The Trials of Miadana

Let me return to Miadana’s family, and recount some of the difficulties they faced on moving to Betafo. They are particularly useful witnesses because—as they continually pointed out—they arrived in Betafo understanding very little about how authority, in a rural community, actually worked. They too had to start from scratch. Hence, when I showed up they felt an immediate affinity; in fact, they clearly relished the opportunity to tell another newcomer all the things it had taken them so long to learn.

Learning the story from the point of view of such anomalous people obviously had its limitations. For one thing, Miadana and her family were not real participants in most of the delicate games I’ve been describing. At least, they did not go around dropping hints about their possible access to hidden medicine. But their situation was not so very different; much of their power was based on being able to make similar intimations of power on the basis of their identification with the government. Instead of the ghostly intentions of medicine, their presence evoked the ghostly image of the state—and while they never openly suggested they might have access to unusual powers by dint of their contacts in the government, neither did they do anything to discourage such speculation. In this too, their strategy was typical: almost everyone, when speaking of their own role in local politics, would present themselves as passive spectators, speak in awe or indignation of other people’s self-assertion, without ever suggesting they might be capable of such a thing themselves.

Faay

Miadana’s trouble with fady began even before her family were living in Betafo. It was around 1980 that Claude began having serious medical troubles and was forced into early retirement from his administrative post. At first he got a part-time job in Arivonimamo, where life was cheaper, their property in Betafo closer, and there were still good schools for their children. Their oldest, Haingo, was still attending high school at the time. Eventually, though, he had to abandon even that.

At that point, most of their fields were still being worked by sharecroppers, and Claude’s mother’s old house on tampon-tanana—which her father had built in 1940—was occupied by an old mainty servant. When the family did visit Betafo, it was with the sense of a pleasant country outing. Like most inhabitants of the capital, one of their first thoughts on finding themselves in the countryside was to find a nice secluded place and have a picnic. There was a beautiful spot just below Betafo to the northeast, invisible from all around, where waters from a hidden spring runs softly between huge flat rocks, forming little pools, a place overhung by ancient trees.

Miadana: The second year we took a trip, and came here. And when we took trips, we were still living the life of Antananarivo—“We’ll be able to do a little fishing,” “We can have a picnic.” So we brought along everything—plates, pots—and had a picnic down there by the water. Afterwards we washed the dishes by the waterside. What did we know? We washed the cloth, washed the pots there. People came to speak with us: “You’re not allowed to wash things here, not anything. Especially not the blackened bottoms of pots.”

We were really amazed! “Oh! So what is it about this water that we shouldn’t be able to wash things in it?”

“We’ll tell Ingahy Ratsizafy!” We were really amazed.

So the rest of the pots, this is what we had to do with them: we had to carry them all way up the hill and wash them there so as not to dirty the water again.

It was a scene that would repeat again and again, as her family became more of a presence in Betafo. The first step came when they decided to take some of their fields back from their sharecroppers, and begin working them themselves—at first, with the help of hired laborers from town. Then in 1986, they moved in to the house on tampon-tanana. At the time, there were two other occupied houses there. One had belonged to Raoelizaka, and was now occupied by his widow. The other was Sely’s; he had recently separated from his first wife and married his former servant, a black woman named Rasoa, and had two children by her.

Sely and Raoelizaka were born country people, from a village to the west of Betafo, connected to its illustrious center by what were considered rather tenuous female lines. They had built their social position as mediators between the great andriana of the capital, who still owned most of the best land around Betafo, and the more humble people they had left behind. As organizers of sharecropping, they had every reason to be a little disconcerted when a family of great andriana actually appeared, and started working their fields themselves. Scolding them about local fady was one way to establish their seniority. Claude and Miadana felt they had no choice but to defer, at least in public. The result was that, three years later when I showed up and started asking questions—by which time Rasoamanana was dead, and Sely a broken shadow of his former self—they had for years been observing a number of fady most of Betafo’s residents had never even heard of.

