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.

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