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Comme Victoire: Approaching a Holy Woman in Postcolonial Madagascar
by
Jimmy Grzelak
Denise Kimber Buell, Advisor
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Religion
WILLIAMS COLLEGE
Williamstown, Massachusetts
March 15, 2013 Grzelak 2
Mes sincères et vifs remerciements à tous ceux qui m’ont béni (explicitement et implicitement) pendant mon séjour à Madagascar.
And also my thanks to Prof. Buell, who for all her patience and insight, I would say should be canonized – if this document did not, in part, explore the dangers of that exact gesture. Grzelak 3
Table of Contents
Foreword 4
Chapter One: Pierre 8
Chapter Two: The Comic Book 37
Chapter Three: Rosette 68
Epilogue 92
Bibliography 95
Grzelak 4
Foreword
This project began accidentally. I happened into walk into the chapel across from
the Catholic cathedral in Antananarivo dedicated to Victoire Rasoamanarivo (1848-
1894), a popular Malagasy holy woman and Blessed in the Catholic Church.1 A cluster of
water bottles standing on top of a casket caught my eye. People would occasionally approach the casket – either to retrieve or set up new bottles, or to simply cap or un-cap
them. I was intrigued because, with these micro-rituals, I saw Malagasy laypeople actively and creatively managing the chapel space. I sat in the chapel for hours on end.
This was not entirely bizarre; plenty of others would pass whole mornings, afternoons and days on the pews beside me. In part, I chose the chapel as my study site because I, having grown up Catholic, felt that I had some understanding of the grammar of behavior within. I certainly hoped, and hope, that one day soon Malagasy researchers – from all the island’s ethnic groups, from all the castes of Merina society – will have a more prominent voice in the academic world which still often views them as a object of inquiry. But, in the meanwhile, I aimed to find the best way I could contribute to the
conversation about Malagasy religion, as a student with the sixth sensus catholicus2 of someone whose family history contains its own ancestor/saint, who would soon return to a university with access to experts on Christian history and phenomenal library resources.
I could sit in the chapel and catalog lay ritual with some basis of understanding. I felt that
1 A ‘Blessed’ has been officially beatified by the Pope; this is the final step before the canonization that confers sainthood. The declaration asserts certainty that the deceased is in heaven and can intercede on behalf of the living, just like any saint – but, significantly in this case, s/he is accorded a feast day only in certain bounded geographic regions, and not in the whole church. 2 Like any sixth sense, this is awareness is sometimes unwanted, sometimes valuable. Grzelak 5 the Catholic Church’s claim to universality both authorized my presence and gave me a metric against which to measure what I saw.
I was eventually asked who I was. This made sense – the chapel was a meditative, but not anonymous, space; people greeted acquaintances even while praying. I was also noticeably white. I must recognize that my race (white), gender (male), and national identity (American) were, in some sense, assets in conducting this fieldwork. My informants saw my project as an important one, felt that I deserved the privilege of access to any available information, and assumed that I was completely ignorant. Though insider ethnography certainly has its benefits, in this case, I believe that some of my informants were also more explicit about their feelings than they might have been if I were more easily locatable in Antananarivo society. I do not deny that my ability to conduct this research in the first place somehow carries with it the legacy of colonialism, but I can, at least, say that conversations about ethnicity especially would have unfolded differently had I been French, had I been Merina (with aristocratic, ‘common,’ or slave heritage), had I been of any other ethnic group, had I been Sino-Malagasy, or had I been
“African.”3
Being American also meant that I was often confused; with this project, I am attempting to make use of that orientation. It is precisely the ethnographic moments that were initially hardest for me to understand, and easiest to dismiss, that I will be returning to here. I pay the closest attention to the moments where my interlocutors made the least sense to me. These moments have become tools for me in thinking through issues that I also find hard to understand and easy to dismiss, in both the Malagasy context and the
3 Malagasy people generally do not consider themselves African. Madagascar is an island, after all. See Pierre’s thoughts on Malagasy manners below. Grzelak 6
study of religion more broadly. For example, Talal Asad’s critiques of the Euro-
Protestant assumptions at work in the study of religion4 seem entirely pertinent to the
scarce and problematic body of scholarship that treats Madagascar. Much anthropological
attention has been given to things easily labeled ‘myth’ or ‘taboo;’ little of it has been self-reflexive enough to consider the pre-conditions that lead one to those labels. I hope
this study, treating aspects of Malagasy religious life that, if mentioned, are often literally
relegated to footnotes, can be an even incremental corrective to this imbalance. But it
may be less clear how one should respond to Asad’s call to refashion considerations of
agency – turning to more specific puzzles from my field work (including the question,
“What were they doing with those water bottles?”) will help provide a response. I am
offering my ethnographic data here because I believe that, as Mary Keller argues, “the
world’s religious traditions become important resources for thinking about agency
because they have been engaged in developing ethical arguments about and community
responses to nonvoluntaristic accounts of human agency for a very long time.”5
Ironically, applying the sociological and anthropological methods I had available
to me in Malagasy libraries made my experience incomprehensible to me. I could frame my interlocutors as self-determining bounded individuals or as circumstantially- determined parts of a social whole, but such interpretations directly contradict my interviewees own claims to interconnectedness and supernatural intervention.
Essentializing and reductionist approaches do not do this postcolonial ethnographic field justice.
4 See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 21-66. 5 Mary Keller, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 97. Grzelak 7
I began this re-consideration of my field work with the following thought: if my interviewees’ actions or stories make little sense to me in the context of whatever intellectual framework I might already have, I would do well to try to discover theirs. Grzelak 8
Chapter One: Pierre
“Who is Victoire Rasoamanarivo? Tell me as if I knew nothing about her,” this is
the question I posed to Pierre6 (and most of my interviewees) at our first meeting.
“She was Malagasy, daughter of nobles,”7 said Pierre. Then he went to find a
book. When he returned, he continued to tell me that Victoire was beatified by Pope John
Paul II on April 3rd, 1989, formally placing her just one step short of sainthood. Pierre would spend the next several hours answering that first question, almost all of it with book in hand, offering me a guided reading, with commentary and translation, of a hagiographical text.
“Rasoa was the fourth of seven children. Sweet like her mother,” he told me, “she preferred to stay at home.” There, she received “an education following the ancestral wisdom,” meaning a non-Christian upbringing. She learned proverbs, including, “Do not touch cow dung when it is dry.”8
“This is a true Malagasy catechism,” explained Pierre, “It is that which opened
the heart of Victoire Rasoamanarivo.” He then offered examples of Victoire’s decidedly
non-Christian milieu: “She carried ody [charms]. Her parents were idolaters. She
practiced sikidy [divination].”9
The first Catholic missionaries to Madagascar were, Pierre explained, “clever.”
They came not only as the guests of merchants, but disguised as merchants themselves.
They brought not only spiritual goods but also material ones. When they arrived, Victoire
6 All my interviewee names have been replaced with pseudonyms, following standard ethnographic practice. All translations unless otherwise stated are my own. 7 Pierre, interview by author, held at his home, Antananarivo, Nov. 4, 2012. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. Grzelak 9
kept her distance. “She was afraid of vahaza10,” said Pierre, consulting the book as he
continued. According to Pierre, the reigning queen was also not a fan of the European
newcomers. Because of her “amour sacré pour sa patrie,”11 Pierre explained, she
expelled the French missionaries from the country. Victoire was nine years old.
But when Victoire turned thirteen, Pierre said, “There were signs. A great flame lit up Ambohimanga12… A voice, a song, was heard. The mpsikidy [diviners] were
consulted. Something big was going to happen in Tana.13 The queen was gravely ill.”
With the old queen’s death, and her son’s ascension to the throne, missionaries were
welcomed back into the central kingdom of Madagascar. “With Radama II, religion was
liberated,” said Pierre, “Nuns greeted the Malagasy in Malagasy. The Malagasy were
happy.” Victoire’s mother brought her to one of the Catholic women’s religious orders,
saying, “Here is the little white one: I entrust her to you.”14
Victoire was a model student, said Pierre, “She was very observant. She whole-
heartedly learned writing, geography – the place where Madagascar finds itself in the world –, but she loved most to learn about God the Father, through Christ. She was taught that, the desire to be a child of God.” Pierre quoted one of Victoire’s teachers: “Victoire is sweet, obedient, and careful.” He then quoted Victoire: “We cannot do what the saints do, but we can follow their path.”15
10 According to Maurice Bloch, Malagasy for “European, clever.” In my experience, it is certainly applied to anyone who seems “Western,” including, for example, Americans of Jewish and Ethiopian descent. Of course, Bloch’s glossary also defines Malagasy as “not vahaza.” This is untrue in contemporary Madagascar, at least. Those of Indian descent, who have been living in Madagascar for generations, do not become Malagasy, and in fact, are still denied Malagasy passports. 11 Ibid. French: sacred love for the fatherland. Apparently the queen kicked out the French while singing the Marseillaise. 12 The traditional palace-city of Malagasy Merina monarchs. 13 Colonial/popular short-form of the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. Grzelak 10
“She took the Blessed Virgin as her mother,” Pierre explained. “Here is the
proof,” he said, continuing the story in the voice of Victoire, “I entered the church. I was
eating a fruit inside the church. Suddenly, my eyes perceived the tabernacle. I sensed that
someone was looking at me. I was ashamed of what I had done. I left and then returned to
the church, and I set myself down on my knees.”16
“She accepted the call of God,” he concluded.
I have to admit that my first question, “Who is Victoire Rasoamanarivo?” was intended more-or-less as an ice-breaker – I knew well enough to let my informants tell me first about what they thought was important about this figure whose chapel and cult I had come to study. But Pierre’s answer raises more questions than it answers, especially for someone who does not know anything about Victoire Rasoamanarivo, a popular
Malagasy religious figure who is hardly a household name in the United States. A number of cross-cultural gaps must be confronted in order to make sense of many of the story’s details – why, exactly should one not touch cow dung once it is dry? And what, exactly, does it mean to say that this advice forms part of a Malagasy catechism? What relationship does that draw between Pierre’s Christian present and Madagascar’s pre-
Christian past?
Even if Pierre had explicitly spoken to those concerns, the significance of his responses, or of Victoire Rasoamanarivo more generally, might not be readily apparent.
Those issues, however, can all be explored through a dramatic question that Pierre himself placed at a center of the narrative: where was the Christian God for the Malagasy people before the arrival of European missionaries?
16 Ibid. Grzelak 11
Madagascar’s pre-Christian past is not too distant. There was no significant
missionary presence on the island until the 1800s, and Christianity has yet to be
introduced in parts of the country to this day. So for someone like Pierre, in his seventies,
that question presents a more than academic concern. His grandparents and great-parents
could well have had no awareness of the Catholic devotional life that regulates his day and on which he depends. The link Pierre draws between ancestral dictums and Christian belief, therefore, could say a lot about how he sees the world. In fact, its ramifications in
the Malagasy context, considering the intertwined histories of colonial and missionary projects in the country, are broad and deep. The exact value of the “Malagasy catechism” would seem to inform how one might value the continuing role the Catholic Church in
Madagascar, or on a personal level, how one might imagine the relationship between being Malagasy and being Catholic.
Rome, in turn, would seem to be aware of this. Victoire’s beatification came in the course of one of Pope John Paul II’s globe-trotting tours; she is just one example of over 1,000 recently-beatified figures, many of whom are also from the formerly-colonial world. In one sense, then, a close examination of Pierre’s reading of Victoire’s life could contribute to a better understanding of this pontificate-long, record-breaking saint-making spree. At the same time, in Madagascar specifically, the presence of Catholicism is inextricably linked with the legacy of French colonialism. How one relates the Catholic catechism to Malagasy traditions would seem to indicate one’s attitude towards not only colonial history, but also towards the real continued influence of France on the island.
Though Pierre talked about France, Catholicism, the ancestors, and Victoire in multiple, sometimes seemingly-contradictory ways, how he grapples with the memory of pre- Grzelak 12
mission Malagasy society cannot simply dismissed as incoherent. Rather, his responses
come out of a lived necessity to adjudicate between an array of potentially competing
truth claims. Even more immediately, he sought to articulate the spiritual nourishment he
has been able to draw from a colonially-imposed source. As Charles Long would put it,
drawing from W.E.B. DuBois’s work, Pierre’s worldview reflects a “double
consciousness”17 in which a revolutionary re-valuing of the agency of the oppressed must
also recognize the practical hegemony of the oppressor. Long’s model illuminates much
of Pierre’s narrative, such that his story in turn effectively illuminates the challenges of
understanding contemporary Malagasy religious life.
‘True’ Catholics and ‘True’ Malagasy in a French Religion:
Making sense of double-consciousness
Otherwise put, I began my fieldwork hoping to ‘re-value the agency of the oppressed,’ but those hopes seemed quickly dashed by ‘the practical hegemony of the oppressor.’ It seemed as though placing the Malagasy layperson in any position of power would require ignoring both colonial history and continued colonizing forces on the island. Thinking in terms of double-consciousness however, allows me to reconcile these observable political realities with my interviewees’ insistence that Victoire really does mark a postcolonial victory for the Malagasy people.
For example, Pierre’s first response to the question, “Who is Victoire?,” does have political implications; in fact, my initial analyses of this interview focused entirely
17 Charles H Long, Significations (New York: Seabury Press, 1985), 170. Grzelak 13
on the political. He said Victoire was, before all else, “Malagasy, daughter of nobles.”18
My heart skipped a beat as I scribbled that quote down. Here was a clear identification of
Victoire as a Malagasy ancestor quite literally first, without any mention of her Catholic practice. And it was coming out of the mouth of a man, who while not a clergy member, was still a readily identifiable member of the Catholic community. Pierre seemed the perfect picture of a Malagasy layperson malagasifying his Catholic practice. My rapture continued as Pierre explained, “Before, the Church was considered France’s accomplice, and France was considered an enemy. Victoire made an exception. With Victoire, we are true Malagasy and true Catholics.”19 My enthusiasm was dampened, however, when he continued: “Victoire was baptized in the French religion.”20 I felt forced to come to a
cynical conclusion. For all those above clauses to be true, Catholicism, being
fundamentally French in Pierre’s view, could not have ceased to be a colonial agent. The
“exception” that Victoire made was apparently not to separate France and the Church, but
to reframe France as not “the enemy.” In the space of the sentence, Pierre seemed to cede
Victoire to the French.
I now realize these initial interpretations missed a crucial aspect of Pierre’s
explanation. As much as I wanted to tell a story about how lay people shape the cult for
other lay people, and for clerics, and also a story about how clerics shape the cult for lay
people and for one another, the problem is that this is not how anybody on the ground
construes the situation. As Long would suggest, my Malagasy interviewees were
certainly aware of the politics at work in and around the chapel, but strictly political
readings of Victoire’s cult are reductive. The double-consciousness that Pierre and others
18 Pierre, Interview by author, Nov. 4. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. Grzelak 14
elucidate provides a much more sophisticated reading strategy that refuses to flatten
Victoire’s story into either political or other-worldly terms, and instead allows it to
operate on both levels.
I initially read Pierre’s recognition of the colonial legacy of the Catholic Church
in Madagascar as a constraint on his initial statement that Victoire allows one to be
Malagasy and Catholic – that Victoire allows Malagasy people to be Catholic but does not allow Catholicism to be Malagasy. His presentation, however, lacked this defeatist quality. His mention of French influence, in fact, seems appropriate. Had Pierre simply concluded that Victoire erased Catholicism’s colonial legacy, my field experience would have compelled an even more cynical reading. It would have seemed naïve to say that
Victoire erased colonial history. But at the same time, Pierre did not say that the continued effects of that colonial history erase the power of Victoire’s beatification. On the contrary, it is clear that Pierre views Victoire’s beatification as a significant triumph for the Malagasy people. But it is not a tactical victory; Victoire’s beatification did not mark the expulsion of all French-trained priests from the country. Instead, her beatification provides an “exception” that allows for the expression of a Malagasy-
Catholic identity that was previously unthinkable. The victory is an ontological one.
As Long explains, “The hegemony of the oppressors is understood as myth – myth in the two major senses, as true and as fictive. It is a structure with which one must deal in a day-to-day manner if one is to persevere, but it is fictive as far as any ontological significance is concerned.”21 In other words, Pierre should be taken at his
word. He recognizes the political reality that, especially in Victoire’s lifetime,
Catholicism was “French.” The use of the possessive is entirely appropriate; especially in
21 Long, Significations., 170. Grzelak 15
Victoire’s lifetime, the clergy was French and so was the savoir-vivre they taught at
mission schools. But he does not say that Catholicism is “truly” French in the same way
that he insists that “[w]ith Victoire, we are true Malagasy and true Catholics.” Long’s
model helps me return to the ethnographic moment. For Pierre, the labeling of
Catholicism as “the French religion” came as a matter-of-course. The way in which
Victoire allows for the expression of the two “true” identities merited more emphasis. In
many ways, this distinction would serve as his thesis. It will also serve as guide for my own orientation. I must reconcile my first-hand day-to-day observations of Victoire’s cult with the claims of her devotees who insist on the reality of “exceptional” happenings, of miracles and supernatural presences. I must interrogate the effect of colonially-inflected thought (coming from both theological and anthropological sources) on those claims, but recognize that it is precisely how my interviewees handle colonial sources that will point me towards the best method of interrogation. Pierre does not seek to alter the events of colonialism as he has witnessed them, but he does search for new ways of understanding them. Similarly, it is not my goal to forget any previous sociological or anthropological understandings that I have found useful, but it is my hope that engaging with my interviewees’ ways of knowing will guide and situate the application of any ‘outsider’ knowledge.
