In his new novel Ambatomanga, the Malagasy novelist Michèle Rakotoson recounts the colonial conquest of her country in the 19th century, revisiting through fiction the brutalities and devastation from which her society has not yet fully recovered. Author of several plays, short stories, essays, stories and novels, she draws most of her inspiration from the both dramatic and exhilarating realities of her native Madagascar.
” My mother always told me that at the age of two, three, I slept with my head resting on a book. She, she worked, she was a librarian and her library was right in front of our house, on the hill opposite. And I suffered a lot from the absence of my mother. So, to have a connection with my mother, I had books. From childhood, it has been my passion. A book is fascinating, a word is fascinating… »
Thus speaks Michele Rakotoson, one of the major literary voices of Madagascar. She was born in Antananarivo in 1948 to a journalist father and a librarian mother. She was herself a journalist, notably at the Paris headquarters of RFI for more than twenty years, before returning to settle in her country which she had had to flee under Didier Ratsiraka for political reasons. Still an activist at heart, she now devotes herself to the development of solidarity publishing as part of a project called “Bokiko” which she initiated, and which brings together cultural associations from the diaspora and from Madagascar.
Michèle Rakotoson came to writing in the 1970s by publishing Dadabe, a collection of three autobiographical short stories first written in Malagasy, then published in French in 1984. This first book was a tribute to the writer’s grandfather, who was a country doctor and who, as a little girl, accompanied him on his rounds to care for his sick. Even today, she nourishes a real veneration for this man who traveled the island to distribute medicines to the needy. ” A man like that haunts you all your life “says the little girl who has since become a renowned writer.
Author of several works – novels, short stories, but also plays, autobiographical chronicles and essays – this great lady of African and Malagasy letters was awarded in 2012 by the French Academy the Great Medal of Francophonie for all of his work.
A protean work
When you ask Michèle Rakotoson what makes the coherence of her protean work, she replies tit for tat: “ Madagascar… It is the quest for Madagascar that makes my work coherent and it is also the quest for myself because I am a Malagasy who has lived in Europe for a very long time, and who, at the same time, when she returned home, was Malagasy because it was out of the question to speak French at home, I had to speak Malagasy. So at the beginning, I experienced it as a heartbreak. Now that’s an identity. We had a literary movement, “mitady ny very” (“search for what is lost”). It may be a nationalist movement, but I think it’s really a self-seeking movement, a movement of doubt. I believe that you have to have doubts in life, we move forward with doubts “.
The quest for self and country is one of the constants in Michèle Rakotoson’s work. It goes through the author’s return to childhood in Dadabe, his first work of fiction. It also involves the exploration of ancestral traditions, particularly in the novel The bath of relics, published in 1988, where the novelist depicts the Malagasy tradition of “fitamphoa”, the second funeral, and what is at stake in this ceremony which is not only mortuary hygiene. More myth and tale than novel, Hennoyhis third opus, offers an almost daunting crossing of hell, which can also be read as a questioning of the cycle of life and death.
According to critics, Michèle Rakotoson has reached the pinnacle of her art with Lalanapublished in 2002, and July in the country : chronicle of a return to Madagascar, published in 2007. The first is a novel. With hypnotic writing, this road novel traces the initiatory journey of two friends to the sea, a symbol of freedom and infinity. The protagonists thus escape from this prison that African societies have become for their youth. Autobiographical story of reappropriation by the author of her country and its landmarks, July in the country looks like a report in places. It is as a journalist that Rakotoson recounts the silence of the hills of his country, the beauty of the landscapes and the dignity of a people who draw, from the vestiges of their grandiose past, the strength to resist the onslaught of such a mercantile present. how miserable.
Denial of history
Entering today the age of great elders, the writer continues her search for the country lost and found in her new novel entitled Ambatomanga, silence and pain which she published last fall. This is a historical account, with the subject of the colonial conquest of the Red Island by the French army, in the wake of the partition of Africa by the European colonial powers gathered in Berlin in 1885, including France . To avenge itself for a humiliating defeat that the island had reserved for it during a first confrontation and above all to establish its guardianship over this recalcitrant little country, Paris dispatched an overarmed military expedition in 1895. It decimated the population, bombarded its monuments and places of power and inflicted devastation on towns, villages and rice fields. Despite its magnitude, this tragedy continues to be glossed over in the history books.
According to Michèle Rakotoson, a heavy weight hangs over this part of Malagasy history. ” It’s a trauma and like all traumas, we don’t talk about it, explains the novelist. There is a denial of the story and the denial he is one of those who have been invaded. In fact, at the moment there are a lot of invasions. It’s always kind of the same process. First we break people, then we arrive. And then, we continue to demolish them by saying that they were savages. I chose Madagascar because it was an old wound at home that I had to heal. We won’t get out of this until we understand what happened. Let’s stop being in the posture of the little savage victim. Nope ! We were defeated in war. »
The story of the invasion and conquest of the Red Island is told in Ambatomanga through the points of view of the slave Tovoa and a young officer of the French contingent, Frédéric Le Guen. The latter had long trusted the military strategists of Paris and their discourse on the civilizing mission which founded the colonial enterprise. However, faced with the horrors of war, the lieutenant’s illusions fade, allowing him to become aware of the hypocrisy and cruelty behind the grand speeches. As for the slave Tovoa who knows Malagasy society from the inside, he recounts its violence, its corruption, its internal rivalries which are, according to him, the causes of the dislocation of his country, in the same way as ” the White, his weapons, his power “.
Far from being a simple trial of the West, Ambatomanga is the novel of a historian. In these glaring pages of truth and fiction, Michèle Rakotoson not only puts the trial of colonization, but also succeeds in making heard with brilliance ” silence and pain » men and women victims of history on both sides of the colonial fault line.
Ambatomanga, silence and pain by Michele Rakotoson. Editions Atelier des nomades, 2021, 268 pages, 18 euros.