Re-Turning Transgressions from an Exi(S)L-Ander: Michèle Rakotoson's Juillet Au Pays

Re-turning Transgressions from an Exi(s)l-ander: Michèle Rakotoson's Juillet au pays

With Juillet au Pays: Chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar, Malagasi writer Michèle

Rakotoson, who has been living in France since 1983, adds another bow to her body of works without however ceasing to write against the silence imposed by the dictatorial censorship of the

1980s and 1990s.1 In this beautifully-edited book published in 2007 by Éditions Elytis,

Rakotoson recounts her country -- Madagascar -- and in particular her region –Imerina -- such as they appear to her now upon her regular returns to Madagascar every July after her twenty years or so of exile in Paris as journalist and writer.2 The unidentified illustrations in black and white reproducing past and present postcards and photographs of people, historical buildings, quotidian scenes, pages drawn from newspapers, stamps from various periods, coins, fabric swatches, advertisements and iconic representations such as that of the zebu. All seemingly assembled as if found and placed in a diary, they either interrupt the text, or appear on their own page, in the margins, creating a border, framed or not, attached to a title, at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the twenty-two chapters and the epilogue, yet none carry a date nor a place notation.

Juillet au Pays reminds one of Cahier du retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire. Because of its title first of all, but also because of the way it draws together threads of lost knowledge that weave a text liminally close to the swan’s song suggesting the (ethical) urgency of tracing the past in and for Malagasy culture. Intertextual like the Cahier, Rakotoson’s Juillet au pays neither dissimulates nor renders evident its borrowings and its references to contemporaneous works and its precursors. Criss-crossed as if gifted with other voices and socio-political,

1 religious and historical alterities, the text incorporates them in multiple ways to its form and content so that their recalls and intratextual layerings redraw figuratively the separate and yet interdependent handkerchiefBlike Malagasy rice paddies.3 With this correspondence, the chronotope4 of Juillet au pays B the narrator’s annual visitB enables a pointillism which lays out the different senses and memories beside each other, and calls up Malagasy history, the history of Imerina royalty, slavery, colonization and the ensuing post-colonial state thus making evident the temporal and geopolitical threads that web similarly the Césairian Cahier. A mix of journalism and bearing witness, Juillet au pays binds the account to history. Rakotoson writes herself in as traveler as she stitches in her personal trajectory and renders explicit the sources of her literary imagination. Thus, as she threads through her holidays, she chronicles her days, her encounters, her excursions, her thoughts, all the while asking questions that remain without explicit answers, recreating as she has in her fiction the type of text that subtlely uncovers in the ordinariness of unfolding lives the traces of life’s lessons.5

Juillet au pays is an intimist collection of moving and troubling remembrances divided between Antananarivo, the city of the author’s childhood and the village of Ambatomanga where she spent her holidays with her grandmother. It moves back and forth between autobiography, diary, travel journal, and an alternative history of Madagascar such as the one a grandmother might enjoy recalling for her grandchildren, which is perhaps why, for the first time, Michèle

Rakotoson dedicates this work to her grandchildren. The interest that Rakotoson evinces for history traduces her as a chronicler. However her chronicles confuse historical accounting with the day-to-day listing of local news and history itself. Her prose sways between concrete realism and the singing of a fable, French and Malagasy, and incorporates the constant presence of the

2 past in each quotidian moment, whether she is telling of the success of the peasants, or its opposite the rural exodus, or of the intellectuals and their losses at the state and institutional levels and their inability to exercise their professions. This brings her to dissect the Malagasy society with a lens that relates architecture to housing, transportation to vehicles, rural life to urbanization, industry to the environment, the penury of water to electricity, music to the songs that haunt her, and the continuum that strings old with new, death with life, history with current political realities.

