Christine Salem

An author-composer-performer with impressive charisma, Christine Salem incarnates the dream of an island at peace with the complex genealogy of its Creole culture.

Christine Salem's musical voice is one of the most innovative and one of the most firmly rooted in Reunion Island. With her group Salem Tradition, she has been striving to achieve something very exciting for the past fifteen years: opening Reunion maloya to languages and forms linked to its genealogy. Maloya music, close to three-beat blues, is now emblematic of the island after having been swept under the carpet for decades because a “cafre” music i.e. considered too closely linked to African and Madagascan black slaves. Not content with having visited Madagascar and the Comoros to meet maloya's sister cultures, Christine Salem adds touches of Swahili and Arabic to Reunion Creole. "In the beginning," she explains, "people said they didn't understand, that it wasn't Reunion music. There was still a lot of ignorance about maloya, but now people accept it better."

It's true to say that she was fighting age-old taboos: "There is a lot of blending and mixing of races on Reunion Island. In this melting pot, we find African origins, the Brittany side, the Comoros, Madagascar, India… Everyone understands different traditions depending on where they come from. For people of “cafre” origin, practices that used to be hidden are now more and more open, such as servis kabaré1, for a long time banned by the Catholic Church and the police. Thirty years ago, if people played maloya – the music of servis kabaré – in the street, they were stopped and their instruments broken or burned… "

Her work as a musician is thus structured around culture and politics. "I carry out research into our roots, into what Reunion Island has been through. It's a rocky road. The school curriculum has only just started to include the history of Reunion Island. My approach consists in giving legitimacy to values that have been banished or are scorned. It started with a trance in a servis kabaré. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if I was bewitched… My family indulged four or five generations ago, but I was totally ignorant. I had to do my research. Today, a lot of Reunion people of African or Madagascan origins are returning to it."

The abolishment of the old censorship has gone hand in hand with in-depth formal research. Contested by the establishment, maloya was void of any artistic angle in the literal sense for a long time. "When people made recordings, they didn't care whether or not the choir was singing in key. That changed with Danyel Waro, who started to travel with this music. With him, we realised that there was material to work on." In the early '90s, Danyel Waro was the first singer from Reunion to take this tradition to a level of artistic professionalism and power that opened the road to big international festivals and concert halls. Christine Salem does not hide the stimulating role played by her elder. "When I founded the group Salem Tradition, I wanted, for example, to really work on the choir. And I wanted everyone on the stage to really enjoy themselves. That energy nourishes new songs."

A lot of Christine Salem's songs gush out of the energy of the trance or concerts, although she does also write alone. The maelstrom of languages and rhythms in her music are nourished as much by a sort of almost supernatural instinct as by encounters and residences with musicians of different nationalities and practices. Complementing her many journeys through Indian Ocean countries, she has a particularly fecund relationship with the French group Moriarty, who sing in English. As well as all of the above, Christine has continued her job teaching prevention. Based in Saint-Denis, she is also a theatre and visual arts teacher and runs a summer camp. Music is part of her social work: for two years she has been taking Reunion music into schools. She has an ambitious project for "a venue where all disciplines of Reunion tradition can be found – music, dance, song, food… A place that symbolises Reunion Island." Apart from the value to tourism and culture, such a venue would also play an obvious social role, notably for youngsters.

1 "Servis kabaré": Festive devotional ceremonies that are a spiritual and cultural reality specific to Reunion Island and a symbol of Reunion Creole identity. Founded on the remains of African and Madagascan cultures blended with various influences (Hindu, Arab, Catholic…), they feature rites, offerings to ancestors, dancing and music, and give rise to trances or "speaking in tongues".