Ann O’aro loves everything to do with body movement, with rhythm and with the voice: “I came from martial arts and music, before choosing maloya to sing about intimate and taboo subjects“.

Her powerful writing is impregnated with robust language and linguistic tics: a poetic fulmination about island taboos and strong emotions, sexual violence, incest and love affairs. As in “Kap Kap”, one of her songs written in the Creole of her native Isle of Reunion, a raw and excoriating outburst that describes the hold of an incestuous father who embraces the madness and violence of a criminal impulse in all its banal savagery: “Amoin, marmay, bonom, lo lou, tousala ansanm, mi mor pour rash aou in kri, kan mêm sa pal amour / Me the child, the man, the wolf, all at the same time, I’m dying to rip a scream from you, scratching, thrusting, even if this is not a cry of love.”

And out pours Ann’s song, a song that plunges straight into reality and is not afraid of shadows.