For example, following Long, I can say that Pierre’s thesis contains recognition of the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified. Victoire’s “exception” re-signifies the Church so that one can be both truly Malagasy and truly Catholic. But
Pierre himself is also signifying upon this re-signification, in that he couches Victoire’s beatification as a response to an established conversation about the incompatibility of Grzelak 16
Malagasy and Catholic identities. He “form[s] new and different relationships within a
discourse that was already taking place.”22 When Long references signifying, he is
explicitly citing what is a colloquial term in African American communities; signifying is a verbal form he encountered growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas. I ultimately find it vital to my comprehension of what I encountered in Antananarivo. I turned to ethnography in large part because I was suspicious of many of the venerable established anthropological generalizations.23 But actually in the field, I found many of these same sweeping claims coming from the mouths of Victoire’s devotees. This was endlessly frustrating until I considered the possibility of signifying – in short, Long makes the point that the repetition of a colonial phrase does not necessarily mean acceptance and duplication of a colonial meaning.
It sometimes seemed like Victoire’s devotees, detractors and academics have all conspired to agree that her cult is “nothing new.” A sociological text stated, “The body of the Malagasy Catholic saint Victoire Rasoamanarivo,” noting that she was actually only beatified, and not yet a canonized saint, “receives a cult much the same as that of the zanahary at the doany.”24 Then, in a footnote, it gossiped, “Ever since Victoire
Rasoamanarivo was beatified, the people think that ‘the Pope finally accepts the
22 Ibid., 2. 23 Ethnography, certainly, is part of what led to these generalizations, and is far from an innocent enterprise, but this is partially what makes it a logical starting point for rebutting colonial claims. I admit the dangers in my own fieldwork, but it seems better to turn to the field with self-awareness, especially if they alternatives are either giving up attempts at cross-cultural contact, or leaving those attempts to those unaware of their dangers. Also, some contemporary ethnographers have successfully deconstructed previous academic orthodoxies with a turn to the field. In the case of Vodou, see Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). 24 Chantal Radimilahy et al., “Lieux de culte autochone,” in Les dieux au service du peuple: Itinéraires religieux, médiations, syncrétisme à Madagascar, ed. Sophie Blanchy et al. (Paris: KARTHALA Editions, 2006), 167. Zanahary, Malagasy: God/s. In Malagasy, there is no distinction between plural and singular forms; since the colonial period, zanahary has often been referenced as a creator god, but the authors here use the French plural des. Doany, Malagasy: sites of ancestor veneration. Grzelak 17
ancestors.’”25 “A prominent Malagasy academic told me confidently that the chapel was
proof of “cultural permanence, the permanent side of Malagasy spirituality.”26 In the
Malagasy context, Radimilahy et. al. believe this “assimilation is already done at the level
of vocabulary; ancestors and gods are masina, just as are the saints to whom Catholicism
directs its worship.”27 Interestingly, this sort of linguistic assimilation works between
French and Malagasy in way that English cannot broach. In both of those languages, the
words for “holy” and “saint” are the same; and so, “ny razana masina” can be translated
to English as both “the holy” and “the saint” ancestor. This logic clearly has its limits.28
Yet, it is pervasive in not only academic, but popular, explanations of Malagasy religion.
As one prominent text puts it, Christianization was simply the “assimilation of mission
religion to the cultural logic of Malagasy sacred practices.”29
As radical as that assertion may seem to be, it and its attendant image of
‘Malagasy religion’ being an unstoppable, all-encompassing consumer of outside influences, has own its roots in the logic of the mission. Recent ‘genealogies of religion’ have shed light on the colonial legacy behind classifying certain spheres of indigenous
life under the headings ‘sacred’ or ‘religious.’30 In the broadest sense, scholars now
question how religion, a term whose roots are specifically Western (and Christian and
Protestant), can be applied in any community that is not all of those things, let alone
25 Ibid. 167. 26 Prof. Rafolo Andriananaivoarivany, interview by author at his office, Nov. 20, 2011. 27 R. Andrianampianina and Sophie Blanchy, “Terre du tombeau, corps de l’ancêtre,” in Les dieux au service du peuple, 226–227. 28 For example, in Malagasy, masina also means “salty.” Holy water and salt-water are both ranomasina. I am not sure if the ancestors, if they are saints, are accordingly also salty. 29 Pier M. Larson, “‘Capacities and Modes of Thinking’: Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (October 1, 1997): 978. 30 For example, David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1996). Grzelak 18
universally. Furthermore, the study of “world religions” has a troubling legacy of placing
those “discovered” entities into hierarchies used to justify colonial crimes.31 Whether or
not one rejects the deconstruction of the category of religion that often comes with this
self-aware scholarly turn, the missionizing roots of academia in Madagascar are evident.
Many social scientists32 still cite, for example, Lars Vig, an ethnographer-missionary who
codified The Religious Conceptions of the Ancient Malagasy, all the while trying to
convert his informants.33
I cannot uncritically accept these assertions of assimilation because I am aware of
the implications they have for any understanding of power relations in the chapel.
Insistence upon continuity between pre- and post-Catholic mission contexts in
Madagascar can not only mask, but authorize, change that might otherwise warrant
interrogation. Concretely, the priest-in-charge of the chapel deployed assimilationist
logic: “The people come for Victoire… that goes automatically, it is the tradition of the
Malagasy to pray at the tombs of kings.” He attributes to the chapel-goers the view that their veneration of Victoire is continuous with pre-Christian traditional practice, and therefore, justifies his own covert efforts to use the space for Catholic evangelization through such means as placing a tabernacle near Victoire’s casket.
But the priest also linked the behavior of chapel-goers to the historical Catholic tradition of cults around the bodies of saints. “In the Church,” he said,” it has always been like that. It’s not new. It’s normal.” In fact, he rejected the explicit comparison of
31 See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 32 Including, for example, Sophie Blanchy, Les dieux au service du peuple : itinéraires religieux, médiations, syncrétisme à Madagascar (Paris: Karthala Editions, 2006). 33See Lars Vig, Les conceptions religieuses des anciens Malgaches: Ny fireham-pinoan’ny ntaolo Malagasy (Paris : Karthala Editions, 2001). Grzelak 19
the chapel to doany: “A doany, that is where the pagans go to pray. There are certain
people who think that the chapel is like that, but that is false… dirt, wood, candles, water.
All that we use here, they use. It is the prayer that is different. There it is the ancestor.
Here, it is the Blessed Virgin.”34 As much as my turning to ethnography was an attempt
to recognize change at the chapel site, my informants unfailingly reprised the theme of continuity. The priest used an observation of one sort of continuity, of a gravitational pull
between Malagasy worshippers and royal tombs, to justify the re-fashioning of the space
along the lines of another observed continuity, the reliquary chapels of Catholic cult of
saints. Even where he insisted on difference, his statement was complicated by claims of
continuity. Despite the urgent emphasis Fr. Josef-Noel placed on the distinction between
the doany and the chapel, it is difficult not to conclude that the difference between
ancestor veneration and Victoire’s cult is syntactical, or even superficial.
As Pierre’s narrative, which repeats many of the same elements as the priest’s, so
elegantly highlights, who is Victoire Rasoamanarivo, “Malagasy, daughter of nobles,”35
if not an ancestor? Victoire’s devotees may pray to the Blessed Virgin at the chapel, and
this may make the site “different” from a doany36, but prayer to Victoire is certainly also
an active part of even the officially sanctioned cult, which makes it hard to say that it is
only at the doany that one prays to “the ancestor.” My time at the chapel made clear the
dangers of simple assertions of continuity, but Long’s exploration of signifying makes it
possible to hear my interviewees’ apparent parroting of institutional language as
something other, as something very possibly subversive.
34 Fr. Christophe-Noe interview by author held at the archdiocesan offices, Nov. 15, 2011. 35 Pierre, interview by author, Nov. 4, 2011. 36 Though it seems likely that prayer to Mary does occur at some doany. Grzelak 20
In fact, Pierre’s narrative makes an argument in direct contradistinction to one of
the most venerable anthropological assertions of all: in Madagascar, Protestantism is
Malagasy and white; Catholicism is French and black. This was the declaration of
Maurice Bloch with the 1971 publication of Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagascar.37 Since then, his writings have been translated into several languages, including Malagasy. This racial-national-religious conflation has
been repeated countless times in various iterations, not only by Malagasy academics, but
also by church-goers and politicians. It appears often enough in everyday Malagasy
conversations about religion that, regardless of whether or not Pierre knows of Maurice
Bloch, his citation of Victoire can still be read as a response to this way of thinking. Most
often, Bloch’s thought surfaces as a reformulation of his observation that there is a “way
that the Protestant Church can be described as ‘the religion of the ancestors,’ something
Malagasy, as opposed to something ‘vahaza’”38 Race and religious identity are worth
considering as different things, but in the Malagasy context, an understanding of one is
impossible without an understanding of the other.
Bloch’s justification for the seemingly counter-intuitive way in which “the
Protestant Church is associated with the traditional past” is based on the interplay
between the historical caste system and the timeline of colonial evangelization: “This
possibility is open to the Protestants who contrast Protestantism which came first to
37 Maurice Bloch, Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagascar (London and New York: Seminar Press, 1971). 38 Bloch, Placing the Dead, 6. According to Bloch, vahaza is Malagasy for “European, clever.” In my experience, it is certainly applied to anyone who seems “Western,” including, for example, Americans of Jewish and Ethiopian descent. Of course, Bloch’s glossary also defines Malagasy as “not vahaza.” This is untrue in contemporary Madagascar, at least. Those of Indian descent, who have been living in Madagascar for generations, do not become Malagasy, and in fact, are still denied Malagasy passports. Grzelak 21
Imerina39… and which can be associated (and often is) with the Merina kingdom, with the Catholicism which is a more recent introduction… and is associated with the forces that destroyed the Merina kingdom.”40 To put things more directly, Madagascar experienced two waves of Christianization and colonization. At the start of the nineteenth century, British missionaries succeeded in converting some members of the Merina royal class to Protestant Christianity. By the end of the century, Madagascar was a French annex with an active system of Catholic missions, schools, monasteries and churches, reaching all strata of society. Following from this, Bloch explains that the Malagasy link
Protestantism with higher-class “free” Merina, and “Catholicism with the ex-subjects and slaves of the Merina.”41 The categories of ‘free’ and ‘slave’ descent are, perhaps unsurprisingly, often racialized. Inside of Malagasy society, there is a bewildering array of racial/social categories and hierarchies. Some of those will be explored in the pages that follow, but for the moment, suffice it to say that Bloch used formula first deployed in the colonial era (though still present in Malagasy society today): the descendants of ‘free’
Merina are fotsy or white; the descendants of ‘slave’ Merina are mainty or black.
Fittingly, Pierre’s narrative, and many retellings of Victoire’s story, focus on her social position; Pierre was not the only one to introduce Victoire as a “daughter of nobles.” But his introduction highlights a specific response to the kind of argument Bloch makes based on the sequential waves of Protestant, and then Catholic, missionary activities. Protestantism, Bloch argues, is more ‘ancestral’ because it came first and is not as associated with the French government that toppled the ancestral monarchy. Pierre’s creation of pre- and post-Victoire eras does not deny the truth of Bloch’s understanding
39 Home of the Merina, the Malagasy central highlands, the capital region. 40 Bloch, Placing the Dead, 15. 41 Ibid. Grzelak 22 as it applies to the 1964-1966 period in which he conducted his fieldwork, but it would seem to place it firmly in the time “before.” The Catholic clergy in Madagascar has, in fact, become predominantly Malagasy since Bloch’s time. But Pierre broaches topics beyond statistics. He notes that Victoire was “an exception” to, among other things, royal
Protestant homogeneity.
That said, although Pierre begins his story about Victoire with reference to her nobility, I came to realize that he actually gave it comparatively little attention.
Experience dictates that introductions in Antananarivo often require talking about one’s parents. On the walk to Pierre’s house, he told me about his parents, and he asked me about mine. In introducing Victoire, it would be unthinkable to not mention Victoire’s parents at all, but compared to some ecclesiastically-sanctioned sources such as the first few dozen pages of the comic book Victoire Rasoamanarivo42, Pierre’s attention to her family tree was minimalist. Pierre believes it is now possible to be ‘truly’ Catholic and
‘truly’ Malagasy, but it is unclear what makes one ‘truly’ Malagasy in the first place. The reasoning that conflates Malagasy and Protestant identities locates ‘true’ Malagasy identity in the noble class. As a Catholic noble, Victoire complicates this model, but it is
Pierre’s claim of a Malagasy Catholic identity that disrupts it. Victoire does not cease being noble, nor does Pierre become one; rather, at the same time that the Church is re- signified as a space that permits Malagasy identity, Malagasy identity is re-signified so that it does not depend on noble standing.
Following from this, though Pierre first establishes Victoire as a noble, and certainly does not deny her the traditional positive associations that come with the title, he also quickly re-signifies her, stressing her differences from the Protestant and ‘pagan’
42 Marie Reine Marchand, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, 1848-1894 (Fianarantsoa: Ed. Ambozontany, 1989). Grzelak 23
nobility of her time. Moments after highlighting Victoire’s nobility, Pierre described her
alienation from the royal family. “She was a rebellious girl,”43 he said. Because of her
Catholic practice, he said, she was expelled from the royal banquet table and forced to sit
on the floor amongst the servants. In the abstract, it is exciting to contemplate the beatification of a rebel. In the Malagasy context specifically, the implications of such class-barrier crossing are enormous, with both religious and racial connotations. As I noted above, since the colonial era, Merina social class has been explicitly racialized. The descendants of royal ancestors to this day are seen as ‘white’ (fotsy) and the descendants
of slaves are seen as ‘black’ (mainty). For this reason, practice at traditional doany is sometimes ironically framed not as an assertion of Malagasy self-worth, but as a perpetuation of the French colonial system. Lower-class ‘blacks’ come to venerate the ancestors of higher-class ‘whites.’44 Victoire’s cult would seem to avoid this trap if
Victoire could be read as forfeiting her ancestral whiteness.
This reading, however, is easily contradicted by Victoire’s nickname. According
to Pierre, her own mother gave her over to Catholic nuns, saying, “Here is the little white
one,” and many of her devotees continue to call Victoire exactly that, la petite blanchette.
In other words, however much I might want to imagine Victoire staging a sit-in, did
Pierre just want me to feel pity for Victoire sitting among the mainty? Pierre himself, it should be noted, occupies an ambiguous location in Malagasy society. His wife was a doctor, and Pierre hassled her patients about overdue bills on our walk to his home, about
45 minutes from the chapel in Andohalo. He was building a very large new home, called rova-kely, the little palace, by his neighbors, who had considerably humbler abodes. And
43 Pierre, Nov. 4. 44 See Sophie Blanchy and Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa, “Rangs et conditions d’existence,” in Les dieux au service du peuple. Grzelak 24
yet, others, those who lived in more central Tana, were surprised to hear that I, a white
ethnographer, visited his house. One person labeled him flatly as a “third-class” person,45
“a black who wants to enter the noble parish.”46 Pierre’s social self-identification, just
like his reading of this story, remains ambiguous.
But ultimately, in Pierre’s reading, whether he is ‘black’ or ‘white’ is irrelevant to
his ability to be truly Malagasy and truly Catholic. Pierre’s articulation of Malagasy
identity relies on both anthropological and theological language, but it is not rightfully
called either anthropological or theological. Through a series of significations and re-
significations, he engages with models that have tied together race and religion, subtly
rejecting their most fundamental premises. While Pierre might see Victoire as having
altered the effects of the historical relationship between the colonizer and the Church,
what he is offering is not an alternate timeline, but an alternate narrative. Pierre’s account
is not strictly chronological, and his recounting of Victoire’s family tree, for example,
only loosely coheres with any published genealogical accounts. This treatment of time is
not unrelated to his ungluing of Malagasy identity from noble ancestry. They both reflect
a double consciousness that “dehistoricizes the relationship for the sake of creating a new
form of humanity – a form of humanity that is no longer based on the master-slave
dialectic.”47 To do so, Pierre’s story places Victoire both inside of, and outside of, the
noble class; considering this, it is unsurprising that his own social position is difficult to
pin down. The entire presentation he makes of Victoire’s life requires a reconsideration
of the colonially-established conception of the human being.
