of his memories
bestows meaning on the image of the present and vice versa, and his gaze
on the beach at the end of the documentary points to a time to which he
no longer belongs. With no possibility of obtaining a pension because
he no longer had the fisherman’s licence obtained during colonial times,
Marceline Fernandes died in 2012, according to the information in the final
caption. In conclusion, the themes addressed by the testimonies, as well
as the narrative structure indicated by the inter-​titles, point to a general
context of change, marked by opportunities but also by the precariousness
and risk that fishing entails, the sea being considered the source of life and
death. The documentary gives us back a fragment of the Indian Ocean
and a coastal community whose future is uncertain, impacted by the
routes and maps of the global economy. On the other hand, the aesthetic
choices and narratives provide a representation of the Calangute beach as
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 201

an affective and poetic space, where men, boats, nets, fish, waves and sand
participate together in the ritualization of daily life between land and sea.

Second shore: Island of Mozambique

Why are they here? Chinese Stories in Africa by the Mozambican film-​
maker Yara Costa was launched in 2011 and deals with the journeys of
three Chinese emigrants, respectively, in the Island of Mozambique, in
Semonkong, Lesotho and Accra. In this paragraph we will briefly address
the episode pertaining to the Island of Mozambique, centred on prob-
lems related to fishing, so as to reflect on another declination of this ac-
tivity in an insular community in the Indian Ocean.
A UNESCO heritage site, the little Island of Mozambique is a place
where controversial transnational cultural memories converge, a symbol
of the Portuguese presence in Africa, but also a crossroads of the commer-
cial, religious and cultural circuits of the Indian Ocean. For this and other
reasons, the representation of the Island has given rise to an extensive corpus
of literary texts, photographs, news articles and documentaries, a good part
of which are centred on the division between colonial city and African
city; on the architectural heritage left there by the Portuguese; and on the
cultural and religious traditions of the population. Among the audiovisual
narratives centred on the Island, Licínio Azevedo’s documentary A Ilha dos
Espíritos (2010) stands out in particular. The main theme is popular reli-
gion of an animist bent where the sea is depicted as a material and symbolic
archive of stories, beliefs, transits and cultural contacts (Leite & Falconi,
2018). It should also be pointed out that Yara Costa’s second documen­
tary, entitled Entre eu e Deus (2018) is set on the Island of Mozambique,
focusing on the conversion of a young Mozambican woman to Islam. Thus,
both films by this film-​maker work on the less popular aspects and stories
of the Island, contributing to deconstruct mystified images of this pivotal
place in the African Indian Ocean.
In Why are they here? Chinese Stories in Africa, the episode dedi-
cated to the Island of Mozambique develops the general argument of the
202 falconi and spinuzza

documentary, whose aim is to investigate the presence of Chinese people

on the African continent following the migratory waves that occurred after
the first conference of the Forum on China-​Africa Cooperation in 2000.
The episode, segmented into four sequences, tackles the figure of Min Nan
Wang, a young Chinese man aged 23 who arrived in the continent in 2006 to
work in the exportation of sea cucumbers to China –​the country where the
sea cucumber is considered a gourmet foodstuff. As already mentioned,
the interaction with far-​away markets is one of the central characteristics of
the littoral societies described by Pearson, currently constituting a pressure
factor that has had a significant impact on different communities of the
Indian Ocean, especially as regards the consumption and exportation of
foods and their consequences for local sustainability (Pearson, 2003; 2006).
Although the captions of the documentary frame the China-​Africa relations
in the temporal limits of the last two decades, in the case of Mozambique
and, in particular the exportation of sea cucumbers to the Chinese and
Asiatic market in general, it should be emphasized this activity was re-
corded in previous eras (Medeiros, 2007; Alpers, 2019), which connects
the trajectory of the young person viewed in the documentary to a broader
history of relations, transits and traffic on the stage of the Indian Ocean.
The first sequence of the episode introduces the young Chinaman,
locating him in the context of the Island of Mozambique, thus providing
a representation, albeit partial, of the location of another community, this
time insular. The juxtapositioning of the shots of this initial sequence points
to the correlation between space and social relations, working the ideas of
exterior/​interior; open/​closed; inclusion/​exclusion. In fact, the young man
is framed in an exterior space delimited by metal bars that outline the sea,
while he tries to talk on his mobile phone, without success, to his distant
family. In the following shots, while the voice-​off screen refers to feelings
of homesickness, a series of shots in a closed space show moments when
the inhabitants of the island and, in particular the women, come together
and socialize ( Figures 8.8, 8.9 and 8.10).6 The internal composition of the
shots and the interrelationship reveals a complex articulation of the bino-
mial exterior/​interior, open/​closed, light/​shadow. The spaces where the
African women socialize are marked simultaneously by vivid colours and

6 All images from Why are they here? Chinese Stories in Africa ©Yara Costa Pereira.
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 203

shadow, while the space of the young Chinese man’s loneliness is open and
full of light, but cut by the bars.

Figures 8.8, 8.9 and 8.10 Min Nan Wang’s loneliness in contrast with a
group of African women

Attention should also be paid to the presence of a closed wooden door

in both spaces, which suggests symbolically a possible opening that does
not, however, materialize in the narrative. Also, the shots that depict the
young man in the streets of the Island register his isolation and his lack of
integration into the social fabric of the Island (Figure 8.11). This is con­
firmed by his testimony, which alludes to the unfriendly relations with
the inhabitants of the island, who, in his words, are afraid of the Chinese
and step out their way whenever they see them in the street. Thus, for Min
Nan Wang, looking lingeringly at the sea is the way for him to feel closer
to his country, which transforms the ocean into a connecting link, more
than separation, between countries and continents (Figure 8.12).
204 falconi and spinuzza

Figures 8.11 and 8.12 Min Nan Wang looking lingeringly at the sea

If this imaginary connection acquires positive connotations in the young

man’s discourse, the real inter-​economy of which he is a mediator has im-
pacts and problematic consequences in the insular community, as is ex-
plored in the second sequence of the episode, throughout which there is a
closer focus on the impact of the sea cucumber business on local sustain-
ability. Different shots focus on the search for the sea cucumbers in the
sea, showing that this is a kind of artisanal fishing, carried out through
diving by individuals or small groups, with the help of little boats. It
should be pointed out that along with other activities, artisanal fishing
continues to be one of the main economic activities and sources of income
and subsistence for the insular community of the Island of Mozambique.
Through the captions and interventions of the fishermen, the documen-
tary depicts a fragile environmental, economic and social balance, since
the sea cucumbers were abundant along the Mozambican coast, but the
growth in demand in Asia, the lack of regulation and the illegal trade
has radically altered the availability of this species beside the Island of
Mozambique. According to the testimony of biologist Célia Macamo,
many families from coastal locations depend on the sea cucumber busi-
ness, because of which the current shortage puts their food security and
subsistence at risk. On the other hand, the Mozambican fishermen com-
plain about the conditions in which the business takes place, since the
value of the cucumbers is fixed by the Chinese entrepreneurs, leaving the
fishermen without a great margin for negotiation. Thus, the episode of
the documentary shows how the sea cucumbers, from being organisms in
the Mozambican coastal ecosystem, are transformed into transnational
merchandize through the dynamics of the economy, power and desire,
incorporating stories of work, displacements and unequal relations, as
well as the failures of the postcolonial State.
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 205

From the aesthetic point of view, we note that in this documentary what
was referred to above as haptic visuality is also privileged, where the capacity of
the images to evoke tactile and, more generally, bodily sensations is explored. In
fact, various shots capture the inhabitants of the island involved in activities in
which the movement of the body is central, as, for example, the dance; the reli-
gious rituals in the mosque; the preparation and placing of the m’siro,7 and the
actual diving to catch sea cucumbers. In these shots, too, the emphasis on the
texture of the bodies and material recreates a universe experienced through
the senses, beside the visible and the audible, which suggests to us a possible
aesthetic feature common to the audiovisual representations of the Indian
Ocean. In addition to this aspect, the approach adopted in these two docu-
mentaries has made it possible to identify as a common topic the existence
of environmental, socio-​cultural and economic conflicts around the fishing
and communities involved in these activities. In both narratives, the relation
exterior/​interior is declined through the topic of migration. In Shifting Sand,
the focus is on the emigration of the fishermen of the Kharvi community to
other places in the Indian Ocean, namely the Persian Gulf, while immigrants
from other Indian states have entered the fishing business, thus producing
an alteration in local community structures. On the Island of Mozambique,
the presence of Chinese people involved in the sea cucumber business also
has an impact on the life and sustainability of the families of local fishermen,
generating problematic intercultural relations as well.

Third shore: Atauro Island, East Timor

The documentary Wawata Topu,8 which portrays the fisherwomen of

the little coastal village of Adara, Atauro Island, East Timor, was made

7 Beauty mask made with natural dust.

8 The documentary Wawata Topu had great resonance on the international scene.
For example, the first Forum of Fisherwomen of East Timor took place in Dili in
October 2018, organized by World Fish and centred on the sector of small-​scale
women’s fishing <https://​fish.cgiar.org/​imp​act/​stor​ies-​of-​cha​nge/​gain​ing-​voice-​
first-​women-​fish​ers%E2%80%99-​forum-​held-​timor-​leste>. Considering that it is
206 falconi and spinuzza

in 2013 by David Palazón and co-​directed by the anthropologist Enrique

Alonso. The documentary focuses on the fisherwomen of the village of
Adara, whose particularity is that they practise underwater diving in the
coral reefs of the island (maximum depth about 3 metres), hunting the
fish with a kind of harpoon. The Adara women are the only ones in
the whole country to practise this kind of fishing and in a certain sense
they remind us of the ama in Japan, who also traditionally dedicate them-
selves to underwater fishing, as the acclaimed film Ama-​San by Cláudia
Varejão shows.
In two scientific articles (Palazón, 2016; Alonso, 2016) the directors
analyse the preparatory phase of the documentary and its immediate impact
on the local population; these texts are extremely interesting because they
refer to details of the filming and present the theoretical framework of the
ethnographical research that underpins the production of the documentary.
The fisherwomen represent various generations, from 15 to 70 years
of age. They are clearly the centre of attention of the invisible interlocutor
behind the camera, these women who have struggled against hunger and
poverty and who, for this reason, decided to dedicate themselves to this
kind of small-​scale fishing. However, this short documentary (just thirty-​
three minutes) does not limit itself just to fishing activity, because it man-
ages to encompass a great variety of social and economic themes, without
neglecting the aesthetic level, with the stunningly beautiful images that
show the underwater fishing, as we shall see below.
In a perfect balance between the images filmed in the village and the
underwater scenes, we observe, then, that in Wawata Topu there exists a
perfect harmony between the informative material (which predominates
in the interviews) and the aesthetically more interesting sequences, as is
the case of the underwater images.
This documentary shows the lived experience of the population of
Adara, who between forest and sea, find the indispensable means of sub-
sistence, because in this little village everyone is dedicated to fishing: the
men, women and children. But an uncertain future seems to dramatically

normally the men who take governmental and local decisions in the field of fishing,
the Forum propose to develop the empowerment of fisherwomen.
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 207

threaten this apparent timelessness. It is for this reason that, along with the
women, another great protagonist of this story is the capacity for resilience
of the inhabitants of this island, from the children (who walk along a long
path beside the sea in order to get to school), to the women (many of them
do not have nets, or boats, and for these reasons they began to practise
underwater fishing) to the older inhabitants, who live in a context where
there are no other means of subsistence. We might then ask how far the
insular communities will be able to survive in these conditions, bearing in
mind that the main natural resource (the fish) may be threatened by large-​
scale fishing practices, by climate change, among other things.
The documentary leaves many questions unanswered, above all in re-
spect of the uncertainties of the future, the younger generations, emigra-
tion, the protection of the coral reefs, the tourism potential of the village,
among other aspects, but it provides us with precious testimony about this
little community. Wawata Topu must therefore be considered an extremely
important audiovisual repository because through the interviews and the
filming of these women and children’s everyday life, it shows us the daily
life of this little community. In addition to this, despite not having an ex-
plicit narrator (voice-​over), in this documentary there emerge both the
economic and social reasons that led these women to dedicate themselves
to this kind of fishing, and other problems that interest the fisherwomen
(namely the dynamics of family and marriage,9 gender issues, economic
difficulties, health, tourism and education.)
Many of these aspects have been broadly analysed and articulated with
the filmic practice in the directors’ texts, mentioned above; we see that the
documentary was based on wide theoretical research and field work (in
fact, one of the directors, who is an anthropologist, led the interviews, in
which the stories of some of the women emerge through the evocation of
their memories) but, on the other hand, this documentary must not be con-
sidered just as an anthropology tool. For that reason, we do not intend to
analyse the relationship between anthropology and the audiovisual product
or go more deeply into the questions raised by the directors. Rather, we

9 For example, the question of the barlaque, a kind of dowry offered by bridegroom
to the family of the bride.
208 falconi and spinuzza

intend to privilege an aesthetic analysis that will allow us to highlight es-

pecially the relationship between the women and the aquatic milieu.
Accordingly, we have to mention the poetic aspect of Wawata Topu: in
fact, the images of the fishing take on a dramatic character and create two
levels of reading of the documentary, one that is informative and more
linked to ethnographic research –​with the interviews of the women and
the other dwellers in Adara; the other is poetic –​with the images of the
fishing at the bottom of the sea and the music or local songs accompanying
the fluid movements of the fisherwomen and their lances.
In Wawata Topu, the fisherwomen, who are the central but not ex-
clusive subject of the documentary, look and speak directly to the camera
(most times in closeup). We then observe that the director frequently uses
the participatory model defined by Nichols (participatory mode, 2001: 115),
which is mainly comprised of interviews –​in which we neither see nor hear
the voice of the interviewer (in this case the anthropologist Alonso). The
participatory model is often used in the social sciences in field research
(as in ethnography) and is a tool which, in this documentary, makes it
possible to avoid using voice-​over which would intensify the gaze of the
women as object of study.
Besides the participatory model, the director also opts for the ‘observa-
tional mode’ (Nichols, 2001: 34), above all in representing daily tasks (going
to school, diving, cooking, selling the fish, etc.). The observational model
predominates in the underwater images, and it is in these moments that the
documentary takes on an unmistakably poetic tone. Generally speaking, we
can say that the director combines the two techniques, achieving greater
aesthetic and poetic efficacy when representing everyday life in Adara in
a non-​intrusive manner, without having recourse to the narrating voice.
With regard to the underwater images, in the first part of the docu-
mentary, as well as the opening scene in which we hear the song of the
‘mermaids’, there is a kind of approach to the aquatic world in a shot in
which the women are filmed outside –​we only see parts of submerged
heads –​and successively we dive, like them, into the Adara sea. In this
first introduction to the universe of the women divers, the horizon of the
water’s surface is established as the point of intercommunication between
the two worlds: that of the land and that of the water, synthesized in the
mermaid metaphor.
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 209

From the documentary we would like to flag up three longer under-

water sequences: in our opinion these are the most poetic images of the
documentary, accompanied by music or local songs.
In the first sequence a man and his wife (who is waiting in the boat)
are going fishing. In this the rhythmic and hypnotic of the rama, an in-
strument in the form of a long metal bow (a kind of berimbau) creates an
underworld parallel to the real world. In the second sequence, the chil-
dren dive and fish in the shallow water of the coral reefs, accompanied by
a song they themselves sing. In the third underwater sequence, the women
are the protagonists; these stunningly beautiful images are accompanied
by a song sung by the women, while at the end instrumental music seems
to intensify the dramatic movement of the underwater weapon. With a
camera mounted on the actual harpoon, we see the fisherwomen’s perspec-
tive of their prey, thus in a game of shots and reverse shots the outside view
is added to the fisherwomen’s point of view.

Figure 8.13 A timorese fisherwoman

Figure 8.14 Marine flora and fauna
©D. Palazón and A.Enrique

These images capture the interaction between the fisherwomen and their
prey, showing both violence of the hunt and the underwater dance of the
women. In this regard it is important to point out an aesthetic that shows
210 falconi and spinuzza

the dramatic side of this interaction, resorting in particular to the sound

track. When we consider the most memorable sequences we under-
stand that the traditional instrumental music or song has unquestionable
relevance, and is one of the elements that heightens the poeticity of the
scenes being represented, because the mermaids’ song is, along with the
mermaids, as important as they are. The soundtracks of these underwater
sequences also relate to the approach chosen by the directors, who do
not impose external commentary by using voice-​over, but reproduce local
sounds and voices. In this way, then, bearing in mind the three sequences
mentioned above, we note that the directors privilege the more sensorial
side, because the viewers can hear the natural and human sounds of the
island (as in the scenes in which we hear local songs sung by the children
and women). In the case of underwater fishing, this process becomes even
clearer in those final shots of the women’s fishing in which we hear the
sharp sound of the harpoon hurled against the prey.
In addition to this, in the absence of a narrative voice that interlinks
the sequences of this documentary, on an aesthetic level, the thread that
unifies these fragments is the horizon of the sea and the water’s surface. The
horizon of the sea appears behind the women who are interviewed, with
their back to the beach, and the water’s surface delimits the space outside
and inside the water in the underwater images that depict the children and
women who are fishing. In this regard, it should be noted that there are
various shots in which the camera is placed on the same horizontal axis
of the water’s surface. This kind of framing allows us to see the portion of
the aquatic space in which the women are moving; these images also em-
phasize the texture of the water and the interaction of this element with
the women’s bodies.

Figures 8.15 and 8.16 Fisherwomen

Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 211

The underwater world is a nonhuman world and initially it was the

documentaries that, capturing the depths of the sea, opened the doors
of this unknown universe to the popular imagination (Mikkola, 2018: 5).
However in Watata Topu, the underwater scenes contrast clearly with the
typology of the documentary about natural and animal life at the bottom
of the sea:10 instead of contemplating the marvellous coral reefs and their
coloured fishes, we witness the women’s hunt; think in particular about
the brief shots filmed with the camera placed on the harpoon, making it
possible to see and hear the sudden sound of the lance hurled against the
fish. On the other hand, it is impossible not to notice the immense coral
reefs that cover the bottom of the ocean. In fact, Atauro Island is located
in a zone of coral reefs that present one of the greatest marine biodiversity
in the world. However, the documentary does not explore eventual eco-
logical or environmental questions in depth but points to the fishing as
being practically the only means of subsistence of this population.
Thus, the underwater images are not intended to show this very rich
natural world, but rather its relationship with human beings. The sea is
part of the human habitat, and, vice versa, the human being is part of this
aquatic world in a process of bringing land and water closer together. In this
way, not only the vertical axis inside/​outside the water which is unified by
the line of the horizon and the surface of the sea, but also the horizontal
axis land/​water that is overridden by the incursions of these ‘mermaids’
through those of the two worlds.
In addition to this, the directors have managed to avoid an aesthetic
that would privilege the potentially ‘touristic’ side of the island,11 with
golden beaches, palm trees and transparent waters, and this aspect is even
more obvious through the representation of the sea as a means of subsist-
ence and not a paradise on earth.