As in the novels and short stories of the author, memories, remembering and stories B personal and familial in touch with collective history B inform Rakotoson’s notion of identity6 since for her memory and identity are interdependant variables which validate each other

(Lambek 243). Indeed during an interview in June 2002, a month before her first return to

Madagascar, she shares this with Pascale Perraudin:

[...] le travail que je fais [...] pour moi, personnellement, c’est essayer de retrouver cette mémoire-là. Je parlerais même de traumatisme [... parce qu’] on nous a refusé notre mémoire, on nous a parlé de peuple sans mémoire, on nous a refusé notre histoire. Je suis en train [...] de travailler sur la vie de mon père et de ma mère, qui ont traversé ce siècle. Et je m’aperçois que ce sont des gens [...] à qui on a refusé leur histoire. On leur a dénié leur douleur, [...] leurs espoirs. Ce sont des gens que l’on a mis entre parenthèses. (Perraudin 755) Whereas she was fully implicated in the history of her country, because of her parentsBher mother was a librarian and her father a journalistBand because of her own political involvement,

Rakotoson realizes upon her return that she has lost the threads of the family history and of the

Imerina history certainly due to her absence but also due to the muting cultural silences which accompanied her childhood according to the social and cultural traditions of her society and, since then, the censored mediatised versions of political events and their effects on the Malagasy.

3 Insisting upon the erasure perpetrated in waves by Christianisation, slavery, colonialism and dictatorship, Rakotoson understands with her return how much she has been cut off from

Fihavanana, which most of all locks in the keys to the Malagasy’s mutual support. As she weaves dialogues and Malagasy idioms into her questioning poetic chanting, she points to the silenced realities of the last twenty or more years, that began with the erasures enacted during the colonial period. She positions herself so as to figure out the role a Malagasy writer can play, even “out of place” as Edward Saïd would have said, especially as a feminist and an ecologist, and in relation to a society in full mutation in order to regain access to the Great Red Island’s ever-receding ancestral knowledge. Confronted with the contrast between the wild beauty of

Vakiniadiana and what its vales incorporated of “histoires de sorciers et d’empoisonnements, de passions et de haines mortelles” (Juillet 126) for the young Michèle, she begins to “rêver de touristes choisis, qui iront à pied de village en village, de visites des églises centenaires et de leurs autels, de villages à restaurer, de maisons d’hôtes...” (126).

As in all her writing, Rakotoson tenders the music underlying the Malagasy culture and language with her insertions of verses of poems, fragments of songs, proverbs, rhetorical formulas as well as phrases she remembers and that she translates into French within the body of the text creating the effect of a refrain. In Juillet au pays, the page lay-out itself increases the musicality of her writing as almost all of them appear as visual echoes allowing for the temporal perspectives of the past to be present on the page, in the current-ness of her diary. Furthermore the syntagms are differentiated graphically and italicized as well as slightly off set from one another; in a bolder yet fuzzier grey font often extending right into the margins, as background to other lines of the text, or reaching over images; and then re-incorporated into the text but in

4 French (see figure one). This layering of the two languages avoids the syncretisation of her writing as a malagasization of French or a Frenchisation of Malagasy (Fonkoua 141) since such a presentation both translates and retains what depends on orality as well as relays the silences through the incorporation of songs and poems (Fonkoua 141).

Musical phrases haunt the writer too as she revisits the public and private spheres associated with her youth during the early years of Madagascar’s independence:

C’était l’époque où les poètes écrivaient les textes des chanteurs, où jusque dans les campagnes, la musique marronnait, aidant tout un peuple à sauver sa culture, c’était avant l’époque des couvre-feux, de la censure violente, des militaires, des taxes sur tous les produits culturels et des “accidents” à répétition. C’était avant l’horreur... La chanson est accompagnée au piano, un rythme qui a malgachisé la valse lente: Ki-dao-mbara-mita-, ki-dao-mbita. Je respire. Cette musique-là, ce fut à la maison à Favahitra, mon père et son Borsalino, toute une bourgeoisie qui dansait sur “Marinella...” avant que nous- mêmes nous ne chantions “In the mood for love”, tout en jouant à être les personnages du film, ou des êtres à la Duras, mais du côté des rizières... (Juillet 62) The melodies of waltzes, 60s operettas, tangos, blues, classical poems put to music such as those of Dox the Malagasy love poet,7 hymns, her father’s favorites: “Marinella” by Tino Rossi, and

