#ReadAroundTheWorld. #Madagascar

"Love is like rice, when you transplant it, it grows, but never in the same way. It retains a bittersweet memory of its first soils. Every time it’s uprooted it dies a little; every time it’s replanted, it loses a piece of its soil. But it also bears fruit"

Beyond the Rice Fields is the first book from Madagascar to be translated into English, although this is from French, not the native Malagasy, so I’m not sure why this took so long. The story is set in the village of Sahasoa and the City of Thousands (Antananarivo), in Madagascar, in the early to mid 19th century before French colonization, during the reign of Queen Ranavalona I (1828-1861). The Queen defended her empire against foreign influence and protected the traditional ways. She also persecuted those of the Malagasy that had converted to Christianity with widespread trials by poisoning, the “tangena ordeal,” in which the accused had to swallow three pieces of bird skin and the tangena poison, if they did not vomit up the three pieces or died, they were considered guilty. During her reign, due to the mass purges and killings, warfare and disease, the population of Madagascar was reduced from 5 million in 1833 to 2.5 million in 1839.

The story is about Tsito whose village is destroyed and becomes a slave to a zebu hunter Rama. Tsito falls in love with Fara, Rama’s only daughter, but she believes she is above him as he is a slave. The story takes us through tales of colonialism, the battles between Christianity and the old religion, witchcraft, drama and romance. My favourite character was Fara’s feisty grandmother Bebe.

Despite the interesting cultural and historical background, it was not an easy read. Much of the first two thirds of the book seem to drag along and lack direction. The last third became much more gripping and intense. 3 stars for me. ( )

I discovered this novel in a rather roundabout way. Beyond the Rice Fields is said to be the first novel from Madagascar to be translated into English (and it isn’t even written in Malagasy, it’s written in French), and it comes from a small American publisher called Restless Books. (It had 60-odd books to its name on the day I looked). I’d been reading an article entitled ‘There’s more to homegrown African literature than what Western publishers favour’ at a site called Quartz Africa, which was on about ‘Afropolitan’ authors writing ‘African Books for Western Eyes’:

Books like Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun, Teju Cole’s Open City, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing have confounded neat divisions between Western and African literary traditions. The Cameroonian novelist Imbolo Mbue captured a million-dollar contract for her first book, Behold the Dreamers. That’s even before it joined the Oprah’s Book Club pantheon this year.

(All of which I’ve bought for the TBR, except for the last one, which I hadn’t heard of). But there’s criticism of these highly successful authors:

Far from advancing narratives with deep roots in local African realities […] many of Africa’s most “successful” writers hawk a superficial, overly diasporic, or even Western-focused vision of the continent.

Well, I’m in no position to have an opinion about that, except to say that I’ve tended to enjoy books more when they were written by African authors living in any of the 54 countries in Africa rather than from a university in the US or UK. But (as my reviews show) there are exceptions. A good book is a good book whatever its derivation IMO. But I was very interested to see the books that were named as part of an entire new body of African writing that escapes this closed circuit of damning truisms. And I’d read or read reviews of, or had on the TBR some of the suggested young and adventurous African writers.
*Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu (Uganda), on the TBR
*Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 (Congo), see my review
the first ever Burundian novel in English,
*Roland Rugero’s Baho! on the TBR
the translation from the Portuguese,
*Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, (Angola) (See Stu’s review at Winston’s Dad) and
*(newly purchased as a result of reading this article) Beyond the Rice Fields by Naivo (Naivoharisoa Patrick Ramamonjisoa) from Madagascar.
So, I set about reading Beyond the Rice Fields expecting great things from its young and adventurous writer…
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/04/03/beyond-the-rice-fields-by-naivo-translated-b... ( )