Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar
250
Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar
250Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780295996608 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Washington Press |
| Publication date: | 07/21/2015 |
| Series: | Samuel and Althea Stroum Books |
| Pages: | 250 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
And All the Towns Between
I arrived in Antananarivo, or Tana as the capital of Madagascar is called,in March 1993 at the end of the rainy season, an unhappy coincidence forsomeone like me coming from the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest.In the States, I knew how to clock the seasons by rain, knew the differencebetween a solid blanket of clouds that would not lift for days on end,and an uneven bank that signaled a sadden thunderstorm. But the skyabove the Highlands of Madagascar was not the endless gray that shapedNorthwest winters. The Southern Hemisphere lay under the sweep ofsummer rains, and the sky was a palette of changing colors and shapes,one moment as placid as a watercolor landscape, the next filled with thick,viscous clouds streaked with red and yellow spears of light like a Van Goghpainting. From the balcony of the La Karthala Pension, I watched theweather come in from the south and scatter across the hills, shadows ofapproaching rain smearing the whitewashed houses into a monochromegray. And then the rain, sudden and fierce, streaking over the cup of thevalley, threatening to turn everything into silt. But sometimes, as quicklyas the rain shower began, it would end, and the sun would return to theHighlands as if the storm had never really happened—as if, indeed, theancestors were smiling upon Antananarivo.
I came to expect those sudden bursts of rain, an almost welcome relieffrom the gritty air that usually cloaked the city. But the relief was alwaysmomentary; within the hour, the soil had soaked up the moisture, leavingTana coated with a layer of pale ocher dust, punctuated by brightpatchesof green where a profusion of flowering cacti, poinsettia trees, and palmsgrew on the many balconies and parks terraced on the hillsides abovethe center of the city. Only in the low-lying areas—the swampy flatsnear the loading docks of the market, the freight yards spiderwebbed behindthe train station, the windowless mud brick houses that skirted thecity—was there evidence of the rain storm. In those places, the waterwas slow to run off, resisting the porous earth that beckoned it. In thoseplaces, the clay red soil was blackened by deposits of coal and firewood,and children who ran errands in the market ran barefoot through themuck, ignoring for a moment the work they had been sent to do. Frommy vantage point on the balcony, if I listened closely, I could hear theirvoices rising above the rush of traffic, the call of vendors, and the soldiers,stationed in the barracks between the pension and the market, answeringthe orders of the day.
Antananarivo—the city of a thousand warriors, the city of a thousandvillages—was a city of red-tiled roofs and terraced hills circumscribedby circular roads separating the king's palaces and older houses of UpperTown from the government buildings, hotels, and the Zoma market ofLower Town. La Karthala Pension was located on the slope above theZoma, not quite Upper Town but high enough to leave me with a viewof the elementary school and army barracks on the side street above themarket, high enough to allow me to see the sweep of land on the otherside of Lower Town, picture perfect hillside houses crowded together ina seemingly chaotic sprawl that kept to its own sense of order. The mainthoroughfares and arterial streets were crisscrossed by a spiderweb of hillsideclimbs, some no more than stone steps passable only by foot. But allthe traffic spilled down to the Zoma. Everything, from roads and sidewalksto narrow stairways, radiated from the hub of the market. Under acanopy of white canvas umbrellas and peaked vendors' sheds, the Zoma'sofferings ranged from refilled Bic lighters and fresh figs to live poultryand intricately embroidered linens. Market stalls were resplendent in thecolors of orchids and bird-of-paradise flowers, racks of clothing both oldand new, leather and wood carvings, bins of deep yellow', red, and brownspices, carts of dried meats and boxes of delicacies, some for which thereseemed to be no name of English equivalence. But whatever the name, ifit could be found in Madagascar, the Zoma was sure to carry it.
After the rain, I'd stand on the balcony and listen to the traffic of theZoma resume its breathless speed—the noise, halted momentarily by thestorm, building again until it became a relentless tide spliced now andthen by a blast of car horns. Above me, the sky shifted almost imperceptiblyfrom Persian blue to pale blue, sunlight feathered by thin clouds. Iwatched as the last of the rain, dripping off gutters edging the tiled roof,fell onto the terraced garden that Mme. Arianne, owner of the pension,tended every day. Sometimes after the rain, I'd hear Mme. Arianne playingone of her favorite French ballades, a tune that reminded her, shesaid, of her university days in Paris. And I'd watch the ever-changingweather and breathe in sugary air scented with orchids and roses.
