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Research in African Literatures 31.2 (2000) 174-178



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Interview

Charlotte-Arrisoa Rafenomanjato Speaks to Carole Beckett


Antananarivo, June 1998

Charlotte-Arrisoa Rafenomanjato 1 is a bilingual author who writes both in French and her mother tongue, Malgache. Her works are numerous and varied: poems, novels, short stories, essays, plays, and translations. Her dramatic works, unpublished for the most part, have twice been awarded first prize in competitions organized by Radio France Internationale and her play Le Prix de la Paix [The peace prize] was made into a television film in 1987. Other plays have been translated into English and Italian and have been performed in Madagascar, France, and Italy as well as the United States of America. However, it is the publication of her novels, Le cinquième seau 2 [The fifth seal] (Harmattan, 1993) and Le pétale écarlate [The scarlet petal] (Société Malgache d'Edition, 1995) that have enabled the general public to read the works of a writer who, until recently, has been internationally unknown. Who is this woman whose works are deeply rooted in a traditional setting dominated by Malgache superstitions but which nonetheless portray a contemporary world? It was this question that I attempted to address in the interview she graciously granted me.


Carole Beckett: Can we start with an autobiographical note--could you speak about your childhood and your youth?

Charlotte-Arissoa Rafenomanjato: If there is one thing that I don't like doing, it's speaking about myself. I can however tell you that I am a doctor's daughter and my mother was an accomplished pianist so I spent my childhood surrounded by gifted people. Afterwards . . . I didn't really have a time of youth because I married very young, at barely sixteen, and I had my first child at the age of sixteen and a few months, before I was seventeen, in fact. I went straight from dolls to babies.

Like everybody else I have always written. I like to write without at all thinking of writing "literature." I started writing seriously very late in life, a mere fifteen years ago, not more. I must also add that I have traveled a lot because my husband was a diplomat and, as a result, I have lived in many countries. We spent eighteen years of my life abroad and it was only when we returned home that I fell in love with writing.

CB: What inspired you to start writing?

C-A R: My first work was Le prix de la paix. I had lived abroad for years and years and when I returned, what I saw was a distressing contrast compared with the memories that I had. When I saw that, I started writing, writing without thinking. The film that was made of this work was rooted in this distress. Later, of course, I varied my themes, but the first was a cry of anguish, the cry of a woman who no longer found what she had left behind when she had left her country. [End Page 174]

CB: You have written in all the genres: novels, plays, short stories, literary essays, poems . . . .

C-A R: I have written only a few poems and I haven't even shown them to my nearest and dearest because of a sense of modesty. Except for a few poems written in Malgache. They belong to me. They are so personal, so much me.

CB: Isn't poetry, by definition, personal and intimate?

C-A R: Yes, but they reveal the real me. I must admit that I have never submitted my poems to a publisher. I have always sent my novels, my short stories, and my essays, but never my poems.

CB: Have your short stories been published?

C-A R: No. Not so far. Yes, they have been published in reviews, but not as a collection. I must admit that I am above all a playwright. I have written about fifteen plays, twelve of which are known to the general public. They haven't been published but have...

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