45 Blandine, interview by author outside the chapel, Nov. 12. 46 Blandine, interview by author in the archdiocesan offices, Nov. 15. She saw the cathedral’s parish rightfully belonging to the former nobility who live in the neighborhood. 47 Long, Significations. 170. Grzelak 25
It is not enough to simply recognize a double consciousness at work in Pierre’s
account; Long argues that this sort of dehistoricized orientation demands the replacement
of the colonial history with another genesis story: “There is thus a primordial structure to
this consciousness, for in seeking a new beginning in the future, it must perforce imagine
an original beginning.”48 Following from this, I will return to the question with which I
opened this chapter: how does Pierre frame beginnings? Pierre’s response to the question
“Where was the Christian God for the Malagasy people before the arrival of
missionaries?” will not only provide insight into how he understands the relationship
between Malagasy tradition and Catholic teaching; it will also give conceptual tools for
talking about human beings in a world that acknowledges a double consciousness, and for
making sense of how Pierre deals with categories of race and class. As Long states, “The
religions of those who have had to bear the weight of this confrontation in the modern
world should generate forms of critical languages capable of creating the proper
disjunctions for a restatement of the reality of the human in worlds to come.”49
Things are ‘flou’
What Long promises Pierre provides. Up to this point, I have tried to make clear
the high stakes at work in what might seem to be a simple act of story-telling, and I have
done so with recourse to Long’s model. But Pierre, out of necessity, provides his own critical language. If my goal is to make sense of this complicated ethnographic field, I should take full advantage of the resources offered by someone who lives, and finds
48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. Grzelak 26
meaning, in this field. Pierre framed pre-Missionary Malagasy religion thusly: “Of
course, The Malagasy believed in zanahary, but it was a little flou.”50 Flou can mean
blurry or hazy. Rather than taking his claim as a simple acknowledgement of the hard-to-
pin down nature of his story, I am interested in this blurriness as a resource for
understanding his relationship not just to Victoire, but with the Church, with France, with
the pre-Christian Malagasy past, and with the entire suite of entities political and
supernatural implicated in his mythic reading of Victoire’s cult. An awareness of flou-
idity, in fact, is necessary to even make sense of what Pierre meant by the statement that
the Malagasy believed in zanahary. The word zanahary can be translated as either plural
gods or a singular God. Malagasy, unlike French, does not have articles that specify
number. It was unnecessary for Pierre to broach the question of whether Malagasy people
were traditionally monotheist or polytheist. But not all constructions allow this
ambiguity.
The social scientists who claimed that “[t]he body of the Malagasy Catholic saint
Victoire Rasoamanarivo… receives a cult much the same as that of the zanahary at the
doany,”51 used the plural article des to indicate multiple zanahary. Pierre, on the other hand, used both singular and plural articles. He later reprised the same general sentiment:
“Before the arrival of Christianity, the Malagasy knew God, the Zanahary.”52 In this
context, he first referred to God as dieu, and specified that he meant a singular deity with
the article le preceding the Malagasy zanahary. That same day, however, Pierre told me
a story about a “very intelligent priest” who carried out a successful mission trip in the
Southeast portion of the country. This priest created a ceremony to consecrate, to “make
50 Pierre, Nov. 4. 51 Radimilahy et al., “Lieux de culte autochone,” 167. 52 Pierre, Nov. 9. Grzelak 27
sacred”53 the kings of a non-Christian village. Pierre showed me photos of the village kings wearing rosaries as necklaces and crosses as scepters. This priest, Pierre told me, converted most of the village, and the kings “little by little”54 abandoned traditional
practices. He explained that the villagers continued “certain practices” but that the priest
declared: “You can kill cows, but they are no longer to be considered as a sacrifice aux zanahary. The sole sacrifice is that of the Mass, that of the blood of Jesus. The sacrifice of cows can function as a kinship link.”55 It could be said that Pierre uses the singular to
align zanahary with an acceptable, single Christian God. The priest, on the other hand,
uses the plural in forbidding a polytheistic zanahary cult. He does not forbid cattle
sacrifice but demands its redefinition as a social, not religious, practice. In suggesting the
Eucharistic sacrifice as a substitute, he would seem to literally be asking for “the assimilation of the religion of the mission into the logic of Malagasy sacred practices.”56
That said, the very fact that I received this story through Pierre would suggest that flou- idity works in more ways than one. The term zanahary drifts in and out of contexts such that it cannot be easily ‘aligned’ with any single referent. Perhaps the priest is trying to fit
‘the religion of the mission’ into ‘the logic of Malagasy sacred practices’, but the fact that
I received this story through Pierre would seem to also suggest the inverse – that
‘Malagasy sacred practices’ are being re-framed through the logic of the mission.
Missionaries re-signify local practices in other missionary contexts as well. Long asserts that colonized people share phenomena like “double consciousness” because they also share the experience of colonization; the legacy of a relatively small colonial elite
53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Larson, “Capacities and Modes of Thinking,” 978. Grzelak 28
serves as a constant, allowing comparison across variable contexts. Looking at a few
comparable cases is instructive not only because the ‘colonized’ in each circumstance
grapple with a certain set of issues presented by the colonizer, but also because, frankly
often still due to the interests of former colonizers, scholars have spent more time
exploring colonialism in places other than Madagascar.
In North America, upon encountering Pueblo dances, Catholic missionaries
deemed them permissible as “custom” in mission territories, but not “religion” properly
speaking.57 Later, Protestant missionaries labeled the dances “religion” but “false religion.” Finally, anthropologists and artists held up Pueblo practice as a positive exemplar of “primitive religion.” Today, Native American legal defenses of sacred practices rest on first-amendment rights – on the fact that they have “a religion.” While this argument might help to preserve some aspects of certain practices, Tisa Wenger highlights how such a strategy necessitates a fundamental shift in the way such practices are practiced and approached: “Language shapes perception, and a tribal requirement that seemed matter-of-fact as long as the ceremonies were understood in terms of community work became a violation of individual conscience when they were redefined as
‘religion.’”58 It seems plausible that cattle sacrifice certainly would change if defended as
a ‘kinship link;’ similarly, it does not seem to be a stretch to say that Malagasy aphorisms
become something different if they are re-framed as ‘a catechism.’
Jonathan Z. Smith traces a similar colonial modification to religious life in New
Guinea. He too describes an instance in which missionaries permit the continuation of
animal sacrifice – should its meaning be ‘transposed.’ Functionally, pig sacrifices were
57 Example from Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 58 Ibid., 6. Grzelak 29
continued, but “a ‘legal fiction’ was created that one pig was slaughtered in an ordinary act, in contradistinction to its fellows, which were ritually slain.”59 He claims that such
transpositions operated in, and themselves created, ‘feedback loops’60 in which cross-
cultural translations between missionaries, social scientists, and indigenous populations
gradually shifted the position of ritual behaviors such that all could use the same
vocabulary to describe them – everyone can agree, for example, that the cattle sacrifice is
a “kinship link” – but that the actual meanings ascribed to such terms continued to differ.
Certainly anthropological and missionary impositions had their effects on indigenous
ways of doing and thinking, but it is reductive to assume that the encounter would affect
no change to European entities. Smith’s analysis stays on the macro-level; the space of
cross-cultural translation remains a sealed black-box. Below I hope to put this idea of a
‘feedback loop’ to work using not just Smith’s suggestions but also taking full advantage
of Pierre’s emphasis on flou-idity. Understanding Pierre’s narratives requires an understanding not only of the motives of institutional entities in the ethnographic field,
but attention to their interaction, and awareness of Pierre’s own ability to operate
differently (though perhaps using the same language to do so) in different contexts.
This request that the cows “no longer be considered” as a sacrifice, which Pierre
attributes to the priest, is parallel to the shift in opinion wherein the Church is no longer
“considered” France’s accomplice, which Pierre attributes to Victoire; both instances
engage, and to a certain degree adopt the tone of, anthropology. This can be read as a
very active use of re-signification. In both cases, no change in day-to-day reality is
demanded, but an ontological shift is declared. Pierre’s citation of the priest demonstrates
59 Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, 1st ed. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2004), 341. 60 Ibid., 340. Grzelak 30
that the ‘cultural assimilation’ often claimed by Malagasy and European anthropologists
works in more ways than one. Malagasy culture may absorb outside influences, but it does not do so simply and unproblematically, nor do the meanings of these ‘outside influences’ remain unchanged in the process. This realization forces a nuanced re- contextualization of the other comparative gestures Pierre makes. For example, in the
broader context of historical Catholicism, Pierre’s framing of Malagasy proverbs as “the
catechism which opened the heart of Victoire”61 – of local tradition as praeparatio
evangelica – would certainly seem to be nothing new, but it is just as telling that he
insists on the unique power of an “exceptional woman.” He believes in a special
coherence between Malagasy and Catholic identities – which he explicitly believes does
not exist between “African” (and other colonized peoples’) and Catholic identities.
Despite the way in which insistence on continuity can be used to de-value
Malagasy traditions, it may be even more often that my interlocutors (interviewees and academics) used social-scientific language in (sometimes only partial) defense of the
Malagasy ancestral cult as something exceptional. Modern social scientists have been obsessed with the uniqueness of the contemporary Malagasy relationship to the ancestors.
It was a New York Times article on the famadihana (the “turning of the dead” ceremony) that brought me to this “big island in the Indian Ocean”62 in the first place. The
famadihana is often described broadly as ‘syncretic’ – local priests are often invited to
watch over the ceremony, which is typically an all-day affair centering around the
moving of ancestral remains to a new tombs. I found myself, unexpectedly, invited to a
famadihana after only a few days on the island. Standing on the site where several cattle
61 Pierre, Interview by author, Nov. 4. 62 Barry Bearak, “In Madagascar, the Living Dance With the Dead,” The New York Times, September 5, 2010, sec. World / Africa, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/world/africa/06madagascar.html. Grzelak 31
had just been slaughtered, a Malagasy professor told me that he practiced traditional
rituals to keep up family ties, but that he did not believe in the efficacy of the ancestors,
saying, “I am scientific; I am Christian.” I was struck not only by the ease with which he
placed ‘tradition’ in opposition to Christianity and science, but also by the conflation of
scientific and Christian action.
So, when Pierre brought up “respect for the ancestors,” I could not help myself. I
reflexively asked him about famadihana. “We practice the famadihana,” he stated, “We
do not organize the famadihana. If we are obligated to do it, we profit from the
occasion.”63 At first pass, Pierre seems to be saying that he attends the ritual, and enjoys
the party, but will not personally initiate a celebration. But what does it mean to be
“obligated to do it?” Obligated by whom? He explicitly critiqued the habit of some
coastal people to perform the famadihana during harvest time; their obligation, he felt,
was obviously not genuine because it seemed unlikely that the ancestors would conveniently ask to be moved when the larders were full. But how can that be squared with a world wherein ancestors can easily, and justifiably, be turned into anthropological
constructs – metaphors for social bonding?
Pierre’s narrative also rests on its own variation of anthropological logic.64
“Madagascar is closer to Africa geographically, but our manners are more
Austronesian.65 The Merina are almost Austronesian,” he said echoing the 1970s
academic insistence on “the strength of the Indonesian culture in some parts and the
63 Pierre, interview by author, Nov. 4. 64 Eusebius certainly wouldn’t have had access to these sorts of anthropological materials, but one wonders, especially in the French context, if he might have influenced them. 65 A language-based category centering mostly in South-east Asia and Oceania. Grzelak 32
weakness of any other influences.”66 Yet, from this point, Pierre ventured into territory
Bloch would not have even touched,67 stating, “[w]e have a respect for our ancestors, like
the Hebrews.”68 Respect for the ancestors, as an orientation, seems to slide into the same
category of acceptability as the “Malagasy catechism.” In this light, pre-missionary-
contact Madagascar presents the Old Testament world; post-contact, the New. Such a
reading, though, ignores the actual tenses Pierre used. “We have a respect for the
ancestors,”69 he said. Following from that, the Malagasy are, in some sense, still the
Hebrews.
Long, of course, has already prepared us for such transtemporal leaps; Pierre was
claiming a mythical, not genetic or genealogical, Hebrew identity. But even Maurice
Bloch recognized the limits of dialectical models like that which separates ‘French
Catholicism’ from ‘Malagasy Protestantism.’ Is not a certain amount of flou-idity required to make sense of a Catholicism that is French and black and a Protestantism that is white and Malagasy? At the same time, a Western Christian framework would, generally, seem to be not so kind to blurry belief. Haziness is of questionable orthodoxy.
Nevertheless, the narrative thus far also demands blurriness, porous distinctions, to make any sense at all. How else can the Catholic Church cease to be France’s colonizing accomplice but remain French? How can Victoire’s mother be an idolater who opens her heart to Christian teaching? How can the Malagasy be Austronesian Jews? At the same time, this begs another question: how does one deal with blurry relationships between hazy entities?
66 Bloch, Placing the Dead, 16. 67 Though earlier missionary anthropologists, and current Mormon missionaries, make similar rhetorical gestures. 68 Pierre, interview by author, Nov. 4. 69 Ibid. Grzelak 33
One obvious response is this: define them. Looking at Christian history more
broadly, it would appear that not all fluidities are equal. The idea of the “Malagasy
catechism” certainly demands fluidity – it troubles the distinction between ignorant
pagans and knowing Christians – but it is also clearly endorsed by Catholic authorities in
Madagascar. Pierre took it ‘straight from the book.’ And in fact, the pope himself cites
Victoire’s specifically Malagasy virtues in his beatification homily, addressing the
Malagasy people, “You all recognize in your first Blessed the traditional qualities of your
people… She never detached herself from the ancestral bonds of solidarity which tie
people together – each person to all of society; in her, the natural spirituality of the
Malagasy people comes to fulfillment.” 70 John-Paul II already seems to be walking a
fine line. He does not say that Victoire remained attached to the ancestors in an active
sense, but that she never divorced herself from “ancestral bonds of solidarity” which
perform a seemingly sociological function. Even more strikingly, this idea of Victoire as
“fulfillment” of Malagasy “natural spirituality” can be read in any number of ways. On
one hand, when the late pope lists a number of Victoire’s “traditional qualities” including
her “patience… inner joy… optimistic confidence” 71 it would seem that it was actually
her Malagasy upbringing that has made her a Blessed.
On the other hand, the idea that Malagasy tradition is ultimately fulfilled by a
Catholic figure places this flou-idity into a clear hierarchy with a teleological
70 Jean-Paul II, “Béatification De Victoire Rasoamanarivo à Antananarivo, Homélie De Jean-Paul II, 30 Avril 1989,” -, accessed August 1, 2012, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/homilies/1989/documents/hf_jp- ii_hom_19890430_antananarivo_fr.html. 71 Jean-Paul II, “Béatification De Victoire Rasoamanarivo à Antananarivo, Homélie De Jean-Paul II, 30 Avril 1989.” Grzelak 34
conclusion.72 In this reading, “Malagasy natural spirituality” is not complete until the
arrival of missionaries. This, of course, recalls the dispensationalist bent of Pierre’s
insistence on the Hebrewness of the Malagasy people. Again, pre-missionary-contact
Madagascar would seem to present the Old Testament world; post-contact, the New. But, again, for Pierre, contemporary Malagasy people are in some sense still like the Hebrews.
This identity opposes itself to a Church-wide narrative of all peoples eventually coming
to see the Catholic light; claiming a Hebrew identity carries a claim of chosenness.
That said, for all the connotations of uniqueness that come with an assertion of
Hebrew heritage, Madagascar is not the only place on Earth that has been claimed as a far-flung post of Israel – and, in the same way re-signification could be illustrated cross- culturally, looking in other contexts will specifically allow for a better understanding of how the idea of tribe of Israel in Africa sits with the colonial project. David Chidester notes the extensive projects “frontier comparativists” carried out in attempting to establish a lineage between South African ‘Hottentots’ and Abraham. He also points out a
tension in these genealogical efforts between the valorization and subordination of pre- mission religion. He attributes some agency to native Africans in summarizing the quasi-
successes that came with the colonial recognition that their traditions constituted a
religion: “Not quite noble savages, the Hottentots had nevertheless succeeded, under
colonial rule, in acquiring virtues of submission to higher authority that were consistent
with ‘natural’ religion. Ironically, these ‘beasts’ could now serve as models of virtue even
for Christian subjects of the Colony.”73 It would probably not surprise Chidester that the
72 As we will see in Chapter Two, the fact that Victoire is a Malagasy Catholic woman is ultimately also relevant, and has its own bearing on a teleological conclusion which follows from a reading of the Merina monarchical history. 73 Chidester, Savage Systems, 47. Grzelak 35
pope’s homily emphasizes Victoire’s docility, her “attitude profondément pacifiée.”74
Pierre’s Victoire is “sweet, obedient, and careful.”75 What might initially seem to be an
effort on the part of colonists to make Africans seem less foreign ultimately makes them
only a greater other. Chidester concludes his overview of Jewish-African comparative
projects, stating that “each began with a formula for establishing similarity but ended by
asserting that Africans represented an unassimilable difference – an obstacle, an
inferiority, an estrangement – in relation to the implicit third term in their comparisons,
Christian civilization.”76 This leads to a cynical conclusion. So much, it would seem, for
my attempt to take Pierre’s claims as an assertion of Malagasy agency. But, even
Chidester thinks such a conclusion would be reductive, and he offers a way out. We can
“compare comparisons.”77
In other words, though the Pope, Pierre and missionaries in South Africa might all
use the trope of the native as Israelite, they do not do so in exactly the same ways.
