It Must Have Gone Something Like This

The reader may well be wondering about my own effects on Betafo’s politics. Especially if one defines politics as mainly about the circulation of stories, the presence of a foreign researcher actively poking about trying to collect such accounts is ipso facto a political phenomenon. This is true, though it is not easy to document.

It was especially difficult to know exactly what stories were circulating about me. There appeared to be many of these. Most seemed to center on my backpack. Around Arivonimamo, this backpack became, in its own right, a kind of icon of hidden power. It was a small greenish backpack and I used to carry it with me everywhere, slung over one shoulder. It mainly served to hold my tape recorder—though it would usually also contain notebooks and pens, an astrological almanac and a plastic bag containing my collection of beads in the outer pocket, and often, an extra sweater. Apparently there was endless speculation about its true contents: tools for gold prospecting, hightech surveillance equipment to monitor the nearby airfield, every imaginable kind of weapon. Almost everyone seemed to believe that I at least had a gun in there, and I suspect some of my best friends—who were constantly fretting and warning me about the dangers of bandits or drunken marauders on the roads at night—did not go out of their way to disabuse anyone of this impression. Opening the bag in front of strangers seemed to do nothing to dispel the rumors.

Even more than becoming the subject of stories, though, I became a medium for spreading them. My style of conducting research often consisted of little more than telling people the most interesting facts or stories that I had most recently heard from their neighbors: e.g., “Someone told me that there used to be a Vazimba in that valley . . .” Chantal used to tease me about this all the time—I was supposed to be eliciting stories, not telling them—but if nothing else it was a simple way to let people know what sort of things I was interested in without asking too many leading questions.

Obviously, I didn’t recount personal gossip, but in Betafo, even knowledge of the distant past was political. It was also very unevenly distributed. Most people knew little of their neighbor’s family histories, so that I frequently found myself opening up what had been sequestered little pockets of tradition, often to the mild surprise of those I interviewed. This is particularly the case with stories that preserved a family grudge or tales of injustice, which, I found, were not the sort of thing normally bandied about to outsiders. Armand, for example, had had no idea that Norbert’s family also claimed their ancestor had once been tied up and thrown in a pig sty; neither did he know much about Ralaitsivery’s murder in 1903, except that it had happened, despite the fact that Ranaivo the Bolt had been telling the story to the village’s andriana for years, and that some of his mainty neighbors in Andrianony, descended from the murderer’s family, remembered the story very well indeed.

Rarely, though, did such revelations alter anyone’s idea of what was really important about Betafo’s history. Neither I am aware of any overt conflicts that arose because of my presence, or because of what someone thought someone might have told me. On the other hand, people certainly did argue through me. And my style of reporting narratives back and forth would occasionally set off a kind of a dialogic process where certain people would take off from something their neighbor had said, or that they thought they had, and fly off into all sorts of unexpected hypotheses.

What I want to do in this chapter is to present one brief sequence of encounters, partly to demonstrate some of the political play involved in researching history in Betafo, but also, in order to make a larger point about the active construction of history. Historical consciousness was not simply a matter of fixed narratives or half-remembered geographies. It was also the subject of constant speculation and invention. But before I develop this point, let me first tell a little story of my own.

An Encounter with Norbert

The closest I myself ever came to becoming an object of political dispute, in Betafo, came after I had been taking pictures of some tombs. Or, really, drawing them. For much of my fieldwork, you see, I had been without a camera; the one I brought with me broke while I was still living in the capital, and it took months for me to come to the realization that, despite many protests to the contrary, none of the experts there had the parts required to fix it.

In early August I managed to borrow another one from a friend in the city, and on a Wednesday morning, the 8th of August, 1990, I walked up to Betafo for the first time with my new camera. Miadana and her husband were off somewhere, I forget where, but her son Dami and daughter Nivo suggested we head straight off and take pictures of the local tombs. This was something I had been intending to do for some time. I thought it would be nice to have a catalog of tombs, a photograph of each one with essential information written on the back: location, owners, razambe . . . So we spent the rest of the morning together, me taking pictures then scribbling down the angles the shots were taken from in a pocket notebook, asking questions and jotting down names.

We started on tampon-tanana then moved on to Avarakady, Andrianony (both seemed entirely deserted), and then finally across the dam and up the hill to Ambohitrimaninana. The latter place I wasn’t even sure we should go, since I had only two shots left in the camera and there were four tombs there, but my companions insisted that since Ambohitrimaninana had by far the nicest tombs in Betafo, to feel it would be wrong to make a tour of tombs in Betafo and ignore the place completely. So I took two photographs and for the remaining tombs, had to resort to sketches. Around 1 o’clock pm, we headed back across the dam.

