The Night is an ideal setting for stories. It embodies one of the protagonists of Marie Ranjanoro’s novel Feux, Fièvres, Forêts (Fires, Fevers, Forests, Laterit, 2023), set in the months following the 1947 Madagascan uprising against the French occupation of the Grande Île [Great Island]. The following extract, which we wanted to include in this issue corresponds to the entirety of chapter 13 of the book. It was translated from French by Marie herself.
I can’t say if I slept. I barely remember nights without dreams, sighs, and ghosts. Ever since the house, for years, centuries maybe, night has become a long whisper filled with the dead women’s breath, with disembodied Ivo, singing her funeral song. A thousand chimes tear my brain, a thousand arms slip under my eyelids, make my skin shake and swell like a lamba under the wind. They play tales and sayings from the past, the future, in their own tongues, mimicking what has been, and what could be. My nights, thus pierced by their noises, are nothing but an endless cacophony, only quieted by dawn, when at last, I can sink, drowsing in the pale green tinged morning. I can’t say if I slept, but now I feel, curled up in the darkness, that I awaken. All of me, finally, trembling with obsession, stung by Ivo in my back and my flanks, assaulting me:
“Voara, Voara, come find me.”