Notably, the Pope, in so far as he indicates that Victoire has brought the Malagasy people
“fulfillment,” places Madagascar firmly in the ancient past. Among the missionary
crowd, “judaizing” tendencies were something to be eliminated. But Pierre’s Hebrewness
was, again, in the present-tense, and he made no apology for it; on the contrary, it was a
point of pride. Following from this, I can specify two aspects of a flou-id analytical
orientation. It observes, as Long would suggest, a “dehistoricized” time. What comes
later is not an inevitable “fulfillment” of what comes before, nor is the present causally
74 Jean-Paul II, “Béatification De Victoire Rasoamanarivo à Antananarivo, Homélie De Jean-Paul II, 30 Avril 1989.” 75 Pierre, Nov. 4. 76 Chidester, Savage Systems, 265. 77 Ibid., 29. Grzelak 36
inapplicable to events in the past – this latter aspect is apparent in the way in which
Victoire’s beatification enacts ontological change without denying political history.
What may be less apparent is how “dehistoricized” time might exist in a Catholic context – is not the claim of the Church an explicitly historical, genealogical one?
Though I might be tempted to paint Pierre as a rebel against “Church time,” I would have to forget the circumstances in which he and I met. He arrived, punctually, to daily morning mass at the chapel. This is important not only because it highlights that Pierre, on a day-to-day basis, works very much on colonially-established time, but because it reminds us that Pierre also clearly found meaning in the standardized Catholic narrative that is liturgical time. Victoire’s beatification very literally draws her into the church’s worldwide calendar. How can a flou-id analytic orientation be maintained in the face of such a push for historicization?
Again, my answer will come from taking seriously a claim that I initially ignored.
Though Victoire’s devotees certainly understood my interest in the chapel, they did often suggest that an academic project might be better served by consulting other sources, namely, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, the comic book. This was frustrating. Why, I wondered, would someone who insists on the importance of Victoire’s bodily presence direct me to a bookstore to meet la bienheureuse? While in Madagascar, I put off reading this text because of its clear ties to the institutional Church. I will now turn to it in large part because of those ties. Pierre has taught me how to read flou-idly, and this has allowed me to see meaning in apparent contradiction. It only makes sense to use that skill to actually read a text, the comic book, where incompatibility between the ethnographic reality and institutional program would seem greatest. Grzelak 37
Chapter Two: The Comic Book
My aim with this project has been to take seriously the claims that were initially hardest for me to accept or understand. For example, the insistence upon Victoire’s case having parallel examples in Christian history seemed initially dubious to me. My conversation with the priest-in-charge made me worry that pointing to continuities, such as locating Victoire within the generic cult of saints, would distract from, or obscure, change. As Pierre’s use of flou helped me to see, however, a comparative claim can be made in such a way that it affects ontological change but does not deny historical particularities – for example, his claim to a Hebrew-Malagasy-Catholic identity clarified, rather than denied, his reckoning with the Church’s colonial history. Similarly, here attention to hagiographical materials in early Christianity helps explain the importance of the book in the Malagasy ethnographic field. In this chapter, I focus especially on the hagiographical Victoire Rasoamanarivo comic book. But first, I will set the context for this analysis in relationship to my interview with Pierre and to scholarship on historical
Christian hagiography.
The book as flou-id thing
When I asked Pierre, “Who is Victoire?” He immediately went to find a book. I did, and still do, find his response amusing, but I can already point here to the insights of early Christian scholarship as a way to take his gesture seriously. “Things such as relics, the invisible bodies of the saints in hagiography, and the saints’ presences in icons take on visual and tactile presences,” writes Patricia Cox Miller in The Corporal Grzelak 38
Imagination.78 I can see Pierre’s book, and the other hagiographical texts about Victoire
which were brought to my attention, as “things” in the sense posited by thing theory,
“excess rhetoric” both creating and reflecting the “surplus value” of the thing.79 To
explain this, Patricia Cox Miller uses the example of a window. A simple pane of glass,
conforming to our expectations, and allowing us to see through it, is not a thing. When it
becomes dirty, when we become aware that we are not actually seeing through it, the
window becomes a thing.80 The “excess rhetoric” around these books had bugged me in
the same way a dirty window annoys me. I saw the constant direction I received towards texts as something separating me from what I actually wanted to see – laypeople actively shaping Victoire’s cult.
The “surplus value” was also evident in that Pierre needed to provide me with further excess rhetoric; he needed to explain the text to me. In fact, he constructed a plan
– he would give me daily, guided readings, translated, with notes. This gave me an evidently tinted, dirty, or thing-y window through which to view the story of Victoire.
After one 6:45 a.m. to noon session, I made my own plan: for my own sanity, I would find a way to get him not to talk about the book at our next meeting. I succeeded, but I am now returning Pierre’s retelling of Victoire’s story precisely because of its thinginess, because it gives some idea of how Victoire’s story is being told in the field, and because its thinginess demands the obvious question – if it is a thing, what sort of thing is it?
Victoire’s story is a flou-id thing. By this, I mean that, first, the surplus of rhetoric
accorded to it in the ethnographic field points toward its excess value. The comic book,
78 Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity, Divinations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 8. 79 Ibid., 3. 80 Ibid., 2. Grzelak 39
for example, presents itself as a catechetical biography, and it is that, but it is also more than that. Like Pierre’s narrative, it implicitly engages the question, “Where was the
Christian God for the Malagasy people before the arrival of European missionaries?” and as such, the reader can extrapolate more than strictly biographical information from it.
For example, Pierre’s characterization of Victoire’s traditional upbringing as consonant with a “Malagasy catechism” allowed for certain responses to that question, and Victoire
Rasoamanarivo, the comic book, treating the same period of her life, will also open up considerations of temporal fluidity. The Pope’s framing of Victoire as “fulfillment” of
Malagasy tradition makes it clear that a certain temporal fluidity is institutionally approved. But, at the same time, Pierre’s citation of the “clever priest” who slowly converts a village’s ancestral kings makes it clear that, from the Church’s perspective, there is a line to be drawn between reading Malagasy custom as praeparatio evangelica and accepting the intercessory efficacy of the ancestral cult. This same boundary-drawing exercise is redrawn in the comic book, but incompletely. Written by a French missionary nun and introduced by a Cardinal, the comic book does contain some meta-level commentary; they say just enough that the savvy reader can imagine their ideal reading of
Victoire’s history.
But at the same time, in images and speech bubbles, the comic book allows, with less ecclesiastical mediation, a direct intellectual engagement with the circumstances of
Victoire’s upbringing and vocational life. As such, fluidities both ecclesiastically approved and feared appear in the text. Victoire can be read as a paragon of orthodoxy and orthopraxy: as a child, she loves learning Madagascar’s “place in the world” at the mission school, and as an adult, she spends every spare moment with rosary in hand. But Grzelak 40
she can also be read as a dangerous, or even potentially heretical, individual: I shall argue
that she can still be read primarily as ‘ancestor’ and not as Catholic convert. Strikingly,
the text also belies anxiety about her public role in the Church during the period of
missionary exile. These are interrelated concerns, and in fact, I will argue that the comic
book’s careful presentation of Victoire as the inheritor of both European-Catholic and
ancestral-Malagasy lineages also allows the reader to come to a frankly shocking
conclusion: both Victoire and at least one of her ancestors can be read as priests.
But even less extreme-seeming points of the story allow for plural interpretations which point towards different relative positions of Malagasy and Catholic identities. For example, the opening pages of the book evoke the familiar trope of pre-Christian
Madagascar as a land of Old Testament prophecy. But, as the Old Testament analogy would also suggest, a more dangerous reading is available. In a sense, the beatification of
Victoire raises the question of “closing the canon.” And so, before moving forward to my analysis of the comic book, I will turn again to the idea of flou-idity, drawing on both
Pierre’s reading and the resources of early Christian scholarship.
Reading with flou-idity
Just as early Church debates of the continued value or necessity of Jewish practices ultimately concern not just decisions about internal practices but also about relationships with external groups, the re-valorization of someone who lived in a society called “pagan”81 ultimately forces a re-consideration of Malagasy traditions. In turn,
81 Marchand, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, 2. Grzelak 41
calling Victoire Rasoamanarivo the “fulfillment”82 of Malagasy tradition might seem to,
and could well be intended to, declare antecedent practices incomplete – until the arrival
of Christianity. But as Pierre’s own claim of present-tense “Hebrew” identity illustrated,
not every devotee of Victoire shares a forward-moving, teleological conception of time. I
will be using Pierre’s epistemological insights, specifically the critical language of flou-
iditiy, to read this story, not just for its narrative details, but for the analytical frames it
contains, suggests and seems to require.
For example, in my interview, it was clear that the book and Pierre’s version of it are two different things. They might even seem to be a double-paned window. Pierre was self-consciously offering himself as my window through to the hagiography. The hagiography offers itself as a window through to the holy person. Elizabeth Clark points out the futility of accessing “the holy woman” of early Christian history through hagiography; the holy woman lies irretrievably beyond the linguistic turn. For example, the seventy-page philosophical monologue attributed to Macrina in On the Soul and the
Resurrection, she argues, cannot possibly be Macrina’s own. Her brother is, instead,
“writing as a woman.”83 She is “a tool,” “a mouthpiece,” and “a shaming device.”84 It is
not difficult to present Pierre’s story as a parallel case. He self-consciously took on
Victoire’s voice, speaking for her in the first-person: “I was ashamed of what I had done.
I left and then returned to the church, and I set myself down on my knees.”85
82 Jean-Paul II, “Béatification De Victoire Rasoamanarivo à Antananarivo, Homélie De Jean-Paul II, 30 Avril 1989.” 83 Elizabeth A. Clark, “Holy Women, Holy Words: Early Christian Women, Social History, and the ‘Linguistic Turn’,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 3 (1998): 426. 84 Ibid. 425-429. 85 Pierre, interview by author, Nov. 4. Grzelak 42
But unlike Clark, my Malagasy interlocutors emphatically believe that Victoire
can be found in and through the text. Clark herself also admits that “While these texts
give us no such clear vision, the ‘holy woman’ leaves her ‘traces’ (as deconstructionists
like to say). Through an exploration of these ‘traces,’ as they are imbedded in a larger
social-linguistic framework and reflected through male eyes, she lingers on. “Afterlife”
comes in different forms— or so we should know from the study of Christian history and
theology.”86 What form of the “afterlife,” then, does Pierre’s narrative present? He offered the book as answer to the question, “Who is Victoire?” He did not offer it as a
living manifestation of the historical Victoire, but how else can her presence be in some
sense ‘real?’
“Real presence” is an undeniably salient concept in the Catholic context. What
could be more a thing, for example, than the Eucharist? Perhaps only Christ himself, “the
word made flesh.” This formulation is usually taken simply as an expression of Jesus’
earthly incarnation, but Cox Miller argues that for early Christians this phrase could
signify an ongoing process: “Techniques for picturing the conjunction of matter and spirit were premised on a conviction not only that the material world was suffused with divine presence, but also that matter could provide an intercessory conduit for human access to spiritual power.”87 With this in mind, interestingly, the late 2nd/early 3rd c. CE Christian
writer Origen provides a specific iteration of Clark’s search for the ‘traces’ of the holy
person: “Those who are capable of following the traces of Jesus when he goes up and is
transfigured in losing his terrestrial form will see the transfiguration in every part of
86 Clark, “Holy Women, Holy Words.” 430. 87 Miller, The Corporeal Imagination. 9. Grzelak 43
Scripture.”88 He concludes with an affirmation of the incarnational quality of the text,
“The word is made flesh eternally in the Scriptures in order to dwell among us.”89 The implications of word-as-flesh force a reconsideration of the earlier double-pane window analogy.
If Victoire is experienced as more than a historical figure, as rather a continued presence who dwells among us in the text, not only is it impossible to say that she is securely sealed-off on the other side of the glass, beyond the linguistic turn, it is impossible to say that the panes themselves are all that distinct, being that they are suffused with the same presence. Vicki Kirby poses this question in the context of literary theory, “What is writing when it is more than writing – when the familiar meaning of the word assumes such monstrous elasticity that it surrounds and invades everything, when it is everything, when there is no getting outside this ubiquitous text?”90 I cannot pretend to
even partially resolve that question here, but it first underlines the silliness of my initial
thought that the aim of my ethnographic work could somehow be divorced from my
interlocutors’ own desire to introduce me to Victoire through the text. As already
explored, Pierre’s narrative resists any framing that relies on the construction of distinct,
mutually exclusive entities, such as Blessed Victoire and ancestral Victoire. Supernatural
presences remain at work – prophetic flames illuminate the royal city and invisible eyes
stare at Victoire through the tabernacle – but they are both presented as response to the
question “Who is Victoire?” Both are necessary elements in explaining her trajectory.
What happens if I revisit Victoire’s story with attention to both the rhetorical creation of
88 Ibid. 30. 89 Ibid. 30. 90 Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 56. Grzelak 44
distinct things and to the fluidity between them implied by their shared relationship to
Victoire?
This is undeniably murky territory. Luckily, Pierre has, as Keller suggests,
provided resources for making sense of it. Pierre’s world must be understood in terms of
a double-consciousness that recognizes political realities but allows for ontological
creativity. As Long points out, however, “Such a procedure does not define a simple
dichotomy, for the to-day existence is in fact the oppressed’s labor – labor from which
their autonomy arises; therefore their own autonomy takes on a fictive character.”91
Otherwise put, just as the oppressors’ political hegemony does not completely annul the autonomy of the oppressed, the autonomy of the oppressed – however cleverly asserted – does not erase the oppressor from either political or mythic conceptions of reality. As
Long also highlights, double-consciousness does not simply allow the politically dominated to become the mythic dominator. The inappropriateness of “simple dichotomies” becomes readily apparent with the example of the comic book. I can, and initially did, read it as the production of the institutional Church, but its presence in the ethnographic field compels me to also consider it through a flou-id lens and to look for how the “oppressed’s labor” might disrupt the hegemony of the text.
But I am not searching to disrupt the hegemony of the text as an end in and of itself. Instead, recognizing both how the text might represent colonial interests and how imaginative readings of that text might subvert these interests can tell us how to deal with these same tensions in the postcolonial ethnographic field. Sociologist Avery Gordon, in harmony with Long, recognizes that “the power relations that characterize any historically embedded society are never as transparently clear as the names we give to
91 Long, Significations. 170. Grzelak 45
them imply.”92 In harmony with my own consideration of the holy woman in the
postcolonial context, she also seeks “what can represent systematic injury and the
remarkable lives made in the wake of the making of our social world,” and concludes,
“literary fictions play an important role in these cases for the simple reason that they
enable other kinds of sociological information to emerge.”93 She seeks something beyond
a social contextualization of literature, and more than the incorporation of literary theory
into sociological thought; she reveals how “a fiction [can read] like a sociological map…
an ethnography of sorts.”94 Sociology normally defines itself as studying the real;
literature, being fiction, falls outside its purview. Anthropological fieldwork likewise
takes the “real” as its concern. A rigorous consideration of the field has led to the
recognition of a double-consciousness that troubles the distinction between the fictive
and the real. In turn, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, the comic book, provides a single document where notions of real and fictive consciousness naturally come to bear. Not only can it be read as an “ethnography of sorts,” it very actively – both clearly making claims to non-fiction status and imagining a particular Malagasy past – adjudicates
between the observable realities of ‘to-day existence’ in Antananarivo and a variety of
creative ontological frames for that ‘to-day existence.’
The non-fiction comic book as ethnographic map
92 Avery Gordon, Ghostly matters haunting and the sociological imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 3. 93 Ibid. 25. 94 Ibid. 14. Grzelak 46
I have to admit that, while in Madagascar, I never imagined that I might subject
Victoire Rasoamanarivo, the comic book, to
serious analysis. My hours with Pierre, I thought,
were a sufficient trip into the world of
hagiography. I might have been curious about any
printed materials I encountered, but I was more
urgently interested in the personal stories of Pierre and the other Malagasy devotees with whom I spent each day. Luckily, my interviewees were persistent in pointing me towards the bookstore for information about Victoire, and I did leave the country with the aforementioned seemingly omnipresent comic book. As in the same way
Pierre’s guided reading provided resources for understanding his relationship with colonial history, this guided reading of comic book will provide a testing ground for the critical orientation sketched out in the previous chapter. Following
Gordon, Victoire Rasoamanarivo will serve as an
ethnographic map.
In fact, I would suggest that the comic book is, in many ways, an ethnographic
enterprise parallel to my own. Just as I do, the author of the comic book amasses details
about Victoire’s history and cult and sequences them in a way that requires a certain Grzelak 47
amount of gap-filling and imagination. The cartoonist was not there for the event she
describes on page one. She declares, “Voici la petite Rasoamanarivo en 1855,”95 but the reader cannot look into 1855. She imagines the entire event, but still instructs the reader:
“Look, here is the little Rasoamanarivo in 1855, underneath the Jacaranda tree of her childhood home.” I do not mean to use ‘imagine’ here pejoratively. She imagines
Victoire standing underneath the Jacaranda tree. This seems plausible. Not only are
Jacaranda trees common in Antananarivo, Victoire’s childhood home still stands and one can see the specific tree outside of it. It would seem reasonable to imagine her standing underneath it at some point. And though I do not personally know what kind of dress
Victoire wore, the author’s imagination also seems reasonable.
