Josephine Baker and her Indo-Chinoiserie
Posted: January 30th, 2013 | 1 Comment »Regular readers of this blog will know that I often opt for posting on some quite obscure aspects of Chinoiserie. Today is such a day. With the prospect of a couple of days in Paris I thought a biography of Josephine Baker (and I’d recommend Phyllis Rose’s Jazz Cleopatra – Josephine Baker in Her Time) would make a good reading accompaniment; I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by Baker and the impact she had on France, Paris and the Folies-Bergére. Baker was to visit many places – all across Europe, North and South America, Cuba and North Africa of course entertaining Free French and Allied troops. But she never made it to the Far East – imagine Josephine Baker live in 1930s Shanghai!! But sadly it never happened.
However, there are a few Chinoiserie and Indo-Chinoiserie aspects about Baker. On her post-war American tours she did occasionally forgo her trademark short slicked down hair and kiss curl and made her hair up in a pastiche of an oriental Manchu style. But her occasional interest in things oriental had earlier roots. After making a lot of money since her arrival in Paris from St Louis in 1925 she bought a lovely house called Beau-Chêne in the Parisian suburb of Le Vésinet. She decorated the room in sumptuous style including a Chinese-themed East India room complete with temple rooms.
Baker of course became best known for her song J’ai Deux Amours (I have two loves) but before that her most famous song, first sung in a Paris revue in 1930, was La Petit Tonkinoise, the little girl from Tonkin, a song where Baker played a Vietnamese girl – it was a classic piece of Indo-Chinoiserie about a young Vietnamese girl falling in love with a French colonial planter.
The song was actually old – originally from 1905 and had been written for the music hall artiste Polin, but Baker made it her own in the 1930s. The lyrics in English below – a video of the song here.
It is I who am his little
His Anana his Anana his Anammite
I’m alive, I’m charming
Like a little singing z’oiseau
He calls me his bourgeois p’tite
His Tonkiki his Tonkiki his Tonkinese
Others make it the sweet eyes
But it’s me he loves best
The evening is due to a lot of things
Before starting to pile
I learn geography
In China and Manchuria
The boundaries, rivers
The Yellow River and Yangtze River
There’s even Love is strange
Watered by the Middle Kingdom
It is I who am his little
His Anana his Anana his Anammite
I’m alive, I’m charming
Like a little bird that sings
He calls me his bourgeois p’tite
His Tonkiki his Tonkiki his Tonkinese
Others make it the sweet eyes
But it’s me he loves best.
There used to be a Josephine Baker in Yunnan too. Around same times or so. She had come up from Indochina to add to the confusion here. It took me a while to figure out what the heck it was all about, but the Yunnan Josephine Baker, was a wife of missionary Harold Baker.
Now, this Harold guy was a missionary spitting out Gods fire from the bottom of the mouth, – not some anxious guy – we talk about one of them who went through tiger infested jungles to get to a forlorn hill of Kucong-peoples, to bring an apolyptical message. He wrote books too and theres not much of history to dig up from them, its mostly spiritual.
Now, Josephine Baker, in Yunnan, she had brought chocolate from Europe, and was among the first europeans who had a piece of chocalate to share. I talked to the grandson of a Danish missionary and he said she was the first to give him chocolate to taste. This was during rebel times in Yunnan and chopped heads were hanging in hemp-ropes at market in Simao. Every now and then the local tribes brought in a tiger too. Those days tigers were cheap.