I visited the my village commune elementary school on Thursday morning to decorate the students’ classrooms with environment-related posters and pull-outs from the Your Big Backyard and Ranger Rick magazines donated by Annandale parents and shipped to Madagascar by M&D. The teachers were very pleased to have something to put up on the otherwise barren cement, wooden and sheet metal walls of the two classrooms I visited. The kids were so excited to have posters put up in their classrooms, mostly pictures of animals that don’t live in Madagascar and which they had never seen before. As I taped the magazine pages to the walls, the students mumbled to one another about whether or not the raccoon was a kind of lemur, the hippo a big swimming pig, and the fox some kind of red hairy fosa.

As is custom, I visited with the elementary school director first, to ask permission to visit each classroom. As we talked, he said he had been meaning for some time to invite me to the mitsabora (exhumation of the bones of one’s ancestors) ceremony his family was holding that Saturday. It was an honor to be invited. I biked the 8 km along the coast to Manambia with two of the elementary school teachers who came by the house Saturday morning to fetch me. When I arrived on the school director’s compound, I joined the line of women in brightly colored lamba hoany wraps and men in woven reed hats, waiting my turn to approach the event accountant.

It is the fomba (custom) at Betsimisaraka wakes and mitsaboras (turning of the bones ceremonies, also called famadianas), for each community member present to give an offering of as much money or, in place of Ariary, as many kapokas of rice as they can afford to contribute. Each person’s exact contribution, I would soon learn, is painstakingly documented in a cahier, the names of money-givers in one notebook and those of rice-givers in another. When it was my turn to approach the little old collection man wearing crooked spectacles still bearing their little magnification label sticker, I handed him my donation in a sealed envelope, to put in the collection basket. He gave me this blank look, then proceded to tear open the envelope in front of everyone, pull out the bill inside, and ask a loud voice, “NAME?”

As I learned at the wake I attended last month for a child who died in my village, anonymity is not possible in the giving process here. The accountant wrote down “Rashelle” in his tally book under all the other names, and in the column next to it, he wrote down the sum I had placed inside the envelope. I don’t know why the Betsimisaraka do it this way, but so they do. At the end of the afternoon feast, the same accountant stood up and made a kabary (long drawn-out speech) along with several of the family elders, announcing the grand total that had been raised in honor of the ancestors that day, and that on top of this money, 458 kapoakas of rice had been contibuted.

Soon we all made our way in the merciless January summer sun to the red mud path that led to a neighboring commune, where the family burial ground was located. As the 300 odd villagers attending the exhumation portion of the mitsabora filed into the tight terrain of cross-bearing above-ground stone tombs and marked graves, the droves sought shade wherever they could. Many of the women brought umbrellas with them and their bright colorful arcs, combined with the variety of bright lamba hoanys they wore wrapped around their waists, led the crowd resemble a Serat painting, I thought, all splashes of vibrant color. Their singing, which erupted in waves, was equally impressive to behold.

Men and women participants divided themselves into gender groups and the male family members, proudly wearing custom-made gray t-shirts and black baseball caps printed: “Souvenir du 27 Janvier 2007,” each grabbed a shovel or trowel. After a series of long kabarys in which the family elders prayed, the Protestant pastor led choruses of songs about Jesosy. A public discussion followed in which the three people whose bodies were about to be exhumed were informed of all that had transpired in the world since their passing. An account was given of the recent cyclone rains, the result of the last presidential election, and a long discussion of who had been born and who had died in the community.

The men then took up the task of digging up three graves in the burial area, graves belonging to the director’s father, sister and a infant in the family who had passed away of marary kibo (stomachache), I was told, some years earlier. The father, family patriarch, I learned, had died in 2002. The two large and one tiny wooden hand-made casket were unearthed and raised painstakingly out of their trenches.

A woman in the host family began busily distributing drapes, bright lamba hoanys, and table cloths to the men and women about to open each casket, to be used as makeshift screens around each exhumation area. A special guest of the director, I was allowed to stand close to the bone cleaners and observe the process if I so wished. After the coffin lids were pried open, the bodies inside, wrapped in lambas, the cloth clinging loosely to their skeletal forms, were unwrapped. Ready to faint from dehydration and the oppressive midday heat, I crouched in the shade next to one of the drapes. I watched through a gap in the screen as designated family members meticulously cleaned each bone of residual flesh and hair with a tiny brush, then laid out each bone on a white lamba for re-wrapping. From my seat in the shade, through a hole in the cloth, I watched a femur bone, then several ribs, then a skull, hair still clinging to it, get carefully arranged on the white lamba. When the bones had been cleaned to the satisfaction of the exhumers, the bones were wrapped, cradled in the arms of one family member, and then brought over into the shade for dressing.