That said, I am not beholden to simply accept all the author wants to present as reality; in fact, it has been my own ethnographic background that allows me to point to statements in the text that warrant attention to flou-idity. Most readers of Victoire
Rasoamanarivo have recourse to a similar guess-and-check strategy. Simply put, the comic book circulates mainly among those who have also walked through, or perhaps lived in, the neighborhood in which it is set; an in-the-field knowledge of Antananarivo is assumed. So, as much as the author exercises a certain amount of agency in arranging these materials towards her own ends, the reader – in bringing his or her own foreknowledge of Victoire’s story and circumstances to the text, and because the author has created the text with this awareness in mind – also has a lot of leeway to read the text creatively. Furthermore, these readers are most often antecedently part of the same cultic community; simply through discussing and disseminating the text, readers loosen the author’s apparent grip.
95 Marchand, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, 3. Grzelak 48
Following from this, I will not be drawing upon the admittedly great wealth of
contemporary scholarship on graphic novels. Much study of the western graphic novel
focuses on the intentionality of the form. Rhetorically, much of it also opposes itself to
the assumption that the comic book is kids’ stuff.96 Both of these orientations are
inappropriate in the case of the Malagasy comic book. The association of the text-and-
images format with children’s literature is not embedded in Malagasy society. Victoire
Rasoamanarivo is not the only notable woman whose life has been immortalized in comic-book form. After one lecture I attended while in Antananarivo, the instructor offered copies of her own biographical comic for sale to a class of twenty-something students. Tellingly, the comic book was also rarely referred to as such. Usually, it was not une bande-dessiné but un livre. In fact, every time an interviewee told me I should read
“the book about Victoire” I hoped that they could help me locate a more serious text.97
Every time, I soon realized that they were referring to the comic I already owned. This is not to say that the comic book format is particularly prestigious in the Malagasy context; rather, it simply does not connote juvenileness.
At roughly $1.50 USD, it is a significantly less expensive than, say, a paperback scholarly text which in Antananarivo can go for something around $100 USD – especially in the context of the Malagasy GDP per capita, which hovers in the $900-1,000
USD range.98 But, in context, $1.50 USD is still not cheap; rather, it is accessible.
Furthermore, the great value accorded to the book in the field indicates that it is not seen
96 Of course, not all comic-book scholarship does this; see, for example, Understanding Comic by Scott McCloud (1993). 97 Hagiographies without pictures do exist, but even the central Catholic bookstore in Tana does not carry them. I had to return to the U.S. and use interlibrary loan to locate them. In a larger project, they would certainly also warrant analysis, but they are frankly not all that relevant to the ethnographic field, as they are largely unknown and unavailable. 98 “CIA - The World Factbook,” accessed January 13, 2013, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the- world-factbook/geos/ma.html. Grzelak 49
as cheaply assembled, conceived or constructed. The comic book format reflects not just
pragmatic pricing concerns, but the reality of inconsistent literacy rates even among those
who could purchase Victoire Rasoamanarivo. Otherwise put, it is inappropriate to say
that the graphic format is ‘intentional’ in the same way that a “graphic novel” uses its
genre ‘intentionally.’ Sister Marie Reine Marchand, who wrote the images and the text,
was not a graphic novelist by vocation; she was a French missionary nun. Her creation of
a graphic hagiography was certainly not accidental, but the formal analysis techniques of
contemporary graphic novel scholarship will not be the most useful lens for separating
the multiple voices present in Marchand’s work.
To be concrete, Victoire Rasoamanarivo sports a number of typographical and
visual quirks; I will illustrate how these seem less so the deliberate choices of a single
artist and more the result of the ecclesiastical publishing process, of revision with specific
attention to discouraging dangerous readings. The comic presents a literal collage of
materials from an array of sources. Even without making much effort at a critical reading,
one notices that snatches of text echo and paraphrase other sources. Among other stylistic quirks, the comic book features contemporary photos pasted into cartoon renderings of
Antananarivo. Thus, I shall explore what now seems to be obvious and not-so-well- hidden, namely the way in which the parts of Victoire’s story that come from different authors (for example, those in quotations and those in speech bubbles) can be read as having their own agencies. The comic book – with its self-effaced author, its clear
contextualization in the political goals of a male hierarchy, and a number of missing
quotation marks – already presents as an unstable, flou-id text. My goal in reading it is to Grzelak 50
take seriously exactly what my informants suggested – that I might be able to discover
something about Victoire in the comic book.
That said, my suspicion towards the comic book was justified. The introduction to
the comic book bore the seal of “his eminence, the Cardinal.”99 His prefatory remarks
declared flatly that Victoire was “a witness” in the “shadows of paganism.”100 With this
set-up, it seemed unlikely that the text would address the pre-Christian past with the level
of nuance and complexity I had learned to appreciate in my interviewees’ responses.
While in Madagascar, I put my lay informants’ suggestion that I read Victoire
Rasoamanarivo, the comic book, in the same category as I put their insistence that I might be better served talking to a priest. Closer examination seemed to only confirm the comic book’s irrelevance to any exploration of lay agency in large part because the seal and the introduction were followed by an official imprimatur.
I first read ‘imprimatur’ as a ‘seal of approval’ from the Catholic hierarchy. In the midst of a messy ethnographic field, with several voices claiming the official position of the Church, this seemed like a point of clarity; I further took the imprimatur-granting cardinal’s introduction to the text as an even stronger claim of this text’s uncomplicated status vis-à-vis the Catholic hierarchy. It also seemed to help me make sense of the apparent puzzle presented by worshippers at the site pointing me towards this text. Again, why would they literally point me away from Victoire’s bodily presence and towards her textual representation? Cynically, I reasoned, it was because the comic book presented the least dangerous, most canonical-seeming reading available. This re-examination of my ethnographic work has, in general, sought to take more seriously exactly the sort of
99 Marchand, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, 2. 100 Ibid. Grzelak 51
claims I quickly (and cynically) dismissed, but my reading of the comic book very
concretely deserves revision because my initial interpretation of the imprimatur was
wrong. A more nuanced reading of the imprimatur will necessarily lead to a more nuanced reading of Victoire Rasoamanarivo.
The word imprimatur retains its Latin meaning – “let it be printed” – in Catholic law to a greater degree than it does in journalism, for example.101 (A quick scan of
current headlines reveals that, among other things, the imprimatur of a championship win has “capped” a racehorse’s season.) Bishops have “have the duty and the right to condemn writings which harm true faith or good morals;”102 their imprimatur can only strictly be taken as the evaluation that this book does not actively “harm true faith or good morals.” But it is not positive endorsement, and this alone disrupts any framing of
Victoire Rasoamanarivo as an ‘official’ document. At the same time, the imprimatur
indicates that the text has been officially vetted. It was not necessarily produced as the result, or along the lines, of the Cardinal’s dictates but it did have to pass his (or his agents’) editorial approval. It now seems obvious that a text with has explicitly passed through the hands of censors should warrant suspicion, especially when it comes to its self-presentation as a single narrative.
This is not a new problem in the study of religion, and so I will now turn – as often suggested by my Malagasy interlocutors – to early Christian resources for comparative cases. Patristic texts share in common with the comic book a plurality of sources, a variety of potential readings, and a definite effort on the part of the author(s) to flatten those multiplicities into a single narrative. Elizabeth Clark views the simultaneous
101 Can. 822-832. 102 Can 823, §1. Grzelak 52
presentation of commentary and source as, following Roland Barthes, a “tissue of
quotations.”103 The source and commentary are not presented side-by-side in hermetically-sealed packages; their simple juxtaposition belies a narrative agenda. This
concept seems equally, if not more so, applicable to Victoire Rasoamanarivo, the comic
book – a text that explicitly and implicitly quotes (with a dizzying array of ambiguous quotation formats, including speech bubbles) historical sources, presenting them in cartoon synthesis.
Unlike most comics, the pages of Victoire Rasoamanarivo carry citations and
time-stamps. In the patristic context, Clark also notes various strategies used to indicate
factuality, suggesting that the more detailed the narrative, the more it warrants suspicion:
“To put the matter more bluntly: the very details that social historians argue give veracity
to a text are here repositioned as a creative artist's attempt to create an illusory reality in
the reader's imagination.”104 If we follow Clark’s conclusion, which like Chidester’s,
would seem to be quite pessimistic, we must deduce that Victoire Rasoamanarivo, the
comic book, does not present Victoire Rasoamanarivo, the holy woman. But Clark, also
like Chidester, offers a way out, ultimately stating that the ‘traces’ of the holy woman
live on “embedded in a larger social-linguistic framework and reflected through male
eyes.”105 I have already discussed this concern in terms of thing theory – the window through to Victoire is a cloudy thing. Clark’s exhortation to scrutinize truth claims will
certainly guide my re-reading of Victoire Rasoamanarivo, but rather than looking for
‘traces,’ I will be paying attention to the thinginess of those exact moments.
103 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 53. 104 Clark, “Holy Women, Holy Words,” 420. 105 Ibid, 430. Grzelak 53
The missionary project in Madagascar seeks to reframe parts of the Malagasy past
– respect for the ancestors, for example – that may be difficult to reconcile with Catholic
theology. Elizabeth Clark points out that patristic writers also had to deal with what they
saw as a partially-problematic, partially-valuable past, notably in relationship to
Jewishness; they sought to reframe “an apparently ‘underasceticized’ Hebrew past.”106
Clark sees patristic commentaries on Old Testament texts as repainting the God who called his people ‘to go forth and multiply’ as a God calling his people to monastic dedication. In a parallel move, Victoire is valorized for fidelity to marriage despite her family’s insistence that she could find another husband; her position on marriage is simultaneously recast as both more authentically Malagasy and more authentically
Catholic than that offered by the Protestant members of the royal family.
Simultaneously, she is equally valorized for her ties to the royal family. All of this is to say that, again, the comic book puts on display an interconnected system of fluidities and attempts to affirm and define them in particular ways – Victoire should seem
Malagasy and noble and committed to her marriage in ways that serve a Catholic catechetical end. The intended lesson is clear – the contemporary Malagasy Catholic should reject divorce and “idolatry,” as the Cardinal states Victoire does. Nonetheless, the clarity of that intention belies a worry that Victoire’s story might well suggest the contrary. Victoire’s story also contains an assertion of female autonomy and an insistence upon the wisdom of the ancestors – issues that are only thingier. The institutional
Church’s positions on divorce and idolatry are clearly negative, but it has a more complicated interest in promoting laywomen and ‘traditional values.’ Fittingly, though
106 Elizabeth A Clark, Reading renunciation : asceticism and Scripture in early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 177. Grzelak 54
marital fidelity was explicitly cited as one of Victoire’s primary virtues on the occasion
of her beatification, most of the comic’s narrative focuses on these thingier aspects of her
biography; they have, comparatively, ‘excess’ rhetoric surrounding them. I will argue that
the comic’s detailed presentations of both Victoire’s ancestry and of her public life are, at
once, narratives intentionally constructed to reinforce mission ideals and openings for
potentially dangerous readings. Both Victoire and her kingly ancestor
Andrianampoinimerina can be both viewed in ways that are distinctly priestly; looking at
them thusly does not merely provide a provocative counterpoint to the text’s seeming
canonicity, it permits a thorough exploration of the intersecting Catholic and Malagasy
identities.
Grzelak 55
Andrianampoinimerina as priest
The comic book strictly observes Malagasy tradition in its first pages; it spends a substantial amount of time on Victoire’s genealogy. It gives the traditional introduction that Pierre’s story lacks. Just as it was telling that Pierre instead began his story with the beatification, it is telling that this version of the story begins not with Victoire’s birth, but with a story about her own ancestors. Again, the missionary project has in interest in presenting Victoire’s life as the teleological conclusion of a pagan history; for this reason,
a cardinal could very easily read this foregrounding of Malagasy tradition and find no
problem with it. That said, Pierre has already illustrated that the Malagasy reader need not read time teleologically, and so, the Church’s eventual approval of Victoire can also be read as an endorsement of all of her ancestral stock.
Above, we see – on the left – Victoire’s great-grandfather, Andriantsilavo. On the right is the famed Merina king, Andrianampoinimerina. I will argue it is possible to read the latter in this scene as both prophet and priest. The former reading falls in line with the colonial depiction of pre-Christian Malagasy ancestor veneration as praeparatio evangelica, whereas the latter allows for a messier flou-idity that blurs the lines between the Catholic saints’ and Malagasy ancestral cults.
That Andrianampoinimerina speaks French is an obvious, but not insignificant, anachronistic flou-idity. In fact, the Malagasy version of the text indicates that the French version is the original. Andrianampoinimerina’s speech had to be translated into
Malagasy. What he says, “Blessed are you and your descendants! Among them will be the glory of this kingdom, of this people,” is striking for many reasons. The phrase Grzelak 56
“Blessed are you” (and in its French iterations bénis soyez-vous and bénis sois-tu) also has currency in the Catholic context, appearing in the text of the mass and in popular biblical passages, like the beatitudes. Furthermore, the blessing of descendants, and of a
kingdom, recalls Pierre’s suggestion that Malagasy ancestral veneration is somehow Old
Testament in character. As much as the king’s proclamation is blessing, it also would
seem to be prophecy – “the glory of this people” will descend from Andriantsilavo. In the
context of a Victoire-Rasoamanarivo comic book, the referent of “the glory of this
kingdom” is clear. It is a foregone conclusion that Andrianampoinimerina’s prophecy is
efficacious.
The way in which this allows for re-reading of pre-missionary Malagasy politics
as a prelude to Victoire’s birth certainly could be intended to give gravitas to the story of
her life, but this is not the only possible reading. Andriantislavo earns
Andrianampoinimerina’s trust because of his role in the coup that elevates him to the
throne. In other words, Andrianampoinimerina chooses Andriantislavo based on his
specific loyalties in pre-Christian politics. As much as Andrianampoinimerina can be
read as pointing towards Victoire’s eventual rise to prominence, he can also be read as
causing it. Either way, the accuracy of Andrianampoinimerina’s prediction poses
problems for any worldview that might want to keep the idea of an efficacious Malagasy
ancestral cult firmly in the pre-Christian era.
It begs a question with heavy implications – if Andrianampoinimerina’s
prediction was effective enough, or his wish powerful enough, to either divine or cause
Victoire’s coming, why stop believing in his power? Or, as one Franco-Malagasy team of
social scientists asked, “Why does the advent of Christianity mean the end of Grzelak 57
prophecy?”107 This concern also resonates with much of Christian history, to name only a
few examples, with the closing of the Biblical canon, discussions of the relevance of
Jewish law to Christian life, controversies surrounding post-Pentecost charismatic practice. This question also pervades Madagascar’s postcolonial quest for ancestral
heroes. The Merina monarchs who descend from Andrianampoinimerina, those in most
recent memory, took clear positions on both missionary and colonial intrusion.
Ranavalona, the queen who successfully expulsed all Europeans from the highlands and
staved off colonial domination, is an evidently pro-independence figure. She, having sent
everyone “Christianly baptized”108 to death, is also an evidently anti-Church one. Pierre
explained that Radama, who preceded her, let missionaries in because he was “for the
ideas of the English, of the French, of civilization.”109 The difficulty of separating
mission-izing and colonizing reflects the very practical reality that not only did traders
prepare the way for missionaries (and vice-versa) but that each could appear to be the
other depending on the context. The first Catholic mass was celebrated at the Malagasy
capital by a Fr. Finaz who had only been admitted to the royal environs on the pretext
that he was Mr. Hervier, the secretary to another trader.110
Andrianampoinimerina never actually interacted with any Christians but united the Merina kingdom immediately before sustained European contact. Other scholars of contemporary Malagasy religion and culture have argued that the particular elevation
“par excellence” of Andrianampoinimerina as pre-Christian “mediator between God and the Malagasy” minimizes the problem of reconciling a sometimes anti-Christian
107 Malanjaona Rakotomalala, Sophie Blanchy, and Françoise Raison-Jourde, Usages sociaux du religieux sur les Hautes-Terres malgaches: les ancêtres au quotidien (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2001), 138. 108 Marchand, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, 1848-1894. 17. 109 Pierre, Interview by author, Nov. 4. 110 Marchand, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, 23. Grzelak 58
traditionalist monarchy with a sometimes pro-Christian pro-colonial one. It has been
argued that “it allows side-stepping of the major contradiction between Merina culture
and Christianity in showing not only that one can remain Christian while returning to a purer tradition, but that conversion was itself this movement, inside of Merina society, of
turning again towards a past purity and perfection and not a rupture under foreign
influence.”111 This recalls the slippery usages of the term zanahary. For example, if one
reads zanahary as singular God, then monotheism, even Christian monotheism, could be
presented as a more authentic option than folk polytheism.
The comic book positions Victoire as an ancestor, condensing the lineage of
nobles between Andrianampoinimerina and Victoire into a single frame; it establishes a link that is far more direct than a more detailed genealogy might suggest. (One of the longer-form French language hagiographies, for example, says the Victoire is not even properly speaking “noble” as her family only became notable through the action of
Andriantsilavo.112) The simplification of Victoire’s family tree, something we also see
Pierre enacting, though in different ways with different ends, reflects an endorsement of
one sort of temporal flou-idity over another. Actual assertions of Malagasy political
independence, like Ranavalona’s, do not bear Andrianampoinimerina’s endorsement, but
Victoire’s cooperation with European missionaries does.
