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Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo (1901/1902?-1904?-1937) |
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One of Africa's most important French-language poets, a prominent figure in the literary revival known as the Mitady ny Very, which swept Madagascar in the 1930s. Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo wrote both in Malagasy and in his own unique version of imperfect French. He was passionate and restless, drifted from one job to another, and suffered from drug addiction and depression. Rabéarivelo took his own life at the age of 36. And you witness his daily torment Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo was born Joseph-Casimir in Antananarivo (Tananarive), the capital of Madagascar, into a relatively poor family. He was the only child of his mother, Rabozivelo, who was an aristocrat, related to the royalty of the largest Malagasy ethnic group, the Merina people. At the time of his birth, she was no more than 17. Alexis Rafaralahy, whom she married later, was a tailor. The loss of her family's property was partly caused by the abolition of slavery. In 1895 Malagasy armed forces had been defeated by the French, and the next year Madagascar was annexed to the French colonial empire. The new administration led to the pauperization of most of the Merina royalty. Several nationally prominent writers were imprisoned in the 1910s. Rabéarivelo was educated by his uncle, who sent him to the
Ecole des Fréres des Ecoles Chrétiennes at Andohalo, then to the
Collége Saint-Michel in Amparibe. He left school at the age of
thirteen, but continued to read widely, gaining familiarity with
Western classics, and mastering both Spanish and French. For some years
he was employed as a secretary and interpreter of the head of the
Canton of
Ambatolampy, and then he returned to Tananarive. Until 1923 Rabéarivelo worked in odd jobs, and eventually ended as a proof-reader at the printing press of the Imerina, keeping the poorly paid job until his death. In 1926 he married Mary Razafitrimo, a photographer's daughter; they had five children. The death of his youngest daughter, Voaghany, was a terrible blow for him; she was three years old. In Un conte de la nuit, a short story, Rabéarivelo recounts the family tragedy. Rabéarivelo's mother encouraged him to write and at the age of 20 Rabéarivelo published his first poems in a journal. (The novel was not a popular form of literature during the colonial period.) In 1923 the Austrian review Anthropos accepted an essay on Malagasy poetry. He started to contribute articles to journals in his own country, in the neighboring Mauritius, and in Europe. Among his friends was the French poet Pierre Camo (1877-1974), who worked as a civil servant, and included some of Rabéarivelo's poems in his review 18° Latitude Sud. Rabéarivelo's early pieces, written in strictly metered verse, were influenced by 19th-century French Symbolism. He corresponded with André Gide (1869-1951) and a number of poets in France, Belgium, and Tunisia, who stimulated his own creation of poetry. Simultaneously he was interested in hain-teny, a traditional form of Malagasy poetry. His countryman Flavien Ranaivo (1914-1999) also drew from them. Embracing the darker side of his persona, Rabéarivelo
asked, at the beginning of his career, a doctor to inject him with the
type of tuberculosis bacilli that
had
killed in 1900 the symbolist poet and writer Albert Samain. (Against
the Postcolonial: "francophone"
Writers at the Ends of French Empire by Richard Serrano, Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2006, p. 45) In 1931 Rabéarivelo was accepted into the Académie Malgache,
founded after the model of Académie Française. He never got
the higher-paid job, which he always hoped for, from the
administration.
The oppressive colonial rule set the boundaries to Rabéarivelo's work
more or less visibly. Although Malagasy-language writing was restricted,
memories of independence were still fresh. Unable to pay his taxes, Rabéarivelo
was imprisoned for a brief time. In spite of being treated badly by the
colonial government, he refused to give up his faith in French culture.