“Izany foko lasanao” by the great Malagasy singer Mme Jeannette, all return and inform her own movements in the rooms and spaces she once knew so well and that have since lost their familiarity. Carlos d’Alessio’s composition for Marguerite Duras’ film India Song8 perhaps most of all creates the undertone of Juillet au pays and situates with its ubiquitous mentions the socio-economic, historical and generational gaps of Malagasy society:

Comment faire pour oublier la musique d’India Song?

5 Il y avait... Rien. Je n’ai pas de mémoire, rien ne m’a été transmis, je dois tout recomposer, et au fur et à mesure que le puzzle se dévoile, les couleurs sont de plus en plus sombres. (Juillet 53)

The poetic chanting composition of Juillet au pays incorporates the key notions associated with the traditional ritual spectacle known as hira gasy which includes music, dance and texts that are elaborated with political intent and to encourage the active involvement of all citizens.9 Fused with pauses that indicate both the unspoken and Rakotoson’s contemporary questing gaze as it traces out a set of roots and roads that work their way through the temporal and spatial topography of her region, her hira gasy counteracts step by step, entry by entry, the historical denial and the concomitant secrecy such opacity induced.

In Juillet au pays, “ pays” corresponds as much to precise locations as to Rakotoson’s novelistic and theatrical remembered imaginary, to the staged space of her childhood. Certain anecdotes seem to be staged by the director that Rakotoson was, such as the story of the young garage woman who is determined to give her children an education; or the one about the washer women who complain about their difficulties with the penury of water; as well as her own search through her grandmother’s garage in Ambatomanga, in a chapter during which her breath and her body are incorporated into the stories’ rhythms and their temporal and physical displacements.

Although the title gives no indication of the text’s time-frame, the first page of this chronicle states: “1er juillet 2002 // Michèle”, set out top right as if it were a diary entry or the beginning of a letter. However the usual acknowledgment of a place is replaced confusingly with Rakotoson’s first name and thus initiates the narrator’s wandering which then spreads out over five Julys, a month that she leaves grammatically in the singular in the title and yet places in

6 the plural diegetically by blurring the linear chronology which would generally organize such a travel diary or a historical chronicle. 2002 corresponds to the year of the massive strikes during which “il y eut un million cinq cent mille personnes dans la rue” and the elections that brought president Ravalomana to power. As the son from Rakotoson’s childhood home village, and who according to custom was expected to “enrichir d’abord les siens, de leur donner du travail, un présent à défaut d’un avenir” (Juillet 200), he is the one on whom she closes her chronicle with her epilogue signed once back in France, at Chatenay Malabry on May 22, 2007, which asks on the one hand: “Comment lézarder les murs de silence malgaches?” (Juillet 203), and on the other:

Où est la vérité ? En malgache on dit marina pour la vérité. Et pour y parvenir, on cherche le rariny et le hitsiny ; pour arriver à un tissage régulier on rassemble les fils, on les tire et on les croise. Mais dans ce silence-là, qui est passé dans les trappes du vide? (203)

The value to articulating an integral story inclusive of all Malagasy brings up questions about the relational consequences of such an enunciation at the present time. This problematic underlies

Rakotoson’s insistent questioning of the temporality and the geography of truth emanating from notions of justice to ensure that ““ l’histoire à venir ne soit plus la répétition des horreurs passées” (195). Juillet au pays is an unearthing of “souvenirs [qui] se bousculent dans [sa] tête et dans [son] corps” (191) to identify the tunes that no longer have words and the persons she holds within her; what so many did to prevent Madagascar’s losses when faced with the advance of colonialism and to bring down the dictatorship; as well as to answer the vexing identity question about who or what is a Malagasy. Once upon departing from Roissy, she sits next to a young twelve-year old boy of Indian origin, born in France who is returning to Madagascar for

