Michele Rakotoson Speaks with Stephen Gray

After attending the week-long Time of the Writer Festival in Durban, sponsored by the Centre for the Creative Arts of the University of Natal, Michèle Rakotoson participated in a panel on 2 April 2001, at the Protea Book House in Pretoria, courtesy of the French Institute of South Africa, where we met.

Born in 1948 in Antanarivo, Madagascar (nowadays the Malagasy Republic)--the great red island off the East Coast of Africa--Michèle Rakotoson has lived the last two decades in Paris, where she works as a journalist for Radio France Internationale. She has published several plays (in Malgache and French), four novels, and several short stories (in French). In 1991 Jean-Louis Jouvert (in his Littératures de l'Océan Indien, Vanves: Edicef) rated her as the key figure in the renewal of the Malagasy literatures of that date.

I had recently published The Picador Book of African Stories, which includes one of her few pieces as yet available to English-language readers. We led in French, but translating into English as we went along, with a tape recorder in Johannesburg the next day.

In 1948 Senghor entitled his trendsetting Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, as if Malagasy literature were a separate category from the African. Is this a useful distinction?

Yes, because the differences between Madagascar and the rest of Africa, to which it does belong nevertheless, are important; and I think it is often worth asserting those differences. Because Madagascar is a very hybrid country. After all, my part of it is originally Indonesian in culture, and has been since the eleventh century; then we had an Arab, an African input, Indian, Portuguese, and so on, all since the eighteenth century under the French colonial system. Nowadays, in fact, it is no secret that we have a very deeply cross-bred culture.

We don't reject the African label: we are part of Africa. But, you know, I feel especially being in your country that there is no one Africa. South Africa is not Mali, Mali is not Ethiopia . . . there are many Africas. So when you say: Africa, I reply: which one? At home we do certainly have a black cultural element, and there is a broader black culture which does cross the national boundaries, but at the same time we also have our own cultural way. This nuance absolutely defines the literatures of Madagascar. We had the fortune there to formalize our Malagasy language as early as the start of the nineteenth century, when already we had a literature written in Arab style. Then, the literature has been democratized for a long while. By 1900 we had 200,000 students studying in Malgache, out of a population of two million inhabitants; in 1905 we had our first novel. So rather uniquely that language preserved the mental structure of the island, while I know ghettoization also took place . . . but that whole problem gets very complicated! But we do have two literatures in Madagascar, both a bit separate from African literatures on the mainland.

Abroad your country is principally known for the three pre-war R's: Rabéarivelo, Rabémananjara, and Ranaivo--who wrote in French. In South Africa their work became known in English translation as early as 1960 (in Africa South 4.2). Are they of living interest to you?

Oh yes, even though I discovered their interest later. At first I followed the Malgache direction and I used to live as a teacher of that. I think, of that generation, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo was the very, very great one, and he wrote in both languages, you know, as I do too now. His Malgache poems are extraordinary, from the point of view of style, his use of proverbs, that unique form I suppose Madagascar is famous for--the hain-teny, those short secretive traditional verses. But he...