Jacques Rabemananjara

Rabemananjara, Jacques (1913-2005). One of the three best-known francophone writers of Madagascar (with Rabearivelo and Ranaivo), Rabemananjara has written poetry, plays, and essays. Both his life and work have been dominated by politics. The earlier poetry, such as Antsa (1956; Malagasy for hymn or eulogy), Lamba (1948; Malagasy for the traditional strip of cloth worn as clothing), and Antidote (1961), was written during a period of considerable political instability and violence. The first two collections were published in the year of his release from prison and his move/exile to France. In 1958 he published Nationalisme et problèmes malgaches, and in 1960, the year the island gained independence, he returned, first as deputy, then minister, and finally vice-president of the Republic. Following President Tsiranana's fall in 1972 he has devoted most of his time to editorial work with the publishing house Présence Africaine in Paris.

Antsa is a long, complex poem, dense with violent images of the primordial, sometimes reminiscent of Césaire's early poetry. The poem culminates in the island's birth—and liberation. Origins, in this case the delivery of a fictional continent, is the focus of Lamba, another long poem. The importance of origins is combined with a desire for a return to a primordial innocence and coherence, symbolic of a pre-colonial time. The poems in the collection Antidote are militant, concerned with liberation often brought about through magic and ritual. These poems belong broadly within the protest tradition, but they are also difficult and complex texts.

Rabemananjara has also written three plays: Les Dieux malgaches (1942), Les Boutriers de l'aurore (1957), and Les Agapes des dieux (1962). The first two are historical dramas and all are, once again, dominated by a fascination with origins and man's primal relationship with his environment.

— Belinda Jack