7 the first time, to his parents’ native home. She wonders about his sense of identity as, in her mind’s eye, the shadow of the young singer in India Song attaches itself to the thought even though only her voice remains.10 Film-like, Juillet au pays’s story is both synchronic and diachronic, punctuated with sensorial effects of her straying which has set off the memory of a word, a syntagm, an object, and a trip against time. Such wanderings allow Rakotoson to link the vague impressions of her childhood and what they encapsulate as well as to establish her relationship to the past, her family, her ancestors and with the colonizers, the clan, the slaves, the villagers as well as to imbricate within it all her own exile and tearing.

Whereas the first phrase translated from Malagasy in Juillet au Pays is one once often spoken by the narrator’s father: “Sao bedin’ny vazaha”-”nous allons nous faire gronder par les blancs” (9) and is enveloped in allusions to India Song, the last one before the epilogue takes up this fear of Whites again as it depicts a scene of men on motorbikes passing through a village and children scattering screaming “vite, vite, des Blancs sur des motos” (170) since they have learnt that the Whites kill with their bikes. Similarly the story of the village’s washerwomen ends with the finality of Ramaria, the gossiper of Rakotoson’s grandparents’ village: “Mais vous autres, mainty-noirs, vous supportez ça [la pauvreté]” (186)11 and a description of the “[...] discussions

[qui] se font en mise en abîme: on ouvre une spirale, qui tourne, tourne, va de plus en plus loin”

(185) and finishes with making evident the marks of the “disparités et des castes” especially evident in the country (186): “ce racisme profond et tranquille des “Blancs” de chez moi, de ceux qui se réclament de racines indonésiennes, face à ceux qui sont plus foncés, qu’ils traitent de nègres et d’esclaves” (186).

8 “s she visits each of the places she once knew, she measures the time and space that separate her from the present, from the identity which she wears in France and which, upon her return to Madagascar, renders visible the responsibility an “ex-i(s)l-ander” who takes refuge bears: “En exil, on ne peut accepter les changements qui se font sans vous, l’éloignement serait trop douloureux” (199) writes Rakotoson, in her epilogue, which echoes her first chapter when she was waiting to embark at Roissy: “l’exil c’est cela, cette mutilation de soi, de sa mémoire, ce manque définitif qui colle à la peau...” (8).

This sense of taking responsibility over time and on the ground returns in two key chapters: “Behenjy” and “Vers Ambatomanga” each of which include a journey out of

Antananarivo. Driving herself to Behenjy, she offers a ride to a young man, Randria, who turns out to be a baker not of beignets as the narrator remembered them but of madeleines. As the conversation meandered, she realizes that Randria corresponds to the generation, who at thirty, fought for democracy and has been trying to get by ever since. This type of voyage brings out the stories which speak of the tranquil courage of so many who seek to live free of the chains of history, and makes evident the gap which separates the peasants from those who were called the

“acculturés” during the 1980's, or the “deux-tout” (59) as Rakotoson puts it having experienced the French school she attended at the age of four as a “no man’s land” (59), and who as an

“écrivain francophone” (59) feels “dépaysée” since her history books and newspapers do not carry the same discourse as she witnesses:

Je n’ai même pas les béquilles de la fiction dans cette histoire-ci, la réalité est devant moi, avec ce jeune homme qui parle doucement, ces caillasses et ces collines pelées et ses mots: “la vie coûte de plus en plus chère, il faut que nos enfants fassent des études. Le no man’s land intérieur a grandi.” (60)

This encounter which widens the perimeter of her interior space also draws the outline of a memory vacuum that she feels not because she has forgotten but because she never knew. Her acculturation resulting from the sequels of colonization denied her a whole part of Malagasy culture.