10 In this way the documentary reverses an approach more usual in cinema that focuses
on the ocean or the bottom of the sea, that is, disconnecting the existence of these
underwater worlds from historical, social, gender or racial dynamics (Starosielski,
2012: 150), which on the contrary has marked the history of the oceans.
11 Despite this, as the authors of the article make evident, the documentary has given
a certain visibility to the island, which has had positive repercussions for the tourist
dynamic (Alonso, 2016: 268).
212 falconi and spinuzza

To sum up, this documentary reveals that the women, children and
other inhabitants of this island are no longer beings who live just on the
land but who, in order to maintain their own survival, become amphibious
beings, dividing their very existence between land and sea. These women
(just like the children) are beings who belong both to the land and the
water, and this idea is reinforced by the many images in which the camera
is placed at the height of the fisherwomen with their bodies submerged
and their feet stepping delicately on the coral reefs. These images become
even more unusual because of the vivid colour of the traditional cloths tied
round their waists, brightly coloured tee-​shirts and beach sandals.

Figures 8.17 Fisherwoman on the coral reefs

It is important to recognize that an anthropocentric perspective predom-

inates in this documentary, centred on human activity and its relation-
ship to the maritime and coastal territory. It is clear that the inhabitants
of this coastal community on Atauro Island depend on the resources of
the ocean. This documentary focuses on the local stories of this commu-
nity of women divers, however, they are not depicted as belonging to a
tradition that is distant from the global dynamics and problems of the
contemporary age and, more specifically, from those that interest the
coastal communities. As is indicated in a review of Wawata Topu:
The film’s strength is that without relying on voiceover or commentary, through the
use of only interviews and extremely well-​shot visuals, it manages to convey the very
real sense of a community caught in the cusp of change. It may be set in a remote
equatorial island village but the film speaks of the universal dilemmas that accom-
pany the condition of modernity, and raises questions about the survival and future
of small-​scale fishing communities everywhere. (Biswas, 2013)
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 213

It is in this sense that the problems revealed in this documentary affect

both the women divers of Adara and the fishermen of Goa, it is not a
binary opposition tradition/​modernity or local/​global, it is the struggle
of these coastal populations for their own survival and interdependence
with the ocean.
In conclusion, this documentary must not be considered just an an-
thropological object or an ethnographical tool, because there is a clear
poetic and aesthetic dimension, above all in the underwater images; and
these women cannot be reduced to repositories of tradition, because a
private dimension emerges from the characters, their stories and personal
memories, their individuality. The lived experience of these women is pro-
foundly intertwined with the sea, at heart, the history of the relationship
between the sea as these women coincides with their own life stories, be-
cause without the sea, for the fishermen of Goa, this ‘amphibian’ life could
not exist. For these women the space of the sea is also the space of resilience
in the face of an increasingly uncertain future.

The Indian Ocean and the challenge of audiovisual narratives

The erosion of the coast and coral barriers, as well as the progressive
emptying of the coastal strips bathed by the Indian Ocean, are phe-
nomena strictly related to the current fragility of the littoral societies and
the little coastal communities faced with a future in constant and rapid
change. In fact, if coastal societies have undergone constant change, in
this century we will witness an increasingly rapid increase both in climate
change that profoundly marks the activity of these communities and the
economic changes related to tourism, fishing, etc.
As we have seen, the documentaries analysed above show littoral so-
cieties in a specific temporal space, representing an extremely important
cultural repository in a chronological perspective, bearing in mind that cer-
tain practices and dynamics that characterize those little communities may
come to disappear in a short space of time. The forms of artisanal fishing
214 falconi and spinuzza

practised in the three places examined in the documentaries are expressions

of local knowledge on the different shores of the Indian Ocean, strongly
impacted, for different reasons, by exogenous and endogenous factors of
an ecological, economic, social and cultural nature. These factors intervene
in various ways in the transformation of the littoral and, sometimes, at
their end, in fact they configure paradigm changes. Keeping this aspect in
mind, we understand the reason why Pearson attributes great importance
to the chronology of the littoral space and we observe that through the
practice of the audiovisual narrative the documentaries help to ‘crystallize’
a process of irreversible change, thus seeking to leave a memory record of
these universes.
Taking up the concepts formulated by Pearson and Samuelson that
were addressed in the introduction, we observe that the littoral examined
in the documentaries may in fact be understood as an ecotone, a space of
transition, in this case between sea and land, but also a space of meeting
(Pearson, 2017) that bears witness to the persistence of ‘amphibian lives’,
where the communities represented live in symbiosis with the sea. What we
intend to corroborate in this essay is the emergence of these cultural forms
also from an aesthetic and narrative point of view. Having considered the
audiovisual practice of these three documentaries (framing, shots, scenes,
topics, sound, etc.), we note that this not only proves that thesis of a con-
tinuum between land and sea, but extends this interdependence to the
relationship interior/​exterior, inside/​outside, surface/​depth (of water),
seeking to record ruptures and continuities between past and present.
We can therefore state that these documentaries, through aesthetic and
narrative choices, point to an amphibian aesthetic, as well as establishing
an affective link –​not only linked to a question of survival –​between
the inhabitants of the coast and the sea. These common elements bring
closer the distant geographies of the shore of the Indian Ocean since, as
the Mozambican writer João Paulo Borges Coelho (2019: 21) asserts, ‘não
é só dos grandes cruzamentos oceânicos que se vive, quando se vive junto
à costa. Há características próprias que se instalam nesta faixa humedecida
por tudo isto. Cumplicidades entre quem partilha essa mesma condição,
contrastes com os do interior’ [it is not only from the great oceanic crossings
Fishing for stories: Narratives of Indian Ocean 215

that one lives, when one lives beside the coast. There are characteristics
that establish themselves in this strip moistened by all of this. Complicities
between those who share the same condition, contrasts with those of the
interior]. We believe we have detected such complicities by the identifi-
cation of common affective and aesthetic poetics that invest in recreating
the human, material and liquid texture of this ocean, represented as a space
of sensorial experiences.
In conclusion, we underline the importance of ‘relational’ poetics ar-
ticulated with Indian Ocean Studies, developed by Ute Fendler (2013) on
the basis of Glissant’s theoretical concept about the relational potential of
the world as ‘tout-​monde’. It is in this context that the cultural productions
of the Indian Ocean may be articulated with the notion of insularity, not
only in the sense of an in-​between-​space between land and sea but also
between multiple memories and cultures (22). Such an approach makes
it possible to identify imaginaries, perceptive sensibilities and cultural
practices common to the coastal communities of the Indian Ocean, but
above all, to the artistic representations of them that are produced. We can
therefore demonstrate, as Torabully proposes, that the sharing of cultural,
poetic and affective imaginaries bears witness to the existence of a coralline
identity that connects and brings together the worlds of the Indian Ocean.

Documentaries

Costa, Y. (2011). Why Are They Here? Chinese Stories in Africa, documentary, 35’.
Filinto, S. (2013). Shifting Sands, documentary, 29’, [Konkani, subt. English]
Palazón, D. and Enrique, A. (2013). Wawata Topu: Mermaids of Timor-​Leste, docu-
mentary, 32’, HDV [Rasua, Subt. English].
216 falconi and spinuzza

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‘Ethnographic Filmmaking as Narrative Capital Enhancement among Atauro
Diverwomen: A Theoretical Exploration’. Development in Practice, 26 (3),
262–​271.
Alpers, A. E. (2018). ‘From Littoral to Ozone: On Mike Pearson’s Contributions
to Indian Ocean History’. Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, 2 (1), 12–​24.
—​—​. (2019) ‘Moçambique Marítimo’ (séculos XIV–​XXI)’. Revista de História,
(178), 1–​32.
Beja, H. (2013) ‘Há muitos filmes para fazer em Timor’. Ponto final Macau. <https://​
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—​—​. (2007). ‘Studying the Indian Ocean World: Problems and Opportunities’. In
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Ute Fendler

9 The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary

Over the last two decades the Indian Ocean has turned into a major field
of research, mainly in history (Pearson, 2003) and anthropology (Gupta
et al., 2010), but more recently, in literary studies as well (Hofmeyr, 2015;
Arnold et al., 2020). Very often, the imaginary of oceans is dealt with
in terms of tropes and metaphors in literature (Lavery, 2021) and art
history. Shanty Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal suggested first steps towards
an ‘Indian Ocean poetics’ (2010), as the area is ‘constantly in circula-
tion and recirculation, in flux, suppliant and yet enormously resilient’
(2010: 3), offering ‘the possibility for new imaginative conjunctures’
(2010: 13). The idea of imaginative conjunctures is the starting point
for reflections on a relational imaginary in the art works of three artists
from Mozambique and from Goa (see Vicente, 2001). I draw on the
writings of the Martinican philosopher and author Édouard Glissant,
as relationality of local and global spaces is central in all his writings as
well as the convergences with questions of identity, relating to others
and of being in the world. In his essay Traité du tout-​monde (‘Essay on
the All-​World’, 1997), he defines the ‘relation’ as follows:

Et j’appelle Poétique de la Relation ce possible de l’imaginaire qui nous porte à

concevoir la globalité insaisissable d’un tel Chaos-​monde, en même temps qu’il nous
permet d’en relever quelque détail, et en particulier de chanter notre lieu, insondable
et irréversible. L’imaginaire n’est pas le songe, ni l’évidé de l’illusion. (1997: 22)

[And I call Poetics of Relation this possibility of the imagination that leads us to
conceive of the elusive ‘worldness’ of such a Chaos-​World, at the same time as it
allows us to pick up some detail from it, and in particular to sing the praises of our
place, unfathomable and irreversible. Imagination is not a dream, or the emptiness
of an illusion (2020: 12)]
220 ute fendler

In one of his five poetics, Philosophie de la Relation. Poétique IV (2009),

he gives a tentative definition of imaginary:
L’imaginaire pressent, devine, trouve, il ne prévoit rien en termes de rapport, il
n’accompagne ni l’avoir ni le savoir. Il ne conclut à rien. Il suppose en archipel.
(2009: 109)

[The imaginary senses, guesses, finds, it does not foresee anything in terms of rap-
port, it accompanies neither the having nor the knowing. It concludes to nothing.
It supposes in archipelagoes.]

Glissant highlights the meandering way of imagining, bringing things to-

gether, connecting them, so that something different or new might emerge
or shine through to hint at potential directions of the imaginary. It is a
process of linking suggestions, assumptions, ideas and images, bringing
up new combinations. He uses the metaphor of archipelagoes to explain
his conceptualization of imaginaries: islands of different size, form and
nature are scattered in the ocean and can form clusters of varying size and
connections depending on the perspective, the criteria of selection for the
combination of various aspects that might be based on colours, on size,
on age, on distance, on fauna or flora, etc. The linkages can change and
with them the archipelagic setting.
In other disciplines, we find two major lines of research on im-
aginary: one is placed in a sociological context, the other in an iconological
one. John B. Thompson, for example, defined the social imaginary as the
‘the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension
through which human beings create their ways of living together and their
ways of representing their collective life’. For Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘the
central imaginary significations of a society […] are the laces which tie a
society together and the forms which define what, for a given society, is
“real” ’.1 In these two definitions, we see the importance of the intertwine­
ment of social settings with the imagination of what this community is and
might be as well as how they should live together. It is an entanglement of

1 John B. Thompson, Theory of Ideology (1984: 6). Thompson referring to Castoriadis

(1984: 16–​41).
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 221

given facts and settings on the one hand, with the imagination of the po-
tential and the modalities of this very specific realization of an imagined
community on the other hand, that comes into being by the ongoing ne-
gotiation of a collective imaginary and the challenges of the present built
on the past, projected to the future.
The ‘creative and symbolic dimension’ can be linked to Moorthy and
Jamal who were most probably thinking of imaginative conjunctures in the
sense of the real and the imagined, possible encounters in this vast contact
zone (Pratt, 2007) that is the area of the Indian Ocean. I will link this with
the ideas developed by Stephen Muecke in his article ‘Fabulation: Flying
Carpets and Artful Politics in the Indian Ocean’ published as a contribu-
tion to Moorthy’s and Jamal’s book (2010: 32–​44):

Fabulations are the kind of storytelling that takes off on a flight of becoming rather
than repeating the available discourses and genres. It is ‘fabulations’ that enable a
subject to begin to feel engaged or dis-​engaged, to either belong or depart, but in
any case to continue the process of becoming. (2010: 41)

His definition of fabulation highlights the process of becoming –​and

this is very close to Glissant’s concepts of ‘relation’, ‘chaos-​monde’ –​,
an ongoing exchange between various agents and objects, ‘actors in the
network’ as he explains further on giving some examples for complex
exchanges that could take place between and with concepts, monsoon
winds, songs, ceremonies, slave beads’ (2010: 41). Further on, he speaks of
the oscillation ‘between description and fictionalization, between speech
and writing’ (2010: 41), which links the actors not only with the media of
fabulation and the modus (Fendler, 2014), but it also underlines that the
distinction between documentary and fiction is obsolete, as the process is
fluid linking different epochs, regions, genres and modes crossing all bor-
ders. The reading of Muecke’s article brings us back to Glissant’s poetics
of the Relation.
I would like to combine these various approaches as multiple points
from which to view the process of coming into being of a relational,
archipelagic imaginary. The fabulations contribute to the creation of a
collective imaginary that is based on the ‘actors of the network’, as Muecke
put it, that draw on shared cultural, socio-​historical experiences as well as
222 ute fendler

on imagined elements, thõse being objects, narratives, images, etc., as is the

case for the artists from Mozambique and Goa relating to the ocean as a
relational space that is built upon shared imaginaries.
How to approach the poetics of a relational imaginary? Focus on the
‘space in between’ or ‘putting in tension of images’
For this article, I would like to focus on the iconological elements
in photos, sculptures and installations, taking some inspiration from the
procedures of the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–​1929) who
suggested building an atlas of tropes and motives in images. He developed
a procedure that would allow the tracing of recurrent motives in different
art histories trying to follow the entanglements of images, stories and myths
that accompany them. All these elements together constitute an imaginary
based on the collective memory of entangled images and stories and their
respective meanings and narratives.
Furthermore, Warburg talked about the iconology of the ‘space in
between’ (Ikonologie des Zwischenraumes), the space in between various
pictures that ‘tell the same stories’, but that can be linked to each other.
This approach recalls the explanations by the Russian film-​maker Sergej
Eisenstein explaining the importance of the montage. He drew on the
Japanese sign system to explain how each single take has its own meaning,
while a sequence might have an additional meaning that arises from the
combination of two signs. The example he used was the sign for tears that
combines two signs, namely the sign for water and the one for the eye.
The combination of the two signs means ‘tear’. He used this technique of
montage to create additional symbolic meanings in his films. Warburg’s
approach is similar as he is looking for the space in between two images,
for the surplus of meaning that arises from the linkage of two or more
images that use the same motive. He creates a kind of map of dialogue
between various pictures, moments or spaces of remembrances, what he
calls ‘Mnemosyne’. Philippe-​Alain Michaud (2006) describes Warburg’s
mnemosyne as a map of a region of art history, but also as a sequence of
pictures that represent at the same time a chain of thoughts, which could
contain the spaces in-​between as moments of ruptures and/​or relations,
so that ‘archipelagoes’ of pictures emerge from a larger corpus:
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 223

das, was auf jenen unregelmäßigen schwarzen Feldern, die die Bilder auf den Tafeln
vereinzeln und eine rätselhafte, prädiskursive Funktion erfüllen, die Motive einander
annähert oder voneinander trennt, als Introspektion und zugleich als Montage zu
begreifen: in Mnemosyne stellt jede Tafel die kartographische Aufnahme einer
Region der Kunstgeschichte dar, aufgefasst als objektive Sequenz und zugleich als
Gedankenkette, in die das Netz der Zwischenräume die Bruchlinien einzeichnet,
die die Abbildungen in Archipele oder auch, wie Werner Hofmann es nennt, in
‘Konstellationen’ aufteilen oder gliedern. (2006: 4)

[to conceive of that which, on those irregular black fields that separate the images on
the panels and fulfill an enigmatic, prediscursive function, brings the motifs closer
together or separates them from one another, as introspection and at the same time
as montage. In Mnemosyne, each panel represents the cartographic recording of a
region of art history, conceived as an objective sequence and, at the same time, as
a chain of thought into which the network of interstices draws the fault lines that
divide or divide the images into archipelagos or also, as Werner Hofmann calls it,
into ‘constellations’.]

This rapprochement of images, so that the space in-​between, of the rela-

tion, becomes ‘visible’ and can invite a reflection on the archipelago of the
imaginary, can be a means of drawing closer to the ever ongoing process
of relating in the world of chaos Glissant spoke of.
Michaud mentions the ‘tension of images’ by putting two or more
images next to each other, or in relation to each other:

La mise en tension des images, et de la mise en mouvement des surfaces que Warburg
produit dans Mnémosyne: Jean-​Luc Godard, dans ses Histoire(s) du cinéma
cherchant «à rapprocher les choses qui ne sont pas disposées à l’être », travaille le
matériau filmique comme Warburg celui de l’histoire de l’art, faisant surgir le sens
de l’actualisation des images par révélation réciproque que seule permet la technique
du montage. (2006: 9)

[The putting in tension of images, and the putting in movement of surfaces that
Warburg produces in Mnemosyne: Jean-​Luc Godard, in his Historie(s) of cinema
seeking ‘to relate things that are not inclined to be’, works the filmic material as
Warburg works that of the history of the art, making appear the sense of the actual-
ization of the images by reciprocal revelation that only the technique of the editing
allows.]
224 ute fendler

The approach to a relational imaginary is the analysis of the emergence of

a tension that might result from the combination of various images. The
process of relating images to each other could create a surplus of meaning
contributing to the imaginary of the Indian Ocean.

