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.
I am Malagasy: daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of Chinese traders who took up a twentieth-century Dante-esque struggle against the strong social pull unceasingly digging into their stomachs, and which scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—who they had never heard of—would spend a lifetime observing, describing, and theorizing under the name “Subaltern Studies.” She would undoubtedly have explained to them that they were not so badly off, Chinese or Métis, scrupulous shopkeepers and collectors of precious spices, and that, below them, suffocated by the social ladder, were the natives, notables, workers, and the enslaved. She would have also explained that each layer of subalternity is further complicated by being a woman. They, the stubborn hard-heads of my ancestors, would have retorted that they only looked upwards, above them, envious of the beautiful white wooden verandas where the vazaha (the white people) led an idle and refined existence, sometimes simple merchants themselves, often plantation owners, always dominant.
In Malagasy, the term “vazaha” originally embodies the notion of power, particularly administrative power, but has gradually shifted, and rightly so, towards a racial meaning to designate white people, the majority of whom are French. It de facto endorses the social and political ontology of race. My elders noticed that, beside them, their children read Balzac, went to French schools, and all left for France to pursue vague but necessary studies before returning to the rich red soil and benefitting from the fertile power of an exotic island where, after all, they were born. From this astute observation, the Chinese traders thought, “Well, maybe that’s what makes a White white. It doesn’t matter that my house, my business, and my clothes are identical in size, price, and workmanship. It’s his child’s beautiful book and blue notebook which makes him white.” So, the Chinese withdrew his children from the Chan Koc Fan school opposite the port of Antalaha for the French school on the road to Sambava. When money came in, and in consultation with his peers, the Chinese man sent his sons to the Dominican Collège of Sorèze, the former royal military school, which had kept its uniforms but lost its attributes since the suppression of the royal schools in 1854.
As for the girls, decency prevented them from being sent far away alone to secluded and foreign Tarn in rural France. They would unfortunately have to live at St-Joseph-de-Cluny boarding school, on the garden level, the Malagasy floor, under the threshold of the second floor, the French one. At any rate, it doesn’t matter: they would have fewer steps to go up and down in addition to the proverbial climb up to the upper town, to get to and from the brand-new Lycée français, inaugurated one November morning in the former Catholic seminary of Ambatoroka the day after the “events” of May ‘72.
May 1972 honed in on the core of the convulsive and passionate relationship between Madagascar and the French language, the point of impact we know lies far beneath the dermis of an old bruise. In just two weeks, a movement of students in Antananarivo turned into a nationwide popular revolt that some of us dare to recognize as Madagascar’s third independence. There was the one we tried to wrest away, in 1947, the one we were given for being well-behaved children, in 1960, and the one we still don’t know how to talk about, in 1972. Those with the knowledge and editorial scope to do so could explore the full extent of the reasons that led to this revolt, as indeed has been done in the book Madagascar Mai 1972 edited by Brigitte Rasoloniaina (Hémisphères, 2023).
As I have neither, all I can describe is a fire. Its spark, distinct and precise, a blatant inequality between the medical school graduates of the Ankatso University, which came into being in 1961, and those of the historic Befelatanana school, heir to the Assistance Médicale Indigène, Marshal Gallieni’s glory, the Empire’s showcase, which was intended to be primarily for health. From Ankatso emerged city doctors, specialists, and francophones, who, when they emigrated to France, could even scoff at the state of its University and hospitals. From Befelatanana emerged only bush doctors, barely nurses, good for amputations and penicillin. But its fuel, diffuse, sprawling, incomprehensible, brings together all large-scale injustices that marked Madagascar’s First Republic, brought about by the Franco-Malagasy diglossia alone and the consecration of French as the de facto language for cultural, economic, and administrative elites.
This overlooks the fact that a similar diglossia existed prior to colonization, between Merina, the language of the central power and its administrations in the Malagasy highlands, and those subjugated by the royal yoke of the Merina Kingdom. It overlooks that Merina was chosen by the missionaries of the London Missionary Society, in order to translate the Gospels into Latin characters, affixing Malagasy writing to the page. That this choice was made to the detriment of Sorabe (literally “large writings”), an arcane Arabic-Malagasy liturgy inherited from the Arab migrants of the eleventh century, surreptitiously passed down—or rather revealed—to adept Antemoro men, the sole guardians of the word, of its magico-religious power, of its fluctuation, and of its mysterious alphabet, almost extinct today.