As she traveled towards Ambatomanga, her grandparents’ village, this time in a bus, following the route that she took as a child, a second Randria, a carpenter, a “descendant des ouvriers de Jean Laborde” (117) B Queen Ranavalona I’s lover, who during the nineteenth century fought off the European invasions B tells Rakotoson the story of the region along with the other riders, all going home for the fête des descendants, the “rassemblement de la grande famille, du clan où on fait le point des vivants et des morts, des succès de l’année, des naissances et des départs, des retours aussi, des mariages, moyens de ne pas oublier ses origines et sa généalogie” (124). Randria reveals to her aspects of their roles in the uprisings to topple the dictatorship which she had not even suspected. Other travelers let her know in no uncertain terms that her paternal grandmother’s clan had met the previous week to bring all the family up to date with regards to their history, a performative act which as Michel Lambek explains in his ethnological article on Madagascar, is a cultural practice of remembering with its own moral responsibility.12 Once there, Rakotoson transgresses the tabous enshrining silence and reading her grandfather’s notebooks, and begins to situate herself in relation to the witches of her childhood and to all that had remained opaque because unspoken. Such a piecing them together allows her memories to fall into place and to align themselves with the present:

Il est étrange ce voyage, extrêmement étrange. La maison de Grand-père ne m’appartient plus et j’ai l’impression d’un éloignement qui assèche tout. Moi

10 j’ai été éduquée pour être une espèce d’entre deux, pas Française, mais pas Malgache non plus B du moins si on suit les critères ancestraux B j’ai été coupée de tout, de mon pays natal, mais aussi de l’extérieur, parfaite exécutante, sans recul, destinée à faire tourner la machine de manière efficace. Il m’aura fallu cinquante ans pour réaliser tout ce que cela implique, tout ce système économique, culturel et idéologique mis en place, cinquante ans pour commencer à comprendre l’ampleur des dégats et du gachis.” (Juillet 175)

This voyage and its displacements in time and space opened up a space for her to (re)construct herself (Lambek 241) through acts of revision. As a chronicle of traumas and memories, her family and her ancestors take their place on the pages of Madagascar’s historical trajectory over the last century.

For Rakotoson with her own activist past which informs her personal experience together with the know-how and knowledge of others, the urgent question to ask oneself and to think through whenever one is remembering should be: what is affirmed and what is denied and buried? Her fluid style and her continually changing perspectives prevent the objectification of memories. The past surges up before her at a bend in the road, in a conversational aside like phantoms returning to haunt those who are not thinking about them (my paraphrase, Juillet 127), and intervenes in the present of her return as evidence of the narrator’s memory and identity.

Situated in the reality of her own return, Rakotoson’s text sidesteps the exotic pitfalls of the classic travel narrative, the picturesque island paradise, and the melancholic expressions of lost innocence. Her fragmented memory jumps from one element to another as if following her gaze which alights here and there, giving the reader her own sightings, her perspective.

Certainly chronicles in the plural, and thus a work of discontinuity, she (re)traces anxiously the known pathways to (re)mark the lacunae, the gaps and the forgotten to be exhibited. The past of the metaphor gives way to the present of the comparison so as not to rub out the transitiveness of

11 her wandering return to the island which encodes the rhythm of Juillet au pays. This recital of her return to the Red Island is conducted by her memory which is furnished with cultural conventions and which in turn set in motion the collective history. Indeed the chapter placed at the very heart of this text, which dissimulates its very fine construction, is entitled: “Errance”.

Written from elsewhere, from France, her chronotope becomes a writing of transhumance (with trans. signifying beyond; and humus, earth) a writing from beyond the earth according to

Fonkua’s coinage (142). A musically measured ballad, it follows, with a tango rhythm, her walk through the capital city; the transformation of a seamstress’s shop into a cybercafé; the different waves of inhabitants coming to live within Antananarivo’s perimeters and finding themselves living next to the prime ministers’ family mausoleum; or in its closing, a man who shared a common educational journey and political engagement with Rakotoson, without however leaving, and who is now a baker like Randria of Behenjy, tired of not being able to make it, and so representative of a certain petrified image of Malagasy poverty which travels the world.