On the other side of the valley, beyond the Zoma, pink and whitestucco buildings nestled along the craggy hills seemed to glow under thesun washed sky. Only a few buildings were taller than two stories, butstacked against the hillsides, they created the illusion of height. In thosefirst few weeks in Tana while I waited for the paperwork I'd need to beginmy research, I had ample opportunity to count the number of tallbuildings: the bank, the French-owned department store, two governmentbuildings of plain colonial architecture, all connected to the centerof town by the palm-lined boulevard, Avenue de l'Indépendance.
But despite the sprawl of its burgeoning business district, and its ever-growingpopulation of over one million, Tana still had the air of a smalltown. Given the adobe houses, I could have imagined myself in a coastaltown in Mexico, or at an intersection in Ipoh, Malaysia; and if I closedmy eyes, I heard the bustle of traffic in New York City or Kingston, Jamaica.But the landscape and the people kept jolting me back to reality.This was Madagascar—modern in its intentions, ancestral in its traditions,moving like the clouds, imperceptibly toward its future while neverlosing sight of its past.
In those first few weeks in Tana, I set about learning the rhythms ofthe city. At night, I fell asleep to the yelps of wild dogs quarreling theirway through the streets in a language only they understood. Morningsbegan with the sound of roosters crowing, and the call of the reveillebugle from the army post at the base of the hill. Soon after, I'd hearTeddy, the concierge, unlatching the front gate to the pension. Then theskittering of geckos heading for the shadows of flowerpots, and on thestairstep street outside my shuttered window, the footsteps of passersbyso close I almost imagined them, geckos and humans, brushing againstthe foot of my bed. I listened to the vendors hawk their wares, baskets ofbread or fruit, or stacks of firewood on their heads as they climbed thehillside, calling erratically to anyone who might be interested in buyingwhat they had to offer. Sometimes I'd hear Teddy call to one, then a hastyexchange before the vendor moved on up the steps. As the vendors wentup the street of stairs, schoolchildren laughed their way down. But somemornings were not so peaceful. Before the vendors and children beganpassing my window, before the roar of diesel engines from trucks andbuses headed for the Zoma, I was jolted awake by the thunder of pestleagainst mortar as a few hillside residents kept to the old-fashioned practiceof pounding coarse grains of rice. Whenever the women lifted theheavy wooden pestles and slammed them into the mortar bowls withcannon fire accuracy, tremors rolled under La Karthala and out towardthe Zoma, and I awoke, heart in my throat and convinced that the citywas under attack. In response to my call of distress, the family on the terracedirectly above the pension moved the time for grain pounding fromfive a.m. to seven a.m., which allowed me to escape into the madness ofcity traffic before they began.
All of this made it possible for me to understand the stubbornness oftime in a land made famous by lemurs and elephant birds, baobab andtamarind trees, by magnificant comet butterflies with yellow wings thatsometimes measured as much as eight inches tip to tip, by chameleonsthat were all eyes, and walking sticks that measured the length of aschoolchild's ruler—flora and fauna that seemingly had remained unchangedwith the passage of centuries. In those first few weeks, with allof the frustrations of bureaucratic red tape, I had a chance to get my bearingsin a country that had been both politically and geographically isolated,a place where the past and the present, in all of its extremes, mergedinto the vividly colorful and sometimes unsettling fabric of the culture.And I learned to come to terms with Tana, with the snail's pace of itsbusiness day and the breakneck speed of its traffic.
