OVER THE LIP OF THE WORLD: AMOUNG THE STORYTELLERS OF MADAGASCAR - COLLEEN J McELROY

The quest to read all the english language material on Madagascar continues and this time it gets a bit more uncanny. The author of this one is a professor at UW so occasionally she’ll compare Madagascar to Seattle, a comparison not all that many of us could be totally familiar with. Also, she at one point stays in a hotel I have a very clear (then very, very blurry) memory of drinking in. This book is strange. I thought it was going to be a collection of Malagasy folklore and proverbs from across the island (such a book still doesn’t exist, to my knowledge, in english, which is a real cultural lacuna). But then it becomes a travelogue, which is fine, but less interesting to me than a collection of tales. It’s always interesting to see different writers try to come up with different ways to get across just how bad the roads are. The travelogue sections include mini-biographies of the storytellers and a little bit about Malagasy history and the difference between ethnic groups but not enough to makes these sections too interesting. To be fair, McElroy is not, nor does she claim to be, a historian nor a sociologist. The categories of expression she documents are all over the place. There are traditional, mythological folktales and sayings, but she also includes hiragasy, a type of storytelling song, as well as contemporary poetry. It’s really interesting to read a poem written in the late 60s about another former French colony, Vietnam, written by a Malagasy person (the poem is called Isan’andro Vaky Izao), but the breath of this collection leaves all the individual components unfilled. She makes a point of leaving out (but hardly mentioning) Kabary, a style of Malagasy public speech that has it’s own interesting set of informal rules and quirks. I wanted a book of all oral stories, or all poems, or all variations of hiragasy. I think it’d be easier to contextualize and make sense of the material if it was more limited but deeper. But, it’s a foolish complaint to complain about something not being what it isn’t. And there’s lots of really wonderful stuff in this book. When I was in college I really like this book of Russian folktales, mostly because their morals and lessons seemed so confused and bizarre. You’d read them and have no idea what one was suppose to take away. The best stories here have that quality. The author doesn’t speak any Malagasy nor is she in expert in the island and occasionally there are questionable translation choices and cultural subtleties that she clearly missed. For instance, she goes to a Famadihana, obviously, but one where they are moving the bodies to a new tomb instead of rewrapping the corpses and placing back where they came from. This is much, much rarer than what people usually mean when they say Famadihana, it requires a different party and slightly different procedure. I never saw such an event (thought I did see a few Famadihanas), and I believe there’s actually a different word than “Famadihana” for this ceremony. Anyway, it’s got a lot of great stories and tales. I only wish there was more. 22 Lemurs.

ADDENDUM: I heard a lot of stories when I was in Madagascar but informally since I’m not a folklorist nor an ethnographer. However, once in Ft. Dauphin a British student, who was trying to collect stories in a systematic, way let me come along and I listened while he recorded this story:

“At the intersection of 2 paths, 2 men run into one another. Each is carrying a sack and stops to take a rest. They get to talking and realize they have a lot in common. Each one is making a long, arduous trip to a market, to sell the same items they sell week after week. For both men, this routine has grown boring and unprofitable. One man is always trying to sell chickens, the other is attempting to sale metal spades. They both agree it would be more interesting to get a break from selling the same old thing and they agree to switch bags. They make the switch and each go off on their own way. A ways down the path the first man puts the sack down to take a closer look at the spades and decide how much he wants to charge for them. He opens the sack and pulls out a spade. The man tries to test it on the ground and it breaks apart in his hand. It was made of clay. On the other trail, the other man also places his sack on the ground, eager to inspect the chicken he just traded for. He opens the sack, and a giant vulture leaps out of the bag and takes flight. Both men race backwards on their trails meet again at the intersection. The both realized that they had tricked the other and been tricked in turn. The men laugh and spent the rest of their lives as friends.”