Portrait
Dhiyana Saeed, at sixty-one, paints the sea for the first time
The lawyer who defended Maldivian statehood at The Hague has a studio in Hulhumalé and a first solo show opening next month.
Bodu beru, bas, and everything between.
In a single-room workshop off Fareedhee Magu, Kamaal Ibrahim has hollowed, soaked and skinned drums for sixty-two years. He has two apprentices left.
Three Ramadans ago, a teacher in Gaaf Dhaalu carried a drum into a school hall and asked fifty children to remember a rhythm. This is what happened next — and why the recording is in the parliament archive now.
A rhythm is a small thing. Four beats, maybe six, a call and a response. It is also, in this country, a way of saying the island itself was here before any of us arrived. And so when Shareef Maniku walked into the Thinadhoo school hall with an old hide drum his grandfather had made, and asked fifty children to repeat a pattern none of them had heard in twenty years — he did not think of it as politics. He thought of it as a class. The parliament’s culture committee thought otherwise.
Before the Arabic-based Thaana that every Maldivian child learns today, the islands wrote in a script called Dhives Akuru— right-to-left, curled, entirely their own. By 1920 it had been largely retired from correspondence; by 1980 from inscriptions. Today, according to a count compiled by the National Archives in March, there are nineteen people alive who can read it fluently, and eleven of them are over seventy.
The Archive’s new pilot programme trains twenty secondary school teachers per atoll to teach two hours of Dhives Akuru a term. Money runs out in eighteen months. We spent a week with the first cohort, in a spare classroom in Kulhudhuffushi, and watched a fourteen-year-old read aloud from a document signed by her great-great-grandfather.
The lawyer who defended Maldivian statehood at The Hague has a studio in Hulhumalé and a first solo show opening next month.
Four directors, one shared editor, and a Gaaf Dhaalu family drama now on the Busan shortlist.
Ibrahim Shafi’u rewrote the ghost scene for drum. It is, improbably, good.
The National Museum opens its largest exhibition since 2018, with 240 pieces loaned back from Colombo and Mumbai.
A Raa atoll marine biologist, a dying coral garden, and a son who will not come home. In 312 pages, Nashida out-writes every one of her shortlisted peers.
It is slow. It is exact. Ali’s camera sits with a carpenter in Maduvvari for twelve minutes before anyone speaks. Somehow you do not move.
Bodu beru has been shrinking toward a wedding novelty for a decade. On Thursday night, seventeen hundred people stood for two hours. They remembered how to clap on the two and the four. The building held.
ereyge· the particular fatigue of a long sea-passage that only lifts when you sight your own island’s trees. From ere- (to reach) + yge (the return). Used of sailors, of fishermen working two-week trips, of anyone returning home from abroad after a long absence.
“Kon ireh men fenunee Male’? Adhi miothy ereyge-gai.”
— When did we last see Male’? I am still in ereyge.
There is an argument you can make, if you have been reviewing Maldivian theatre for twenty years, that the island audience is too kind. I have made it myself, many times, usually after a play I disliked. This week, watching a bodu beru performance at Dharubaaruge, I have stopped making it. Kindness, I think now, is not the right word. What the island audience does is an older thing: it offers the performer the benefit of the doubt. Not the benefit of praise. The benefit of attention.
This is not the same as liking something. It is deciding, communally, to find out whether you like it. On Thursday, two thousand people sat through forty minutes of drumming they did not recognise, because the players were nineteen and it was their first time on a stage that size. By the fifth song, the building had found the beat. By the eighth, the players had. We were, all of us, better at the end than we had been at the start. I cannot think of another kind of room where that is true.
Carved bodu beru for three generations of Maniku family players and taught twenty-two apprentices. His workshop closes this month.
The nation’s foremost scholar of pre-Thaana Maldivian script. Her 2019 concordance remains the standard reference.
Published four volumes of Dhivehi verse; his “Kuree ge ras” (The Village of Then) is taught in secondary schools island-wide.