As we came past the flat rocks at the end of the dam and up to the strip of land to the east of Andrianony, Norbert came out to meet us. Actually, I had no idea who it was at the time. At that point, I had never met Norbert, and had only vaguely heard of him. So I didn’t notice the fact that my companions were already silently cringing as he approached; all I knew was that there was a shortish man, probably in his forties, with a small mustache, carrying himself in a stiff, somewhat officious manner as he strode up the path in our direction. I started to call out a greeting; he ignored it, and as soon as he was about five feet in front of us burst into a loud and forceful diatribe in French.

After a minute or so, Nivo took advantage of a pause to stick out her head. “He doesn’t speak French,” she said, in Malagasy. He glared at her, hesitated a moment, then began again in Malagasy. What had we been doing up there at Ambohitrimaninana? Who had given us permission to go up there, anyway? Taking some foreigner up to look at other people’s tombs, snapping pictures, doing God knows what—how was he supposed to know I wasn’t planting some kind of nuclear bomb up there? It was outrageous! Did we ask permission at the fokontany office, did we even so much as speak to the owners of the tomb? Had we no respect at all? The tirade was occasionally interrupted by gestures of great generosity, directed at me: if one asked, if one showed the slightest respect, it was not as if people would not cooperate— even if it were a matter of digging the tombs open on the spot so I could look inside, they would be willing to do it. But we hadn’t even asked!

It was very hard to get a word in edgewise, but from the moment I realized what he was protesting about, I started trying to apologize. I was a foreigner, I explained. I was ignorant of local customs. I had no intention of insulting anyone. Just tell me what I should have done and I will certainly do it in the future. But while (as Nivo later pointed out) Norbert the whole time avoided even looking at the two teenagers, they were his real targets. I also don’t think he had expected me to be so apologetic. It made it very difficult to maintain a front of outrage. In Malagasy, the phrase one uses to apologize is miala tsiny, “to remove the tsiny”—the meaning of tsiny falling somewhere between the English “guilt” and “blame”, the recognition that one’s actions have harmed others in an unjustifiable way. Finally, Norbert felt obliged to reluctantly reassure me: yes, well, with you there is no tsiny. With those other two, however—finally looking at Nivo and Dami—there is tsiny. And with that, he turned his back and walked away.

The three of us looked at each other, still slightly dazed, and then ourselves returned to tampon-tanana.

By the time we got there, their parents were already in; Claude lying in bed, Miadana and two younger daughters cutting up cucumbers and tomatoes for a salad and otherwise getting ready for lunch. Nivo and Dami immediately called everyone in to tell the story, each breathlessly cutting the other off to emphasize how angry Norbert had been, how terrified they had been while he was yelling at them,. “We didn’t say anything,” said Nivo. “David was like: ‘Miala tsiny, miala tsiny . . .’ But we just didn’t say anything at all.”

“Well,” I asked, “was it true, what he had been saying? Should we have asked first? I’m really sorry if it was me who was the cause of all of this . . .”

The response was unanimous. Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no such custom. Hadn’t everyone in Andrianony seen me go up to Ambohitrimaninana at least three or four times already, and practically every other place where there are tombs for that matter? Has anyone ever objected before? Had anyone so much as suggested there might be some impropriety involved? No, Norbert just wanted an excuse to start a fight. He’s always looking for some new excuse to pick a fight with us.

Before long, Haingo, Miadana’s eldest daughter (the one who had married Norbert’s eldest son Soanaivo), arrived, her baby in her arms. She had heard there had been some kind of confrontation. I produced the pack of cigarettes, someone else brought coffee, we all sat down and, as Haingo breastfed her baby, went over the story for her sake. Then we told it again for Jean Kely (“Little Jean”)—another of Norbert’s sons, who lived with Haingo and her husband in the lower apartment of Norbert’s house. He had been clearing brush to the west of town, and appeared carrying his sickle. “So what is it that makes your father so ferocious?” asked Miadana, as he greeted everyone. Jean Kely replied by looking depressed and helpless. “My brother says we’re caught between two families,” he said, with a gesture to me.

Conversation continued for more than an hour, as Nivo and some of the other daughters periodically disappeared to help with lunch. It swirled around a number of topics, but the main theme was always the same: what is it that makes Norbert act that way? Everyone seemed determined to find some explanatory framework, some way to render him not entirely to blame for his behavior. Claude thought it was all because of his stomach. Norbert had an ulcer, which was something Claude could understand, since he had suffered for years from one. When his stomach wasn’t acting up, he said, Norbert was fundamentally a simple person (tsotra). As soon as it did, the pain would carry him away, and he’d become ferocious, flying into a rage at the slightest provocation. Jean Kely was of a different opinion. It wasn’t so much Norbert’s stomach as his family. In winter, he was off on business most of the time; while he was away, his wife Juliette was left in charge of a household crowded full of children; she would be threatening everyone with his wrath if they were disobedient, and saving up her complaints against the neighbors until he came home. The moment he did come home, he would have to listen to an endless list of grievances, complaints, misdeeds . . . Finally it would just overwhelm him.

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