French reading group, 2018

This ‘dense and mythic’ novel follows two friends, Naivo and Rivo on a journey from the capital Antananarivo to the sea, a trip that is almost a pilgrimage for Rivo, who is suffering from AIDS and has never seen the sea. Haunted along the way by their ancestors and by the ugly present-day social and environmental realities of their country, they continue in search of dignity, redemption and peace. Inspired by the myth of Orpheus and his journey to the underworld, Rakotoson’s mastery of Malagasy oral storytelling lends an intoxicating musicality and rhythm to this work which painstakingly traces the limits of reality and fiction, life and death, tradition and modernity. Not only have readers, critics and author herself have hailed Lalana as her best, most beautiful work, the novel also demonstrates her engaged activist sensibilities, as she was the first artist to address the 90s AIDS crisis in Madagascar.

Triste Jeunesse (Sad Youth) is the chronicle of a simple love story gone awry. Its chief protagonists are Houda and Said, two science students who meet at the University of Marrakech and decide to plan a modest life together. Following their failure to navigate the country’s corrupt institutions and graduate into well-paying jobs, they are driven by poverty to take up work in a guest-house frequented by Western tourists, where Houda and Said’s relationship is slowly but surely torn apart by a series of events that depict the unfortunate situation of many of Morocco’s young people.

Tasked with casting one hundred extras to play deportees in a film adaption of Marguerite Duras’ war memoir La Douleur, Damya wanders the streets of Paris. Her lively presence and gaze transform each fleeting exchange into a meaningful encounter with another person, whether it is the walker who keeps time only by the wearing down of his shoes, or the street juggler who resembles one of Fellini’s clowns. But in the maze of the city, Damya is clinging on to the mad hope of finding again the boy from a tragic missed connection one November evening, whose memory haunts her. This intense and serious novel is a magnificent journey through Paris, the city of a thousand faces inhabited by memories and those who relive them.

Festins de la détresse (2005) proposes an interesting insight into contemporary Senegalese society through the lives and interactions of a closely knit family that spans four generations. Maar, the central character, is a retired teacher with two adult sons who find it hard to gain employment in spite of their determination and excellent qualifications. That situation gives rise to much angst, desperation and various attempts to escape the systemic failure of Senegalese society. Drawing on the complex memory of African song and tradition, Aminata Sow Fall wishes in this novel to ‘change the belief that food and material things are the only things necessary to survival and to demonstrate the importance of creativity and spirituality. They are perhaps even more important than material needs, which are not enough to support the dignity of the human being’.

Hira, born on the seventh anniversary of Madagascar’s independence, seeks to return, but to where? To his first memories of an enchanted childhood, full of laughter and colour, when he would secretly read forbidden books stolen from the church and play ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in the hills haunted by the spirits of the Vazimba? Or towards the more distant past of his own father, a pacifist intellectual and member of the opposition who was arrested and tortured? Family history and island history merge through the tales and images of the 1947 riots, the 1972 student movements and lynchings of 1984…

For Hira, writing is not only a refuge where the lost poetry of his childhood can be reborn, but it also becomes necessary for speaking resistance and denouncing terror. A feverish hymn to hybridisation and to peace, this almost autobiographical novel of entangled individual and collective histories is a declaration of love for Madagascar, for literature and for life.