His begging which breaks up the musical strain profoundly upsets the author because it is a reminder of what is meant in Malagasy by the notion of truth which includes at once justice and culpability and which as a performative act can neither be out of time nor neutral (Lambek

240). Standing before him, Michèle Rakotoson sees herself confronting her phantoms who embody memory rather than lasting as static remains and remainders of memory.13 They are a

“lot de morts non enterrés” (33) not even turned over, and they people her no man’s land, her between-two (40). Thus she asks herself the questions of a “tout-deux”, of an x-islander, who pierces the prudent familial, religious and political silences at the heart of the red island to lay

12 out the woof of her loom, to weave an “histoire qui intègre tout le monde” (195). Her return is a quest for the tangible, for the threads which tie her definitively to her country as she says herself:

Je réalise qu’inconsciemment je suis venue pour ça, récupérer des documents qui me reliront à mon pays dans ce lointain où je vis maintenant. Je repartirai sans rien, juste des images dans ma mémoire, des images rafraîchies. Mais je ne veux pas de cela, il me faut de la matière concrète à emporter là-bas. Pour ne plus être exclue, exilée.(194). The iterative questioning in Juillet au pays marks the work as a space for Rakotoson to find her sociologist and journalist self and for recovering Malagasy culture. Her memories bear witness and act out her engagement.

These chronicles that recall the past transcend the idea of memory as fixed invariable object and connect tradition with contemporaneity. The very mixing of codes of the permissible and impermissible tie the Malagasy rice-paddies to the carefully delineated societal markers in

India Song to weave intertextually the patterns of Duras’ Song onto Rakotoson’s comparative pages of musically determined poetics of language and pays, of identity and responsibility. In a promenade from one place to another, one moment in time to another, the exi(s)l-ander moves beyond her own fictional work and updates and adjusts the images of Madagascar that are promulgated over and over again by the media’s oppressive politics of poverty by juxtaposing them with multifaceted rich representations that transgress and turn the page on the silences of the past.

Figure one: an example of a page with the layering of text and language, with varied fonts extending into the margin.

14 Bibliography:

Döring, Tobias. “Edward Said and the Fiction of Autobiography,” Wasafari 21:2 (July 2006): 71-78. Fonkua, Romuald. “Michèle Rakotoson: histoire, mémoire et écriture,” Interculturel francophonies 1:1 (juin-juillet 2001): 133-43. Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. King, Adèle. “Juillet au Pays: Chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar” World Literature Today 82:3 (May-June 2008): 76. Lambek, Michel. “The Past Imperfect: Remembering As Moral Practice” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Eds Paul Antze & Michel Lambek. London: Routledge, 1996. 235-254. Ligier, Françoise. “Portraits: Charlotte Rafenomanjato,” Théâtres Sud 3 (1990): 27-29. Makward, Christiane. “Entretien avec Michèle Rakotoson,” Women in French 7 (1999): 174- 192. Martin-Chauffier, Gilles. “Un Paradis noir comme l’enfer” Paris Match 3054 (29 nov-5 déc 2007): 22. Ndebele, Njabulo S. “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa.” Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture, Scottsville, South Africa: U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2006. 31-54. Perraudin, Pascale. “Entretien avec Michèle Rakotoson.” The French Review 78:4 (March 2005): 754-764. Rakotoson, Michèle. Juillet au pays: Chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar. Bordeaux: Elytis, 2007. C. “Le Hira Gasy Discours paysan ou rituel des rois?” Théâtres Sud 3 (1990): 9-23. Suk, Jeannie. Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

Notes:

1 . See Christiane Makward’s 1998 interview with Michèle Rakotoson in which the writer emphasizes that very little has been written about the last twenty years in Madagascar (Women in French 7 [1999]:175).

