I was dodging between the capital’s stalls, at the top of Independence Avenue, pursued by sellers eager to clinch a deal over their long-held treasure. Word had gone out loudly in several dialects that this foreign scholar had ventured there for a book.
The masterpiece in question was whipped out from under cash-boxes and robes of raffia-cloth. The labyrinthine market of Madagascar’s Antananarivo was acry with a dozen copies held aloft, at ever more bargain prices. I fled.
I was after a copy of the tome, still in print, published under the patronage of the first president of the new republic, on his official press, back in 1960. My friend at the ice-cream shop sorted out how much I should offer. Pushing me ahead, she discreetly exchanged my fistful with the least riotous vendor. Now I had in hand one copy of Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo’s Poèmes, 50 years old. The pages had not yet been cut.
Although Dorothy Blair of the University of the Witwatersrand, from a copy of the selfsame volume, had first made Rabéarivelo known to our English-speakers, I was not sure his reputation had really caught on abroad. But as she remarked: “He began alone, unaided, an intellectual effort that must be unparalleled in the history of literature in French.”
The circumstances of Rabéarivelo’s life were discouraging. Born in 1901, five years into French colonial rule, what chance would there have been for an illegitimate Afronesian, with father unknown and descended on his mother’s side from Protestant royals, collapsed into poverty by the Jesuits?
Perforce self-taught, he published his first pamphlet (in Malagasy) at the age of 12 and worked his way through the metropolitan styles of aestheticism and symbolism. Only in the 1920s did he hit his stride as an explosively skilful surrealist. Finding work as a library assistant and a lowly proofreader, he drew on a network of fellow haunted poets abroad for moral, if not financial, support.
Although nowadays hailed as the lone precursor of most of the francophone poetry that would burgeon after World War II, there was to be little reward for him on the outpost which he never escaped. But perhaps best known about our genius pioneer is that, once he had been denied travel documents to voyage to Paris, turned down “for budgetary reasons”, in protest he staged a ritual suicide. He even saw to it that his demise would be metered in his last journal: “22 June, 1937. There is nothing left to argue and nothing left to wait for. In a little sweetened water I shall take the potassium cyanide, more than 10 grams. I am going to … stretch out.” Beyond the poetry his family archives contained at least two masterly novels. Censorship had not permitted publication until some 50 years on.
I learned that he wrote each poem twice (in classical French, but also in indigenous Hova to stress its viability, in effect translating from traditional sources both ways).
At the Havatsa Institute, maintained to preserve his literary reputation, his circumstances were explained. Suffering from “existential disequilibrium” (or was it opium?), Rabéarivelo had been handicapped sufficiently. He wished to join his ancestors. Finish.
I was filling with his images: of zebu’s horns “like a crescent moon rising”; of the old sailor “who kept a pebble as a souvenir, besides the shell of a miniature pirogue, bought in a distant isle that only a dream inhabits, but where huts line the shore”; of his ringing eulogies to the Goddess of Departures. Aware that he could counter the propaganda of those pillaging his heritage only with literary truth-telling, I enjoyed how he had called upon a line-up of fellow conscientisers: Mahatma Gandhi, Marcus Garvey, even Lord Byron and André Gide, all immortal now.
I duly visited his birthplace, converted from a clinic into the glorious Museum of Art and Archaeology. Then out of the city buzz to his tomb, down a dirt track where his fishers and herders proceed in age-old tranquillity. And there was a little girl with her bike, stopping to read the inscription, like the daughter whom he mourned as she preceded him into that vault.
In the taxi to the airport, feeling I have to be in touch with every detail, because “disorientated birds become strangers to one another, no longer recognising their own nests”, I slice the last pages open.