PBase Gallery - Photography by Rachel Kramer
Fall Wildflowers of New England field guide (undergrad project)
A Guide to Invasive Plants in Massachusetts is scheduled for printing and distribution by the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlife and The Nature Conservancy’s Massachusetts Chapter in the summer of 2006.
Learning Malagasy One of my main challenges during training will be learning Malagasy. I’ll also work on perfecting my French, which is taught in Malagasy schools and still used in urban areas, but isn’t widely spoken outside of major cities. From my reading, I’ve learned that Malagasy culture has a rich blend of Indonesian, African and Arab influences, as well as more recently acquired French, English and South Indian elements.
A strictly oral language prior to the arrival of Europeans, the written form of Malagasy was invented as late as the early nineteenth century by Welsh missionaries, who crudely adapted our Latin alphabet to the Malagasy tongue. Malagasy spelling involves a combination of Malagasy, English, French and Arabic rules, meaning the written form of the language bears a less than keen resemblance to spoken Malagasy.
The sheer length of Malagasy words, especially proper names, can be daunting to read, much less to pronounce. For example, the Malagasy word for “dazzle� is mampipendrampendrana. One eighteenth century Malagasy king took the name Andrianampoinimerina, this, a historically shortened version of his original name,
Anrianampoinimerinandriantsimitovianminandriampanjaka. “Tom,� “Dick� and “Harry� aren’t such popular names in Madagascar, it seems.
A few of my favorite words so far:
mandoa — paying (also the word for vomiting)
mibobobobo — making a bubbling noise
mibitsibitsika — to whisper
One interesting characteristic of Malagasy is that gender doesn’t really exist, so the same word, izy, may refer to “she,� “he,� “it� or “they.� Plurality isn’t acknowledged in Malagasy, either, so vazaha might refer to “white person� or “white people,� depending on the context in which it’s used.
My favorite, 5 letters are missing from the Roman alphabet used in Madagascar. The letters c, q, u, w, x do not exist, so when those sounds are needed, such as when words are borrowed from French, English and other languages and incorporated into Malagasy, consonant substitutions have to be made that seem bizarre to anglophone rookie such as myself.
This’ll be fun…
photo: http://www.mobot.org/mobot/madagascar/madex.asp
To learn more on Madagascar, here are some helpful links recommended by the Peace Corps:
The World Factbook - Madagascar
Embassy of Madagascar
The Lonely Planet - Madagascar
Cortez Travel and Expeditions (how to come and visit me!)
Don’t worry, Madagascar is a huge country (the fourth largest island in the world) and a cyclone that brushes by the northern tip will have no impact on the southern areas…
Other links:
Jenny Stella’s Blog (Peace Corps Volunteer, Cameroon)
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.
