Notes from France Dragons

Sometime in the weeks leading up to my return home to New Orleans from southern France, a friend who is a literary scholar sent me his review of Edward P. Jones’s award-winning novel, The Known World. Later that day a writer friend e-mailed me an online link to the first chapter. It is the unlikely tale of a Black slave-owner, his scientific approach to slavery, and the seemingly inevitable collapse of his plantation following his death. The author explains that the work takes its title from the old European explorers’ maps, which divided the world into “known” and “unknown” territories. The Unknown could be populated by any kind of exotic, mysterious and savage creatures. In 1985, James Baldwin wrote:

Ancient maps of the world…inform us, concerning that void where America was waiting to be discovered, HERE BE DRAGONS. Dragons may not have been here then, but they are certainly here now, breathing fire, belching smoke…attempting to intimidate the mores, morals, and morality of this particular and peculiar time and place.

I have been on a kind of quest. Unable to find books by contemporary afro-francophone poets here in France, I’ve turned to re-reading the authors I read as a student: Césaire of Martinique, Depestre of Haiti, Senghor of Senegal, Damas of French Guiana, Tirolien of Guadeloupe. I have already written that much of the peculiar racism and exploitation engendered by French colonialism throughout Africa and the Caribbean is alive and well here in France today. It was during the period between the two World Wars that these and other writers of the Négritude movement first addressed the fallout of enslavement and colonialism under French rule. But the poet who stands out in my mind these days rarely addressed these topics. And I am fascinated and troubled by him.

Before his death in his early thirties, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo published four collections of poems, founded a literary review, single-handedly revived literature written in the Malagasy language, and then paved the way for a whole new literature in both Malagasy and French. A quarter of a century later, in 1963, a translation of some of his works appeared in English as 24 Poems. These past several months, I have been writer-in-residence at a foundation in France, where I can readily buy or order Jones’s Known World, as well as works by Baldwin and other African American authors, but cannot purchase works by living Black poets writing in French. Rabéarivelo, long dead by the time I first read him as an undergraduate, has become for me an emblem of the Unknown – a kind of marker on a literary map I cannot purchase for any sum of money. His name is written in dark letters on a landmass off the southeastern coast of the African continent.

Although the French began colonization efforts in Madagascar as long ago as the 1640’s, it was not until after the crushing military defeat of 1895 that they succeeded. The following year, Madagascar became a French colony under a truly brutal military rule. Half a century later, following World War II, like many of France’s colonies, it became an overseas territory. After fourteen years of political limbo, it finally re-gained independence in 1960.

Madagascar has a population of about 13 million, larger than California and Oregon combined. Extending 1,000 miles in length and 360 miles across at its widest point, it is the fourth largest island in the world. It is a place of great natural beauty – coral reefs, rain forests, rice fields, baobabs and forestlands. It produces coffee, vanilla, and many semi-precious stones. Most plant and animal life found in Madagascar are found only there.

The capital city is Antananarivo, “City of a Thousand Warriors.” At its highest point sits the “rova,” or royal fort. Mazes of narrow alleyways and stairs cover the town. One of the more remarkable, reaching 600 feet, is called Tsiafakantitra, which translates, “Old folk cannot make it.” In the heart of downtown is the Zoma, the largest outdoor market in the world.

Madagascar has a long and heroic history and Rabéarivelo was well versed in it. Of noble lineage, his family became impoverished almost overnight as a result of the French take-over. In spite of now meager resources, an uncle paid for his private school education, and his mother encouraged his early literary efforts.

The Malagasy language has borrowings from several African languages, including Arabic and Swahili, as well as from French and English. During the years of French military rule, however, writing in Malagasy was outlawed and authors who defied that dictate were routinely imprisoned.

The fact that slavery, colonialism and race-defined economic oppression have been removed from the texts of French history and social debate may be only one reason that works by Black authors in French remain unavailable. I don’t know what other reasons there might be. I do know that this invisible literary and political history of African and Caribbean authors writing against French racism is at the heart of the mistaken notion that France is a haven to Black artists seeking asylum from oppression. I know that, beginning in the 19^th century, African American artists, including New Orleans poet and dramatist Victor Séjour, and later Wright, Baldwin and la Baker found homes there. I know that Séjour resided there as a free man during the period of French slavery. The others took up residence at various stages of that country’s long colonial rule around the world. And I know that not one of them ever wrote against that particular tyranny. In writing about the United States in “Here Be Dragons,” however, Baldwin insists:

Nor, since this country is the issue of the entire globe and is also the most powerful nation currently to be found on it, are we speaking only of this time and place… . monumental struggles being waged in our time and not only in this place resemble, in awesome ways, the ancient struggle between those who insisted that the world was flat and those who apprehended that it was round.

I once attended a dinner party of six or so given for Baldwin in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was mildly interested in the fact that I had attended university in France. Of his own life there he offered only that, it wasn’t that there was “no racism” in France; it was just that he hadn’t been prevented from working as a writer there. Rabéarivelo never had the chance to see for himself.

Born sometime between 1901 and 1904, Rabéarivelo, only knew his home as a colony of the France to which he was repeatedly refused entry. Having single-handedly revived and revivified Malagasy literature, having published in Madagascar and Mauritius as well as on the African and European continents, he was, during his lifetime, an acclaimed author. In addition to poetry, Rabéarivelo wrote about the long history, folk-life and literary traditions of the world of Madagascar. Stuck in low-wage jobs as a translator and proofreader for a publishing concern, he also worked odd jobs his entire life. Even after election to the newly created Académie Malgache – the Malagasy equivalent of the Académie Française and the American Academy of Arts and Letters – he was never able to find better work. Recognized though he was as a man of letters, he was also a married man and father of five who was never able to rise from penury. The worst blow was the death of his youngest daughter. He wrote about it in poems and short stories and sank into a depression from which he probably never recovered.

While Rabéarivelo endured a life of continued struggle at home, off in Paris, other poets from Africa and the Caribbean had begun to organize what was fast becoming the Négritude movement. Spurred by the works of such Harlem Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, they were writing a new politically engaged poetry, almost none of which is available in France today.

Senghor, Césaire and Damas adamantly rejected the French policy of assimilation and denial of African heritage. In 1934, they published their manifesto, Légitime Défense. That same year they brought out L’Étudiant Noir. Only one issue of the review was ever published, but because it included works by authors from across the Diaspora, its effect was massive. Like Hughes’s “Black Artist and the Racial Mountain,” L’Étudiant Noir proclaimed the rights of Blacks to glory in the African heritage and to revolt against racism in all its forms.

The possibility of some “better life” in France – at a time when francophone African and Caribbean writers were at the height of public recognition – represented so much to Rabéarivelo that he chose death over life in poverty in the African island nation of his birth. His visa application for travel to France having been repeatedly refused, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo committed suicide in 1937. Just two years before, he had published Traduit de la Nuit (Translated from the Night). One of the most telling poems reads in part:

And you who witness his daily suffering
and his endless struggle –
you watch his agony riddled with thunder
… .
but you no longer pity him
and hardly even recall

How his sufferings begin again
each time the sun capsizes.