But this move does not eliminate the possibility of other fluidities. What gives
Andrianampoinimerina this particular power to predict, or even choose, who accepts the
dual mantles of Christianity and true Malagasy tradition? It ultimately may not be the text
111 Rakotomalala, Blanchy, and Raison-Jourde, Usages sociaux du religieux sur les Hautes-Terres malgaches, 138. 112 Étienne Fourcadier, La Vie Héroïque De Victoire Rasoamanarivo (Paris : Dillen / Procure de la mission de Madagascar), 9. Grzelak 59
of Andrianampoinimerina’s prophecy that is the most strikingly Christian-seeming part of this depiction of pre-Christian Madagascar. Rather it may be the gesture depicted:
Andrianampoinimerina lays his hands on Andriantislavo. The laying-on-of-hands is
reprised twice more in the book. These episodes are, on one hand, a clear attempt to
establish ‘good’ flou-idity; simply put, the more Andrianampoinimerina looks like a
Christian, the less one has to feel like one is abandoning tradition in adopting
Catholicism. On the other hand, the sequence of benedictions opens up the possibility that God’s favor is literally passed back and forth between Malagasy and European figures; the fact that the final blessing lands on a Malagasy laywoman could have radical implications, but, as we will see, the framing of these events actively minimizes that possibility (ironically, of course, drawing my attention to it).
Below, Victoire receives the sacrament of confirmation – she is imbued with the exact virtues for which she will later be lauded, those qualities that make her “the glory of her people.” Reading the first scene with this scene in mind makes
Andrianampoinimerina’s role even more complicated. He speaks like a prophet, but acts like a priest. The ancestral king has been replaced by the European cleric. But an ambiguity remains: is the Malagasy reader supposed to think that the benediction pictured here is more, or less, or equally, or differently efficacious from Andrianapoinimerina’s?
Like Clark’s early Church texts, this comic book places ‘Old’ and ‘New’ in one narrative.
The second scene, it should be noted, bears a time-stamp – which at least places it in a different temporal realm from the first scene that takes place in a mistier ancestral period.
But in isolation, the frames themselves give little indication of authorial intent, and such a Grzelak 60 question might ultimately be unanswerable. But it remains relevant to the rest of the comic book’s story.
Grzelak 61
Victoire as priest
The laying-on-of-hands scene is reprised a third-time, landing again on Victoire’s
head. It is, at once, a transmission of the same ancestral blessing – a direct tying of
Andrianapoinimerina’s commission to her eventual notability – and a signal of her unique
role in Malagasy Catholic life. Perhaps most strikingly, as a second (and post-
Confirmation) laying-on-of-hands, it invites comparison to priestly ordination.
Considering the heavy and many implications of such a comparison, it makes sense that
the comic book does a lot to prepare the reader for this moment. The gesture is not only
visually anticipated with Victoire’s confirmation and Andrianampoinimerina’s prophecy,
but also directly alluded to on the first page of the comic book. Grzelak 62
Cardinal Razafimahatratra’s introduction to the text encloses the words of
colonial-era missionary in quotes: “Père Casséque confided a great mission to Victoire in
these terms: ‘Victoire, when Jesus ascended into heaven, Mary, his mother, stayed on
Earth to encourage and support the apostles and the first Christians. Therefore, in the
absence of missionaries, you must be the guardian angel of the Catholic mission and the
support of the faithful.” More or less the same text re-appears later in a speech bubble.
This revised edition shows much attention to narrowing down the available range of
readings; Victoire, at the same time she is elevated is placed under a glass ceiling.
In the second presentation of the quote, “Jésus” becomes “Le seigneur Jésus.”
Jesus is qualified as seigneur, as Lord. “Aussi, en l’absence des missionaries” becomes
“Ainsi, durant l’absence des missionaries.” The first statement is that “therefore” Victoire takes on this role when the missionaries are absent; the implication is causal – she takes on this role because the missionaries are gone. The “durant” of the second statement indicates a particular period of time “during” which the missionaries are gone, along with the “ainsi,” reframes the second clause a corollary condition. In the second presentation,
Victoire becomes the “guardian angel” more so because the priest tells her she will be than because of any antecedent conditions. Finally, “Devez-vous être l’ange gardien” becomes “Tu dois être ici l’ange gardien.” The priest now uses the tu form, while
Victoire continues to use vous with clergy in the text – as a student might use with a teacher. Finally, her role is specified to something that takes place ici, here, restrictively.
So, while the visual aspects of the frame might suggest that Victoire is commissioned in much the same way as Andrianampoinimerina, this re-writing of what would effectively be the commissioning speech emphasizes the verticality of the Grzelak 63
relationship between Victoire, God and Church. If Victoire is addressed as vous, is not
restricted to ici, the priest could seem to even recognizing her saintliness during her
lifetime; the use of familiar forms of address and the emphasis placed on the
conditionality of her role, on the other hand, suggest that Victoire’s public role is
permissible because of circumstance. This also seems to be an acknowledgement of the
sacerdotal-seeming nature of Victoire’s commission. Handing leadership over to a
Malagasy laywoman could be a revolutionary move, but the transference of sacramental
powers to the layperson – under certain circumstances – follows precedent.113
Nevertheless, both renderings of the speech allow for some unexpected readings.
Jesus is dramatically equated with the missionary presence, but Victoire is somehow installed as mother. Even more radically, in this reading, Mary “stays on earth” to fulfill a mission. Though it might be a strictly maternal vocation “to encourage and support the apostles,” and though Victoire’s role is shifted to a not-exactly equivalent post as
“guardian angel of the Catholic mission and support of the faithful,” this parallelism rests on a uniquely active Marian theology and a radical transtemporality. With this second characteristic in mind, it is perhaps telling that another time-stamp prosaically marks the upper-left corner of the frame. According to the date listed, this all occurred on May 30th,
1883 at 11a.m. While such specificity can be read as a general claim to non-fiction, its
placement is important. This device, not used throughout, appears suddenly in a scene
where time is otherwise being dealt with fluidly. While the Cardinal presents Père
Casséque’s quote as a particular piece of evidence of Victoire’s saintliness, the time-
stamp here places it (a statement which is corroborated in other hagiographical texts114)
113 Can. 861 §2. 114 See Fourcadier, La Vie Héroïque De Victoire Rasoamanarivo. Grzelak 64
on equal footing with all the other statements on the page (including Victoire’s sartorial
choices). The fuzzy church backdrop perhaps makes little difference to the meaning of
the passage, but the other words placed in speech bubbles do.
Victoire’s power is given specific, pragmatic causes. The exchange is un- mystical. “Daughter of the Prime Minister and pious woman that you are,” says the priest, “You can do a lot for them.”
“Father, I cannot do anything big, but I will do all that I can,” says Victoire.
The text in the frame above would seem to continue this sensible outline – the priest talks about the formation of a Catholic Union (again, to be kept up during the
absence of missionaries). But the image tells a different story – the priest is not just
informing Victoire of a political maneuver. At the very least, he is raising his hand in
blessing, but Victoire’s bowed head would seem to indicate (beyond her active reception
of the blessing) that he is about the place his hand on her hand, recalling sacramental Grzelak 65 confirmation (which includes the laying on of hands) or ordination (in which the laying on of hands is not just a feature, but the act that establishes the efficacy of the rite). The
Catholic Union, also, seems to be given a sacramental quality. Père Casséque here states,
“The spirit of the Lord will be will you. Be united; be brothers. Maintain the association and nothing will tear you apart.”
Of course, the explicitly gendered frères is a striking choice; a woman is being installed as the chief of a brotherhood. Accordingly, a lot would seem to ride on the hanging quotation mark after that statement. The speech bubble concludes with a more typical blessing – and the quotation mark would seem to somehow mark it as a separate statement. But it is still fundamentally unclear what the author intends with a single quotation mark – does everything before the quotation mark come from a journal or some other quotable source? Is what comes after, which falls outside of the bubble, a later addition? The ordination-like gesture certainly opens up a potentially dangerous reading for the Catholic hierarchy. Has the priesthood been passed from Andrianapoinamerina to
European missionaries to Victoire? The paragraph before the quotation would seem to give a sacerdotal weight to the gesture; the sentence that comes after would seem to explain it away as a simple blessing. Grzelak 66
Interestingly, the speech bubble at the bottom of the frame, unattached to any
voice except the narrator’s, would seem to anticipate this ambiguity: “If heaven has confided a great mission to Victoire, it is because Victoire already caught the eye of
heaven with the heroism of her virtues.” This statement does not diminish the cosmic
scale of the act on the page. Heaven, represented by the priest, gives Victoire a mission.
But it is immediately explained that this is the result, not of a sacramental moment, but of
Victoire’s character. Still, the phrase “heroism of her virtues” is ambiguous.
Locating either “heroism” or “virtue” alone as the cause would both indicate
different schemes of volition. If her heroism alone had caught heaven’s eye, it would
imply that she earned God’s grace – this is a less-dangerous option in that it removes the
possibility that Andrianampoinimerina’s blessing has been the cause of her holiness, but
it is a more-dangerous option in that it places a great deal of cosmic power in Victoire’s
hands and skates dangerously close to a conception of grace by works alone. If her virtue
alone had caught heaven’s eye, it would imply that God’s grace was gifted on her
because of her character – which is attractive in that it makes her story more
“exceptional.” Much effort is expended in the scenes above and other episodes to make it
clear that Victoire steps into a leadership role because of the emergency caused by
Merina anti-colonial action. But, there is the strong possibility that her inborn character
would be popularly tied to her nobility in a way that may not be attractive to the
missionizing establishment. Making sense of the combination phrase, “heroism of her
virtues,” requires a more complex notion of will.
A reading of comic book alone, even in context and with reference to Pierre’s rich
narrative, does not provide an adequately supple conception of agency to even begin to Grzelak 67
make sense of how Victoire might have gained or exercise her apparent powers. If
anything is perfectly clear, it is that prematurely declaring an interpretation of such a
potentially hard-to-pin-down aspect of Victoire’s story would be about as satisfying as
comic’s disembodied voice explaining away her quasi-ordination in the first place. What this reading of the comic book has accomplished is a further exploration of the implications of the flou-idities Pierre brought to our attention. A lot (including, for example, the question of the redemptive value of the Malagasy ancestor cult) rides on how one reads the constantly invoked relationships between post- and pre-mission figures. It has established, I hope, what is at stake in Victoire’s biography – a turn away from biography will ultimately help explain how and why Victoire’s devotees pray in this seemingly tense ethnographic field. I was pointed towards the text as a place to meet
Victoire, but not only there, and in fact, it is highly unlikely that anyone’s first meeting with Victoire would take place through Pierre or through the book. Most often, people claim to meet Victoire herself through miracles – and in this mess of potential readings, a miracle could well be what is necessary. Grzelak 68
Chapter Three: Rosette
I thought I was done with my fieldwork. I had the last interview I thought I
needed. I was ready to collect my notes and write them out. But as I was packing up,
Jeanette told me to come back to the same spot at daybreak. Her friend, Rosette, had a
miracle to tell me about.
Rosette started her story without introduction. She guessed correctly that I was the
vahaza115 she was supposed to meet, and began: “My testimony – I am a civil servant, so
was my husband. We worked together in the Ministry of Finance. And my husband…,”
she paused and made a few gestures. He liked, she explained, “to go out with girls.”116
“He was a big drinker,” she said,” “But that didn’t bother me. Really I couldn’t have cared less, just like with Victoire and Radjika.” Her reference was to Victoire’s relationship with her own adulterous husband; among Victoire’s virtues cited by Pope
John Paul II was her ‘patient’ commitment to marriage.117 A little later, she also pointed out that her upbringing was also just like Victoire’s; both came from a Protestant family
but went to Catholic schools.
“One day,” she continued, “Victoire m’a soufflé to pray the novena – not so that
he’ll change, but for the children and for me.”118 I leave m’a soufflé un-translated because, like flou, its range of meanings will ultimately help make sense of the story. For the moment, though, I am going to note that m’a soufflé is not a common French
115 In Chapter One, I discussed the multiple potential meanings of the word vahaza; here, suffice it to say that it can mean “white” and was what was I was called several times a day (with no malice) as I lived my life in Tana. 116 Interview by author with Rosette outside of Victoire’s chapel in Andohalo, Antananarivo, November 17, 2011. 117 Jean-Paul II, “Béatification De Victoire Rasoamanarivo à Antananarivo, Homélie De Jean-Paul II, 30 Avril 1989.” 118 Rosette, interview by author, Nov. 17. Grzelak 69
construction and that it initially made about as much sense to me as it currently makes to
the current reader (regardless of his or her knowledge of French).
On the ninth day of the novena, a set nine-day prayer sequence, Rosette went
downtown to run an errand. Her husband worked, she said, “just around the corner. I saw
his little mistress. It was a big family scandal. He chose to protect the girl and not me.”119
“But that day,” she said, “He fell very ill – a man’s illness, you know?”120 She
gave him a certain sum of money, and told him to go recuperate in Menakara, the coastal
city he was born in, where his parents could take care of him.
“He was very, very sick” in Menakara, she said, “He came back with all the gris-
gris possible.”121 Gris-gris is a catch-all term for bewitched objects and charms; its etymology is unclear, and its use is spread across the Francophone world; American readers often encounter it in the context of Vodou.
Rosette recounted that, immediately upon returning from the coast, her husband found a portrait of Victoire she had hung in the house and said, “I will destroy that.”
“Destroy it if you dare,” she responded.
“It’s the cause of my illness,” he replied.122
She ended the argument about the picture and said, “I will not take care of you if
you don’t come with me to [Victoire’s] chapel.”123 He said he would go if they could take
a taxi there. She agreed and took a vacation day from work.
119 Ibid. I admit that this explanation is a little disjointed. Did the mistress also work at the ministry? What does it mean that her husband “protected” the girl? In the interview, it seemed clear that Rosette wanted to communicate the basics – that her husband had cheated on her – without dwelling on the details of that particular day. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. Grzelak 70
It was a busy day at the chapel, she said, “There were a lot of people there. I said
to the others, ‘We are going to do an act of contrition.’ We prayed the rosary, the
sorrowful mysteries.” She made her husband hold two candles. “When we finished,” she
said, “I said to Victoire, ‘Voilà, your man!’”124
After this, she said, “His sickness got worse. He stank.”125 She called their doctor.
She told him to go to the hospital. He refused.
“I have a spiritual father,” a priest she regularly consulted, she explained, “I said,
‘SOS, my father!’ The priest came with all the sacraments.” Her husband accepted them;
then, he died.126
“The months before his death, he went to mass,” Rosette concluded, “Voilà, the
work of Victoire.”127
Of course, this story begs the question: what, exactly, was the work of Victoire?
Rosette is, in many ways, the main actor in her own narrative. She sends her husband off to the coast; she brings him to the chapel. Despite Rosette’s claim that her prayer was not to change her husband, but more ambiguously, ‘for the children and for herself,’ her husband’s behavior does seem to change in exactly the way she wanted. Rosette did not seem unhappy about her husband’s death. There is the suggestion that she, having funded his trip home and worked at the same government office, is financially independent. It would not be difficult, therefore, to read Victoire as a strictly rhetorical entity, as a by- word for a sort of self-liberation that would otherwise be unspeakable in Antananarivo.
124Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. Grzelak 71
This reading is obviously attractive because of the control it would seem to give
Rosette over her own life. Yet, at the same time that it would give her a certain kind of
agency, this interpretation would also take it away. Her telling of the story would become
a clever fiction. This type of analysis skates dangerously close to ‘deprivation theories’ of women’s religiosity. Rosette, seen through such a lens, turns to Victoire because she has no other options. An independent, Western agent with recourse to divorce, presumably, would not. Such an explanation is dissatisfying in large part because it functionally
ignores Rosette’s actual social position. Broadly, Rosette’s caste identity would make her
the social better of her husband. When she mentioned his coastal hometown, she pointed
out that she and her husband were from different ethnic groups, cross-ethnic marriages
not being very common even in multi-ethnic Antananarivo. She called herself “hova,” the colonial-era term for those whose ancestors are from the capital region.
The way in which she compares herself to Victoire further underlines Rosette’s understanding of herself as a powerful actor in her marriage. A crucial part of Victoire’s biography is that she was, because of her husband’s alcoholism and adultery, encouraged to divorce him by her Protestant family members.128 Instead, she refused and used her
married state as authorization for setting herself up as head of an independent household with a largely absentee husband. Rosette’s claim to be ‘like Victoire’ indicates, not just the offensiveness of the ‘deprivation’ model, but its inapplicability. Rosette is both a government employee of high social standing and someone who insists that Victoire acted on her behalf (not simply as a role model) in dealing with a difficult marriage.
