Jean- Joseph Rabearivelo, Africa’s first Modernist poet, was born in 1901 at the cusp of Madagascar’s colonization by France, and ended his own life by cyanide in 1937, a decade before its first heaves into independence. His relationship to the artistic tradition of his colonizers was nonreciprocal, and he remained an unheard interlocutor with the French avant-garde for the first decade of his career. His poetic inspirations were passé- the same year Rabearivelo published his first collection of neo-Romantic verse in French, La coupe de cendres (The bowl of ashes, 1924), Andre Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto, and the Paris art world was toasting the poet members of its Cubist circles, Pierre Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars. Rabearivelo’ s Madagascar-based publisher was French, but didn’t have avant-garde sensibilities; its catalogue included titles on guano harvesting and local folk dress. And there was the inevitable issue of cultural difference. When Rabearivelo broke free of his Romantic influences with the important essay “Quelques poètes, enfants d’Orphée,” Henri Michaux was visiting India and Southeast Asia and writing about his experiences as “a barbarian in Asia.” The exchange with global French culture was at cross currents.
Rabearivelo’s early reputation was never in doubt in his own country, however. As the editor of Malagasy poetry anthologies and renowned local literary journals 18 Latitude Sud and Capricorne, Rabearivelo was the de facto Madagascar laureate. He was an advocate as well as a poet: he spoke for himself and on behalf of an entire Malagasay tradition to his French counterparts. He translated his own writing in Malagasay and that of others into French, an important attempt to establish legitimacy in the language of his poetic influences and political colonizers. Such attempts were not uncommon, and always fraught with political implications. Frantz Fanon writes of the same problem faced by Caribbean natives in Black Skin, White MasL· (1952): “The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter. . .in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language. ” Rabearivelo’s poetry and criticism in French bears the imprint of this identity conflict, even on the level of its formal innovations. His final book, Vieilles chansons des pays d’Imerina (Old Songs from Interina Lands, 1939), adapts the traditional Malagasy verse form hainteny, an oral form that he had written about in critical articles and anthologies, into short lyric poems in French.
You there
standing naked!
You are mud and remember it—
actually you’re the child of this parturient dark
who feeds on the milkstuff of the moon,
then slowly grows into a trunk
above this low wall the dreams of flowers crawl over
and the smell of summer at a lull.
To feel, believe, that roots push from your feet
and slide and turn like thirsty snakes
down to an underground spring
or clutch the sand,
and marry you to it so soon—you, alive
tree, unknown, unidentified tree
swelling with fruit you’ll have to pick yourself.
Your crown
with its windy hair
hides a nest of immaterial birds
and when you come to lie in my bed
and I see it’s you, O my rootless brother,
your touch, your breathing, the smell of your skin
will rouse the sound of unfathomable wings
as far as the borders of sleep.
Read
Not a sound, don’t speak:
going to explore a forest–eyes, courage,
wit, dreams…
Secret forest but touchable:
forest.
Forest rustling with silence,
Forest where the bird to trap got away,
the bird to catch in a trap and force to sing
or cry.
Who to make it sing to, who to make it cry to
for the place where it hatched.
Forest. Bird.
Secret forest, bird hidden
in your hands.