Example 1: The photographer Sergio Santimano, Mozambique

Sergio Santimano is a Mozambican photographer of Goan descent. He
left Mozambique in 1989 and has lived in Sweden since then going back
and forth between Portugal, Mozambique and more recently Goa. The
three countries are linked through colonial and postcolonial history, so his
personal life routes connect complex histories of family stories entangled
with waves of migration between the three continents. Having worked as
a photographer in the then young, independent Mozambique of the late
1970s and the 1980s, his work was influenced by the striving for local rep-
resentation and the construction of a national identity in a multiethnic and
multicultural country. Documenting the cultural diversity and the richness
of the country under the influence of tendencies of the ‘cinéma de vérité’,
a democratization of the construction of images and the integration of
the voices and perspectives of the people, Santimano captured moments
of the daily life of peasants, fishermen and children. His ­photos –​in black
and white or in colour –​succeeded in getting very close to the person de-
picted so that the images seem to freeze intimate moments that turn into
memorable ones due to the qualitative values of intimacy and iconicity.
One of his most popular photographs taken in Mozambique in the
1980s is the photo of a young boy holding a camera made of mud, pretending
to take a snapshot while facing Santimano’s camera. The camera is made of
the same material as the walls of the house in the back so that they create
continuity between the incomplete rectangle of the house with the rect-
angular box of the camera. The link between the house, the perspective and
the camera angle effectively creates a direct connection between the local
space, the inhabitant and the photographer who is taking the photo. The
boy’s broad smile attests to his enjoying his game as well as his gaze –​from
behind his ‘fake’ camera –​into Santimano’s camera. This photo is emblem-
atic for the process of photographic documentation of the Mozambican
people at the time. They look at themselves and at each other creating a
shared imaginary. The strong connection between the space, the two cam-
eras and the gaze of the photographer who is becoming part of this scene
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 225

as well as the gazes going back and forth bring forth a cohesive moment of
recognition of the other: the two persons could easily switch their perspec-
tives. In this manner, it illustrates the new gaze turned towards oneself in
a loving and respectful looking-​out for the other. The photo captures the
‘tension’ between two pictures in the process of becoming that are directly
related to each other. One could describe it as a relational approach that is
inherent to many of his photos.
Over the last seven years, he has undertaken a personal exploration
of his family history, proposing an exhibition entitled ‘Legado’ (Maputo,
2020), the legacy and spending lengthy periods of time in Goa taking pic-
tures of interiors, houses and landscapes. In 2021, an exhibition entitled
‘Porta para Goa’ followed in Portugal with a slightly different corpus. It
is a mixture of personal memories, remembrances of the family that are
present in the house, intimate photos of family members, but also of col-
lective memory, rendered by taking photos of old houses in Goa. Finally,
there are photos that are linked to crops and spices and to the ocean with
fishermen and boats, before photos of persons and spaces follow in the nar-
rative arrangement of the catalogues. The imaginary proposed by these two
exhibitions is mainly linked to the history of Santimano’s family. However,
it goes beyond this focus by connecting the history of the family to the
ocean as the bond between Goa and Mozambique.

Example 2: The Mozambican sculptor Pekiwa

Pekiwa (Nelson Augusto Carlos Ferreira) is a sculptor from Maputo,
Mozambique. A large part of his oeuvre are sculptures using old boats
and pieces of wood from the Island of Mozambique. Getting the material
involves not only a trip to the far North from Maputo but also a journey
to the past. The Island of Mozambique was the most important connec-
tion on the route from Portugal to Goa. The sixteenth-​century fortress
is one of the largest in colonial history of Africa and together with the
enormous governor’s palace, the monuments testify to the connections
built during four centuries of colonial expansion and settlement. At the
same time, fishing and boats belonged to the local tradition of connections
along the long East African Coast for centuries before the Europeans used
the winds and currents for their exploration and trade routes. The cultural
connections along the coast and across the ocean are built on centuries of
contact between cultures. Using old boats or pieces of boats connects with
226 ute fendler

the material history of the coastal regions that carry along the practices
of sailing, of encounters that have taken place from precolonial times to
the present day.
Pekiwa uses the boats as a sort of blackboard, a medium that he uses
to ‘write down’, to visualize oral history. He explains his objective of trans-
mitting stories of the past:
‘Para mim esculpir objetos antigos é ir de encontro ao passado, uma forma de
preservar-​o, uma tela para contar histórias é quase uma obrigação de contar ao mundo
atual estas vivências.

[For me, working on an old object is an encounter with the past, a form to preserve
it, a canvas on which I can tell stories. It is almost an obligation to tell these lived
experiences to the contemporary world.] (my translation)

The boats are a canvas for painting as well as paper for writing. The figures
that appear seem to stem from stories about the sea: there are silhouettes
of fishes, mystical figures that are part of the human and the mystical uni-
verse of hybrid creatures, human faces.

Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2

Sculptures finished in November 2022 for the multimedia exhibition curated by Ute Fendler at Galeria,
Maputo, 22 November 2022
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 227

Figure 9.3 Figure 9.4

The details of each side of the keel (taken at the atelier of Pekiwa, nov. 22, Matola)

The left side of the boat carries two heads that almost seem to form one:
the animal-​like head is next to the back of the head of a human figure,
as if one would chase the other or both moving together as if they were
one body the upheavals beneath them seem to be waves carrying the fig-
ures on their race through the water. From the other side, the ‘waves’ are
the curly hair of a human head resting on branches and leaves, a garden
scene. In this way, the two faces of the boat complement each other, in-
timately combining the land and the sea, mystical and human figures that
are all bound together across time and space. A frontal perspective turns
the waves/​curls into the dorsal fins of a bigger fish that could host all of
the figures and plants in its belly, bringing to mind stories of whales and
arks that carry species and worlds with them.
The metal plaques are reminiscent of glittering fish scales, but at the
same time, they are –​inorganic –​fragments that connect wooden pieces
that break open or apart. The shiny stitches seem to display the bonds be-
tween different spaces and epochs, but also make reference to painful stories
of slave ships with iron chains, silver bullets. The pattern of the holes that
pierce the planks of the boat create a paravent or screen that protects the
other side from being seen, allowing just parts of it to be viewed through
the holes. The structure is that of old wooden windows in Arabian style.
228 ute fendler

The partial visual access gives rise to a fragmented perception of the events
taking place on the other side. Pekiwa’s creation of a fragmented vision of
the stories reminds us of the construction of history that draws on historical
visual and material pieces to put a larger narrative together. The sculpture
does not only carry the coastal history and the daily practices of fishing
with it, it also tells the stories of the fishermen and the ghosts of the sea
they have to struggle with or by whom they are supported. The position
of the spectator/​listener changes the storyline as different parts become
visible while others disappear. Dimensions seem to change with the per-
spective as well as the connections between various pieces.
In this way, the sculpture also raises awareness of the positionality of
the person who tells or reads the story. Pekiwa succeeded in inscribing the
history-​making process into the boat along with the flux of stories that
might change directions, protagonists and constellations.
The boat is from the Ilha de Mozambique but it could also be from
Zanzibar or from Mauritius, carrying the multilayered storylines of a com-
plex interrelated zone of contacts that have taken place over centuries.
Carving the wooden boats creates a certain permeability that allows time
and space to enter and transcend the present moment via this medium.
They are three-​dimensional and invite us to go beyond the mere object by
creating intersections and merging stories and images.

Example 3 The Goan oceanic artist Subodh Kerkar

Subodh Kerkar is a trained medical doctor who left his profession behind
to focus on his artistic work that he had practised from a young age on-
wards under the supervision of his father who took him for long walks on
the beach. In 2015, he founded the Museum of Goa, an art gallery with
space for outreach workshops and collaborative work as well as a gallery.2
He describes himself as an ‘ocean artist’, someone who is inspired by the
ocean and who works next to and with the ocean.

2 <https://museumofgoa.com/about-us/>
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 229

Figure 9.5 Figure 9.6

The anchor The porcelain

Both photos taken at MOG, February 2018

Covered in shells, the anchor is emblematic of the work of the ocean. The
artist exhibits the ocean’s artwork turning a utility object into one that
has been completely absorbed by the ocean. The form of the anchor alone
brings to mind the original object that has metamorphosed into a colony
of shells. In a very similar way, Kerkar puts a porcelain plate recovered
from a sunken ship into a historical shrine, so that it reflects the time the
ocean had to work with the remnants of the sunken ship. The old wooden
shrine that was used for sacred objects sets up a tension with a mercantile
object but one that was nevertheless part of a ‘sacralized process’, and not
questioned as the trade routes brought wealth to the trading countries.
The combination of work done by the ocean with that of the artist
transforms objects into quasi-​sacred relics of colonial trading history. The
last example of oceanic work is the torrom, a piece of wood that is used to
push the boat into the sea. This piece of art, ‘Torrom II’ (2016), is used as
the body of a rowing boat. Old Chinese spoons are placed in a row on each
side turning the old wood gliding support for boats turns itself into a boat
that is driven by the mercantile force of trading between India and China.
The artwork echoes the waves of historical migration and of the ocean.
230 ute fendler

Figure 9.7
The torrom, MOG, 2018

Besides the recreation of historical episodes by using objects that could testify
of past encounters via the oceans, Kerkar works with performative installa-
tions. The series ‘Fishermen’ is a performative work for which fishermen
enact daily practices. They would gather on the beach in such a way that their
bodies form the silhouette of a boat, performing the act of rowing, fishing,
etc. The performance of the fishermen can be considered as a ‘reenactment of
daily practices and of oral history’. In this way, the human body turns into the
medium of a communicative memory, of a shared and lived history.

Figure 9.8
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 231

Figure 9.9
Fishermen and the ocean, MOG, 2018
A relational imaginary: spaces in between the oeuvres

Bringing some of the pieces of art together as a mnemosyne will make vis-
ible parallels in motives and aesthetics that could be part of or contribute
to a shared imaginary that does not use language but visual formats for
the transmission of myths and narratives building a relational imaginary.
The spaces in-​between two or several symbolic representations create the
surplus of meaning in the archipelagic setting of the mnemosyne.
While Santimano focuses on a very personal, individual perspective
that is imbued with nostalgia, Kerkar uses the same elements to visualize
major historical topics with which he sets up a broader diachronic perspec-
tive of the cultural exchange of the last five centuries creating the ‘Indian
Ocean’ as a shared space of experience. He suggests the concept of ‘insepar-
ability’ to capture the essence of this mnemo-​space: the past is intrinsically
entangled with the present.
Both artists work with pepper and chili. In Santimano’s photo, the
work of cleaning and drying the fruits is at the centre of his interest. The
frame he chooses makes the aesthetic arrangement visible in everyday prac-
tices which turns the visual aspect of it into an iconic image that can easily
be remembered and transmitted. Similar to Santimano’s approach, Kerkar
turns to the iconic value of the chili that symbolizes the trade of spices on
232 ute fendler

the East-​Western trade routes. However, he adds the oceanic dimension

in the arrangement of the image: the practice of spreading the chili on the
ground in a perfect circle –​which echoes the daily practice captured in
Santimano’s photo –​is taken to a more abstract, meta-​discursive level by
adding an artificial chili, an object created to draw attention to the im-
portant significance of this tiny fruit. He turns it into a monument based
on the daily practice of the cycle that he exposes on the beach. In doing
so, he links the importance of the production of chili to the transoceanic
trade that also includes indentured labour and slave trade as constituent
parts of the exchange on a global scale.
The relational construction of a visual imaginary brings together the
various layers of production and distribution with the colonial and post-
colonial implications it carries as a historical burden. The photo of chili
that might also appear in a travel guide seems to be reduced to the aes-
thetic beauty of the colourful spatial arrangement, but the individualized
memory of daily practices in combination with the monumentalized chili
statue against the backdrop of the ocean create this oceanic memory based
on archipelagic fragments that gain their signification via the activation of
the relations between the two of them.

Figure 9.10
Santimano: chilli
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 233

Figure 9.11
Kerkar: chilli

When it comes to fishermen, the gatekeepers of knowledge about the sea,

movements and connections, there is a similar disposition in the relation
between the two artistic works.
Santimano places the human being in its living and working condition
in the centre of his photo fig. 9.12. The men are dressed in working clothes.
Three of the four men cover their heads with hats to protect themselves
against the fiery sun they are exposed to. The horizontal line is slightly in-
clined in comparison to the lined-​up human bodies placed on a boat that
therefore has to be in movement as it is not parallel to the sea line and the
horizon. The movement is an integral part of the photo indicating the
difficulties of keeping balance on a boat in continuous movement. Three
of the men turn their gazes to the left, while the man in the middle turns
towards the right, bending slightly and shielding his eyes from the light
with his raised arm. His body forms a natural elegant bow in the centre
of the photo bringing movement to the frozen take of the moment. The
movements back and forth of the water are inscribed in the picture by the
arrangement of the bodies and the lines of the rim of the planks, the sea
and the horizontal line forming one unit. The photo captures the moment
of the balanced movement of the bodies, the boat and the sea as the essence
of the daily practice of fishing.
234 ute fendler

Figure 9.12               Figure 9.9

Santimano                     Kerkar

Kerkar also dedicates some of his work to fishermen, paying tribute to

their intimate knowledge of the ocean and its connections. He arranges
the daily practice of rowing as a performative act on the beach so that it
is aesthetized and musealized by the mise-​en-​scène of the practice: the
beauty of the rhythm in the movement and the visual arrangement dom-
inates the installation but it still also conveys the hardship of the work
fig. 9.9 that needs joined efforts to confront the sea.
Santimano captures the essence of the object in a momentous ‘natural’
or spontaneous performance while Kerkar rearranges and resets the objects
in such a way that the essence of the relation between the fisherman, the
boat and the sea becomes part of the artwork. Setting both works next to
each other creates a continuous exchange between the multilayered aesthetic
pieces so that the individual experience becomes intimately intertwined
with the historized abstraction of the importance of fishermen in the long
history of the Indian Ocean.
The last example will focus on the representations of boats as the
icon of the contact zones and trade routes, as well as an icon of various
historical layers of different linguistic, cultural and epochal storylines of
the Indian Ocean.
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 235

Figure 9.13 Kerkar Figure 9.14 Pekiwa

Boat, MOG, 2018 Boat, Reitoria UEM, 2018

Placing the works of the three artists next to each other in a Mnemosyne,
the iconic quality of the boats differs in each one according to the art-
istic approach of the artist. Santimano’s photo of the fishermen pushing
the boat into the sea trying to get over the strong waves breaking on the
shore, focuses on the daily confrontation between human beings and the
sea –​and eventually their working together. The dynamic comes from
the boat lifted up by the waves. The boat turns into an arrow-​like object
cutting across the parallel lines of the spindrift, the deeper waters and the
horizon.
Kerkar’s sculpture of the boat functions as a synecdoche, a pars pro toto,
as this part of the boat does not only stand for the whole object but also
for the historical and social context in which it was used. Inside the boat,
Kerkar places forms made out of old wires that bring to mind nets with
fish, but also human bodies, or unidentifiable figures that might appear in
the sea or at the horizon, mirages of vague and fluid appearances, spectres
of mystical creatures that are part of the narratives linked to the sea and to
history. As the bodies are made out of old tyres, it also refers to the con-
temporary period, being on the road and stories of migration. In this way,
236 ute fendler

Kerkar links the past and the present, the sea and the land, and the mystic
and crude daily life experiences of migration and hard labour.

Figure 9.15    Figure 9.13

Kerkar, 2018, MOG

With Pekiwa, the boat could also be considered a synecdoche, but it is

highly individualized by the carvings that adapt themselves to the wooden
foundation. The slightly curved form of the boat defines the form of the
mystic and human figures that he ‘carves out’ of the wood as if they had
always been there and just needed to be made visible. A view of the whole
boat shows its great dimensions that gives space to various figures and
stories on the wooden ‘canvas’.
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 237

Figure 9.16           Figure 9.14

2013 Reitoria (photo 2018) Pekiwa

Figure 9.17 Boat, detail, Figure 9.18 Boat, detail,

Reitoria, Pekiwa Reitoria, Pekiwa
238 ute fendler

Figure 9.19 boat, detail, Reitoria, UEM, Pekiwa

Taking a closer look at the boat, he uses a mixed approach combining

carving, perforations and metal bindings. There are parts that perforated
the wood, giving the boat a more fragile aspect. These parts also connect
the two sides of the wood, as if the spectator might see the various narra-
tive layers at once. Furthermore, the boat seems to be reassembled from
bits and pieces as iron hinges reconnect the fragments to build a whole
body again. The transparency of some parts of the boat underlines the
storytelling and memorizing processes. The arm of a figure becomes the
shoulder of another figure, as well as the outline of the rim of the boat.
The changing quality hints at the variability of the stories depending on
the storyteller and the context. The face of a human being whose mouth
seems to be sealed by the metal hinge reminds of the epoch of slavery. The
carving of lines creating the pattern of a net above and underneath the
face evokes the context of imprisonment, nets to bind bodies, just like
animals, and it also recalls bodies gone or thrown overboard and turned
into dead meat.
Putting the three of them next to each other creates a dialogue between
them that seems to complement the iconographic value of the boat: the
boat as the medium to confront the sea, the boat as the medium to carry
nets and objects as well as stories so that it fills the void.
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 239

Fabulation stirred by the tensions in between the various boats. All

together, individual, historical and collective memory aspects complement
each other. The human figure right above the suffering body, is a body grace-
fully floating in the water, it recalls rather swimming and bathing, showing
intimacy with the water, a mermaid figure of fairy tales. At the top of the
boat is a face that is more like a fish than a human being. On the left hand
side, there is another face, mouth wide open, that resembles more of a fish.
The two faces seem to be the fish at the bottom of the boat and the hu-
manoid face at the upper side of the boat, as if the creature can change its
appearance according to its place of being, underneath or above the water.
In a conversation with Pekiwa in February 2020 and again in November
2022, he speaks about his stays on the island where he spends time with
the fishermen who share with him their experiences and traditional tales
as well as their own encounters with the sea and its creatures. He cannot
give details about stories and the connections with his work, but he says
that the stories he heard all flow into the process of sculpting, creating a
storytelling piece that carries the essence of the stories of the fishermen
and the island. His work is a process of abstracting from a multitude of
stories and experiences to create a piece that represents the life stories of the
fishermen and their relationship with the ocean. His boat-​sculpture-​story
literally incorporates the experiences and stories in the boat as a medium
between the human being and the ocean.

Figure 9.20       Figure 9.13      Figure 9.17

240 ute fendler

The three works set next to each other exponentiate the meaning of each
of them. The photo of the daily practice taken by Santimano (fig.9.20)
contextualizes the boat sculpture of Pekiwa (fig. 9.17), while the boat
sculpture tells the stories of the encounter between the ocean, the humans
and the boat. The boat of Kerkar opens the perspective towards aspects of
migration, of suffering bodies trying to escape (fig. 9.13). The three works
together create a complex universe of the interaction of the human being
with the ocean using the boat as a medium of transport and communi-
cation. The human, the historical and the contemporary dimensions are
raised in the spaces in between the works creating a relational imaginary,
an archipelagic memory and vision of the world.

Conclusion

The procedure of the three artists –​as different as they are in their
work –​goes from real objects towards individualized narratives with a
meta-​discursive dimension. The themes, tropes and objects turned into
mnemosynic objects form archipelagos of images that are the basis for a
relational imaginary. They also visualize the embeddedness of storytelling
in the socio-​historical context of the Indian Ocean.
I would like to link these observations with a concept suggested by the
Mauritian writer Khal Torabully who speaks of a ‘coral identity’ (Brugioni
& Fendler, 2021). In an interview, he explained that the coral is a hybrid
and symbiotic being that evolves in and with the ocean in the continuous
flow and movement of the water, fragile and strong at the same time.
De plus, le corail est tronc, branche, racine, il est mou, dur, multiforme … C’est une
créature hybride qui se propage sur un monde multidirectionnel et se développe non
plus sur le mode de la connectivité errante seulement mais aussi agglutinante –​c’est
l’idée de concrétion transitoire d’un processus que je développais en amont. De plus,
le corail est une créature symbiotique, et ne fonctionne pas sur un mode fusionnel
mais dans le cadre d’une association entre un zooplancton et un phytoplancton
dont la négociation est sur un mode égalitaire absolu et permanent. Je le trouvais
plus dynamique que l’image du rhizome, d’autant que le corail, tout en étant ancré,
The Indian Ocean: A relational imaginary 241

est ouvert aux courants marins. Il est le socle de la biodiversité et peut servir de sup-
port à l’idée de mouvement, de migration et d’ancrage (le corail génère la migration
des planctons, la plus grande migration d’une espèce vivante sur Terre), tout en
étant un processus sans fin. Ce socle corallien de biodiversité n’est pas sans lien avec
l’idée d’une diversité culturelle. Il est fragile, comme cette beauté du monde que
nous prônons tous deux, mais avec des majorations de certaines composantes et des
métaphores différentes.