Even more fundamentally, any telling of Rosette’s story that makes ‘the miracle’ not the work of Victoire, but solely the work of Rosette, ignores the very resources
128 Marchand, Victoire Rasoamanarivo, 86-87. Grzelak 72
Rosette gives to make the story comprehensible. Rosette, for all she might be construed more as a bounded, self-willing agent, uses an entirely different conception of agency in her descriptions of herself and others. Insistence upon seeing the ethnographic field in terms of the Enlightenment ideal of the individual as autonomous precludes a response to the question of what is miraculous in the death of Rosette’s husband from a sexually- transmitted infection. As with Pierre, I am now going to take seriously the parts of
Rosette’s story I initially understood least – not merely as a gesture of respect, but because I believe she gives her own theoretical tools which I would be foolish to ignore.
Rosette has been grappling with the question of her own agency in the postcolonial context for much longer than I have been.129
Souffler: Inspiration, Respiration and Instrumental Agency
The very beginning of Rosette’s story – the moment she chose as the setting-off point for the miracle she would recount – raises the question of causality. “One day,
Victoire m’a soufflé to pray the novena,” said Rosette. Souffler means, most directly, to blow. “Victoire blew on me to pray the novena,” of course, makes little sense in English.
Inspire might be a better choice, but souffler foregrounds its physical etymology. Souffler is breathier than inspiration. Furthermore, the term obviously suggests an exhalation, rather than an inspiration. Souffler can just as easily mean to whisper, suggest, or prompt.
In theater, a souffleur is someone who sits just off-stage, ready to give a lost actor his or her cue. It is clear that Rosette too, is in some sense, taking her cue from Victoire, but how does she imagine this cue was transmitted?
129 See Keller, The Hammer and the Flute, 97. Grzelak 73
Again, a turn to scholarship on early Christianity is illuminating. Denise Buell notes the complexity of breath-language in biblical and other ancient texts, finding
“pneumatic interaction used to construe the human as an entity formed and transformed through relational interactions.”130 Genesis 2, for example, portrays God breathing life into man. What exactly God breathes is often glossed in English as “breath of life” (NIV,
RSV, KJV), but in Greek sources is called “pneuma,” and in Hebrew sources is called,
“ruah.” The two latter terms can also mean “spirit.” This idea of a physical-spiritual breath highlights two compelling points for this ethnographic account. As Buell states, first, “Breath turns out to be its own kind of shifting, materially complex agency,” and second, “pneuma appears textually as breath but is also distinguishable as a special material agency that may travel through the air or by other means.” Rosette, then, would seem not be using souffler as an analogical expression; rather it signifies a mutual interaction in a pneumatic relationship. A simple causal chain does not easily fit Rosette’s narrative; simply acknowledging Rosette’s claim of supernatural intervention is not enough.
To be more concrete, is it Victoire’s exhalation or Rosette’s prayer that brings about the miracle? Such a question poses an irresolvable either/or scenario. On one hand,
Rosette clearly attributes the whole miracle to Victoire. On the other hand, Rosette’s own prayer and actions appear efficacious. Victoire blows onto Rosette and she prays the novena in reply; her husband falls ill at the conclusion of the requested prayer. In
Rosette’s telling, both events are placed into a single narrative; neither is necessarily
130 Denise Kimber Buell, “Microbes and Pneuma That Therefore I Am,” in Divinanimality: Creaturely Theology, ed. Stephen Moore and Laurel Kearns (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming). Grzelak 74
privileged; neither is dismissed as a merely symbolic coincidence. Victoire and her breath
are players in the same agential field as Rosette.
In fact, it is arguable that Victoire literally plays Rosette, just as a flautist plays a
flute. This is exactly the model that Mary Keller proposes in The Hammer and the Flute:
Women, Power, and Spirit Possession. I find her program uncannily consonant with my
own: not only do we share a concern for respecting both our interlocutors and their
worldviews, but Rosette’s description of herself in relation to Victoire certainly seems, as
implied by the title of Keller’s work, flute-like. To rephrase my earlier formulation,
Victoire blows into Rosette, with Rosette sounding a prayer as a result. Keller examines
spirit-possession case studies as “theoretical resources for the interpretation of agency
and the development of a feminist methodology for evaluating women's power in
religious traditions.”131 Her goal is also to avoid the reductionism that has plagued even
many feminist accounts of religious bodies. “The key to the problem,” she states, “is not
that possession studies are sexist or racist but that a social scientific method is unable to
take seriously what the witnesses to the possession say is the case – that the power that
overcomes them comes from an ancestor, deity or spirit.”132 This, of course, is also much of the difficulty in understanding Rosette’s testimony. The most immediate path to
‘taking her seriously’ seems to be to not take seriously the religious content of her story
and turn it into a redemptive tale of a woman who takes advantage of her husband’s death
to establish her own autonomy. That said, saying that Rosette is an instrument hardly
seems more desirable; at first glance, taking her religious claims seriously seems to give
131 Keller, The Hammer and the Flute, 9. 132 Ibid., 3. Grzelak 75
us a significantly less empowered version of Rosette than the hypothetical social-
scientist’s report.
In order to avoid these conclusions, Keller asserts that we must reconsider our
understanding of subjectivity. Before advancing her theory of instrumental agency, Keller
found that theoretical ground needed to be cleared; she highlights two particular obstacles
that must be overcome by any attempt to ‘take seriously’ a religious body. “First,” she
explains, “receptivity needed to be revalued outside of dualistic notions such as active- passive or agent-victim because it is receptivity that makes the possessed body powerful.”133 At its most basic level, she questions why we would immediately label the
instrumental person less powerful. In fact, it highlights that Rosette is clearly empowered
as an instrument; she is party to a miracle in a way that a non-instrumentalized individual
could not possibly be. There is clear colonial residue in the thought process that leads one
to declare that the body with stronger borders is the stronger body.
Simply declaring the instrumental powerful, however, still offers little for making
sense of the interaction Rosette describes. Keller acknowledges this in continuing,
“Second, in contrast to the phenomenologist’s strategy of bracketing belief, I propose the
creation of a discursive space in which the agency of the possessing ancestors, deities, or
spirits is preserved.”134 In other words, she is arguing that the scholar of religion should
enter the theological realm, that he or she should look to theology for the sorts of
resources needed to value and explain an instrumental body. This is an undeniably
provocative suggestion. Asad and others have forcefully made the case that the distinction between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ study of religion is not only artificial but
133 Ibid., 9. 134 Ibid. Grzelak 76
reflective of latent colonial ambitions.135 But what does it mean to open the study of
religion to theological suggestions? Or more directly, as much as it may be clear what is
reductive and undesirable about denying Rosette’s, what exactly does it mean to give
Victoire agency?
Though Mary Keller develops her theory of instrumental agency in relation to, or
out of, ethnographic and literary considerations of the possessed body, nothing in her
work forbids the existence of other instrumental beings or cases. Rather, in positing that
the scholar of religion re-examine theology as a discursive space, she expressly asks for a
broader reconsideration of all religious bodies. Keller’s critics have often pointed to this
provocative ‘theological’ suggestion as an unnecessary excess. “As a simple term
‘theology’ is unnecessary,” writes one, “since engaging with indigenous meanings and
interpretations is already a requirement of good scholarship.”136 But Keller is asking for
more than simple engagement with “indigenous meanings.” In fact, the greatest activist
potential of her reconsideration of agency would seem to depend on its extension outside
of the strictest bounds of ‘possession.’
While Keller certainly aims for a corrective re-valorization of the possessed woman’s agency as uniquely instrumental (and powerful), her work also contains a call to action. As I state in the foreword, my entire project is – in many ways – a response and contribution to Keller’s declaration that “the world's religious traditions become important resources for thinking about agency because they have been engaged in developing ethical arguments about and community responses to nonvoluntaristic
135 See Asad, Formations of the Secular, 2-66. 136 Wendy K. Martin, “The Hammer and The Flute, Review,” Sociology of Religion 65, no. 1 (April 1, 2004): 97–98. Grzelak 77 accounts of human agency for a very long time.”137 Following from that, while Keller’s elucidation of instrumental agency will be used as a tool for understanding my ethnographic consideration of a contemporary holy woman’s shrine in Madagascar, my ultimate goal is to share and apply the resources for thinking about agency and divinity that were shared with (and applied to) me during my fieldwork. This is not a project about simply harvesting and bringing to light ‘native categories;’ it is about engaging with my interlocutors’ worldviews, even as potentially comparative resources.
Concretely, this means that, while Keller certainly provides a starting point for thinking about Rosette’s relationship to Victoire, I cannot simply adopt her entire comparative framework. While her suggestion that the possessed woman can be thought of as a ‘flute’ superficially sits well with the idea that Victoire a soufflé Rosette, it has its limitations. On the linguistic level, it is not entirely accurate to say that Victoire blew on or into Rosette – the preposition de indicates what Victoire ‘blew Rosette’ to do (that is, pray the novena), not how she did it. More fundamentally, however, I must recognize that
Keller’s theory specifically addresses possessed bodies. I will retain ‘instrumental agency’ as a useful concept, but it would make little sense – in view of Keller’s own motivations – to hegemonically impose it on Rosette’s story.
Buell’s treatment of pneuma is, therefore, also a guide for my project, not only because it suggests an exchange of breath closer to the mutual (though not necessarily symmetrical) two-way pneumatic street described by Rosette, but also because it a model for re-modeling Keller’s theory. “When humans are portrayed ideally in an instrumental relation to the divine,” Buell writes, “conversion entails cultivating the relationship between one's body and soul as well as the relationship between one's composite self and
137 Keller, The Hammer and the Flute, 97. Grzelak 78
external forces towards an outcome in which, ideally, the human becomes the proper
instrument for God.”138 While Buell is certainly drawing on Keller’s theory of agency,
she also insists upon the diversity, rather than the theoretical cleanliness, of her
interlocutor’s worldviews. As may be obvious, calling a person an instrument raises
questions at the same time that it may provide answers – what kind of instrument? How is
it played? “Early Christians offer a range of answers to these questions,” responds Buell,
“positing a greater or lesser porousness to the boundaries of the human person, and
differing views about the site of authentic selfhood.”139 ‘Porousness’ would seem to be a
natural corollary to instrumental agency, and Keller certainly asks for “a revaluation of
receptivity and permeability beyond the usual associations of such openness with
passivity and weakness.”140 But interestingly, in practice, Keller’s own work seems to
simply shy away from reliance on the idea of permeability.
Keller does note that “traditionally in scholarly texts, the possessed woman is
valenced negatively as psychologically fragile, permeable, ‘less than’ a Western, rational
agent;” shortly thereafter, she goes on to identify in much anthropological scholarship an
undesirable “latent dichotomy in which women, primitives, and the uneducated lower
classes are grouped together as porous, permeable, and bodily beings.” 141 She returns to
permeability later in her case studies – largely with reference to other’s words and
concepts, and often within quotes or summaries. Although she does use permeability as
her own analytical term in reference to the Malay model of subjectivity, “[t]he
138 Denise Kimber Buell, “Imagining Human Transformation in the Context of Invisible Powers: Instrumental Agency in Second-Century Treatments of Conversion,” Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices In Early Christianity, ed Jorunn Økland and Turid Karlsen Seim (Berlin: deGruyter, 2009), 252. 139 Ibid., 250. 140 Keller, The Hammer and the Flute, 28. 141 Ibid. Grzelak 79
microrelations of power are based on a model of subjectivity that includes a permeable
corporeality intimately connected with the power of places to house spirits,”142 in
depicting the specific microrelations presented by the possessed woman, Keller chooses
the image of woman as flute, which I would argue does not fully embrace this permeable,
malleable corporeality.
I am not repudiating Keller’s model – it is, in fact, perhaps entirely appropriate that Keller emphasize the non-porousness of the possessed in the context of a Malay
worldview that more regularly acknowledges porousness. A flute is not, strictly speaking,
permeable – its instrumentality would seem to depend on its boundedness; its rigidity
allows the air to pass through and communicate a relatively ‘pure’ voice. The blocked
consciousness of Keller’s possessed woman, in the same way, allows her to communicate
a relatively ‘pure’ voice, distinguishable as that of the ancestor or spirit. Keller makes this
link directly: “Consciousness is overcome,” she states, “and the body is used like a
hammer or played like a flute or mounted like a horse so that the possessed body is an
instrumental agency in the possession.”143 The temperament of the hammer, the flute, or
the horse is certainly not irrelevant to its user, and in fact, is malleable through repeated
use. But as my ethnographic work deals with those who make no claim to an overcome
consciousness, I am interested in instruments whose porosity is more immediately
evident, whose consciousness is not overcome, and is instead more messily transformed
in the playing.
142 Ibid., 120. 143 Ibid., 74. Grzelak 80
Rosette as Viscous-Porous Instrument
In Rosette’s case, the flute analogy would be fitting in that she does consider herself – with all possible pneumatic connotations available – inspired by Victoire. But ultimately, I need an approach that allows for that inspiration to be permanently transformative. In Keller’s model, the instrumental state is transitory, as possession is a temporary condition. But Rosette does not cease to be herself at any point during her story, and the effects of her interaction with Victoire are quite permanent. Following from this, my understanding of porosity will be – as suggested by Nancy Tuana – viscous. Viscosity, while not allowing determinism or reduction, preserves the possibility of the critical interrogation of established entities. As Tuana explains, “‘[v]iscosity’ retains an emphasis on resistance to changing form [is] thereby a more helpful image than
‘fluidity,’ which is too likely to promote a notion of open possibilities and to overlook sites of resistance and opposition or attention to the complex ways in which material agency is often involved in interactions, including, but not limited to, human agency.”144
In embracing porosity and viscosity, my goal is to take seriously conscious religious bodies’ claims of non-human inspiration and lasting personal transformation, to both account for otherworldly agencies and the material ones with which they interact.
I am not opposing Tuana’s porous-viscosity to Pierre’s flou-idity. In fact, I hope that these categories can inform one another, perhaps even that porous-viscous might be the best available translation of Pierre’s flou. After all, it would be inaccurate to say that his flou-id categories were entirely open or that they ignored sites of resistance. On the
144 Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 194. Grzelak 81 contrary, Pierre’s treatment of Malagasy tradition slid over and between a number of potentially dangerous implications, not with disregard to boundaries but with intelligent and selective crossings. Zanahary145 could be singular or plural god(s), flou-idly
Christian, Jewish and Malagasy, depending on context. Pierre’s story raised the question,
“How does one deal with blurry relationships between hazy entities?” Victoire
Rasoamanarivo, the comic book, highlighted the ways in which flou-id relationships can be clamped down and tamed. Rosette’s story points us towards ways in which a porous- viscous ontology might be embraced.
This is not to say that a porous-viscous worldview is an entirely unproblematic alternative to the typical Western conception of the individual. The coastal gris-gris- maker is not, in some rosy relativistic turn, put on equal footing with the urban doctor.
But neither are they cleanly placed in a hierarchical relation, with one as infallible scientist and the other as superstitious quack. The personal account I am treating here – a woman’s explanation of a miracle Victoire worked in her own life – juxtaposes a stunning array of players from the postcolonial context: ancestral demons, modern medicine and – most significant – Victoire’s own power are brought to bear on, and act through, evidently porous human beings. In contrast to Keller’s blocked consciousness, the spiritual agency has a directly transformative effect on the instrument with which it/she interacts.
Rosette is cued by Victoire, but she expresses clear knowledge of why Victoire has inspired her to pray. This knowledge does not seem terribly specific; Victoire wants
Rosette to pray for herself and her children, not so that her husband “will change.” All the same, an entire course of action vis-à-vis Rosette’s marriage seems implied. It would
145 Malagasy: God/s. (see Chap.1, footnote 24) Grzelak 82
seem Victoire wants Rosette to follow in her own footsteps; this is at least how it appears
Rosette understood her.
Pope John Paul II highlighted the relevant part of Victoire’s biography in his
address to the Malagasy public upon Victoire’s beatification, “Her indefatigable patience
reinforced her Christian conviction to rest faithful to the indissoluble bonds of marriage,
despite the humiliation and suffering she endured.”146 The pope, therefore, holds Victoire up as a model for proper conduct. Rosette would likely agree that Victoire is a model, but this is not exactly how she talks about her here. She does not say that she is emulating
Victoire, rather it is Victoire’s influence that dictates the direction of her prayer. The souffle contains not only the impetus to pray the novena, but to pray it focusing not on her husband’s sins, but on the wellbeing of the other members of her family. Victoire does not just communicate through Rosette; she communicates a specific set of priorities to her. Accordingly, Rosette’s narrative does a complicated dance around the question of her husband’s changeability; this is particularly clear in the account’s ambiguous ending.
What is the work of Victoire? His incremental conversion? His death?
Causality is similarly complicated in the post-novena episode of the story. On the final day of the novena, Rosette went to the neighborhood where her husband works while she was running errands. It is there that she sees “the little mistress” and the “big family scandal” is precipitated. On one hand, Rosette implies that the chain of events is entirely pedestrian – the opposite of miraculous. For entirely practical reasons, she ran an errand. She ran into her husband with his mistress, coincidentally, in the strictest sense of the word. And yet, on the other, Rosette prefaced the re-telling of the event by pointing
146 Jean-Paul II, “Béatification De Victoire Rasoamanarivo à Antananarivo, Homélie De Jean-Paul II, 30 Avril 1989.”” Grzelak 83
out that it fell “on the ninth day” of the novena – and though Victoire is not mentioned by name in the sequence of events, it would seem that Rosette does not see the dating of this
discovery as, in a more colloquial sense of the word, coincidental.