By the end of my first week in Madagascar, I hired, as Agatha Christie'sHercule Poirot would say, "a guide most excellent." Tiana Flora Tsizazawas a fourth-year student of English literature at the University of Madagascar.She was particularly interested in American literature—everything from The Great Gatsby to The Color Purple and The Women ofBrewster Place. For her, the bonus was that I was an African Americanwriter and a professor of literature. For me, the bonus was in havingfound an assistant who was not only interested in literature but also ableto translate from Malagasy and French into English. With Tiana's commandof these languages, and her familiarity with a few others that shealluded to but would not claim, we trekked through the maze of governmentdepartments for culture and antiquity, the tangle of academic protocol,and the puzzlement of arranging transportation to places whererailroads ended and airlines did not venture. The theme song of theseoffices seemed to be, "Ce n'est pas possible." "This is not possible." But Ipersisted. Some office calls were made three or four times, until a clerk,catching sight of us again, simply gave in and signed the necessary documentsof les certificats administratifs. And if we needed duplicates, inMalagasy or French, Tiana copied them right on the spot before the clerkdisappeared into the bureaucratic labyrinth and we'd be forced to startagain with someone new.
While Tiana translated my intentions to the offices of Recherche etServices des Finances Extérieurs, I tackled the formidable Mme. Bodo ofthe Agence de Voyages. I mapped out a tentative research itinerary. "I aminterested in villages," I told her during the first of many visits. "Placeswhere storytelling is a common occurrence."
Mme. Bodo shrugged her ample shoulders and said, "Possible. Perhaps,"in a voice that reminded me of my cousin Anna, who had been athird grade teacher and used the voice of patience as a weapon againsteven the most truant student. In fact, Mme. Bodo Raobelina looked likemy cousin Anna—meticulous and exact behind her night-colored eyesand full lips, round face and soft brown skin, plump fingers that werealways counting, counting.
One day, Mme. Bodo turned her patient gaze on me and Tiana. "Areyou relatives?" she asked, ticking off the costs of destinations and mileageon her calculator.
Tiana and I looked at each other. There was a similarity in the shapeof the face, the nose, the complexion. Could we have had common ancestors?Teddy, the handsome concierge, could have been the brother ofone of my classmates at Sumner High School in St. Louis. And surely,someone who looked like Mme. Arianne had sat next to me in a universityclass in Pennsylvania or Kansas.
"It is possible," Tiana smiled. "Perhaps," I added.
"Do you really think I look Malagasy?" I asked Tiana.
She leaned back and studied me. "Some women in the village wheremy mother was born braid their hair like yours, but you also look likesomeone from the South."
I laughed. "I am from the South," I said. "Only the South that I knowis thirty thousand miles away from this land." I stared out the window. Wewere driving along the road outside of Tana heading for a place calledAmbohimanga, "the blue mountain." Our guide, Haingolalao, anotherstudent at the University of Madagascar and a friend of Tiana's, hadpromised that at Ambohimanga, I would see the palace of the first king,the birthplace of the Malagasy state. The bustle of Tana had given wayto rice fields. In the lemon light of morning, white egrets floated abovethe young shoots in flooded rice fields, and behind the fields, the hillskept watch. But there was a harsh contrast between the green fields withtheir flooded dikes, and hillsides scarred from the slash and burn thatbared the land for the planting of rice. That was where saplings weregathered to build fires for the rice pots, leaving behind bright gashes oflaterite, red and swollen like open wounds, ribboned through the earth.The scene reminded me of the strip-mined hills of Appalachia.
"Is your country very different from this?" Haingo asked.
"In some places," I said. "Although maybe the soil is not so red. Maybethere are not so many villages any more." Already we had passed a halfdozen towns, but according to Haingo, we were still some distance awayfrom Ambohimanga.
"The blue mountain is where we have the oldest rova," Haingo said."That is the king's palace, and for the Imerina, it is also the place thatonce held the ancestral tombs of the royal family. For many years it wasforbidden for the people to enter this place without the permission of theking. But now it is a holy city. If we are lucky, we will see those who havecome to speak to their ancestors."
To speak to the ancestors, I thought. And I believed that was possible,because the farther we traveled from Tana, the more I felt as if we weretraveling into the past. Here and there, towns were cupped in patches ofgreen, but everywhere, there was dust. Perhaps it was the dust that gaveme the illusion that I was moving into some ancient time. Dust, churnedup by the wheels of the car, blurred the lines between road and field, andthe road seemed to undulate, rising from hillsides crevassed with the redscars of erosion, then falling in swirls onto sparse green valleys that Iglimpsed only for an instant before the road sent us spiraling onto thenext hill.
