Searching for stoke in Indian Ocean surf zones: surfaris, offshoring and the shore-break

ABSTRACT

This article takes up the idea of Indian Ocean ‘natural logics’ while shifting attention from ‘cultures of trade’ to leisure culture, and from monsoon winds to waves. Surfers who ride these bands of moving energy describe the experience as one of being ‘stoked’, and the search for stoke has over the past century propelled them around the world ocean in pursuit of the perfect wave. Focusing on the Indian Ocean arena, the article traces three distinct yet not necessarily sequential waves of surf travel therein: the ‘surfari’ and the concealment/exposure of secret spots; enclaves of consumption in the offshore coliseum; and, the swirling shore-break in which the energy parcel conveyed through the ocean is unloaded on the coast. In the process, it explores what insights Indian Ocean studies bring to cultural histories of surfing and how surfing practice has been reshaped as it moves out of its traditional Pacific – and then Atlantic – locations, along with the ways in which surfing has in turn reconfigured the Indian Ocean littoral. The article concludes by shifting mode from critical commentary in order to present the shore-break as a dynamic concept-metaphor for materializing immersed and energised scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Surfing and surf travel
• Indian Ocean
• wave energy
• shore-break

Acknowledgements

This article was developed in two workshops on ‘Indian Ocean Energies’ convened by Sharad Chari and Isabel Hofmeyr at the University of Witwatersrand in 2015 and 2016. I’m grateful to both, as well as to all the participants, for invigorating discussions. My thanks also to Robbie Farquhar, who helped me track references across a large personal collection of surfing stories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Meg Samuelson lectures in the Department of English and Creative Writing and is a member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. She is also a research associate of Stellenbosch University. She has published widely in South African, eastern African and Indian Ocean studies. With Glen Thompson, she edited a special section in African Cultural Studies (2014) on the South African surfing film Otelo Burning. Her current projects in progress include the provisionally titled books South African Literatures: Land, Sea, City and Amphibian Aesthetics: Writing from the African Indian Ocean Littoral.

Notes

1 See Stefan Helmreich (2014, p. 266, 273), who argues of waves that, for all their ‘manifest materiality, they are also only apprehensible through abstractions’ and are thus both ‘physical and cultural objects’.

2 Originating in its modern guise from the venerable cradle of the Hawaiian Islands, surfing was introduced to California and Australia by the early twentieth century (see Warshaw, 2010). Practiced wherever American GIs found themselves during the two world wars, it remained a fleeting activity in the Indian Ocean – with the exception of Western Australia and a handful of breaks along the eastern South African shore – until this arena was cast as the new surfing frontier in the 1960s.

3 See, inter alia, Comer (2010), Laderman (2014), Westwick and Neushul (2013), Thompson (2011, 2014).

4 Initially shown across America by Brown in his travelling cinema with live voice-over from 1964, it was re-released by Columbia in 1966. A surfing film made by surfers for surfers – in contrast to the Hollywood ‘beach-blanket’ productions blamed for the congestion of many a break – The Endless Summer not only became a classic among surfers but was also an unexpected hit with mainstream audiences, and was declared one of the 10 best films of 1964 by Newsweek (Ormrod, 2005, p. 39).

5 See, inter alia, Comer (2010), Ormrod (2005) and Thompson (2011) on the use of colonial tropes and genres in The Endless Summer.

6 That this is a man’s world is underlined in Winton’s previous novel, Dirt Music (2002, n.p.), when a female character comments trenchantly on Heart of darkness: ‘The horror, the horror! she declaims. Is it a bloke-thing, you think?’

7 Milius’s classic surfing feature, Big Wednesday (1978), does not represent the war zone to which some of his surfers are conscripted, but the war does cast a shadow over the Californian beach, bringing to a close a golden age of hot-dog styling that is ushered out by a new generation of power surfers carving up the wave.

8 See also Laderman (2014) on how surfing featured centrally in ‘the US military’s rest-and-recreation circuit’ during the Vietnam War.

9 Bali, for instance, ‘has tens of thousands of annual surf visitors but only about 1,000 native surfers’ (Comer, 2010, p. 24).

10 It is telling that Brown had apparently intended to shoot only in South Africa, but round-the-world air tickets were significantly cheaper than direct returns (Ormrod, 2005, p. 39).