TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY CHANELLE ADAMS
In 2003, Jean-Luc Raharimanana wrote “Ambahy – Night ripping and rending itself at clarity’s dawn, on eyelids closing in dream” and the waters opened up. At once immense, unfathomable, and clear, those words devastated everything and lifted me as they passed through. Jean-Luc Raharimanana’s Nour 1947 displaced all literature, language, and identity landmarks I had carefully learned as a teenager. A reversal of poles. Or rather, the smooth realization that compasses were useless. To read the incantatory prose of Raharimanana, enfant terrible of Malagasy literature, in a language that had nothing left of French but its borrowed signs and phonemes, was like walking a strange path: strangely soft to my barefoot soles accustomed to the softly padded salons of Madame la Comtesse de Ségur, Théophile Gautier, Jules Verne, and other benevolent figures who had been asked to wisely lean over my cradle.