Jean Joseph Rabearivelo

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The Malagasy poet Jean Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937) was the first major French-language poet in Africa. Some of his most powerful poetry arose from the conflict between his intimacy with two cultures, Malagasy and French, and his estrangement from two societies, native and colonial.

Jean Joseph Rabearivelo was born on March 4, 1901, in Tananarive (Madagascar) into a noble family which had been impoverished as a result of the abolition of slavery by the French authorities soon after the colonial conquest in 1895. He left school at 13 in order to earn a precarious livelihood as proofreader in a local printing shop.

Tananarive in the early 1920s was a focus of intense literary and journalistic activity in the vernacular, and Rabearivelo was one of the first Malagasy poets to use the French language as his medium of literary expression. His early collections, La Coupe de cendres (1924), Sylves (1927), and Volumes (1928), were in the romantic-academic manner of such French 19th-century poets as appeared on the school curriculum in those days. But through his friendship with Pierre Camo - a French official who was also a minor poet - Rabearivelo became acquainted with contemporary symbolist poetry and managed to free himself of the shackles of conventional versification and diction. His best poems are to be found in Presque-songes (1934) and Traduit de la nuit (1935).

The poet's love of France, its language, and its literature was apt to take weird ritualistic forms. His wide reading in romantic and postromantic poetry had somehow driven him to the notion that poetic genius was inevitably associated with various forms of abnormality, such as reckless extravagance, chronic lack of money, almost permanent debauchery, ill health (usually tuberculosis), and suicidal tendencies. With pathetic conscientiousness, he was thus striving to mimic the most futilely morbid aspects in the lives of Balzac, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and a host of other, minor, if even more wildly aberrant, writers.

This ill-advised imitation of alien models was uneasily coupled with considerable pride in the literary achievements, oral and written, of Malagasy culture, even though, as a former aristocrat and a Frenchified intellectual, he felt some contempt for the illiterate masses. He was thus rejected by his more tradition-minded or nationalistic fellow citizens. As a native, he was also rejected by the local French society of petty traders and administrators. In his bulky diaries, which have never been edited in their entirety, he described his tragic predicament as that of a Latin mind under a black skin but also as that of a proud Malagasy eager to shed the Christian and Western disguise imposed upon him. His habit of wearing the traditional robe, the lamba, over his Westernstyle clothes illustrated this duality more than it could hide - let alone solve - it.

This dual allegiance and this dual rebellion imbue Rabearivelo's poetry. Although he mostly wrote in French, in part of his work he sought to bend the alien language to native themes, experiences, and even literary forms such as the hainteny. Aware of his uncommon gifts, yet confined to his underprivileged status, Rabearivelo found the best of his inspiration in an all-pervading, tragic sense of alienation, which finds adequate utterance in images of exile and death, rootlessness and sterility. He committed suicide on June 22, 1937.

Further Reading

There is no biography of Rabearivelo in English. Information on him is in Ulli Beier, ed., Introduction to African Literature (1967), and in Norman R. Shapiro, ed. and trans., Negritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean (1970).

Rabearivelo, Jean-Joseph (1901-37). One of the three major francophone writers of Madagascar. Rabearivelo's poetry belongs to a very particular moment in the colonial history of the island. His work is, on the one hand, intensely focused on the self, displaying extraordinary inner coherence and self-referentiality, and on the other, symptomatic of a common experience of cultural and political conflict under a colonial power. A predictable progression is visible in texts that range from the early La Coupe de cendres (1924), Sylves (1927), and Volumes (1928), which follow regular verse forms and remain French poetry, to Presque-songes (1934) and Traduit de la nuit (1935), where both the formal and cryptic features of the traditional Malagasy hain teny are visible in a poetry more intimately bound up in a Malagasy landscape. The Vieilles chansons des pays d'Imerina (1939) are hain teny, transcribed and translated.

Rabearivelo's suicide ended a life dominated by illness, relative poverty, unsuccessful love-affairs, the death of a favourite daughter, an inability to find a place within colonial society, and a profound psychological difficulty in reconciling the French and Malagasy sides of himself. In the early poetry an obsession with death is consistent with the Symbolist aesthetic. In the later work it has become part of a preoccupation with the Malagasy identity, and intimately associated with the idea of communication with ancestral voices. The sense of uncertain identity gradually becomes the poetic focus of Rabearivelo's work, paralleled by numerous antitheses (e.g. day and night) and moments of uncertainty and transition, such as twilight.

— Belinda Jack

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (March 4, 1901 – June 23, 1937) is widely considered to be Africa's first modern poet. Born Joseph-Casimir, in Tananarive (now Antananarivo), the capital of Madagascar, just five years after the island nation had become a French colony, he was the only child of an unwed mother whose family wealth had been lost. At the age of 13, he was expelled from the College Saint-Michel for refusing to join the religious order; after briefly attending public school, he abandoned formal education and began working at various petty jobs which colonial society offered. In 1924 he began work as a proofreader at the Imprimerie de l'Imerina, and though he was employed without pay for the first two years, he kept this low paying job for the rest of his life. To its credit, the printing house published several of Rabearivelo's books in limited editions, which was probably reason enough for him to stay there. In 1926, Rabearivelo married Mary Razafitrimo, an African photographer's daughter, together they had five children. In debt throughout his life, and even jailed for it, his financial woes were an admixture of low wages, gambling, a love for acquiring books, and a sweet tooth for opium. A voracious reader, and primarily self-taught, he edited anthologies of Malagasy poetry and was involved in two literary periodicals, 18 Latitude Sud and Capricorne. Of about 20 literary works accounted for, including poetry, plays, fiction, and literary criticism, it appears that only half of his works were published at the time of his death. On the afternoon of June 23, 1937, after having dispatched letters of farewell, Rabearivelo took his own life with cyanide, faithfully recording his final moments in his Calepins Bleu (Blue Notebooks), a personal journal of some 1,800 pages.

His work shows an affinity with both the Symbolist and Surrealist poets, while remaining strongly grounded in the geography and folkloric life of Madagascar. He absorbed French colonialist aspirations of being a Frenchman as well as a Malagasy, but was denied the opportunity to live and write in Paris. Rabearivelo despaired after that refusal and committed suicide in 1937. Complete works are:

• La coupe de cendres (1924)
• Sylves (1927)
• Volumes (1928)
• Enfants d'Orphée (1931)
• Presque-Songes (1934)
• Traduit de la Nuit (1935)
• Imaitsoanala (1935)
• Chants pour Abéone (1936).

The first complete English translation of his masterpiece Translated from the Night, translated by Robert Ziller, was published by Lascaux Editions (www.LascauxEditions.com)in 2007.

External links

• Short biography in English (Bookrags).
• Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, presentation of author (in French) by Claire Riffard, with bibliography and works of criticism ("île en île").

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