THE GARDENS OF MARS - JOHN GIMLETTE

My Peace Corps buddy recommended this one to me a while ago, when he was in town and we were bullshitting about old times. I can be pretty pedantic when reading, generally, but it certainly amps up to a new level when the subject is something I think I know something about, in this case Madagascar, so I’m perhaps not the ideal reader. Gimlette, who I wasn’t aware of but who appears to be a pretty serious and competent travel writer, spent about a year moving around Mada and wrote this for a general audience unfamiliar with the nation. He does a pretty impressive job. I’ve read a lot of the available literature (in English, most of the stuff about Madagascar is in French, which I, to my shame, don’t read) and this is perhaps the best overview of the history of the island. Typically, writing on Madagascar will center on the highlands and focus primarily on the (admittedly insane) story about the various Merina kings and queens of the 18th and 19th centuries. Gimlette makes it a point to travel to most of the country. He misses some rather hard to get to and/or dangerous places like SAVA and the Toliara but I haven’t been to those places either (read Vollmann’s RISING UP AND RAISING DOWN for an insane story about Toliara) and he does travel, largely, on the packed and difficult taxi-brusses, for which he has my respect. He does a pretty good job of explaining the relations between Madagascar and the outside world and the process that eventually led to their colonization. Likewise, the book was published in 2021 and, thankfully, it is pretty up-to-the-moment about current political developments on the island. Occasionally, he veers into noble savage territory when describing the poverty and degradation; at one point he calls a group of indigent folks in Tana “cheery paupers.” Since his sources are mostly French accounts (more on that in a sec), he, in my view, goes too easy on them and paints them largely as befuddled by the Malagasy, rather than laying bare the brutality of the relationship between empire and colony. He, suspiciously, doesn't have this problem when describing the brutality of the Merina kingdom. He makes the bizarre claim that foreigners find Malagasy “impossible to learn” tho I can tell you, as a stupid person who managed, it’s not that hard, the French are just lazy. You can see a how this effects his thinking of this when he tries to wrestle (and, again, I would say, comes down too softly) with the demonic level of child-exploitation at the French resorts he visits and how quickly he comes to the defense of foreigners who got lynched for that sort of stuff. That execution happened while I was living there and I wrote my own little take on it here, if you’d like my take. On another note, could have used more Betsileo stuff, they’re the forgotten MVPs of Madagascar. Likewise, it would have been nice to fold in more of the recent archeology and scholarship (another shameless plug for David Graeber’s Madagascar work) w/r/t the history of the island, instead of just relying on mostly French accounts. But the story of Madagascar is fascinating. It’s full of shipwrecks and strange customs and a truly unique history. No book could cover it all, Gimette doesn't go to a Famadihana for instance, but he does an admirable job trying to cover this whole island. I’m sending it to my other Peace Corps friends to build up some nostalgia in order to propel us to a return trip. It’s been almost 10 years since I first stepped foot there and I miss it. Time to return. 1896 Red Islands