Again, Rosette herself prays the novena. But it is ultimately unclear whether or
not it is the novena itself that is efficacious in this scenario. Perhaps it is, but among
many other possibilities, perhaps Victoire presented the novena as a requisite test-of-
faith, or perhaps it was simply to help Rosette prepare for the shock of the surprise
meeting (though, Rosette indicated that her husband, like Victoire’s, liked to “go out with
girls” as a general rule). Keller identifies this spirit-agency/human interaction as an
ultimately epistemologically unknowable space of ‘negotiation.’
She states that “what is interesting about the possessed body is that it is
negotiating with an extraorganic insufficiency – ancestors lack the body that speaks.”147
Though Rosette is not possessed, this would seem to be applicable to her relationship with Victoire. In a reverse of the typical sort of intercessory prayer directed to saints,
Victoire asks Rosette to pray. And yet, it is also unclear to what degree Victoire needs
Rosette, and is Victoire’s lack of a body really an insufficiency? In fact, with her body so very present in the tomb feet away from where I spoke to Rosette, can Victoire really be said to lack a body? Resources used to make sense of possessed bodies provide powerful tools for understanding Rosette’s viscous-porous with Victoire, but – considering these questions, and that Rosette is not possessed (her consciousness is never overcome) – the instrumental analogy could clearly benefit from some modification.
147 Keller, The Hammer and the Flute, 91. Grzelak 84
Pneuma and microbes in the chapel and in the hospital
The next part of Rosette’s testimony suggests such another way of framing viscous-porosity. Rosette’s husband falls ill with a “man’s disease” on the same day that she concludes the novena. This is neither the first, and it is certainly not the last, interjection of a health-related theme in the story. In this web of non-coincidental coincidences, Rosette was passing by her husband’s work place to take care of a very specific errand, to pay medical fees. In short, Victoire is not the only unseen presence in
Rosette’s story; illness is also a major player. How Rosette deals with germs can help us understand how she relates to other invisible agencies. I have argued that an insistence upon the bounded individual obscures our understanding of Rosette’s interactions with
Victoire; Buell, in turn, argues that the same conception of the individual often obscures our understanding of the bodily ecosystem. “Bacteria can be a part of the invisible breath we inhale or exhale,” she observes, “moreover, bacteria and other microbes are integral to and constitutive of what we consider our human bodies.”148
Following from this, she asks, “What happens when we conduct a trans-temporal
experiment and pair pneuma with microbes?”149 Rosette’s testimony would seem to
constitute exactly this sort of experiment, sans time-travelling. Buell affirms that an
“articulation of microbial invisible agencies and those who claim to speak for and about
them illuminates our understanding and reception of ancient claims about invisible agencies and disrupts the notion of rupture between pre-modern and modern ways of
148 Buell, “Microbes and Pneuma That Therefore I Am.” 149 Ibid. Grzelak 85
conceptualizing the human.”150 In the same way, examining how Rosette articulates the
work of microbes could help explain what she means when she says “Victoire m’a
soufflé” – and, similarly, could disrupt both the rupture that might be drawn between a
contemporary Malagasy case study and ancient Christian practice and the rupture that
might be drawn between a ‘religious’ worldview that accounts for the agency of spirits or
ancestors and a ‘scientific’ worldview that accounts for the actions of invisible germs.
Where exactly healing and illness come from is an ambiguous point in Rosette’s
story. What makes Rosette’s husband fall ill, and what stops him from getting better? Is
Victoire’s breath a contagious force? Does it cause his STI? I would argue that it does not. First, Rosette would likely be offended by a reading that reads Victoire as a vector for infectious disease, but second and perhaps more importantly, the cause she attributes to illness seems distinctly terrestrial. But, ultimately, we will see that the pneumatic implication is still relevant, and that even Rosette’s husband seems to see the world in viscous-porous terms.
I will argue that Rosette’s account of her husband’s illness is racialized.
Interestingly, immediately after describing how her husband fell ill, Rosette digressed into an account of his and hers genealogy. Racialization would furthermore seem
inevitable in any exchange between Victoire Rasoamanarivo, “la petite blanchette,” and a
coastal, “black” Malagasy man.151 Rosette’s characterization of her husband as a chronic
drinker and adulterer fits neatly with Merina stereotypes of more “African” coastal
Malagasy – she also took care to mention that when her husband left home to seek
treatment for his sickness, he took a “certain sum of money” which was not his, but hers.
150 Ibid. 151 See Chapter 1 for discussion of race in Madagascar. Grzelak 86
But it is probably most significant to note where he actually went to get better. He left for
Menakara, home to the Antaimoro, and his parents. According to Rosette, however, this was not at all a good move for his health. “He got very, very sick over there,” she said.
The association there is clear – his ancestral homeland was somehow more deleterious to his health and the capital region.152
Rosette locates an even more specific cause for the worsening of his condition. It
remains linked to the habits he learned at home, but not necessarily to its geographical
location. When he returned, “He came back with all the gris-gris153 possible. Instead of
going to the hospital, his father gave him gris-gris.” Rosette’s account does not specify
whether she views the gris-gris themselves as worsening his condition, or if it was their
use instead of hospital care. This ambiguity allows Rosette to side-step a complicated
question: would recognizing the power of the gris-gris be an affront to Victoire or to the
Christian God, or would claiming their impotence be a denial of the very real power of
demons? The role of her father-in-law allows for a similar sort of slipperiness: does she
view him as personally culpable for her husband’s worsening condition, or, considering
the strongly ancestral character of the Malagasy conception of homeland (tanindrazana,
the word for it, literally means land of the ancestors), does she view her husband’s father
as representative of Antaimoro character in general? Regardless, Rosette did begin this
part of the story by saying that gave her husband an instruction, “You will go to
Menakara,” which can be interpreted, minimally, as a statement-of-fact, or more strongly,
as a command.
152 I think an epidemiologist would be hard-pressed to say which reason is actually more healthful; certainly medical facilities are more “modern” in Tana, but the air quality and income inequality are arguably much worse. 153 Malagasy: charms. Grzelak 87
Significantly, however, her husband sees himself as porous – he took the gris-gris
because he thought they were efficacious. That he was hell-bent on destroying the portrait
of Victoire upon his return from Menakara, that he cited it as the cause of his illness, is
likely even more telling. Beyond the clear recognition of at least one non-human agency
affecting his health, the husband’s language is strikingly aware of his own porosity due to
the invisible power he attributes to a very visible object. His statement would seem to be a textbook example of Cox Miller’s understanding of “thing theory;” the thing names not just an object but a particular subject-object relationship.154 He does not say, “That
portrait is the cause of my illness.” He points in the portrait’s general direction, and then
blames “it” for his illness. Considering that he might be naming a relationship (very
likely one with Victoire), rather than some absolute quality of the object, allows us both
to imagine that he has a sophisticated grasp of the viscosity of his porosity – how he will
be affected by the presence of an object depends, for example, on what other objects he
has been in the presence of – and helps make sense of his next decision.
In response to his claim that the portrait is the cause of his illness, Rosette insists
that he come to the chapel. If he will not, she declares, she will leave him to die without care. While we might read this as an obvious invocation of the church and hospital over
her husband’s folk knowledge – a denial of the possibility that Victoire (or her representation) is the cause of his illness, Rosette has said no such thing. The assumption that she does so to debunk his claim would seem to carry with it an assumption of the primacy of faith in Rosette’s religious world.
Such an assumption is not justified. Her husband believes that the painting is
causing his illness; she believes that the proper course of action is to take him to the
154 Miller, The Corporeal Imagination, 8. Grzelak 88
chapel. Her husband agrees to come with her if they take a taxi. She agrees to these terms and takes a day off from work. That he agrees to come does not necessarily indicate that he has given up on the idea that Victoire is somehow tied up with the genesis of his sickness.155 Even if earlier he labeled the portrait as the absolute cause of his illness,156
this gesture would seem to recognize a viscous porosity that accounts for the relative
importance of several interactions (such as the one he has with his wife, or how he would
feel about walking or taking public transportation to the chapel).
Beyond all of this, Rosette here establishes herself as a powerful agency; her own
participation in his healing process is held out as a bartering chit. Upon their arrival at the
chapel, her personal volition becomes even more marked. She described a sort of home-
made penitential service she created for her husband’s benefit. There were many other
people at the chapel on that day, she said, “I said to the others: “We are going to do an act
of contrition.” An act of contrition generally refers to formulas of prayers that are used in
the context of sacramental confession; here, however, Rosette led the group in reciting
the Rosary, specifically the sorrowful mysteries.
This is an act of liturgical creativity in a few notable ways – collective prayer is
being harnessed in the name of a particular person’s (as-of-yet-clearly-expressed)
contrition. It is clear that it is not her husband’s own sorrow that is seen as the necessary
factor in this ritual. Nor is the meditative quality of the Rosary typical of the sort of acts
of contrition one finds in the Church’s handbook on indulgences. The French label for the
prayer sequence she chose, les mystères douloureux, lays perhaps even greater emphasis
on the degree to which the images presented in the prayer sequence focus on a greater
155 In fact, it may well be confirmation that he does think so. 156 Which is not necessarily the case. In fact, in Rosette’s telling, he never names “The portrait of Victoire” as the cause – he simply uses pronouns. Grzelak 89
range of pains than an individual’s sorrow for sin. Also, a sequence of the rosary is just
much longer than the typical Confiteor; in a sense, Rosette could be seen as administering
her husband’s penance before he makes any sort of confession.
This ritual explicitly also involved her making her husband hold two candles
(another act of apparent liturgical creativity). “When we finished,” Rosette stated, “I said to Victoire, ‘Voila, your man!” Of course, this first begs the question: what does it mean
to say something to Victoire? Given the layout of the chapel, one would not be
geographically forced to say such a statement in the general direction of Victoire’s statue
or her actual body. Secondly, what does Rosette mean in saying that her husband is
‘Victoire’s man?’ She has already drawn parallels between the personalities of Victoire’s
husband and her own. Is this just a re-statement of that observation? If so, what is her
intent? Victoire’s original instruction was to explicitly not pray for any change in the
husband. Considering his apparent inertness during this ritual, this final declaration could
be seen as a certain conclusion to the process of consciousness changing initiated with the
novena. Rosette associates herself with Victoire, and as much as she might be placing her
husband in Victoire’s trust, she could just as well be saying that their husbands are
essentially similar, or even more directly offering her husband to Victoire.
The most compelling evidence for Rosette’s viscous-porous consideration of her
husband’s (racialized) character might that this ceremony induces no change in his health
or in his attitude towards medicine. His health worsened, and when he really began to get
“pué,” his wife called the doctor; together, they insisted he “go to the hospital right
away.” He refused. Then Rosette called her priest, and asked that he come with the final
sacraments; her husband accepted those. Up to this point in his life, he was an irregular Grzelak 90
churchgoer, attending on holy days (Rosette mentioned Easter and Mother’s Day). Then
he died. Again, this is how Rosette concluded the story: “The months before his death, he went to mass. Voilà, the work of Victoire!”
Interpreting the miracle
When I was told Rosette had a story about a miracle in her life, I was not expecting that to be its conclusion. Foreknowledge of Keller and Tuana’s models likely would not have helped me anticipate this course of this story, but they do help make sense of it. This last turn makes clear the way in which Rosette sees herself as Victoire’s instrument; she opens the testimony with Victoire’s souffle and it ends with the labeling
of her husband’s partial conversion as the “work of Victoire.” Of course, it is clear that
Rosette’s own actions – her weighing of the offer to help her husband against her wish
that he attend church, her creative liturgy, her call to the priest, all had a role in this
conclusion. But she does not see these actions as her “own” in a sense that relies on a
concretely-bounded individual. Her husband’s habits are similarly only dubiously his
“own;” his actions are situated in the context of his ethnic background. It would seem that
– despite the opening prayer intention Victoire prescribes (or suggests) – he does change,
but that he can only change so much and in certain ways. And yet, it would be reductive
to paint this as a sort of racial determinism. In Rosette’s world miraculous
transformations are possible – but only, it would seem, with the right inspiration. Buell’s
work raises the possibility of pneuma as a racial marker. “In the writings of Paul and the Grzelak 91
Gospel of John,” she writes, “we find pneuma used to mark a distinctively superior kind
of human.”157
In a way her husband is apparently not, Rosette is capable of receiving this
pneuma from Victoire. Even during the ‘act of contrition,’ he is essentially inert. His
cooperation is less than enthusiastic; rather it is Rosette who has all the ‘inspiration’ in
this concocted liturgy. Similarly, a lack of receptivity is ultimately what seems to prevent
the husband from accepting Western medicine.
This placement of European science at the heart of a Malagasy conversion
narrative is perhaps not as arbitrary as it might seem. Victoire’s own biography makes
strong links between her spiritual receptivity and her openness to European culture – and
so while a consideration of porous-viscous instrumental beings helps clarify ‘Malagasy’
conceptions of agency that already seem to be at work in Rosette’s world, it is not an ontology wholly immune to colonial imposition. In Antananarivo, nowhere is this complexity more evident than wherever one finds water. It is probably not surprising that the foreigner would seem to be particularly aware of water’s role in the field; staying hydrated requires practical adjudication between the advice of American doctors to avoid all local water and local wisdom about what is and is not safe to drink. But water, specifically bottled water, is a visible part of contemporary Antananarivo religious life, and Rosette’s narrative very natural brings me back to the question that opened this study.
157 Buell, “Microbes and Pneuma That Therefore I Am.” Grzelak 92
Epilogue
So, what about those water bottles I
mentioned in the foreword? I regret that the only
cogent answer I have to the question of the
function of the water bottles comes from a source I
have critiqued. None of my interviewees, even
those who faithfully brought bottles to the tomb,
could tell me where the practice came from.
Maurice Bloch, however, offers an answer. He
abruptly concludes Placing the Dead with this
digression:
Occasionally Merina will leave bottles of water to stand on their tombs to capture the power of the ancestor group and so that the water can be sprinkled around the house to transmit good luck and fertility to the inhabitants. Again it is contact with the tomb and the dead in general which produces this effect. We are therefore not dealing with a clear dogma.158 It seems somehow unfortunate, but somehow appropriate, that after my own
efforts to explore the blurriness in the ethnographic field that I must admit the blurriness between my conclusion and Bloch’s.
Before I had any inkling of who was buried within, I passed by the tomb and noticed the mass of water bottles, most of them identical to the sort I carried to class each day. Some people would enter with bag filled with bottles. Others made a micro-ritual out of uncapping, praying and re-capping the bottles. I went into the ethnographic field with
158 Maurice Bloch, Placing the Dead, 222. Grzelak 93
plenty of questions about the water, and I left with few answers. Sometimes a priest came
to bless the water using the normal rite of the church, and, in fact, the morning mass at
the chapel including a locally added water-blessing segment, but more often than not it
was entirely a lay ritual. The priest-in-charge remarked that the practice was difficult to
regulate. People preferred, he stated, the get their water from a specific royal fountain in
the neighborhood, but he had recently learned that the water had been tested and found
non-potable. He had moderate success in convincing worshippers to switch to tap water.159 The water too seems to be a body wherein scientific and sacral, microbial and
spiritual, agencies co-mingle. But, even questioning my interviewees about the bottles of
water in their homes, after weeks at the chapel, I was still not sure what people actually
did with the water – until Rosette insisted that I use some myself.
“It’s the water,” she explained, “that keeps us holding on. Mornings, we fast,
drinking only the water. We wash ourselves in it; we take baths.”160
She assured me that the water could be blessed without ecclesiastical intervention:
“If I am really in a hurry, and if there is no priest, it’s faith that saves you.”161 This, of
course, is a strikingly atypical sentiment in a Catholic milieu – salvation by faith being a
primary sticking point between Catholics and Protestants. But Rosette continued without
skipping a beat. The holy water, she said, would cure my acne: “It’s not good for a boy
your age – Victoire will heal you.”162
159 Fr. Josef-Noel, Interview by author, Nov. 15. 160 Rosette, Interview by author, Nov. 17. 161 Ibid. 162 Ibid. Grzelak 94
Pierre arrived just as she said this. He corrected her, and she agreed, “Faith will heal you.”163
For the record, I still get acne, but I never took a bath in the water either. I regret this. It seems ironic that my last ethnographic memory from a project that has lauded the virtues of porosity is one in which I insisted on maintaining my own boundaries – explicitly refusing what I feared might be contaminated. But how porous should the ethnographer be?
When Rosette concluded her story, when she told about the death of her husband, the words fell out of my mouth in reply, “C’est une belle histoire.” That is a beautiful story. I hope I have made it clear how she and I could both come to such a conclusion – but questions, some decidedly unbeautiful, remain. As satisfying as it is to point to my interviewees’ ontological victories, I wonder about the political future. If Victoire is ever made a saint, what victory will be canonized along with her? And what is one to make of the hundreds of others of recently beatified and canonized postcolonial figures?
163 Ibid. Grzelak 95
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