[Moreover, the coral is trunk, branch, root, it is soft, hard, multiform … It is a hybrid
creature that spreads over a multidirectional world and develops not only in the mode
of wandering connectivity but also agglutinative -​this is the idea of transient con-
cretion of a process that I was developing before. Moreover, the coral is a symbiotic
creature, and does not function in a fusional mode but within the framework of an
association between a zooplankton and a phytoplankton whose negotiation is in an
absolute and permanent egalitarian mode. I found it more dynamic than the image
of the rhizome, especially since the coral, while being anchored, is open to marine
currents. It is the base of biodiversity and can serve as a support for the idea of move-
ment, migration and anchoring (the coral generates the migration of plankton, the
largest migration of a living species on Earth), while being an endless process. This
coral base of biodiversity is not unrelated to the idea of cultural diversity. It is fra-
gile, like the beauty of the world that we both advocate, but with increases in certain
components and different metaphors]3

It is a metaphor for being lost and anchored at the same time, for being in
between and in continuous multidirectional movement. Kerkar suggests
the concept of ‘inseparability’ which can be found in the objects that
are co-​created by the sea, like the anchor or the porcelain covered with
shells. This process of coming into being is very close to the idea of a coral
being: the transformation of an object or a creature under the influence
and the continuous and changing contact of the ocean. All the aforemen-
tioned artists approach the question of being in the world by suggesting
reflections on fluid and relational identities. Each of them focuses on a
different aspect, on nostalgic memory, entangled histories, or communi-
cative construction of memory and history via art to build a relational
imaginary of the Indian Ocean.

3 <https://​blogs.mediap​art.fr/​pie​rre-​car​pent​ier/​blog/​040​216/​khal-​torabu​lly-​le-​
poete-​mauric​ien-​lorig​ine-​de-​la-​coolit​ude-​evo​que-​edou​ard-​gliss​ant>
242 ute fendler

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Meg Samuelson and Pamila Gupta

10 Moving frames and circulating subjects:

Reflections on Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar

Moving frames and circulating subjects: Reflections on

Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar

Located on Kenyatta Road, which is now the main tourist artery through
Zanzibar’s Stone Town, Capital Art Studio was founded in 1930 by
Ranchhod Oza and has remained in constant operation right up to the
present, moving just a few metres down the road in 1972 after the prem-
ises in which it was lodged collapsed. Today, it is run by Rohit Oza,
Ranchhod’s youngest son, who continues to reproduce his father’s images
while adding new ones of his own. This longevity and continuity distin-
guishes Capital Art Studio: it is unique among the many that were in
operation when Ranchhod Oza began to practice for having survived the
revolution and its austere and oppressive aftermath, as well as the subse-
quent turn to the tyrannies of the free market and the digital deluge that
has transformed the nature and function of photography in Zanzibar as it
has elsewhere. The studio stands at the centre of our collaborative enquiry
into photographic culture in Zanzibar in a project that seeks to trace a
150-​year arc from the first studio, which was established by the Goan emi-
grant AC Gomes in approximately 1868, to a new one that was about to
be opened by Goan Zanzibari Robin Batista when we last visited in 2018.
In this chapter, we reflect on Capital Art Studio’s distinctive practices of
‘moving frames’ to convey the ‘circulating subjects’ of this African Indian
246 samuelson and gupta

Ocean island while relating the story of the studio’s unusual history and
accounting for how we were ourselves moved to undertake this project.
We were both attending a conference on ‘Indian Ocean Africa’ in
Zanzibar in 2011 that had been organized by Preben Kaarsholm (Roskilde
University, Denmark) and hosted by Abdul Sheriff, Director of the
Zanzibar Indian Ocean Research Institute. Before the conference com-
menced, Meg was wandering through the labyrinthine streets of Stone
Town when she found herself being drawn into a photographic studio by
a window display featuring ‘Zanzibar Views’ from the 1950s. The magnetic
pull that these images exerted resided perhaps in their resonance with the
paper she would present in the coming days on Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel
By the Sea (2001). By the Sea references Zanzibar’s long entanglement in
Indian Ocean trade routes and depicts Stone Town in the years leading
up to the Revolution of 1964 and through the subsequent decades after
the archipelago amalgamated with the mainland state of Tanganyika to
form the United Republic of Tanzania. Gurnah had fled Zanzibar shortly
after the revolution and By the Sea, like the rest of his oeuvre, displays a
tempered nostalgia –​or what Svetlana Boym describes as ‘reflective nos-
talgia’ (Boym, 2001) –​for the town of his youth. The images that drew
Meg into Capital Art Studio seemed to reanimate that bygone era, while
the tonal complexity that she encountered inside its ornately carved door
resonated with the mood she had discerned in Gurnah’s fiction. Leafing
through a box of prints, she selected two that seemed to manifest some of
the ambivalence she had noted in Gurnah’s depiction of the circulations
that had composed the town and which –​in her reading –​present them
as simultaneously cosmopolitan and consuming, simultaneously gracious
and rapacious (see Samuelson, 2012, 2013, 2016). These prints included
one of Ranchhod’s earliest surviving images, which was taken in 1948 and
features a dhow approaching Zanzibar under a portentously moody sky.
Moving frames and circulating subjects 247

Figure 10.1: Dhow approaching Zanzibar, 1948 © CAS

Redolent of the Indian Ocean traffic that animates Gurnah’s novelistic

portraits of Zanzibar, the image was evocative also of the paper that
Pamila would present during the conference that we attended over the
following days. Entitled ‘Monsoon Fever’, it addressed the lyrical mon-
soons in their discursive and aesthetic registers. The paper used Alexander
Frater’s elegiac travelogue Chasing the Monsoon (1990) as a conceptual
centrepiece to capture the monsoon as a fevered energy, affect, sensorium
and weather pattern that transforms the lives and livelihoods of a large
swathe of Indian Ocean peoples on an annual basis (Gupta, 2012). This
reading of monsoonal elements (of wind, water and sky) would shape
how Pamila would later reflect on the ‘darkness’ of monsoonal images
from the Capital Art Studio collection (Gupta, 2020a).
Having broached the possibility of developing a research project on
the studio with Rohit on her initial visit, Meg met with Pamila for dinner
248 samuelson and gupta

at a popular tourist restaurant fittingly called Monsoon to discuss collab-

orating on it. The resonance that we discerned between the prints she had
purchased and the narratives with which we were concerned is what ini-
tially caught our joint attention, but what has held it since is the story of
the studio itself, including its particularly distinctive photographic practice.
During that first encounter, Rohit Oza had explained to Meg that he had
inherited the studio from his father and that his vocational preoccupa-
tion was keeping his father’s work alive. This he achieved by maintaining
the studio’s operations and reprinting his father’s images for sale, as well
as through the intriguing practice of re-​taking scenes that his father had
framed up to a half century before. An example of this practice in which the
photographic frame moves, as it were, across time is presented in Figures
10.2 and 10.3 –​these photographs of the Stone Town market were, respect-
ively, shot by Ranchhod Oza in 1956 and Rohit Oza in 2004.

Figure 10.2: Stone Town Market, Ranchhod Oza, 1956 © CAS

Moving frames and circulating subjects 249

Figure 10.3: Stone Town Market, Rohit Oza, 2004 © CAS

Hooked by the poignant practice of the retake, which we reflect on in

the final section of this chapter, we returned to Zanzibar in the following
year for what became the first of three visits (2012, 2015, 2018) during
which we gathered images and interviewed Rohit and several other pho-
tographers. In the process, we have pieced together a story of the pho-
tographer Ranchhod Oza from the fragmentary images tendered by his
taciturn son and from those that he himself framed and developed. It is a
story in which the photographer, the camera and the photograph’s com-
positional elements are all in states of circulation peculiar to the Indian
Ocean world.

Ranchhod Oza’s circulating subjects

A young Ranchhod Oza, accompanied by his bride, boarded a dhow in

Gujarat and sailed for twenty-​eight days across the Indian Ocean before
disembarking in Stone Town in 1925. The route was a well travelled
250 samuelson and gupta

one: lateen-​sailed dhows had been harnessing the reliable monsoon

winds for over a millennium, knitting the Indian Ocean into an arena
through which merchants, scholars, sailors, artisans and slaves circulated
(Sheriff, 2010). Ranchhod had no family in East Africa, and his son is
not sure why he chose this destination. ‘Many Gujaratis were coming
then’, he simply says, before appealing to the evidentiary function of
photography and its ability to record circulating subjects: ‘You can see
in the old ­photos –​many Gujaratis.’ The lively photographic scene that
Oza found in Stone Town was itself an expression of Zanzibar’s pivotal
place in the Indian Ocean and imperial networks. Erin Haney (2010)
notes that a ‘fervor’ for photography swept through the urban enclaves
of the Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth century –​and Zanzibar in
particular became a magnet for Goan photographers, starting with AC
Gomes, who arrived in Zanzibar in approximately 1868 after first having
set up a studio in Mombasa, and who was followed by others such as E. C.
Dias, the Coutinho Brothers and A. R. P. de Lord in the 1890s (Haney,
2010: 49–​50). These early Goan entrepreneurs in East Africa were im­
portant in developing Zanzibar as picturesque, an ideal type (of place) for
the production of a range of images, including studio portraiture, native
life, and flora and fauna. They catered to Europeans who arrived in the
bustling port via steamship tourism and local elite populations (Arab,
Indian, African) (Haney, 2010: 49–​50). On arriving in Zanzibar as an as­
pirant photographer, Ranchhod Oza apprenticed himself to AC Gomes
& Sons and would have developed many of his compositional techniques
in their venerable practice before striking out on his own to found Capital
Art Studio.
Just as Ranchhod had apprenticed with Gomes, he and his son Rohit
can also be inserted into a historical genealogy that includes not only a
group of ‘global Goans’ (Frenz, 2014), but a larger community of diasporic
South Asians (including Goans, Parsis and Gujaratis) that arrived in
Zanzibar less as British colonial subjects but rather as ‘imperial citizens’
(Metcalf, 2007), transformed in the act of crossing the Indian Ocean, and
choosing this destination to fit their own sense of cosmopolitanism. They
created a niche for themselves, operating a range of businesses (tailoring,
general stores, bakeries, photo studios) that are evidenced in the many
Moving frames and circulating subjects 251

photographs taken by Ranchhod Oza of these shop placards dotting Stone

Town’s narrow streetscapes, and that show a thriving South Asian com-
munity in Zanzibar during the first half of the twentieth century (Gupta,
2018b). In documenting these businesses, Ranchhod also included himself
as a member of this minority Asian group, and into a longer genealogy of
(largely Goan) Zanzibaris involved in adornment work, including two
generations of tailor fathers and photographer sons (Gupta, 2018b).

Figure 10.4: A shop placard, Ranchhod Oza, 1950s © CAS

Ranchhod was drawn to the heart of Zanzibar’s image production when

he became the favoured photographer of Sultan Khalifa II bin Harub
Al-​Said –​the incumbent of what had been the seat of the expansive
Sultanate of Oman and Zanzibar but which had in Ranchhod’s time been
stripped of all but ceremonial power under the now-​dominant British
Empire. Ranchhod was commissioned to magnify the reduced Sultanate
on large format prints that Rohit can still recall from his childhood
252 samuelson and gupta

(Oza, 2012), and he produced and circulated an iconography of symbolic

power, tinting the town with the Sultan’s ceremonial red in a series of
royal family and palace portraits. Many of Ranchhod’s images were them-
selves entered into circulation in the form of postcards, and some of them
only exist today by virtue of this dissemination (see Samuelson, 2018).
Ranchhod’s popularity also extended well beyond the Sultan’s palace.
Rohit, who was born in 1950, remembers how, when he was 6 or 7 years
old, his father would cycle to the studio in the morning and return again
only at midnight. ‘You won’t get space […] to sit here’, he tells us in 2015,
waving his arm across an empty room as he remembers the queues that
would await his father at the door, and how –​on special occasions such as
Eid –​people would continue to stream in until 11 o’clock at night to have
their portraits taken against one of the sepia backdrops that Ranchhod
had ordered from London in the 1940s.
But Ranchhod’s most alluring backdrop was provided by Stone Town
itself. Walking incessantly through its streets, his roving camera received
the Indian Ocean world as it circulated through the town on the seasonal
rhythms set by the monsoon. It conveys a sense of this fluid motion by
attending to technologies of transport: bicycles, cars and carts are ubiqui-
tous in these frames, as are the boats that attend Stone Town’s harbour
(Samuelson, 2016). Propelled by rotation, these technologies suggest ways
of thinking about circularity in the Indian Ocean, which Sugata Bose has
helpfully defined as an ‘interregional arena of human interaction’ composed
of ‘circular migration’ (Bose, 2006: 3, 73).
Bicycles in particular stand out as leitmotifs. Ranchhod Oza’s focus
on bicycles presents them less as objects of desire for Western modernity,
even as they were always that too in Zanzibar, and might even be said to
‘domesticate’ them in much the same way as the clocks that were set to
Zanzibari time (Prestholdt, 2008). Bicycles here are as much a type of
human transport as they are a form of attire to match an equally fashion-
able tailored outfit. They also function as gathering points of sociality and
workhorses to carry commodities newly arrived by dhow to the interior
of the island, circulating through Zanzibar in much the same way that
Ranchhod did on his much loved bicycle taking photographs. Lastly, they
act as stage props under Ranchhod’s discerning eye, their compositional
Moving frames and circulating subjects 253

circularity offsetting the squareness of Stone Town’s historic Arab archi-

tecture and ordered colonial urban planning that the British aspired to
(Sheriff, 2008). In other photographs, bicycles are curiously situated at
the edge of the frame, standing in for absent owners and ideas of person-
hood. All throughout the archive, they are ‘moving still’, with notions of
filmic and the photograph compelling and propelling them down another
narrow passageway to a chosen destination (Gupta, 2020b).

Figure 10.5: Bicycles, Ranchhod Oza, 1950s © CAS

People, too, are shown to be in constant motion in this photographic

archive. This distinguishes Ranchhod Oza’s work from that of his prede-
cessors. Surveying what we have been able to piece together of his archive,
we see little evidence that he had any interest in reproducing the kinds of
taxonomies that AC Gomes & Sons, and their contemporaries, had pro-
duced for imperial consumption. While he does appear to have staged
some studio portraits that typecast population groups and would occa-
sionally fix his mobile subjects with a caption, these are the exception
rather than the rule in his practice. Certainly, the accumulative effect of
the surviving images that he took during the 1950s is that of motility –​of
254 samuelson and gupta

subjects circulating through a moving frame. If they intimate some of the

fault lines of Zanzibari society, photographs such Figure 10.6, which fea-
tures what Rohit described as ‘local people’ (Oza, 2018), are expressive
also of its intricate entanglements.

Figure 10.6: Ranchhod Oza, 1950s © CAS

Rather than inviting viewers simply to register who is in the frame by

reading off a semiotics of race and ethnicity, these compositions call at-
tention to the way in which these subjects move through it. As such, they
convey the fluidity that animated this hub of the Indian Ocean world
while refraining from fixing its circulating subjects in the damaging
manner of the colonial census, which helped to ignite the revolution that
broke out in January 1964 (see Sheriff, 2001; Gurnah, 2001).
Many Zanzibaris who were identified as Arab and South Asian were
killed during the revolution and many more were expelled or fled in the
aftermath, including 17-​year-​old Abdurazak Gurnah and his brother
(Gurnah in Steiner, 2013). A number of Gurnah’s novels represent this tu­
multuous period in Zanzibari history, with one noting that ‘[a]‌mong the
many deprivations inflicted on those towns by the sea was the prohibition
of the Muslim trade’ (Gurnah, 2001: 16). One of the first actions of the
Moving frames and circulating subjects 255

revolutionary state was to close its ports to the circulating subjects who
had moved through Ranchhod Oza’s frame (Gilbert, 2004). It also de­
creed the destruction of all images of the Sultanate. Rohit tells us in 2015
that the ‘Revolutionary leaders of Zanzibar’ visited the studio after seizing
power and pointed to the pictures of the Sultan adorning its walls: ‘all these
photos you should remove’, they advised, and he has a distinct memory of
his father burning a heap of prints and negatives. A series of postcards that
were being printed in Germany arrived after the conflagration. Ranchhod
managed to secure their release because he knew the clerks at the post
office, which was (and still is) located just across the road from Capital
Art Studio. One postcard from this consignment that remains in Rohit’s
collection today depicts the Sultan’s Palace –​which was subsequently re-
named ‘The People’s Palace’ –​with the words ‘The Sultan’ struck out on
the verso caption. It stands in as trace of the piles of images that were erased
during this time (see Samuelson, 2018).
Nonetheless, Ranchhod Oza seemingly negotiated the changing pol-
itical landscape with remarkable canniness. He apparently did so by cir-
culating between different subjects with his moving frame. Even as he
continued to commemorate the last years of the Sultanate, he had begun
taking photographs at Afro-​Shirazi Party rallies from as early as 1955. When
Abeid Karume acceded to the presidency of the recently declared People’s
Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba, Ranchhod Oza was thus able to replace
the portrait of the deposed Sultan that had hung above his front desk with
that of the archipelago’s new head of state. As had been the case under the
Sultanate, he was again called upon to photograph state functions –​his
subject matter now comprising Karume’s military parades rather than the
Sultan’s ceremonial bands –​and also to record the arrival of visiting digni-
taries. Indicative of the post-​revolutionary regulation of travel, these cho-
reographed photo-​ops are typically framed by the airport rather than by
Stone Town’s bazaars and its seafront (see Samuelson, 2018). The subjects,
too, have changed: politicians from mainland Africa, the Eastern Bloc and
China replace the drifting merchants and sailors of the Indian Ocean world.
Yet while Ranchhod Oza’s camera was trained on a state apparatus that
restricted transoceanic travel in order to orient Zanzibar towards its new
geopolitical allies, he also continued to photograph quotidian circulations
256 samuelson and gupta

through Stone Town’s streets. It is during this period also that his photo-
graphic frame begins to move across time, as it were, searching for scenes
that convey the conviviality of Zanzibar’s bazaars and the fluidity of move-
ment through its streets on the other side of the temporal rupture that
the revolution effected. These movements are represented here by Figures
10.7 and 10.8, which were, respectively, taken in the 1950s and the 1980s by
Ranchhod Oza on Gizenga Street. In part, the aftershot bears witness to the
neglect that Stone Town suffered under the revolutionary government, as
well as to the population shift that it affected. But the insistent motility of
the subjects of this composition disrupts any such tidy narrative –​as does
the practice that Rohit would later come to develop from such models.

