Claiming the Field: Africa and the Space of Indian Ocean Literature

As is well known to a restricted company of specialists in the English-speaking world, there are and have been for centuries, writers from the Indian Ocean world. There exist and have existed in the past significant literary movements and major authors. Nonetheless, I remain intrigued by the fact that the category of Indian Ocean literature has never quite achieved the kind of prominence enjoyed by say, Caribbean literature, to consider just one other example of a corpus of texts associated with mainly coastal and island-based communities, sharing in common similar experiences of slavery, indentured labor, colonialism, and other deprivations of political and economic rights. Efforts to project the Indian Ocean world as a zone of distinctiveness and coherence have not yet borne much fruit in the literary field. In universities in the English-speaking world, there are courses on African literature, on Caribbean literature, on Black literature, on Asian literature, but few courses I would suggest on Indian Ocean literature. The fault is of course partially ours as scholars, but it may also reflect a deeper malaise on the part of the communities whose texts we are seeking to systematize.

My concerns in this paper do not primarily pertain to the tensions that may or may not exist between ethnic groups in the region, to both real and constructed differences between fairer-skinned and darker-skinned people in the Indian Ocean area. Nor am I seeking to prove that the community I will be discussing here, namely the Malagasy, really are or are not Africans. The questions I would like to deal with are the following: why is it that writers from the Indian Ocean area have not, by and large, been involved in efforts to advertise the notion of a regional identity? And what would it take for Indian Ocean literature to acquire visibility as an autonomous category of world literature? As I will suggest here, Indian Ocean literature has suffered in the first place from the apparent reluctance of Indian Ocean authors to center their political activism on the region as a whole. Furthermore, and in the second place, the seeming detachment of these writers from the Indian Ocean area fits into a regional pattern of highlighting distant locations and ancestries. This regional pattern can, in turn, be attributed to the proximity of the islands to the African continent, a site historically associated with memories of slavery in local imaginaries. Finally, and for these reasons, the relationship of Indian Ocean communities to the African mainland remains central to the problematic of forging a distinct regional identity in the literature and popular culture created by Indian Ocean artists.

I first started thinking on this subject in the 1980s while doing research and gathering material on the Malagasy author, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo. At the onset of my research project, I had been led to believe that I was working on Malagasy literature, on Indian Ocean literature, on Francophone literature, and most importantly on African literature. Indeed, I became interested in Malagasy literature mainly because it appeared to constitute an insufficiently studied area of African literature. A very productive visit to Madagascar at the end of the 1980s, however, caused me to begin reviewing some of the categories to which I had assumed that Rabearivelo’s work naturally belonged.

For one thing, many of the extremely helpful and friendly people I met in Madagascar made it clear to me that they did not in fact consider themselves to be African. A Malagasy writer whom I met at a conference somewhere in Europe a few years ago echoed these opinions. In later years, I met other Malagasy who had much to say on the importance of cooperation between the nations of the global south la coopération sud-sud (or “south-south cooperation” as they called it), but it was a form of cooperation which could just as easily have involved Madagascar and Peru as Madagascar and Mozambique. If my interlocutors considered the usefulness of a Malagasy rapprochement with countries like South Africa, it was merely a question of proximity and convenience rather...