Malagasy poetry
Photo by Jonathan Annis, Ambatofotsy–Peace Corps Madagascar field site
Poetry is one element of Malagasy culture that I’ve learned a lot about recently. In his book, The Eighth Continent, Peter Tyson discusses Rabearivelo, a Malagasy poet who preceeded the mid-twentieth century movement born among French-speaking African and Caribbean writers in protest of French rule and the prevailing colonial policy of assimilation.
Rabearivelo had a passion for hainteny, the most advanced–and it seems most allusive–form of Malagasy poetry. In his 1935 book of poems Traduit de la nuit (Translations of the night), Rabearivelo wrote the following piece which I like very much (translated in The Eighth Continent):
Slow
as a limping cow
or a mighty bull
four times houghed,
a great black spider comes out of the earth
and climbs up the walls
then painfully sets his back against the trees,
throws out his threads for the wind to carry,
weaves a web that reaches the sky
and spreads his nets across the blue.
Where are the many-colored birds?
Where are the precentors of the sun?
–Lights burst from their sleep-deadened eyes
among their liana-swings,
reviving their dreams and their reverberations
in that shimmering of glowworms
that becomes a cohort of stars,
and turns the spider’s ambush
which the horns of a bounding calf will tear.