A great crowd of men surrounded the dressing of the bones of the family patriarch. One woman came scuttling foreward bearing a pair of new trousers and a collared white dress shirt and handed them to the man closest the body. These clothes were obviously very expensive by Malagasy standards, and much nicer than any worn by the ceremony attendants. The trousers were unbuttoned and fitted around the base of the wrapped bones, then buttoned up again. A heated debate ensued over whether or not the dress pant legs should be left to hang where no legs remained to fill them, or be folded up neatly into the pants waist. The waist-folding proponents eventually won the argument, and then continued to search for a button-up white dress shirt.

The designated shirt was unbuttoned and then fitted to the upper half of the bundle of bones so that the wrapped skull protruded from its neck opening. “Where is his hat?” exclaimed one man, concern welling in his voice. The question rippled through the crowd as the worry that they had forgotten to bring a hat to place on the body consumed each family member. Finally, one woman came running through the sea of people waving a woven reed sun hat over her head and crying with an air of importance, “here it is! I have the hat! I have the hat!” The body was talked to for a time, then offered sweet tea to drink from an orange plastic kettle and a tin cup.

After his bones had been dressed, offered beverage and conversed with, the family males carried their patriarch to his above-ground stone tomb. The old wooden casket was reburied in the body’s former grave, along with his old tattered clothes. At this point, one woman emerged from the crowd and began wailing, screaming and clawing at the air.
Her body seemed to convulse in grief as she muttered wild sobs, collapsing on the shoulder of the woman next to her. None of the party interfered with her display or forced her to leave the otherwise festive circle. The school director motioned me to come over to him, then told me with a bewildered scoff, “she’s drunk!”

I had all the while been aware of the absence of something at this mitsabora, but could not quite put my finger on what it could be. With the director’s comment, it dawned on me that only this woman, out of the 300 odd attendants, was intoxicated from betsa betsa, the home-made sugar cane rum so popular in this region of Madagascar. At large ceremonies it is customary to drink massive quantities of betsa betsa, especially at mitsaboras. The sugar cane rum releases inhibitions and lets ceremony participants collectively express emotions that would otherwise be too extreme for public display.

As I rode my bicycle home after the feast, my stomach full from the rice and zebu meat we all ate off of communal ravinala leaves stretched out on the ground, I asked the young male teacher who biked back with me why there had been no betsa betsa at this mitsabora. The teacher said to me, “oh, Monsieur Directeur is a devout Protestant. He does not allow betsa betsa at any of his family’s ceremonies. The church would not approve if people were drunk as they dug up the graves of their ancestors.” I smiled at his sound reasoning.

As we continued to bike the lovely 8 km home to Voloina along the Bay of Antongil, the teacher asked me, “what are mitsaboras like where you come from? France, is it?” “Etats Unis,” I corrected him. “Where? Oh ‘Amerika’, right,” he said. “Where I come from we do not have the same fombas. We don’t hold mitsabora ceremonies,” I told him. He looked surprised. “But what do you do when you are sad about losing a family member? Don’t you want to spend time with them again?” I explained to him that the Betsimisaraka tradition of turning the bones is, in my mind, a wonderful custom, but that where I come from we are afraid of death and it is fady (taboo) to dig up the bodies of people who have died. “When a family member dies we come together and hold a ceremony to celebrate his or her life,” I said in Betsimisaraka, “we even gather afterwards and eat a feast, sort of the way the Malagasy do. But once we place a body in the ground it must stay there.”

He looked puzzled and again asked what ‘Amerikans’ do when they are sad years after losing someone, if they do not unearth the bones of their fathers, sisters and children, and talk with them. I thought about it for a moment and then gave him the only answer I could think of, “Well, we sit at home alone and we cry”. I could tell he disapproved of our method of grieving. “Fetes (celebrations) are much better,” he said, as I nodded in approval.