Between French and his Malagasy language, his heart swayed for a long time. He eventually wrote in both languages. An immense writer from the beginning of the last century, Rabearivelo was a poet, playwright, novelist, literary theorist. But also deeply in love with life and disappointed not to have been recognized at its fair value by the colonial administration. In an erudite and fascinating biography, the researcher Claire Riffard looks back on the fortunes and misfortunes of the Malagasy bard.
” In 2011, a Malagasy newspaper was still headlining Rabearivelo with this title: Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. He kept only the most sulphurous aspects of this poet’s trajectory: his nightlife, underworld, his temptation of opium, his totally offbeat side. Most of Rabearivelo’s image has been that of a brilliant and provocative intellectual, fascinated by extremes, which perhaps prevents us from reading him in depth. In colleges, in Malagasy high schools, we often only know a few texts of his poetry. »
So says Claire Riffard, researcher at the CNRS, the National Center for Scientific Research, and specialist in the literature of Africa and Madagascar. A few years ago, she co-directed the edition of the complete works of the Malagasy writer Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, published in the CNRS literary collection. Following this long-term work on the texts, the researcher returned this fall with a biography that she devoted to this immense author.
Black legend of the Malagasy bard
Rabearivelo is a real monument of Malagasy letters. He was a poet, novelist, playwright, but also an essayist and literary theorist. Born in 1903, ten years after the conquest of the Big Island by France, the man belongs to the first colonial generation. If his ambitious poetic quest made him the ” prince of Malagasy poets », in the words of Senghor, literary history retains his image as a cursed artist, whose legend is often reduced to his tragic suicide at the early age of 34. However, founder of modern Malagasy literature, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo is much more than his dark legend. This seems to be the underlying purpose of the biography that researcher Claire Riffard has devoted to the Malagasy bard.
” Biography has above all been the quest for a more complex face of the writer,” supports the biographer. And to add: The 20th century was fascinated by the last moments of Rabearivelo who committed suicide with cyanide at the age of 34. But, in reality, behind the violence of this death, there is the intensity of a life. There are friendships, there is a city that he intensely inhabited. There are literary circles that he frequented, both French and Malagasy. Through the first surveys we carried out, the figure of the accursed poet had been very significant. It’s a figure that was constructed by the writer, who had constructed an image à la Baudelaire. And it seemed to me that it was important to look behind this posture and find life again. »
Beneath the legend, life…
Rabearivelo’s life took place in the Antananarivo colonial in full mutation, where the poet grew up, struggled, suffered, made the 400 blows and asserted himself by the sole power of his creative and poetic genius. According to Claire Riffard, it was a life rich in friendships, gallant adventures, many allegiances, and other fights for survival.
Rabearivelo was born into a Malagasy aristocratic family which gave the country famous figures, but which was unable to resist the decline and social downgrading accelerated by colonization. The future poet did not know his father and was brought up by his maternal family. His mother did not have many means: she earned her living as a lacemaker in the village. It was on the initiative of an aunt, attentive to the education of the young people of the family, that he was enrolled at the age of 5 in a Catholic missionary school where his first intellectual training took place. of the future poet.
” In 1913, he went to the Saint-Michel college which was a Jesuit college, says Claire Riffard. And there, he immersed himself in French poetry. He fell in love with the French poets of his time, what was authorized, but also what was forbidden, like Baudelaire. Legend would have it that he was expelled from the Saint-Michel college for having read Baudelaire. I don’t know if it’s true, but in any case, as a teenager, he never stopped sharing both his readings with poet friends and also his first verses. He is readily described smoking his cigarettes and reading his poems with his friends on the heights of Antananarivo. And it is a period of joy, joy of the word, joy of the text, joy of literature. »
The young Rabearivelo had revered school because of the openness it had given him to other worlds, other cultures, other sensitivities. He was 13 years old when he was expelled from college, but he continued to educate himself, devouring the books that fell into his hands, while doing small jobs to meet his basic needs. He will successively be an errand boy, jumper, paper pusher, lace designer. At the same time, he works on perfecting his knowledge of the French language, by reading and re-reading the classics of French literature from the 19th and 20th centuries. He also learns English and Spanish and publishes, at the age of 15, his first poems in Malagasy, in the cultural pages of a magazine dedicated to agricultural information!
“ A colored scholar »
We will have to wait for the 1920s to see the man who now defines himself as ” a scholar of color, mad about the French language and burning to keep his personality », publish his first writings in the language of Ronsard and Baudelaire whom he admires so much. It is the beginning of an original literary career for the time, because it is immediately placed under the sign of interbreeding and bilingualism. ” Rabearivelo has always written in both languages from the beginning, confirms for his part his biographer. He never sacrificed one language to another. He said that these two languages were ultimately his two loves. There was this language that speaks to the soul, French, and this language that whispers to the heart, the Malagasy language. »
In the second part of this column to be published next Saturday, the continuation of the unusual itinerary of the Malagasy bard, resolutely camped at the crossroads of worlds and languages.
Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, a biography, by Claire Riffard. “Free Planet” collection, CNRS editions. 366 pages, 28 euros.