“Sainte! Libre! Souveraine!:” Jean-Luc Raharimanana’s Ecocidal Writing of the Land in Nour, 1947

Abstract

In Nour, 1947, Jean-Luc Raharimanana recounts the 1947 Malagasy Uprising, when France killed 89,000 Malagasy combatants and civils to repress their struggle for independence and political sovereignty. As the novel dramatizes colonial exactions, it particularly emphasizes the complex relationship of subalternized populations with their stolen land. A natural and symbiotic environment sacred for the natives, a soil exhaustible for the settlers, the land is conceptualized as a mythical female-like entity to suggest the concomitant violation and devastation of human beings and lands for extraction and exploitation. While scholars have insisted on the genocidal writing of Raharimanana, the nature of the writing of Nour, 1947 is as much genocidal as it is ecocidal. Taking on a gendered approach to the land, Raharimanana’s ecocidal writing, I argue, reclaims the concept of “mère patrie” to envision the history of Madagascar outside the phallocentric and patriarchal dynamics undergirding both French and Malagasy versions of the 1947 Uprising. A set of aesthetic and discursive strategies that perform the violence against fragile human-nature ecosystems, the author’s ecocidal writing particularly mobilizes rot, putrefaction, and bodily dejections, to expose and repair the unscarred wound at the heart of the concept of “mère patrie,” desacralized by both colonialists and Malagasy independentists and nationalists across the second half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, the novel questions the relevance of land myths in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and Malagasy politics.

Keywords:

• Raharimanana
• ecology
• Madagascar
• ecocide
• ecofeminism
• ecocriticism

Notes

1 See Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism,” Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, David N. Pellow, NYU P, 2016, p. 69.

2 Nour, which means “light” in Arabic, excavates indigenous histories to precisely shed light on an event that has started to garner worldwide attention over the last thirty years only. As Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo suggests in “Madagascar, 29 mars 1947: Tabataba ou parole des temps troubles” (E-Rea. Revue Électronique d’études Sur Le Monde Anglophone, no. 8.3, 2011. https://journals.openedition.org/erea/1741?lang = en#authors. Accessed 7 Dec. 2020), much of what is known today about the uprising comes from French official narratives, whose archives were for a long time unopened to the public. The events of 1947 were occulted by both French and Malagasy political powers. For instance, Marc Ravalomanana, the former President of Madagascar (2002–2009) declared “little interest” for the history of the 1947 Uprising, preferring to look towards the future of the nation.

3 See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke UP, 2016; and Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Princeton UP, 2015.

4 Although Cronan Rose does not mention how the Victorian separation of gender roles in public and private sphere extends beyond the historical and geographical context of Europe, more recent ecofeminists have demonstrated how such bourgeois ideology also permeated colonized spaces. If women were treated as submissive and as reproductive tools, then indigenous, colonized women suffered from an exacerbated oppression.

5 All three real historical figures were foundational to the short-lived Mouvement Démocratique de la Rénovation Malgache (MDRM) which promoted Malagasy independence, autonomy, and sovereignty.

6 For Christian Kull, “Madagascar receives enormous amounts of attention as a hot spot of biological diversity, environmental degradation, and conservation action. As a result of rapid deforestation and species extinctions, the islands hosts a frantic effort by development and environmental organizations to establish protected areas and improve resource management (Kull 1996). Accompanying this conservation effort is a specific narrative, a story of exotic nature and environmental destruction, which is used to justify conservation fundraising, policies, and actions” (424).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aurélie Matheron

Aurélie Matheron is Assistant Professor of French at Skidmore College. Her research and teaching explore how Francophone sub-Saharan literatures, cultures, and visual arts, address environmental injustice in communities affected by global capitalism. She has published in Nouvelles Études Francophones and French Cultural Studies. Her current article project focuses on installation art and ecologies of the Plantationocene.