After May 1972, it is remembered that it was French, used as the administrative and teaching language, that caused the chaos. Not the leonine cooperation agreements between France and its former colony, Tsiranana’s government’s clientelism, the deplorable state of provincial educational structures, famine in the south, the unmasked meritocratic lie, and the generational divide. Revolutions are made to be betrayed. After that Malagasy Autumn, the great pendulum of successive governments, addicted to tabula rasa, began its dance of flip-flops between Malgachizations and Francizations, staged, emphatic, which were quite useful as flagship measures and symbols of great change but, what what was truly wanted most was for nothing to change at all.
Nothing has changed since May 1972. And perhaps not since 1960 and 1947 either. French remains the language of the elites, Merina Malagasy that of the subalterns, and other forms of Malagasy worse off. But change, and the time that is its substance, are apprehended so differently in Madagascar. We are the people who move backward, like our kalanoro predecessors with their upturned feet. In Malagasy, the past is called “taloham” a contraction of “teo aloha,” that which was ahead. Time is thus lived facing the past, with our backs to the future. Whereas French experiences time as a linearity that is always moving in the same direction, Malagasy finds itself amid a spatialized time, constantly catching up. French syntax is one of the clearest expressions of this notion of beginning and end, and of the line that projects from one to the other, a rectilinear ray of light splitting space and leaving no possible return.
On the other hand, kabary, the art of Malagasy oratory, is the perfect entry point into a cyclical culture of spherical time. Its jousts are made up of repetitions, with infinite and minute variations, where the highest value is that of what has been, or what has been said, in an eternal contextualization to the past. New creation can only be understood in this space constructed by the antecedent. Here, I can hear my grandmother, who greets every visitor to her kitchen with a “Mbola tsara?” (“Have you been well?”) “Mbola tsara” (“I’ve been well.”) “Tsara mbola tsara” (“I am well since you’ve been well.”) And she’s not even a mpikabary (a competitive or ceremonial kabary speaker) just a grandmother in her kitchen, which, like all grandmothers’ kitchens across the world, contains the most powerful and acute anthropological archive.
This is particularly so in oral cultures massively colonized by civilizations of the written word. Because they are rich in literature, colonial cultures have had a massive epistemic advantage over those that build and perpetuate themselves through song, poem, or stories. Cultures of wind and oblivion. But colonization remembers because it writes. It is the only truth that can be found in the boxes of the archives. We no longer know ours, because it was in the wombs of the dead, the displaced, and the assimilated. We don’t even know how much we lost in the fire because it never occurred to us to quantify or contain it. Sometimes a song remains, but what can it possibly say?
Above, I chose to confront syntax and kabary, the written word and the spoken word, literature, and clamor, side by side. Both were bottle-fed to me, so I hold these two sources close. Ségur’s books and my grandmother’s beaded babbling. For a long time, they were at war. But, anyone who has read Raharimanana—and other non-French authors of French expression—has probably touched on this contradiction which always eludes us, bewilders us, fades like a dream when we wake up, and leaves a strange impression of déjà-vu. So, perhaps it’s the language we thought lost that colonized French. It lurked, dark and unsuspected, all these years under a layer of ink. One day, it burst onto the paper. Out of control, it sprang up from its inherited pen and screamed out viscerally, reclaiming forbidden words and lost legacies, calling back every part of that which had been smoothed with a comb and cemented over for two centuries. It’s impossible to contain this disheveled thought on notebook lines, just as it was illusory to transcribe its words in this Latin alphabet that stumbles in cascades over our language of capricious vowels. But, beauty always springs from impossibility. And, we invent the things we can’t translate, creolizing words, dressing them up in periphrases and metaphors, displacing meaning like a dance displacing walking. This is when the ordinary becomes poetry. ■