Rabéarivelo remained an unapologetic royalist and admired the
anti-democratic writer Charles Maurras (1868-1852), naming him along
with Paul Claudel (1868-1955), Gide, Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and
Colette (1873-1954) as one of the five greatest living writers. A recurring theme
Rabéarivelo's collections was exile, the journey away from the native
land. When all texts written in
French were considered to belong to French literature, Rabéarivelo
supported bilingual works and proposed that "Malagasy literature" would
recognize French-language texts composed by the Malagasy. To underline
his point about the dual nature of the colonial culture, he wore
Westernstyle clothes under his traditional long robe. Any spare money
he spent on books. Once he received 30 kilos of books abroad. In the 1930s Rabéarivelo launched his own journal, Capricorne. Like Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), his greatest role model, Rabéarivelo was too much of an unpractical dreamer to be able to move into politics. Moreover, he was addicted to drugs and womanizing. Many of his friends opposed French rule. Rabéarivelo's own private goal was to get to France, to see Paris, and to be accepted as he is. He also produced several translations of French poems, but his dream never realized. Sharing
Baudelaire's disgust of mediocre life, Rabéarivelo replaced the reality
of a colonized civilization with his own images, and created a new
mythical world, shadowed by visions of suffering and death. This other realm, which referred to the loss of independence and was populated by wandering tribes, evoked both happiness and sadness. "You who left at dawn / and
who thus entered a doubly walled night, / human words can no longer
reach you, / nor can these floral stalks be a crown for you / having
turned into bursting buds around the trees of Imerina / The very
morning you departed from us." (from Presque-songes, translated in 'French-Language Poetry' by Edris Makward, A History of Twentieth-century African
Literatures, edited by Oyekan Owomoyela, Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1993, pp. 200-201) La Coupe de cendres (1924), Rabéarivelo's first collection of poems, was followed by Sylves (1927), which included 'Nobles dédains,' 'Fleurs mêlées,' 'Destinée,', 'Dixains,' and 'Sonnets et poèmes d'Iarive'. The third collection, Volumes (1928), contained 11 poems about trees, "votre rumeur me dit l’âme de mes aïeux" (your murmur relates the soul of my ancestors to me). Rabéarivelo compares his life with that of a palm tree: Quant à moi, fils des Rois d’une époque abolie, Presque-Songes (1934) was originally written in French and then translated into Malagasy, but Rabéarivelo wrote the French poems as if they were translations. This collection was his first venture into free verse. ". . . they say that this inner source / refreshes thousands of cattle / and numberless tribes, wandering tribes / in the frontiers of the South." ('Cactus,' Modern Poetry from Africa, edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 36) Rabéarivelo's plays, Imaitsoanala, Fille d'oiseau
(1935) and Aux portes de la ville (1936), focused on rituals
and folklore and carefully avoided any reference to politically
inflammable issues. On the other hand, none of his critical works were
published in his lifetime. Rabéarivelo's love poems were
collected in Vieilles chansons des pays d'Imerina (1974). Rabéarivelo committed suicide on June 22, 1937, by poisoning
himself with cyanide. Various reasons have been given
for his suicide, including the colonial administration's decision to
send a group of basket-weavers instead of him to France to represent
the colony. It was also known that he had a melancholic temperament and
was addicted to drugs. He had seriously considered suicide as early as
1934, and even wrote a farewell letter for his children. Rabéarivelo's
record of his last hours was published in the Mercure de France (September 15,
1938) under the title 'La mort tragique d'un poète'. Several of Rabéarivelo's poems was published in Léopold Senghor's famous Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948), the seminal anthology embodying the aspirations of the Negritude movement. However, Rabéarivelo wrote outside the framework of the movement. A selection of Rabéarivelo's poems translated into English, 24 Songs, came out in 1963. Translations from the Night, edited by John Reed and Clive Wake, was issued by Heinemann a few years later. Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier called Rabéarivelo "a poet of genius" in Modern Poetry from Africa (1963). For further reading: Malagasy Ecopoetics: The Hybrid Poetry of Parny, Rabearivelo and Mahaleo by Christie Margrave (2022); Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo: une biographie by Claire Riffard (2022); Refractive Africa by Will Alexander (2021); From Hainteny to Negritude: Analysis of the Transnational Flow of Literary Currents between 'Indocean' and Francophone Literatures by Manfa Sanogo (2020); La double culture de Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo: entre Latins et Scythes by Gavin Bowd (2017); Against the Postcolonial: "francophone" Writers at the Ends of French Empire by Richard Serrano (2007); 'Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo' by Moradewun A. Adejunmobi, in Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998); Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Literature, and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar by Moradewun Adejunmobi (1996); Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, cet inconnu (1989); European Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by A. Gérard (1986); Introduction to African Prose Narrative, edited by L. Losambe (1979); The Critical Evaluation of African Literature, edited by Edgar Wright (1973) Selected works:
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