For miles, ours was the only car on the road, and when we appeared,villagers looked out from their houses like sentries watching us pass. Althoughthere was some distance between villages, there was also a senseof intimacy when we passed through one, the roads so narrow that, ifwe'd slowed down, I could have shook hands with the people who stoodin their doorways to watch us drive by. But their vigil was momentary,because the car whipped through each outpost in almost a blink of theeye—then it was on to the next curve in the road, the next rise of hills,the next town, the car leaving behind it a trail of red dust.
In Tana, I had always been aware of the thin layer of dust that coveredeverything. At the pension, the wood was polished, the floors scoured withcoconut shells, the corners brushed to keep away the dusty pale patina thatsettled on everything by nightfall. But on the road, the faint red coloringI saw in Tana suddenly took on a deeper shade, staining the countrysidebetween the patches of green with a color that I could scarcely find aname for, a red so vivid that I found myself trying on all the labels Iknew: rubia, crimson, cranberry, cinnabar, magenta, mercuro, ocher—andnone of them quite right. As we drove along, a comet of red dustwhirling behind the car, I hoped that words would not fail me when wereached Ambohimanga.
The road seemed endless, twists and turns through the hills, past ricefields and dikes, and then a swatch of a town that looked like the othertowns I'd already seen. Abruptly, the road ended in front of a medievallooking gate. A thatched guard house was perched on the arch of the gate,and pushed to one side was a stone, round as a millstone but so huge, onlythe gods could have used it for grinding. Haingo told me that the measurementwas 4.50 meters, which I calculated to be nearly 15 feet.
"They rolled it over the opening to keep intruders out at night,"he said.
"Like a drawbridge," I told him.
The path was steep and wound its way past a few small houses kneelinginto the dirt road. Although the houses appeared to be occupied,everyone we met looked like a visitor. "They come from Tana," Haingosaid. "And all the towns between."
Tiana recognized a few girls from the University. "Because this is palaceof King Andrianampoinimerina, everyone comes to see where helived," she said. Then, noticing that I was wheezing, she added, "It's verysteep, but you can see everything for many, many miles."
I followed her up the slope, and when I reached the first cluster ofbuildings, sat down on a low wall to catch my breath. Families walkedpast me—grandfathers leading children, mothers hurrying along besidetheir mothers, younger sisters with babies on their backs, and lovers, gigglingand holding hands. A group of musicians walked by, carrying trumpets,guitars, and valihas made from beautifully carved bamboo, strips ofthe wood cut away to form a circle of strings, like a harp, around a tubeof wood. I had heard the sound of the valiha only once before, at a concertplayed by Rossy in the U.S. I found its music so hauntingly beautiful,I would never forget it. They all moved briskly, making me groweven more impatient with my faulty breathing. Then I noticed a groupworking its way up the path at an even slower pace than I had managed.From a distance, they were so tightly clustered together, they seemed tobe marching in slow motion. The men were wearing red and white lambastied over their trousers. "The lambas have the pattern of a nearby village,"Tiana said. It was only when they came closer that I noticed theyseemed to be supporting two older people in the middle of the group whowere moving so slowly, I thought at first that they were being carried.
"They have come to consult with the ancestors," Tiana said. "Maybesomeone is sick or someone is in need of money. In the rova, they will finda person who speaks in the voice of the ancestors."
"Like an oracle?" I asked.
"No, it is the ancestor who speaks," she said.
"That is what we believe," Haingo said.
We moved past the group and on up the slope. I made the rest of theclimb effortlessly, and when I reached the square at the top of the slope,I saw the musicians, who'd been climbing up the hill a few moments earlier,setting up their chairs on a small stage. In the middle of the square,children played tag, and their parents strolled around the edges of thesquare. The terrace of a restaurant at the opposite end of the square wasalready crowded. (Later, I would discover that behind this restaurant wasan outdoor privy unique to Madagascar: two turtle shells placed on eitherside of the hole. And there, I also discovered that my balance was muchbetter than my breathing.) Across from the restaurant was a set of widestone stairs with a constant stream of people moving up and down them.
"That is the rova," Haingo said.
I spotted the red and white lambas inching up the steps. "They willhave some ritual up there," Tiana said.
"Will they let me watch?" I asked.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Over the Lip of the World by COLLEEN J. McELROY. Copyright © 1999 by Colleen McElroy. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.