Figure 10.7: Ranchhod Oza 1950s © CAS

Moving frames and circulating subjects 257

Figure 10.8: Ranchhod Oza 1980s © CAS

The post-​revolutionary years were also the period during which Ranchhod
Oza was training his son in the techniques of image-​making. Rohit re-
members that he was given his first camera when he was 12 and tells us that
his father taught him everything he knows about photography. Through
the 1980s, he began to assume responsibility for the studio, taking over
entirely from his father in 1989 when Ranchhod formalized his retire-
ment by travelling to India (Oza, 2018). During this visit, Ranchhod fell
gravely ill and Rohit went to bring him home. He tells us that his father
died in Stone Town on 3 May 1993 (Oza, 2018), having completed his
258 samuelson and gupta

final circuit around the Indian Ocean before coming to rest on the island
whose circulating subjects had passed before his lens.

Rohit Oza’s photographic ‘retake’

Rohit tells us that his father never staged his compositions but instead
received them ‘naturally’ (Oza, 2015), waiting through time for a com-
position to appear. Now Rohit does the same. Revisiting an altered place,
he waits patiently for the walker, the cyclist, the vendor or shopper who
will step into the frame and magically fuse the ‘then’ of his father’s image
with his ‘now’. These images he describes as ‘retakes’. What moves Rohit
to retake certain images? When we asked him about his photographic
practice, he simply said: ‘When I see something is changing, I go and
take photographs’ (Oza, 2015). This is borne out when he extracts from
beneath the desk in his front room a substantial private collection of
photographs through which he maintains a record of buildings that are
in various states of collapse or which have been earmarked for demolition
or renovation. The phrase ‘this has changed, they have renovated’ recurs
also on each of our visits as we talk through the separate box of prints that
he presents for retail.
What do the re-​taken photographs that he stores and sells say about
Rohit and what moves him to invest in certain images? Perhaps a form of
‘punctum’ (Barthes, 1980) is at work here that opens up and homes in on
these compositions (both his own, and those of a father) that are favoured
by a son, with certain beloved photographs standing in for much more
about history, life and affect? Perhaps, as well, it suggests a more sensuous
understanding of the textures, colours and patinas of old photographs in
new ways (Gupta, 2018a). These preserved images also showcase Rohit as
a heritage practitioner of sorts, delving into his father’s archive and visu-
ally preserving what materially remains from Zanzibar’s baroque past in
the face of an uncertain touristic future where high rise luxury hotels are
allowed to be built by corrupt politicians, thus only allowing the privileged
few a perfect Indian Ocean view (see Gupta, 2019).
Moving frames and circulating subjects 259

Suggestively, Rohit says at one point that he retakes images in order

to ‘see’ rather than simply record changes in the town. There are intriguing
intimations here of photography’s disclosive rather than evidentiary func-
tion –​of what the photograph brings to light, as much as of the luminous
trace of its referent. But what is it that the photograph as retake enables us
to see, and what ‘ways of seeing’ might it foster (Berger, 1972)? In reflecting
on these questions, we return to a series taken across a half century by father
and son, and which initially moved us to undertake this enquiry and has
since repeatedly drawn us back to it. It is a series that Ranchhod started
in the 1950s and carried through to the 1980s (see Figures 10.7 and 10.8
above) and which Rohit has since extended into the twenty-​first century.

Figure 10.9: Ranchhod Oza, 1950s

260 samuelson and gupta

Figure 10.10: Rohit Oza, 2004

Parsed sequentially, the first and final takes of this series by father and son
seem to exemplify Roland Barthes’s reflections on photography’s future
anterior tense –​on the way in which the medium thickens time on the
surface of the image to produce the future anterior of the this-​will-​have-​
been (Barthes, 1980: 96). Looking first at one image and then the other,
we are struck by the mortality of the subjects and of the urbane way of
life that Ranchhod recorded, and then by the precarity that is in turn
imposed on those who walk this street today. This gloomy prospect is
enhanced during our last visit when Rohit tells us a bit about the subjects
of the first image: that the Boharan cyclist and his twin used to run a
Moving frames and circulating subjects 261

silversmith in the front of their house, but that they have since died; and,
that the man in white shorts behind him is one of the many Gujaratis
who used to populate the town before they were dispersed by the revolu-
tion (Oza, 2018).
Placing the two images side by side, however, we see the intimacy be-
tween past and present coming to light and as well as their transport into
the future. While perhaps inviting their viewers to apprehend and anticipate
death, the images seem simultaneously to affirm what Geoff Dyer (2005)
presents in The Ongoing Moment as ‘the simple message that is also there
in all photographs: “You are alive” ’. This message extends beyond the in-
dividuals pictured therein to the Ozas’ most enduring subject: Zanzibar
itself. Neither elegiac nor recriminatory, then, the series instead trans-
ports something of the sense of being a cosmopolitan yet commodifying
centre of the mercantile Indian Ocean world into an African present that
is being scripted out of the uneven flows of late capitalism. Recalling a time
in which Zanzibar was an island metropolis, it refuses the heritage and
tourism industry’s consignment of this time to the past (see Samuelson,
2016). Rather than the haptic poignancy of being faced with the temporal
finitude that Barthes describes, the re-​take displays the kinetic force that
has drawn the photographer back to the scene and that which releases its
subjects into motion across the frame. Bringing into focus the moving
quality of photography that has been obscured by Susan Sontag’s em-
phasis on it as a technology that slices through the ‘flow of time’ (Sontag,
2005: 111), it is evocative for thinking across the revolution even as it may
be seen to provide evidence of a rupture.
The term by which Rohit describes his practice of moving frames across
time is equally suggestive. Specifically designating these images as ‘re-​takes’
draws attention to the conflicting ways in which the camera has been con-
ceived, and thus the conflicting meanings that vie within its frames. In the
first volume of her History of Photography, Kaja Silverman relates how the
verb ‘to take’ came to replace the verb ‘to receive’ in ways that have ob-
scured something of the nature of photography. The notion of ‘receiving’
images dates back, notably, to the eleventh-​century Arab scholar Alhazen,
who discovered certain optical principles that would inform the camera
obscura and which, during the eighteenth century, begins to be thought of
262 samuelson and gupta

in Europe ‘as a mechanism for ‘taking likenesses’, instead of receiving them’

(Silverman, 2015). Rohit’s term ‘re-​take’ reminds us that the etymology of
‘receive’ is the Latin recipere: re-​’back’ +​capere ‘take’ (the noun form of
capere in turn provides the root of the word ‘capture’). Poised between re-
ceiving and capturing, the ‘re-​take’ is an evocative practice with which to
reflect on Indian Ocean Africa –​a region that has been composed through
practices of accommodation (of sailors, traders and other travellers) and
abduction (of women and slaves).
Capital Art Studio thus presents a significant archive and practice that
our project seeks to expose and develop further. Its moving frames and cir-
culating subjects suggest profound ways of thinking through Zanzibar’s
pivotal position between the African continent and the Indian Ocean, and
for theorizing the affordances of the photographic medium itself.

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—​—​ . (2019). ‘Balcony, Door, Shutter: Baroque Heritage as Materiality and

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Clarissa Vierke

11 Imaginaries of far-​away places? Swahili poetry and

its changing worlds in the Western Indian Ocean1

Mas não é só dos grandes cruzamentos oceânicos que se vive, quando se vive junto à
costa. Há características próprias que se instalam nesta faixa humedecida por tudo isto.
Cumplicidades entre quem partilha essa mesma condição, contrastes com os do in-
terior. Exemplo do primeiro aspecto é a cultura e a língua swahili, uma mancha costeira
que se alastrou por toda a costa desde o sul da Somália até ao norte de Moçambique,
e que as actuais fronteiras políticas não conseguiram conter. Como se em todo esse
espaço as pessoas partilhassem um segredo. ( João Paulo Borges Coelho 2019: 21)

[But living on the coast does not mean just living from big ocean crossings. There are
particular characteristics which have become established in this wet strip. Complicities
between those who share the same condition, contrasts with those in the interior.
An example of this is the Swahili culture and language, a coastal belt which extends
all along the coast from the south of Somalia to the north of Mozambique, and for
which the current political boundaries do not count. As if in the whole of that space
people share a secret.]

1 My heartfelt thanks go to Ana Mafalda Leite, Jessica Falconi and Elena Brugioni,
the organizers of the inspiring conference ‘Colóquio Internacional Oceano Índico’,
for allowing me to join the wonderful ‘last minute’ group. This article is based on
research carried out in Mozambique in 2015 with a grant from the Thyssen founda-
tion, and in Zanzibar in 2019 within the framework of the research project ‘Multiple
Artworks –​Multiple Indian Oceans’ which is part of the Cluster of Excellence
‘Africa Multiple, Reconfiguring African Studies’ at Bayreuth University funded
by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)
under Germany’s Excellence Strategy –​EXC 2052/​1 –​390713894.
My gratitude also goes to my ‘partner in crime’, Chapane Mutiua, to Nassor
Hilal Kharusi and Chale Mussa for their generosity and to Ruth Schubert for
proof-​reading the English text.
266 clarissa vierke

Point of departure: The ‘Shared Secret’ of the East African

coast

In the above quotation, the Mozambican writer João Paulo Borges

Coelho refers to common characteristics of the East African coast, ‘the
Swahili culture and language’ as a ‘shared secret’. The notion of the ‘shared
secret’ guides me in my exploration of Swahili poetry in this article in
two ways: Firstly, I will work within the geographical area suggested by
João Paulo Borges Coelho’s view, as it ignores the political boundaries
of present-​day nation-​states and their language policies involving the
former colonial languages, English and Portuguese, which tend to bury
all other historically grown relations and languages under them so that
these become ‘secrets’.
Secondly, I will explore his notion of the ‘secret’ by presenting an aes-
thetic perspective on the Indian Ocean. By aesthetic perspective I mean
aesthetic practices –​here foremost poetry –​which have played a crucial
role in the coastal communities. The poems offer a perspective on common
coastal practices, which, given that they are embodied knowledge, often
escape our attention and remain secret. Furthermore, all along the coast,
poets have exchanged poetry for centuries, so that the circulating poems
add to and describe a broad Swahili coastal map. Lastly, to explore the
coastal ‘secret’, I find it productive to adopt an aesthetic approach in the
etymological sense of sensual perception, and to make philosophical in-
quiries about aesthetic experiences as a way of understanding that goes
beyond logical arguments. An aesthetic perspective leads us to consider the
Indian Ocean not merely as constructed in narratives of manifold relations
that crisscross the ocean, but as evoked sensually through shared scents,
tastes, sounds, visions and practices that produce an experience of a shared
Indian Ocean world. They reveal a common coastal and oceanic world,
create manifold associations and bring a wider world to life, but escape
any straightforward translation into ordinary words –​and hence remain
a secret: how can the experience of a scent or a rhythm and the manifold
associations they trigger be rendered in common language?
Imaginaries of far-away places? 267

Outside Western space and time: Recent approaches

Alternative geographies and timelines have been a primary concern in

Indian Ocean studies. The Indian Ocean came into the focus of scholarly
attention rather late –​the last in the list, after the Mediterranean, the
Atlantic and the Pacific. In comparison to the other oceans, the Indian
Ocean has been characterized as a most culturally, linguistically and
politically diverse oceanic space (Pearson, 2015: 3), where the European
presence was of rather marginal importance (see also Brugioni,
2020: 88): ‘(F)or most of its history, the Indian Ocean was crossed and
used by people from its littorals, not Europeans’ (Pearson, 2010: xv).
Along the Atlantic coasts, Christian and Western missionary efforts led
to institutionalized churches and schools, and to a ‘uniform domination
of Euro-​American Christian culture’ (Alpers, 2000: 86), which shaped
important (postcolonial) critical thinkers of African descent, like, for
instance, Aimé Césaire or Frantz Fanon. In the Indian Ocean, this dom-
inance does not exist in the same way: there is far more cultural and
linguistic variety between the Swahili Coast, southern Somalia and
southern Arabia, Oman, the Persian Gulf, Sind and Gujarat, where
Islam rather than Christianity plays a key role (Pearson, 2010: Brugioni,
2010). As Alpers argues, reflecting upon the African diaspora in the
Indian Ocean, it is rather the lack of a Western-​European framework
which characterizes the Indian Ocean. This can be considered as an
important reason for ‘the significant absence of an educated African
elite in the Indian Ocean world’ who would be the spokespersons of a
particular Indian Ocean identity. Or, as I will argue below, the over-
emphasis on Euro-​American discourses in Western languages makes
Indian Ocean research blind to other languages and practices, often
embodied and tacit, which, however, also evoke a translocal map of the
Indian Ocean. Thus, the Indian Ocean bears the potential of provincial-
izing Europe, questioning existing geographies and the concentration
on European colonial powers as the only enduring presence (see also
Brugioni, 2019), and requiring us to shift our perspectives.
268 clarissa vierke

Despite the emphasis placed by some scholars on their potential for

creating an epistemological shift that would marginalize Europe and the
former colonial powers, non-​Western languages and literary practices, and
archives of texts, have been sidelined. This has been pointed out by histor-
ians and Islamic scholars, who have sketched out alternative views. For the
Western Indian Ocean, for instance, Pier Larson (2009) has shown how
Malgache (besides French) was a language of correspondence across the
Ocean, linking diasporas on Madagascar and Mauritius. Anne Bang has
analysed the network of circulating Arabic books and manuscripts, echoing
transoceanic links between Sufi scholars in the Western Indian Ocean,
on Zanzibar, the Ilha de Moçambique and Cape Town, with contacts in
southern Arabia, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Bang, 2003).
Outside Indian Ocean studies, other scholars have increasingly chal-
lenged a unique geography. Their studies can inspire a new view of litera-
ture circulating in the Indian Ocean. For instance, Muhsin J. al-​Musawi
has written a book called The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters (2015),
in which he maps a vast Islamic space of discussion and disputation that
stretched from India to North Africa, in response to unifying debates on
world literature and postcolonial perspectives: he challenges Casanova’s
La République mondiale de Lettres (1999), where the Greenwich Meridian
is the centre of ‘Eurochronology’ (Prendergast, 2001), a single Western,
seemingly universal space-​time axis. In a productive way, the Indologist
Francesca Orsini (2014) adopts an inspiring relational and multilingual
perspective in her research on literature in northern India, where Hindi,
Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic (and later English) were coexistent and cre-
ated different, but overlapping arenas of discussion and circulation of texts
for centuries. She considers various, often overlapping ‘significant geog-
raphies’ that a text and a (multilingual) author can be part of. Languages
map out different spaces and histories and are linked to different practices
and materialities.
I take inspiration from these approaches that suggest other maps and
timelines, and will look for the geographies that a Swahili literary work
evokes and is part of. So far, Swahili literature –​including poetry –​has
not played a role in thinking about the literary imaginary of the Indian
Ocean. Rather, Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone writers, from
Imaginaries of far-away places? 269

Kenya, Tanzania, the Comoros, Mauritius and Mozambique, have gained

attention with their alternative Indian Ocean imaginary that cuts through
national and continental boundaries (see Brugioni, 2019: 87ff.). And yet,
ironically, their use of the former colonial languages endorses the national
and linguistic boundaries created by colonialism. While Portuguese links
Mozambique with the former colonial power Portugal and its colonial
map of discovery and conquest in the Indian Ocean (and beyond), Swahili
requires a map that not only includes parts of Mozambique, Kenya and
Tanzania but also provides a view of the East African coast as a whole: the
term ‘Swahili’ is derived from the Arabic term for coastal inhabitants. It is
a map that shows port cities on the coast and the nearby islands, roughly
from Mogadishu to Sofala, the homes of Muslim sailors and merchants,
who had far-​reaching connections along the coast and across the Indian
Ocean, following the winds of the Monsoon. Part of the ‘shared secret’ of
the so-​called Swahili coast is not only the language but also a shared ma-
terial culture: different types of boats (from big dhows to outrigger canoes,
ngalawa), and coral stone houses embellished with imported goods, like
porcelain and glass, which archaeologists have excavated all along the coast.
Shared practices of Islam, and poetry, which will be in the focus here, fun-
damentally add to the coast’s ‘secret’.

Contemporary smaller worlds and double affinities on

Zanzibar

Francesca Orsini’s (2015) compelling argument for overlapping maps is a

reminder not to explore the Swahili coast as a neatly definable bounded
area of study, fixed in history and defined by one, unchanging language.
The city-​states along the coast have their different histories echoed in
the language. Swahili is a historical continuum of distinct language var-
ieties, with which people proudly proclaim their regional identity as a
mwunguja ‘Zanzibari’, a mwamu ‘Lamuan’ or a mmvita ‘Mombasan’.
Speakers from the extreme geographical ends of the coastal map recognize
270 clarissa vierke

similarities in their dialects but find it difficult to understand each other.

