Khal Torabully

Khal Torabully is a Mauritian and French poet, who has coined the concept of "coolitude." Born in Mauritius in 1956, in the capital city Port Louis, his father was a Trinidadian sailor and his mother was a descendant of migrants from India and Malaya.

As Mauritian History was made of various migratory waves, Torabully was soon immersed in Creole, English, French, and to a lesser degree, in Bhojpuri, Urdu, Arabic and Chinese languages. The cultural mosaic prevalent on the island accounts for his interest in diversity and the discourse of identity in History, as no nation was existent in this country made of several communities. Torabully started writing poetry at a very early age, steadily explored the virtualities of the Encounter between cultures, histories and imaginaries.

Khal Torabully left for Lyons in 1976, to study at the University of Lyon II. Here he explored language with a need to reinterpret if profoundly, mixing exile with a desire to reconcile peoples across borders, through a "coral imaginary." After studies in Comparative Literature, Torabully wrote a PhD thesis in Semiology of Poetics with Michel Cusin. He was highly interested in T. S. Eliot, Jacques Lacan, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, among others he met in his doctoral researches on intertextuality.

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