2. In her interview entitled “Les efforts des Malgaches méritent d’être soutenus” with Hernan Rivelo in L’Express de Madagascar (mardi 18 décembre 2007) Michèle Rakotoson explains that “depuis dix ans, je reviens systématiquement ici pour passer mes vacances tous les mois de juillet....” (p.17) after having been chased out indirectly by the old regime, which led to her twenty year exile.

3. Barbara Johnson in A World of Difference explains that intertextuality signifies the multitude of ways that a text has of not being closed in on itself, of not being auto-referential, of being traversed by alterity (esp. 116).

4. Bakhtin’s chronotope is the space-time continuum in which the action of any narrative (inscribed in writing, embodied in ceremonies, or voiced and under continual construction ) is construed. The chronotope allows one to compare the worlds in which the subjects of memory, the heroes of the narratives subsist (Lambek, 246).

5 . Njabulo S. Ndebele’s “The Rediscovery of the ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa” looks at three short stories that emerged after the spectacular of protest literature, and which embody in their telling of seemingly ordinary persons’ activities and life choices a sense of the complexity of society’s problems especially during and in the aftermath of some of the most overt and egregious political oppression (Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture, Scottsville, South Africa: U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2006. 31-54.

6. Romuald Fonkoua indicates in “Michèle Rakotoson: Histoire, Mémoire et Écriture,” Interculturel francophonies 1:1 (juin-juillet 2001): 133-143, that history is a major Rakotosonian preoccupation.

7. Jean Verdi Razakandrainy was known as Dox. According to Rakotoson,”son univers est profondément chrétien [...] hanté par l’idée du mal qui guette....” (“Le Hira Gasy Discours paysan ou rituel des rois” Théatre Sud 27), as was the case for the poet Rabearivelo and other artists until Madagascar’s independence.

8. India Song is the film written and directed by Marguerite Duras in 1974. The musical score was written for the film by Carlos D’Alessio. It is comprised of rumbas, tangos, and languorous waltzes. For Duras, the music is like a celestial mechanism together with the added recording of the young Indian girl’s singing. The film emphasizes the importance of space for Duras and is about the space of her childhood rather than about childhood itself. See the interviews with Duras and D’Alessio on the DVD of India Song for the importance of this musical track to the film.

9. The hira gasy is a ritual in the form of a spectacle which commemorates the splendor of the royal court and which is composed of music, dances, and political texts whose messages are aimed at increasing the citizenry’s participation in society. A popular theatrical form from the region of the Hauts Plateaux, its current form dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, and has survived because it is the memory of the Hauts Plateaux and it commemorates the royal traditions (“Le Hira Gasy” 9-21).

10. Rakotoson briefly retraces the history of the boy’s ancestors known as “karanas” and points out that they are stateless in France and in Madagascar, invisible (Juillet 11) as permanent migrants as she asks rhetorically: “...de quelle communauté est-on, quand on est Malgache, d’origine indienne et vivant à Sarcelle?”(10).

11. As Rakotoson explains elsewhere, the societal divisions were caste-like: “Il y avait trois grandes castes sur les Hauts Plateaux malgaches: les Andriana, équivalent à la noblesse, les Hova ou bourgeois, les Mainty ou hommes noirs, tribus dans lesquelles étaient recrutés les serviteurs royaux. Les personnes réduites en esclavage étaient hors caste” (“Le Hira Gasy” n. 4, 13).

12 . Michel Lambek, “The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice,” Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, Eds. Paul Antze & Michel Lambek, London: Routledge, 1996, 235.

13. Lambek recalls how the French historian, Michelet, said that history does not speak for the dead who cannot speak for themselves and how this lead from the nineteenth century on to the series of memoirs which serve to ensure that the writer can have his/her version of his or her story. However in Madagascar, the dead do speak (245).