Swahili is a Bantu language that has been influenced by Arabic and
other languages of the Indian Ocean, as well as the colonial languages,
Portuguese, German and English, and, even more importantly, other
African languages. These influences depend on the region and the histor-
ical period: the coastal map is not homogeneous and is subject to change.
While in northern Mozambique Swahili is now only existent in niches,
it is a national language in Tanzania and Kenya, and in the Democratic
Republic of Congo. It has been a first language to many, and a second or
third language to even more people on the coast since at least the end of
the first millennium. Particularly from the eighteenth century onwards,
when the Omani Sultanate moved to Zanzibar, it expanded widely as a
lingua franca in transregional trade along the coast, but also across the
Ocean to southern Arabia, Madagascar, the Comoros and Mozambique,
and –​via caravan trade –​far into the East African interior, setting the
stage for its later colonial use and use as a national language in Tanzania
and Kenya. In the twentieth century, political ideologies which margin-
alized the Muslim coastal inhabitants turned Swahili from a language of
the coast and the islands to a language of the mainland.
A poem by the contemporary Zanzibari poet Nassor Hilal Kharusi,
Ingalikuwa hiari ‘If I had a choice’, which he self-​published in his anthology
Siku Zapishana (‘Days are passing by’) speaks of the double affinity of the
narrator to the mainland and the sea –​which is not without conflict. His
emphasis on travelling as an essential human characteristic seems to high-
light the dynamic geography I have attempted to describe:
Tunayo waja safari kwa hakika na yakini
Iko wazi siyo siri asiyejuwa ni nani?
Nchi kavu na bahari ni tangu toka zamani
Safari katu haina hiari (Hilal n.d.: 6, stz. )

[We human beings have been travelling –​this is clear,

it is not a secret, who does not know it? –​
On the mainland and the ocean.
Travelling is a necessity.]
(my emphasis)
Imaginaries of far-away places? 271

Nassor Hilal Kharusi’s own background reflects the layers of overlap-

ping maps of Zanzibar. Born in 1978, he is of Omani decent, in the sixth
generation on Zanzibar, and has a kiosk-​like shop in a busy area of the
market selling shiny scarves (mostly from China) and dawa (‘traditional
herbal medicines’) –​reflecting both a contemporary Indian Ocean
world, flooded by products from China, and a historical one of circu-
lating Arabic herbal medicines. When there is no customer around, he
composes poetry behind his counter. He refers to Oman, sometimes with
the melancholic vocabulary of the diaspora, but more often he under-
lines his Tanzanian identity. Zanzibar is his home, where he spent all
his life, Swahili his only language, and yet he is regarded as an ‘Arab’ in
Dar es Salaam, where he has to pay double the price in the market. The
resentment against Arabs, recently reinforced again, is a heritage of the
bloody revolution on the island which put an end to the Omani sultanate
in the 1960s. In the context of socialist Tanzania, Zanzibar, previously a
cosmopolitan hub of trade, whose multicultural flair attracted poets, mu-
sicians, traders and scholars from Arabia, the West, India and other parts
of Africa, became geographically, politically and ideologically marginal
and a troublesome appendix to the state.
This changing geography is also reflected in poetry. On the one hand,
Swahili poetry is still the most important and widespread aesthetic prac-
tice in Zanzibar, building on a longstanding coastal tradition. There is no
wedding without a poetry recitation. Topical poetry is published daily in
newspapers, as well as on Facebook, in WhatsApp groups and in other social
media. Hard-​hitting verbal duels carried out in veiled language between
poets are a much commented on part of everyday life –​as in other towns
along the Kenyan and Tanzanian coast, like Tanga, Mombasa or Lamu.
Poetry travels along the coast, overriding national boundaries, to poetic
rivals or relatives in Mombasa, but also, for instance, to Oman, evoking
older geographies. However, the coast is not the only realm in which Swahili
poetry circulates: Nassor also exchanges poetry with poets from the main-
land, within the confines of the Tanzanian nation-​state, whose imaginary
has heavily relied on Swahili as a national language, and on a national canon
of modern Swahili literature, created and promoted by Julius Nyerere in the
1960s. Canonic writers like Shaaban Robert or Matthias Mnyampala, who
272 clarissa vierke

originally worked to support Julius Nyerere’s policy of a Swahili-​speaking

national state of Tanzania with a fresh poetic imaginary are authors that
Nassor Hilal Kharusi refers to as his role models, whose works he read in
school on Zanzibar. His poetry shows this ‘double affinity’, sitting at the
crossroads of local Zanzibari dialogue poetry and topical verse attentive
‘towards the people of his city, the dramas of life and love both as they
unfold in private and can be sensed in public and a fascination with the
natural world’ (Koenings, 2018: 186), and the (initially socialist) concept
of the writer as socially engaged, serving the national agenda of develop-
ment and progress. Like many other poets on Zanzibar, he uses his poetry
to openly criticize social ills, like the persecution of albinos or a quickly
changing world of ‘dramatic tensions’ (see Koenings, 2018: 187), but in an
increasingly repressive context, his poetry takes on more subtle and alle-
gorical forms –​often in line with his inclination towards philosophical
musing on human existence.
Apart from the small oceanic reference in the poem quoted above, the
Indian Ocean does not play any role in the imaginary of his poetry or that
of other poets on Zanzibar, sometimes locally published in anthologies of
Zanzibari poetry. References to a wider Indian Ocean beyond the imme-
diate horizon are almost absent. The poets seem to have turned their backs
on the sea, concerned in their poetry with their immediate community on
the island, and often looking to the mainland in praise or, more often, in
protest. Nowadays, Tanzania’s Indian Ocean map figures prominently in
East African Anglophone novels. These include the acclaimed works by
Abdulrazak Gurnah, who fled from Zanzibar shortly after the revolution,
like the protagonist of By the Sea (2001), or the novels of Moyez Vassanji, a
reputed writer of South Asian ancestry, and author, for instance, of Uhuru
Road (1991). His stories navigate the lifeworld of the South Asian diaspora
on the East African coast. Some novels in Swahili, such as Vuta Nkuvute by
the Zanzibari writer Shafi Adam Shafi (1999), which has not been taken
into consideration by comparative literary scholarship on the Indian Ocean,
evoke the manifold oceanic and coastal relations, as well as the fault lines
and ruptures, focusing on the dark sides of slavery and social segregation, as
well as splendid cosmopolitan moments of cultural diversity. In addition,
the imaginary of the Indian Ocean has been explored by the Zanzibar film
Imaginaries of far-away places? 273

and jazz festivals, funded by global cultural institutions, which attract a

mobile and cosmopolitan audience, mostly from the West –​a parallel,
inaccessible or insignificant world to most Zanzibari Swahili poets. Their
inward-​looking poetry does not seem to fit the notion of cosmopolitanism
and fluid identities cherished in Indian Ocean studies, which, par contre,
has tended to ignore literary production in the Indian Ocean which does
not match its concepts and has a narrow perspective on genre and time.
The imaginary map of Zanzibari poets has been subject to much
change, and traces of a longer coastal tradition can be dug out in the prac-
tices –​not the discourses –​of poetry composition. The vitality of poetic
production can be linked to Nyerere’s emphasis on art in the service of the
nation, but can also be traced back to an older coastal notion of the ha-
bitus of a respected member of society (mungwana), associated with good
manners and appearance, and refined rhetoric, best expressed in poetry.
Patterns of strict verse prosody, much attacked by modernist poets in the
1960s, are often used to highlight a specific coastal identity. These go back
over the Ocean to Southern Arabian models adapted into Swahili in the
eighteenth century. Corresponding recitation practices are held in much
esteem; these precede but also have outlived, national boundaries along
the coast of the Indian Ocean.
Mwana Kombo, another Zanzibari poet, wrote a poem on commission
to congratulate the Zanzibari government on building a new road, in line
with the modern agenda of the state. Originally from the neighbouring
island of Pemba, she teaches the national canon of Swahili literature at the
local Haile Selasi secondary school. She also recites poetry to pray for bless-
ings for the bride and the groom in an adapted verse form of the Arabic
dua, which in its Swahili form is widespread along the East African coast,
as well as the Comoros and Kenya. In its Arabic form, it is used all over the
Indian Ocean Muslim world. In the verse forms, the voices and the imagery,
one finds traces of older cultural Indian Ocean connections and common
poetic practices. Many of them, genealogically bound to the past, have
become a ‘shared secret’. It is a secret that slowly seems to be fading out of
people’s cultural memory but does not easily leave the hands of poets, who
write in well-​balanced lines echoing earlier Swahili manuscripts in Arabic
letters, their ears and tongues hearing or reciting verse metrically bound in
274 clarissa vierke

a modulating voice with an emphasis on pronouncing Arabic loanwords in

a more Arabic style than Swahili usually does. In Mwana Kombo’s poem
about the new road, it is the form of the poem which reflects the wider
geography of the Indian Ocean.
The present poetry of a smaller world forms a contrast to the poetry of
previous centuries: the Indian Ocean figures prominently in song poetry
dating back to the eighteenth century, as I will show. Thus, a transregional
perspective is not a product of contemporary ideas questioning the con-
fines of the nation-​state, but, in fact, predates the nation-​state with its
narrow perspectives.

Sensuous oceanic geographies in ancient poetry from Lamu

The earliest Swahili poetry of which we have evidence comes from the
Lamu archipelago, geographically situated opposite the coast of what is
now northern Kenya. It is a cycle of loosely related song poems, which
has been attributed to the heroic warrior-​poet and master singer Fumo
Liyongo. He is not only the author of songs but also the subject of many
narrative oral traditions on the Lamu archipelago and the coastline dir-
ectly to the west in the delta of the Tana River (Werner, 1926). While
the northern Swahili versions were committed to writing using Arabic
script in the nineteenth century, when local scholars felt the need to pre-
serve them, the Liyongo songs and stories had been passed on orally for
a long time before this, which makes dating a difficult issue (see Steere,
1870 for a discussion). While a few scholars relying on oral sources and
local Swahili and Arabic chronicles have dated Liyongo back to a period
‘before the 13th century’ (Shariff, 1988: 53, my translation), a number of
historians situate him in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (for an
overview, see Pouwels, 2002: 407).
While the Liyongo songs and tales were forged into more coherent,
plot-​driven narratives by local bards in the nineteenth century (see Meinhof,
1924/​1925), oral traditions (some still existing) and manuscripts in Arabic
script recount and preserve single episodes and only thematically loosely
Imaginaries of far-away places? 275

related songs. There is, for instance, the account of Fumo Liyongo’s spec-
tacular escape from the dungeons where his half-​brother and enemy
Mringwari, had imprisoned him (see Werner, 1926: 249ff.). Mringwari
had become the ruler of the important city-​state of Pate on the Lamu
archipelago, instead of Liyongo, and he sought to trap and kill Liyongo –​
but in vain: the clever Fumo Liyongo made his way out of prison with the
help of a file which his mother had baked into a loaf of bread.
For Pouwels (2002), the stories and songs reflect a fundamental tran­
sition of power in the region: power moves from clans in the Tana delta, as,
for instance, Liyongo’s Bauri clan, to new elites on the islands of Pate, and
later Lamu. While the former –​perfectly embodied by Fumo Liyongo –​
adhered to a specific set of cultural practices, influenced by early Indian
Ocean connections (Vernet, 2015), but mostly from the African mainland,
like beliefs in spirits, cognatic patterns of inheritance, shifting agriculture
and oral poetry traditions like the ones described here, the latter –​em-
bodied by Liyongo’s half-​brother Mringwari –​introduced more ‘literate
Shari’a based rules favouring patrilineage’ (Pouwels, 2002: 407). Thus, ac­
cording to Pouwels, the poems echo the beginning of what later becomes
a wave of Arabization reaching the coast from across the Indian Ocean,
changing older rituals, legal practices and forms of knowledge production.
It becomes most manifest in later Islamic poetry of the 18th and 19th cen-
turies, which I will turn to below.
The Liyongo poems are still composed in an ancient metrical long
form, the genre of the utumbuizo, where the verse meter depends on the
singer’s breath and not on abstract syllable count, which accounts for a
prosodic vigour in line with the moral strictness of the eighteenth cen-
tury. The tumbuizo are far more serene and festive, performed ‘on solemn
occasions’ (‘dans une circonstance solennelle’, Sacleux, 1939: s. v.), such as
weddings. In some contexts, they seem to have been linked to dance, the
gungu, of which we only have a vague idea. The gungu used to be wide-
spread all along the coast, from what is now northern Kenya to northern
Mozambique –​another shared secret of the coast. In Mombasa linked to
the New Year’s celebration that followed the Persian calendar (Sacleux,
1939: s.v., Knappert, 1979: 54), Steere describes it as follows for Zanzibar: ‘It
is the custom to meet at about ten or eleven at night and dance until day
276 clarissa vierke

break. The men and slave women dance, the ladies sit a little retired and
look on. (…) The first figure is danced by a single couple, the second by
two couples’ (Steere, 1870: xi).
Differently from the religiously inspired poetry of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the dance poems provide us with sensuous tableaux of
the East African coast. They evoke the Indian Ocean connections through
precious goods from afar, fruits, scents and clothes, creating carefully cut-​
out pregnant moments, which completely disappear in later Swahili poetry.
For instance, the poem of which a few lines are given below, the Utumbuizo
wa Liyongo Harusini (‘The Poem of Liyongo at a Wedding’), has a rhythmic
force, taking the wedding guests’ preparation as an occasion to present
their fine attire and the scents of an elegant and cosmopolitan gathering,
as if the poet was painting a multisensorial picture:
Mujipake na twibu hiyari yalotuwa kwa zema ziungo
Choshi ni maambari na udi fukizani nguo ziso ongo
Fukizani nguo za hariri na zisutu zisizo zitango
Pachori na zafarani na zabadi twahara ya fungo
Na zito za karafuu tuliyani musitiwe t’ungo
Na itiri na kafuri haya ndiyo mwiso wa changu kiungo
Lines 10–​15 taken from ‘Liyongo Songs’ (Miehe et al. 2004: 40)

Put on choice scent made of the best ingredients,

treat your spotless clothes with the incense of ambergris and aloe-wood,
treat your silken garments and finely made zisutu clothes
with patchouli and saffron and pure musk of the civet,
and ground them with clove-buds, lest people criticise you,
and (finally) add perfume and fine camphor to complete the ingredients.
(my emphasis)

In this poem, according to Jan Knappert (1991: 214) ‘the oldest known
dance song in Swahili and perhaps any Bantu language’, the wedding
guests –​Liyongo’s sister is getting married –​are urged to put on elegant
clothes, silken garments and zisutu, cotton cloths with small red and blue
patterns imported from India (see Ivanov, 2017: 373 for a picture). Textiles
were so highly valued that they even served as payment in the founding
myths of Kilwa and Angoche (Schadeberg, 1999). In the form of turbans
and robes, they became important points of distinction for town dwellers
Imaginaries of far-away places? 277

all along the coast. Fragrances are omnipresent in the poem, reflecting
the high cultural value put on scents. Creating an ‘olfactory rich environ-
ment’ was not only important in rituals, but was a ‘sign of sophistication
and refinement’ (Hillewaert, 2020: 51). Exquisite perfumes of patchouli
(pachori) ‘importé de l’inde’ (Sacleux, 1939: 722 s.v.), saffron (zafarani),
made out of the yellow crocus (Knappert, 1991: 221), and the expensive
musk of the civet, zabadi, as well as cloves, karafuu, were widely traded
spices in the Indian Ocean world. While civet became an important
export good from the Swahili Coast in the Indian Ocean trade (Horton
& Middleton, 2000: 13), cloves (like cinnamon, nutmeg and pepper), ori­
ginally imported from Asia, became such sought-​after spices in the Indian
Ocean economy, that they were also increasingly grown on huge and
(slave) labour-​intensive plantations on Zanzibar and the neighbouring
green island of Pemba from the eighteenth century onwards.
These traded scents, textiles and spices were part of what the historian
Thomas Vernet characterizes as the ‘premodern phase’ of Swahili Indian
Ocean trade. As he shows, relying mostly on Portuguese, French and British
sources, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Swahili seafarers,
sailors, captains and boat-​owners from Pate island, where the Liyongo songs
come from, travelled along the ‘Swahili corridor’ to Madagascar and the
Comoros, and not only received goods from Arab and Indian traders but
also –​though only to a moderate extent –​sent their mitepe, typical East
African sewn boats, to southern Arabia and western India. The coastal in-
habitants of Eastern Africa exported ivory, tortoise shell and timber, and
increasingly foodstuffs, like millet and dried fish. They imported textiles,
like cotton and silk, glass, jewellery, fragrances, sandalwood, kohl, spices,
pottery and porcelain, and brass and bronze ware (see also Horton &
Middleton, 2000: 13).
Not only the actual spices and scents evoke ‘the coastal residents’ his-
torical transoceanic connections with Arabia’ (Hillewaert, 2020: 51) but
also the words (which sound foreign to a Swahili audience) referring to
the spices and perfumes in the poem, which entered Swahili vocabulary
before the eighteenth century, keep alive a memory of their distant origin
and evoke a wider oceanic imaginary (see Schadeberg, 2009). Originating
from different Indian Ocean languages, they mostly made their entry into
278 clarissa vierke

Swahili through a transregionally shared Indian Ocean Arabic (Schadeberg,

2009: 85): For instance, the word kafuri for camphor, an aromatic smell,
was borrowed from Arabic (kafūr) (Sacleux, 1939: 317), but originally
found its way into Arabic through Indian languages (Sanskrit karpura),
and might be of Austronesian origin. To give another example, the word
‘pacholi’ or ‘pachuli’, a plant that is ‘related to mint’, is initially of Tamil
origin (Knappert, 1991: 221).
The Utumbuizo wa Mwana Mnazi (‘The Utumbuizo of Lady
Coconut’), another poem attributed to Liyongo, also presents itself as a
miniature portrayal of the rich cosmopolitan, coastal material culture: a
lady receives her long-​awaited husband (probably Liyongo) at home and
urges the servant, Time, to attend to his needs:

Nitiyani hoyo Time aye, ¨ naanguse, ate masindizi.

Apakuwe pilau ya Hindi, ¨ mzababu isiyo mtuzi.
Ete kiti chema cha Ulaya ¨ na siniya njema ya Shirazi.
Mnakashi inakishiweyo ¨ na sahani hung’ara ja mwezi.
Kaamuru hudama na waja, ¨ ai, ninyi, hamtumbuizi?
Basi, hapo akamwandikiya, ¨ naye Time yushishiye kuzi,
Yapijeto mayi ya inabu ¨ kimnosha kama mnwa shizi.
Kimlisha akimpa hiba ¨ kimuonya yakeye maozi,
Kimlisha tambuu ya Siyu ¨ yi laini laini ya Ozi.
Kiukuta k’ono kimwakiza, ¨ kwa iliki pamwe na jauzi.
Lines 22–31 taken from ‘Liyongo Songs’ (Miehe et al., 2004)

[Call Time, let her come ¨ quickly and let her not tarry.
Let her serve up a dish of Indian pilau ¨ cooked with raisins without curry.
Bring a fine European chair ¨ and a good Persian tray
Engraved with fine designs ¨ and a plate shining like the moon.’
And she ordered the servants and slaves ¨ ‘You, why are you not entertaining (us)?’
Immediately she served him, ¨ while Time held the jug
Full of grape juice. ¨ She made him drink it like a drinker of wine.
She fed him lovingly ¨ and gave him a meaningful gaze,
Offering him the special tambuu of Siyu, ¨ as soft as the one from Ozi.
She folded it and put it into his mouth ¨ together with cardamom and betel nut.]

The poem speaks of the lady’s ardent desire to please her husband: the
servant has to bring him a ‘European chair’ (kiti cha Ulaya), also called a
kiti cha enzi, a commonly shared Indian Ocean piece of furniture from
Imaginaries of far-away places? 279

the epoch of Portuguese rule (Ivanov, 2017: 372). More like a throne than
a chair, due to its rectangular design and its tall back, with what was later
called an ‘Indo-​Portuguese design’ of ‘flat pieces of plainsawn hardwood’
(Meier, 2016: 363) and an inlay of mother of pearl and ivory, the chair,
found all over the Indian Ocean, symbolizes the affluence, power and
(specifically Indian Ocean) cosmopolitan sophistication of its owner. The
food served to the husband adds to the imaginary of far-​away places: an
Indian rice dish (pilau), together with precious grape juice (a foreign
drink from a Swahili perspective), on a tray with fine engravings from
Shiraz (Persia). At the end of the poem, she puts a betel bite (tambuu)
into his mouth. This is a stimulating drug, originally from South East
Asia, used also as an aphrodisiac. Chewing it became a widespread prac-
tice among affluent merchants keen on cultivating a bohemian lifestyle
along the East African coast before the nineteenth century. Other Swahili
poetry from Lamu of the time sings its praises (Vierke, 2019); as Burton
(1872: 430) notes in his nineteenth-​century Zanzibar travelogue, the
‘Waswahili may be said to exist upon manioc and betel’. Travelling to
the Ilha de Moçambique in the nineteenth century, Carlos José Caldeira
is seemingly impressed when he catches sight of an elegant, lasciviously
dancing woman, who finally offers him a betel bite as the sign of a cor-
dial welcome (‘um sinal de cordialidade’) (quoted after Saute and Sopa,
1992: 135). Hardly in use anymore today, the ingredients of the betel bite,
areca nut, tobacco and spices, were planted locally: as the poem under-
lines, the betel leaf came from Siyu, on the island of Pate, and Ozi, the
home of Fumo Liyongo.
The betel bite she puts into his mouth at the end of the poem, together
with her telling look, foreshadow a love scene which the poem leaves the
audience to imagine: the borders between the sensuous and the sensual
are often fluid in the Liyongo poems. The senses are encouraged to wander
on imaginary journeys, inspired by the dense descriptions in the poem.
Besides its usage as a stimulant, the betel bite became a poetic leitmotif
associated with seduction in poetry of the time, comparable to champagne
in a Western context. In the Kamasutra, the betel bite is a recurring topos,
placed by lovers into each other’s mouths (Doniger, 2016: 30). Thus, for the
erudite high class Swahili audience of the time, learned in textual traditions
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from India and Arabia, the betel bite was a reference to the Indian text,
which added to the Swahili poem’s erotic reading.
Thus, one would hardly do justice to the poems by merely considering
them as the oldest historical documents witnessing oceanic trade in ma-
terial goods like fruits, scents and furniture in an African language (which
in fact they are!). The above poem creates a carefully painted East African
tableau, a meal and love scene in a patrician mansion, where the food, the
scents, the attire and the furniture celebrate the exquisite lifestyle of the
mansion’s inhabitants. In her consideration of the particular mundane in-
terior decoration of nineteenth-​century Zanzibar, Prita Meier (2017: 364)
highlights the intended ‘intimate, multisensorial experiences of a range of
“elsewheres” ’, which the much earlier Liyongo poems also seek to evoke.
They recreate the larger world of the Indian Ocean not by referential links,
but by evoking tastes, scents and the haptic experience and sight of the
interior and people’s attire. There is a sensuous immediacy of a common
Indian Ocean space, with its particular tastes, scents and other sensuous
qualities, which invites the audience to indulge in further, unlimited im-
aginations. The Liyongo poems are not narratives of oceanic connections,
tracing an imaginary map like the Sindbad story, but render the Indian
Ocean palpable in minutely cut-​out scenes, so unique in Swahili poetry.
The Indian Ocean here figures as what Ivanov has characterized as an ‘aes-
thetic seascape’ (Ivanov, 2017: 369), a shared world that emerges through
shared materiality and shared sensual perceptions.
I will draw here briefly on recent debates in respect of the knowledge-​
producing capacity of artworks, which has a long tradition in aesthetic
philosophy and has been re-​explored recently in philosophy, the social
sciences and the arts. As Durs Grünbein (2007) has put it, the poet does
not come up with an abstracting argument, but sticks to the ‘abundance of
characteristics’ of the material world (Grünbein, 2007: 89). And in doing
so, the poem stimulates much thought and imagination which cannot be
reduced to a neatly expressed argument, for this would abstract from the
multitude of impressions. For Grünbein, this is the paradox of an insurgent
‘palpability’, on the one hand, which the poem creates through its imagery
and form, and a ‘blurred view’, on the other, meaning that it cannot be easily
translated into conclusions (‘Anschaulichkeit und Unschärfe’) (Grünbein,
Imaginaries of far-away places? 281

2007: 84–​94). In the ancient Swahili poems, the image of the Indian Ocean
certainly remains blurred, a ‘shared secret’, since it figures only in allusions
to the senses –​which, however, also accounts for its appeal. In this sense,
the poem presents a kind of understanding before there are words for it.
Adorno (1997: 126) speaks of the artwork as revealing a truth that is in-
commensurable with discursive knowledge. It essentially presents itself as
a sudden apparition that escapes the logic of a single argument. He com-
pares artworks to elves in a fairy tale, since they stir much thought, yet,
since they cannot be pinned to one idea, they appear as riddles (1997: 126).

Changing times and maps: Al-​Inkishafi

As hinted at before, the eighteenth and particularly the nineteenth cen-

tury saw the emergence of a whole new body of Islamic poetry in Swahili,
authored by an elite of Islamic scholars who had wide connections across
the Indian Ocean, and were well-​versed in Arabic, but deliberately turned
to Swahili for composing poetry. They belonged to Sufi brotherhoods,
foremost the Alawiyya, which had its beginning in Hadramaut, southern
Yemen, in the twelfth century. From the sixteenth century onwards,
it spread with the trade network, spanning a large part of the Indian
Ocean, and linking communities in Arabia, Indonesia, India and East
Africa. Adherents of the Alawiyya, who considered themselves Sayyids,
that is, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and accordingly gifted
with baraka (blessings), arrived on the Swahili coast at that time. But
it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Lamu and Pate
saw a new wave of migration (Bang, 2003: 25). They became centres of
a Sufi reform movement which spread along the coast, spearheaded by
the highly educated Hadhramis. For them not only asceticism, mystical
practice and education in classical Arabic were of importance: composing
poetry in Swahili also became a primary concern, with the aim of starting
an ‘Islamic revival and counterattack against the Portuguese’ (Pouwels,
1992: 270; see also Pouwels, 1987: 38–​42), and later against the British.
Challenging the local establishment, their aim was to pass on Islamic
282 clarissa vierke

knowledge to a broad section of society. Many people had previously had

no access to religious knowledge, which was exclusively taught and dis-
cussed by a restricted elite in Arabic. Literacy in both Arabic and Swahili
gained in prominence, as well as new ritual practices, supplementing
earlier oral institutions and modes of learning (Pouwels, 1992: 92; see also
Bang, 2014: 111ff.; Bang, 2003: 31).
The tone, form and imaginary maps of their poetry are of a funda-
mentally different nature from those of older poems. Lavish dance poetry
gave way to poetry that followed an ethos of asceticism, frowned upon
earthly pleasures, and overflowed with religious zeal for the hereafter. No
other text exemplifies this shift in epistemological perspective better than
the poetic masterpiece Al-​Inkishafi, written by Sayyid Abdallah bin Nasir
(1720–​1820), which was held in high esteem for its profound reflections
and layers of meaning. The poem depicts the rich, ‘lantern-​lighted’ man-
sions, which we encountered in the Liyongo poems: the banquet table is
set with porcelain, fine goblets and crystal pitchers:
Nyumba zao mbake zikinawiri
kwa taa za k’owa na za sufuri;
Masiku yakele kama nahari,
haiba na jaha iwazingiye.

Their mansions, lantern-lighted, glittered bright

with brazen lamps and lamps with crystal dight;
Till light as day became their hours of night,
and in their Halls walked Fame and Honour twain.

Wapambiye sini ya kuteuwa,

na kula kikombe kinakishiwa;
Kati watiziye k’uzi za k’owa
katika mapambo yanawiriye

Their banquetings with ware of T‘sin were spread,

each goblet with fine graving overlaid;
And set in midst, the crystal pitchers made
bright glitter-glow upon the nappery lain.
Imaginaries of far-away places? 283

And set in midst, the crystal pitchers made bright glitter-​glow upon
the napery lain.
Taken from Hichens (1939, stz. 37 and 38, my emphasis) ]

In the Inkishafi, however, the affluent houses full of music and laughter
remain only in the memory of the lyrical I. A few stanzas later, the narrator
is walking through houses that lie in ruins, full of empty echoes and scary
animal sounds. Instead of the houses’ owners and their distinguished guests,
bats, spiders and an owl have taken possession of the house, destroying the
achievements of civilization: ‘Where once in wall-​niches, the porcelain
stood, now wildling birds nestle the fledgling brood’ (stz. 50; Hichens,
1939: 81). The powerful owners no longer reside in their mansions, but lie
in ‘houses of sand’ (nyumba za tanga-​tanga, stz. 60), that is, their graves.
The scenery is constructed very much in antithetical terms. The ruins are
not just empty, but appear as a distorted picture of the previous mansions:
Nyumba zao mbake ziwele t’ame;
makinda ya p’opo iyu wengeme.
Husikii hisi wala ukeme;
Zitanda matandu walitandiye.

[Their mansions bright, with empty echoes ring.

High in the halls the fluttering night-​bats cling.
Thou hear’st no outcry; no sweet murmuring.
The spiders, o’er the couches, spin their skein.
(stz. 49; Hichens, 1939: 80]

On the one hand, the poem is a reflection on the brevity and vanity of
life, inspired by a new austerity and religious sentiment. The futility
of the here and now is drastically underlined by the last stanzas of the
Inkishafi, dedicated to the depiction of the circles of hell awaiting the
sinner. On the other hand, the poem has also been read as having a his-
torical meaning, depicting the fall of the mighty city-​state of Pate, from
a major, cosmopolitan port city to an isolated place on the coast, on the
periphery (Vierke, 2016). The poem spells out the experience of a funda­
mental shift in the coastal map of power constellations, a historical rup-
ture related to Zanzibar’s rise. It is Pate’s history of decay, which in real
284 clarissa vierke

time was a gradual process following a series of political confrontations

and fights over succession to the throne. There was increasing competi-
tion over economic hegemony in changing Indian Ocean trade constella-
tions, which favoured Zanzibar as well as its ally, the neighbouring Lamu,
which demanded heavy taxes from Pate (see also Hichens, 1939). With a
tone of nostalgia that is also present in the poem (besides or parallel to the
contempt for the here and now), the lyrical I recalls Pate’s splendid days.
The narrator evokes the rich material goods only in retrospect, making
them palpable to the audience. He highlights the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of
the translocal material culture of the Indian Ocean that characterizes the
decoration and furniture of the house (Ho Seng, 2006), in a way that re-
minds us of the Liyongo poems. But it is the transience of this cosmopol-
itan world on Pate, the changing map, which the poem underlines. The
ruins also foreshadow a changing imaginary map of Swahili poetry, where
after the Inkishafi, the tableaux of a sensually rich East African urban
landscape, in which far-​reaching connections appear in the here and now
of the poem, never come back.
Instead, many of the poems, composed in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries and in the first half of the twentieth century, create another
transoceanic poetic link that takes their audience across the ocean and
back in time to the Arabian peninsula of the Prophet Muhammad, in all
his glory. The Utendi wa Tambuka (‘The Poem of Tambuka’), for instance,
often considered as the earliest written Swahili utendi, adapted by a poet
called Bwana Mwengo for the Sultan of Pate in 1728, recounts the battle
of the Prophet against the Byzantinian emporer in a suspense-​driven col-
ourful epic narrative, a template for many tendi to follow (Knappert, 1958).
The poets, respected Islamic scholars like Sayyid Abdallah bin Nasir,
the composer of the Inkishafi, enthusiastically immersed themselves in
the task of reproducing Arabic poetry in the newly created Swahili verse
prosody, translating Hadhrami verse patterns into Swahili lines of a new
metrical strictness –​also visible on the manuscript page. Swahili in Arabic
script, previously used only occasionally and foremost in letters and in-
scriptions, became systematically used to write down Swahili poetry at
that time, and manuscripts of the most popular poems travelled all along
the East African coast. The first known translation is the Hamziyya, a
Imaginaries of far-away places? 285

translation into archaic Swahili of the Arabic poem Umm al-​Qurā by the
thirteenth-​century Egyptian poet, Muhammad ibn Sa’īd ul-​Būsīrī. The
first Swahili manuscript of it is considered to have been written in 1749 by
Sayyid ‘Idarusi bin Athman, a prominent theologian and scholar of Arabic
from Pate, related to the composer of the Inkishafi (see Knappert, 1966;
Harries, 1952). Manuscripts of the poem have been found in what is now
Somalia, Tanzania and Kenya. Nineteenth-​century translations spread
from what is now Kenya to northern Mozambique along the scholarly
networks of the Sufi brotherhoods (Bang, 2014; Knappert, 1971). These
included, for instance, Ya Dura Mandhuma ‘Strung Pearls’ (Harries, 1953)
by Sayyid Umar bin Amin, the chief kadhi in Siyu on Pate; the Maulidi
Barzanji (Neuhaus, 1935); and the Tabaraka (Dammann, 1960), an austere
poem preaching the brevity of life, by the most reputed Sharifu Mwenye
Mansab, whom I will turn to below. Furthermore, a great quantity of epic
narrative poetry in the Swahili utendi genre of the kind mentioned above
came into being, accounting for a huge body of Swahili manuscripts kept
in private archives in Lamu, Mombasa and Tanga, as well as the Ilha de
Mozambique and Angoche. This poetry describes legendary battles in the
early history of Islam, or provides hagiographies of the Prophet Muhammad,
or other prophets, such as Ayubu ( Job).
While the production of Swahili manuscripts started on Lamu and
Pate, in the nineteenth century Zanzibar attracted many of the most erudite
Hadrami scholars. Learned in local jurisprudence, they not only occupied
high-​ranking positions as kadhi under Omani rule but also brought their
poetry with them. It was also under Zanzibari tutelage, and with the help
of Comorian networks, that trade connections expanded significantly,
but also the Sufi movements, and with them the Swahili language. It was
in the nineteenth century that the Swahili coastal map reached its widest
extension. In a seemingly paradoxical way, at a time of colonial onslaught
and an increasing influx of Arabic, Swahili spread through maritime ex-
change to Madagascar, the Comoros and Southern Arabia, as well as into
the interior along the caravan routes, and all along the coast, from Somalia
to Mozambique (see Alpers, 2000; Ingrams, 1967: 6). Below, I will take
a closer look at one of the most widespread poems, the Maulidi Barzanji.
286 clarissa vierke

The coast as a transregional Swahili literary cosmopolis

Wewe ndiwe yua, ndiwe mwezi utimiyiwo wewe ndiwe nuru weye nuru u yiu lao

[You are the sun, you are the full moon, you are the light, you shine above them ]
(Neuhaus 1935: 159, stz. 24d with a slight adaptation of the Swahili,
my translation)

In the nineteenth century, the most widespread and best-​known text

all along the East African coast, from Barawa in Somalia to northern
Mozambique, and on the islands including the Comoros, was a praise
poem, in Swahili maulidi, recounting the Prophet’s birth and life, inter-
spersed with ecstatic devotional praises of his outstanding personality
(Bang, 2014: 24). In the Sunni-​Islamic world, mawlid celebrations with
various forms of recitation of texts (prose and poetry) reach back to
the thirteenth century, while the globally most widespread mawlid text
was composed in Arabic in the eighteenth century by Ja’far b. Hasan al-​
Barzanjī (1690–​1765) (Bang, 2003: 149). The Maulidi Barzanji was trans­
lated into various other languages in the Muslim world, including Turkish
(see Knappert, 1971) and Acehnese in Indonesia (see Harries, 1958), as
well as Swahili. In the late nineteenth century, recitation of the poem in
Swahili played a central role for the Sufi brotherhood of the Alawiyya on
Lamu, whose members publicly displayed their ritual affection and love
for the Prophet in front of larger audiences. The recitation practice of
the Maulidi quickly spread to Bagamoyo, as noted by Mtoro bin Mwinyi
Bakari in his early twentieth-​century account of Swahili customs (Velten,
1903: 11), Zanzibar (Dale, 1920: 65), and almost all towns along the coast
(Bang, 2003: 149).
It is not clear exactly when Arabic versions of the Maulidi Barzanji in
prose and poetic form reached East Africa, but they were recited in almost
all towns along the Kenyan, Tanzanian and Mozambican coast, and in the
Comoros (Bang 2003: 149). One of the earliest, if not the earliest (Harries,
1958: 27), adaptation into Swahili was done by Al-​Seyyid Abu Bakr bin
Abdul Rahman al-​Husseiny (1828–​1922), commonly known as Mwenye
Imaginaries of far-away places? 287

Mansab, a reputed and charismatic Islamic scholar and healer from Lamu.
Similarly to other Sufi poets mentioned above, he was of Hadhramy origin,
came from a family of scholars and poets, and was considered to be a des-
cendant of the Prophet Muhammed endowed with special blessings. He
studied law and theology under important scholars in Mecca and the
Hadhramaut before becoming kadhi at the Zanzibari court, and later,
after the Sultan’s death, in Lamu town. He not only translated texts on
fiqh (jurisprudence), and gave advice on Bible translations, but was also
an authority on Swahili poetry, ‘unrivalled in his knowledge of archaic
Swahili’ (Hichens 1939: 5). He adapted a number of Arabic poetic tradi­
tions, like the above-​mentioned paranetic Tabaraka (Dammann, 1960), or
the mystical Kishamia (Dammann, 1940); he copied Swahili manuscripts,
and he knew poems like the Inkishafi by heart. He became reputed for his
Swahili version of the Maulidi Barzanji. His well-​arranged and beautifully
adorned Arabic text with interlinear Swahili translation was recited not only
on Lamu and Pate but also in Tanga and Zanzibar (Ahmad, 2002: 13ff.).
In 1891 Mwenye Mansab composed at least two Swahili versions of
the Maulidi Barzanji of different length and with different rhyme schemes.
The multitude of later Swahili versions seems to echo the variation in the
Arabic tradition (see Dammann, 1958: 43–​44; see Neuhaus, 1935, Harries,
1958, Knappert, 1971). The Arabic text of the Maulidi Barzanji he based
his Swahili adaptations on was an abridged version of the original text by
Ja’far b. Hasan al-​Barzanjī, as Mwenye Mansab mentions in the introduc-
tory stanzas of the poem (the so-​called dibaji): indicating one’s sources is
common practice in this context. Furthermore, Mwenye Mansab also gives
a reason, why he decided to translate the Prophet’s praises into Kiamu,
the dialect of Lamu: on the one hand he wants to become part of a wider
Indian Ocean, or even global, community of Muslims praising the Prophet,
reaching out beyond the East African coast –​an aspect that is key in all
poetry at the time. Leaving the small world of the coast and creating a –​
transoceanic –​bridge in time and space to Arabia at the time the Prophet
lived there, joining a wider community of worshippers, and meditating
on his wonders, his beauty and his perfection, is a typical feature of the
poetry at that time which is echoed in Mwenye Mansab’s words. On the
other hand, to bridge the distance in time, space and language, he brings
288 clarissa vierke

the Prophet closer to the people in East Africa by using the Swahili dialect
of Lamu, and not ‘their language’: he thus distances himself from Arabic
and emphasizes his local identity:
Taitiya kati ya wasifuwo henda hazipata tatuko zawo
Illa sitayuwa kwa lugha yao tanena Kiyamu mutafamau

[I will include myself among those who praise so that I may follow in their steps
But I will not use their language I will speak Kiamu and you will understand.]
(Harries, 1958: 31, stz. 2)

The poem –​though taking on different forms in different versions –​has

the same core, ‘ranconter en psalmodiant, ou plutôt en chantant, la sīra
(biographie) du Prophète Muhammad dans la passion et l’allégresse’
(Ahmad, 2002: 13). After introductory verses in which the poet tells
the audience to prepare the stage for the important event –​‘clear the
place where the poem is recited/​make it look pleasant’ (safidi mahala pa
kusomeya/​ufanye uzuri, Harries, 1958: 31, stz. 5) –​recite the opening fatiha
and burn incense, the actual poem starts by invoking God’s blessings and
praising the Prophet as the ‘wall of his light’ (kuta la nuruwe). The poem
uses hymnal language: ‘in countenance and conduct’ (stz. 35) the Prophet
is depicted as surpassing all beings: he is of fair skin colour and medium
height (stz. 39), full of grace, and intercedes on behalf of all mankind.
Besides the interspersed praises, sometimes recited by a choir, aspects of
the Prophet’s life are recounted: his ancestry, his birth, foreshadowed by
miracles (in the version edited by Neuhaus, wild animals announce his
birth (Neuhaus, 1935: 157, stz. 19)), the maidens who breastfed him (stz.
25) and his mysterious ride to the heavens, when he saw ‘the Lord with
the naked eye’ (stz. 34). In Mwenye Mansab’s and later versions, the poem
ends with duwa, prayer, imploring the Prophet to bestow peace and good
health on the audience (stz. 47 and 48) to open their hearts, and make
them firm in religion (stz. 49).
The poem is more than just an account of a life; it has a tension-​driven
plot. At the centre of the poem, the Prophet is born and later meets God in
the heavens, underlined by praises. It has an uplifting, vital force, a power
Imaginaries of far-away places? 289

that makes people overflow with love for the Prophet, who is not only a
moral guide but, on a more mystical level, ‘a carrier of the divine, eternal
spiritual essence’. The light metaphor is so strong in the poem, which extols
him as ‘the sun and the moon’ (stz. 15), ‘the lamp of good hearts’ (stz. 15),
or ‘the full moon’, so that ‘all (other) moons were extinguished’ (stz. 14).
Such ecstatic language is rather unusual in East African Sufi poetry, which
typically takes a more sober or warning tone (see also Ahmad, 2002). The
poem echoes the strong devotional focus of the Alawiyya and other Sufi
brotherhoods on the Prophet Muhammad, the centre of mystical practice,
created from the divine light (Bang, 2003: 18ff., Schimmel, 2003: 171–​212),
which Sufi disciples are eager to approach through exercises and ritual prac-
tices –​much opposed by orthodox Islamic currents at the time and even
more so today. Coming back to the notion of the aesthetic experience as
an untranslatable sensuous revelation, the poem’s aim, particularly in its
recitational form, is to go beyond words, to open the hearers’ hearts to a
transcendent experience, the experience of the Prophet’s presence, which
constitutes a higher form of ‘understanding’, since it leaves the limits of
human language behind. In present-​day recitations of the Maulidi Barzanji,
which may be similar to recitations in Mwenye Mansab’s time, body move-
ments add to this effect: at the beginning the reciters are seated, swaying
their torsos back and forth, but when the poem reaches the point of the
Prophet’s birth, the performers and the audience have to stand up to pay
reverence to him, and start to move rhythmically to the left and right in
unison with the poem’s rhythm, often enhanced by drums (see also Ahmad,
2002: 75).
In East Africa in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth cen-
tury, the poem took on slightly different textual and recitational forms,
sometimes putting more emphasis on music and performance, sometimes
shying away from translation into local languages, and it spread further
south to what is now northern Mozambique. This reminds us that though
the coast shared texts and recitational practices, the adaptation, inter-
pretation and performance of texts differed according to the hermeneutic
practices, religious and poetic influences of the specific location. On Lamu,
for instance, the ritual was significantly altered by Mwenye Mansab’s most
important disciple, the charismatic Salih b. Alawi Jamalil-​Lail (1844–​1935),
290 clarissa vierke

of Hadhrami origin, born on the Comoros, and commonly and fondly

known as Habib Saleh (Bang, 2003: 149). Not only did he gradually put
it on a different textual basis (the so-​called Maulidi al-​Habshi, named after
its Yemeni composer), but the aspect of musical performance became much
more important: in the early twentieth century, the Maulidi started to take
the form of a cheerful procession through town, accompanied by strongly
rhythmic music driven by tambourines (matari) and dances, inviting all
members of society, including laymen, to participate in a ‘proper’ Islamic
ritual. Initially met with much opposition from the establishment, from
1910 onwards, the Maulidi celebrations started to attract people from all
over East Africa (Ahmad, 2002; Bang, 2014), and still continue to do so
today. It became a hallmark and a celebration of translocal East African
Islamic identity. The practice of processions spread to the Tanzanian
coast, for instance, to Bagamoyo (Velten, 1903), while on the Comoros,
the Maulidi was preserved in the form of Arabic recitation, performed
either by men in the mosque and in semi-​public, or by women in private
contexts (Ahmad, 2002).
The Maulidi Barzanji also reached the Ilha de Moçambique, presum-
ably at the end of the nineteenth century, since Maulidi performing groups,
which my colleague Chapane Mutiua and I visited in August 2015, reported
to us that it has been performed at least since the time of their great-​
grandparents, and still continues to be performed by men’s or women’s
groups. We also found many people on the island who owned recently
produced cheap printed brochures of the Arabic text, which the women
in the front row, at the Maulidi performance we were allowed to attend,
held in their hands –​more for symbolical value, since no one was reading
from it. The Maulidi women’s group, which is regularly invited to per-
form the Maulidi to celebrate important events, sang the Arabic poem by
heart, throwing in praises of the Prophet in Enaharra, their local variety
of Emakhuwa. What surprised us most was that they also interspersed the
Arabic lines with Swahili verses and praises, although none of the per-
formers spoke or understood any Swahili, nor did we ever come across any
printed or handwritten Maulidi text in Swahili. The coach of the group was
Chale Mussa, an Islamic scholar, learned in Arabic, who came originally
from Moussuril, and earned his living as a tailor, but also ran a madrassa for
Imaginaries of far-away places? 291

girls on the Ilha de Moçambique. He trained the women’s group to mem-

orize and sing the Arabic text and explained to us that the Swahili verses
have always been part of the performance, as far as he remembers. Chale
Mussa was born in the 1930s. He also told us that he remembered that long
epic Swahili poems of the utendi type, like the Tambuka and the Kaiza,
were regularly recited on the Ilha de Moçambique when he was a child.
Recitations at night would attract large numbers of people, who would
listen to the story of the First World War depicted in the ‘Poem of the
Emperor’ (Kaiza) for three nights in a row. Nowadays, Swahili poems, of
which Chale Mussa and other elders remember some stanzas, are not recited
on the Ilha de Moçambique anymore, but, to some extent, in neighbouring
Angoche, which, like the Ilha de Moçambique, had a strong connection to
the Comoros and Zanzibar in the nineteenth century. There are traces here
of an older nineteenth-​century huge coastal Swahili map, reaching from
Somalia to the Comoros to Mozambique, now buried under layers of new
political realities and a turbulent history in the twentieth and twenty-​first
centuries. At the Maulidi performance we attended, this map seemed to
resurface, preserved, like a fossil, in the practices of recitation –​the women
stood up at the point of the Prophet’s birth, swaying their bodies back and
forth –​and in the interspersed Swahili lines, whose meaning was clear to
only a few of the women.
Connections between sultanates along the Mozambican coast and
the city-​states of what are now Tanzania and Kenya have a long history of
maritime trade networks, sharing material culture, political and familial
relations, and Islamic practices (see also Newitt, 1995): Islam arrived on
the Quirimba archipelago, the Ilha de Moçambique, Angoche and Sofala
between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries (Newitt, 1995; Macagno,
2007: 85). At the end of the nineteenth century, the wave of Sufi reform
reached Mozambique. The north of the country increasingly came under
the influence of Omani Zanzibar, and the Sufi orders which grew under
its tutelage (see Macagno, 2007: 86). The brotherhood of the Qadiriyya,
which Chale Mussa was linked to, was brought to the Ilha de Moçambique
from Zanzibar in 1904 or 1906 by a ‘native of Moroni’, the Comoros, Issa
bin Ahmed. He had done his Quranic studies on the Comoros and later
in Zanzibar (Alpers, 2001), and was often mentioned to us as a pioneer
292 clarissa vierke

on the Ilha de Moçambique. The Comoros played an important role in

creating a triangle between Zanzibar and the Ilha de Moçambique, be-
cause they had become a centre of Hadhrami migration and home of many
scholars. A close connection between Comorian scholars of Hadhrami
descent, who had connections with their counterparts on Lamu, Pate and
later Mozambique, and the rising Busaidi state of Zanzibar evolved from
the mid-​1830s onwards (Pouwels, 1987: chap. 6 & 8). The Shadhiliyya, an­
other brotherhood, brought by emissaries from the Comoros, established
a foothold on the Ilha de Moçambique in 1896 and soon spread to other
coastal towns and the hinterland.
In this context of the rising and well-​connected Sufi brotherhoods,
which came to northern Mozambique with a programme of Islamic edu-
cation (da’wa), Swahili became a language of learning and teaching in the
newly founded Quranic schools, supplementing Arabic, and reaching large
parts of society (Alpers, 2001: 85; Newitt, 1995: 188). This was not the first
appearance of Swahili on the Mozambican coast, as it had left its imprint
on local languages at several points in history, and a sense of deep-​rooted
kinship certainly helped to foster Swahili as a medium of instruction at this
time. While the larger Swahili world was important in the early history of
the coastal towns –​Angoche, for instance, derives its origin from Kilwa
(in present-​day Tanzania) –​the arrival of the Portuguese in the fifteenth
century and the destruction of Kilwa, made the city-​states in northern
Mozambique subsequently lose their orientation towards what is now
the Tanzanian and Kenyan coast (Newitt, 1995: 10ff.) and turn towards
the Mozambican interior. This shift has left traces in some smaller local
languages, such as Ekoti spoken in Angoche (Schadeberg & Mucanheia,
2000), or Kimwani spoken in the Quirimba archipelago. A large part of
their vocabulary is Swahili (Schadeberg, 1994), but in structure they are
closer to Emakhuwa and Shimakonde, respectively, the dominant lan-
guages in the area. The Emakhuwa varieties which have been spoken in
the area around the Ilha de Moçambique and in the important sultanate
of Angoche for centuries (Mutiua, 2015) are not mutually intelligible with
Swahili. However, for many on the northern Mozambican coast –​including
the Ilha de Moçambique –​Swahili became a second or third language in
the eighteenth century, and particularly in the nineteenth century, in the
Imaginaries of far-away places? 293

context of growing Zanzibari trade influence and the impact of the Sufi
movements.
Swahili also became a transregional language of wider communica-
tion for merchants and Muslims on the Comoros and the west coast of
Madagascar opposite the coast of Mozambique, whose languages were very
different from the Swahili spoken on the East African coast of today’s Kenya
and Tanzania. As evidence from letters written in the eighteenth century
suggests, Swahili was used in written communication, as the language of
power and authority, to the detriment of other local languages. Even the
Portuguese colonial administration used it in the eighteenth century, and
more regularly in the nineteenth century, for its written correspondence
with the coastal city-​states of Mozambique and across the Ocean to India
(Mutiua, 2015).
In addition, Swahili became a language of Islamic poetic composition
and recitation in northern Mozambique in the nineteenth century –​as
remembered by Chale Mussa. Manuscripts of Swahili poems, composed
in other parts of the Swahili coast, reached the Ilha de Moçambique and
Angoche, such as the Poem about the Prophet’s Death, locally called
Nazajina (Vierke and Mutiua, forthcoming), and have been copied and
recited in Angoche since then –​although recently less and less. At the be-
ginning of the twentieth century, local poets started to compose their own
hagiographic Swahili poetry, for instance, the Utenzi wa Nabii Musa (‘The
Poem of the Prophet Musa’) or the above-​mentioned Tambuka or Kaiza.
Elder poets born in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s speak with admiration
of glorious and powerful Zanzibar and the Comoros, centres of learning
which were very much part of their imaginary map of the coast, while for
the younger generation, these places mean very little. For Chale Mussa, or
Fundi Haliti, a renowned poet in Angoche who passed away three years
ago, the recitation of Swahili poems not only made them part of a larger
Muslim community, lifting them out of the narrow confines of their im-
mediate context, but, more specifically, made them part of a vast Swahili
coast, creating a bridge to Muslims on the Comoros, Zanzibar and Lamu.
The practice of reciting and copying Swahili texts created an imaginary
bridge to other distant places along the Swahili coast (Bang, 2014). Traces
of the map can also be experienced with the women who perform the
294 clarissa vierke

Maulidi Barzanji, the youngest of whom was born in the late 1950s. They
speak about Zanzibar with shining eyes, underlining that they perform the
ritual the way it is done on Zanzibar. The Swahili verses open a window
onto a larger world, although the political map has changed significantly.
Reciting these widely circulating poems was, and still is, a form of
participation in a translocal ‘literary network’ or ‘literary cosmopolis’ con-
necting ‘Muslims across the boundaries of space and culture’, as Ronit Ricci
(2011: 2) has said of the circulation and adaptations of Islamic texts in
South-​East Asia. This literary network does not merely echo existing net-
works of scholars, but also, according to Ricci (2011: 3), produces a sense of
belonging to the same translocal Muslim community, providing people with
a set of shared stories, historical and hagiographic accounts –​sustaining
other networks and nourishing the imagination of a shared world. The
concept of the literary cosmopolis, originally explored by the Sanskritist
Sheldon Pollock (2000), is defined by Alexander Beecroft (2015: 105),
who developed it further, as ‘a vast translingual and transpolitical space’,
both echoed and created through literary imagination. For Pollock, the
use of Sanskrit and the circulation of Sanskrit texts in a vast space from
Afghanistan to Java in the first millennium CE mapped out a broad trans-
cultural and translingual polity, just as Swahili language and poetry gave a
sense of belonging to speakers of different languages in Mozambique, the
Comoros, Madagascar, Kenya, Tanzania and southern Somalia. More spe-
cifically than Arabic, the texts enabled people to identify themselves with
a specific Swahili East African coastal community: while the city-​states
were linked to each other by a sense of Swahili kinship and by Swahili as a
transregionally used language, the transregional East African Muslim com-
munity also projected itself into shared narratives, of which the Swahili
formulaic verses are traces. As Beecroft (2015: 110) points out, textual and
embodied practices that span a large cosmopolitan space often persist, even
after the factors which have led to the spread of these practices –​like trade,
colonization or conquest –​have changed: long after the fall of the Roman
Empire, Latin continued to be the accepted literary language in Europe, and
Greek theatre practices in Afghanistan continued to echo the huge exten-
sion of the Greek empire long after the conquests of Alexander the Great.
Imaginaries of far-away places? 295

Beecroft’s examples speak of the enduring nature of language and

embodied practices. Once they have become established, they outlive dis-
courses and meaning, as in the case of the poetry of the Zanzibari poets.
In northern Mozambique, Swahili persists in niche practices and texts,
although links to the rest of the Swahili coast have been disrupted, not
only by the struggle for independence and the Mozambican civil war but
also by national ideologies, inward orientation and language policies. It is
not in the context of colonialism, when a transcoastal Muslim cosmop-
olis was thriving (in opposition to colonialism), but in the context of the
nation-​states of Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique that the Swahili coast
has largely lost its former coastal map, that is, cultural and religious links
beyond national borders.

Conclusion

My paper has been a journey guided by changing maps, along the coast and
back and forth in time, like an archaeological excavation digging through
different layers of soil –​and, importantly, deeper and wider than the
period of colonization or the nation-​state. Starting with contemporary,
inward-​looking Zanzibari poetry, whose form hints at multiple far-​
reaching coastal connections, I turned to the Lamu archipelago and the
oldest surviving body of Swahili poetry, which opens up a wider oceanic
perspective from the distinctively coastal standpoint of the merchant’s
mansion. The festive Liyongo poems bring the Indian Ocean to life as an
‘aesthetic seascape’ of ‘shared material and aesthetic expression’ (Ivanov,
2017: 369). This is echoed in the rich interior of the houses, which the
Al-​Inkishafi, composed in the early nineteenth century, symbolically des-
troyed, reflecting a shift in worldview as well as changing political maps
of the coast. Hymnal Muslim poetry was composed eagerly and in large
quantities in the nineteenth century, reflecting the religious zeal of the
Sufi scholars and adepts. This created a vast Swahili coastal Muslim lit-
erary cosmopolis, sharing poetry and ritual practices, and creating an
even bigger bridge across the Ocean to other Muslims in far-​away places,
296 clarissa vierke

enhanced by the distant literary landscapes of Arabia. Finally, digging for

remnants of the earlier Swahili cosmopolis, I have shown how a panegyric
poem, the Maulidi Barzanji, travelled all the way along the coast from
nineteenth-​century Lamu to the Ilha de Moçambique in the twenty-​first
century. Here, in a context where Swahili was to a large extent a foreign
or forgotten language at the end of the nineteenth century, Swahili poetic
practice is fundamental in creating a sense of belonging to the wider East
African coast, vestiges of which survive in poetic form, often unnoticed,
like a ‘shared secret’, or –​to remain with the Indian Ocean vocabulary –​a
coral reef below the surface.
In my account, I hope to have raised some far-​reaching issues to guide
further research on literature and its relation to the Indian Ocean: Firstly,
in the Indian Ocean, multilingualism is the norm rather than the excep-
tion. The colonial languages add to the existing multilingualism rather
than doing away with it. A focus on the simultaneity of languages requires
research across languages (and across the academic disciplines ordered by
national philologies), with a view to studying multilingual contexts and
individuals, with their multiple affiliations, since each language is part of
a different cultural geography, speaks to different audiences, and comes
with different genres and traditions –​a huge challenge for literary schol-
arship. Secondly, a focus on Indian Ocean literature should not value
widely travelling poetry more than poetry that is more narrowly confined
in imaginary and reach, since this blocks from view the dynamic nature
of changing literary maps. We need to see moments of stasis, forgetting
or changing direction, as I hope to have shown. This can produce a more
refined historical perspective, which takes the nation-​state into account,
but also looks beyond it. Thirdly, we need not only a more subtle view of
history but also of literature. We need research not only on imaginaries
but also on travelling literary forms, like prosody, writing, performative
practices and imagery, as well as travelling texts. There are two reasons for
this: firstly, scholars such as Edward Alpers (2000) have argued that in the
context of the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean, not testimonies or
essays, but embodied practices, like music, folklore and religious rituals,
and formulaic language have persisted over centuries, but have gained
far too little scholarly attention. This implies, secondly, broadening our
Imaginaries of far-away places? 297

perspective on the Indian Ocean, seeing it not only as a discursive and nar-
rative space but also as an aesthetic space, defined by shared materiality and
shared sensuous experiences evoked by the immediacy of sound, taste and
scent and the practices of verbal art. This also implies to question the very
notion of literature, since in many cultural contexts of the Indian Ocean
this term does either not exist or is of recent and unnecessarily narrow ref-
erence, excluding performances, music and ritual, which can often hardly
be separated from forms of verbal art.

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