Now, it is significant I think that about the only person willing to back up Sely about all these fady was a man who was actually his greatest rival. Augustin, former President Fokontany (1975–1982), also based a good part of his social position—and living—as a mediator with wealthy absentees. Augustin was of mainty descent, and lived in Andrianony, but his reputation for energy, grave efficiency, and almost comprehensive local knowledge made him much more reliable, in the eyes of most absentees, than Sely. Over the last five or six years he had been slowly taking over the management of much of the sharecropping. He wasn’t likely to be very happy about seeing former absentees reclaiming their fields either, even more so because he was trying to define himself as spokesman for Betafo’s black inhabitants, who actually worked these same fields. Miadana ultimately came to the conclusion that his real aims were to make life so difficult for anyone who tried to live on tampontanana that they would all leave, and the place become a wasteland. It is probably not insignificant that Augustin was also one of the first people to tell me that story about the andriana ancestor burning down the town; he actively wanted the center of Betafo to be an empty space, destroyed by the weight of history. At any rate, he always encouraged as broad a view as possible of what was not allowed there.

The most onerous fady, though, were the ones imposed by Ratsizafy’s hail medicine. These were, indeed, stricter than any other I ever heard of: no onions or garlic in the growing season, no voanjo bory (Cape Peas, one of the two most popular varieties of bean); if one wants to open a gourd one has to take it outside the limits of the village; there were all sorts of restrictions of crops that could not be grown or not be grown at certain times; restrictions on making noise or picking fruit and many other things besides. Here too, it was Augustin—an ally and relative of Ratsizafy—who was the most persistent in lecturing the newcomers about what they couldn’t do, though almost everyone felt free to warn them if they thought they were breaking one, and threaten to go tell Ratsizafy.

The family adopted the classic Malagasy style of resistance: whenever someone came to lecture them, they assured them they would certainly obey the rules, then they tried their best to continue exactly as before.

Chantal: That’s an awful lot of fady. So if someone were to break the fady, then . . . what?

Claude: They’d probably commit some act of spite against you.

Miadana: That’s all they’d do. Just that but . . .

Chantal: And you’ve never been caught by such an act of spite?

Miadana: We’ve never been caught by one. But just the same, we break them all the time. Violate the things to do no matter what or what or what, break every single one of them. That’s what we do. We totally violate them, you have to say we do not follow the ancestral customs. They’re not really ancestral customs anyway, the ones we’ve come across, they really aren’t. We don’t follow them. “Didn’t you know about the custom—didn’t you know that voanjo bory aren’t allowed in the village?” they’d say. “It’s because of the hail medicine.” So we tested it, we ate some, looked at the sky, and the rain came. And when it had stopped raining . . .

Chantal: There was no hail?

Miadana: None. None at all.

A fady is “true” (marina) if transgressing it produces a disastrous effect. Miadana was appealing to one very common way of talking about hasina; I often heard about people who had tested fady or other customs in this way—though doing so is also considered very risky, since everyone knows there’s nothing that more riles a spirit than some skeptic intentionally testing it. But that’s what Miadana did, and by doing so, she produced an anti-narrative: we violated the fady; there was not a trace of hail. These customs aren’t real. They’re “not really ancestral customs.”

Talk of “spite” (ankasomparana) took matters even further. Ankasomparana was a synonym for witchcraft. Claude in particular was inclined to suspect even if one transgressed the rules and something did happen, it would probably just be that. If the body of Ratsizafy’s ancestor was ever exposed to sunlight, it was often said, his spirit would grow angry and bring down hail on the crops. When Miadana first told me this story, Claude made it clear he was unconvinced. “It’s the descendants of Rainitamaina that would bring down the hail, not him,” he muttered. In general, he suspected Ratsizafy’s pretensions to ancestral authority were so much nonsense; really, he was just making up all these restrictions, then imposing his will through the entirely illegitimate threat of force. It was not difficult to maintain a sphere of autonomy in their relatively isolated house on tampon-tanana. After Raketamanana died in 1987, they were left with only one real neighbor; anyway, there was little way anyone had to know what they were eating in the privacy of their home. But people were suspicious. In fact, even during the time I was there, the family was coming under greater and greater pressure. Miadana began telling me they had to go to ever greater pains to disguise their violation of taboos. I was a bit insulated from popular opinion in this matter, since I was so worried about betraying my friends’ trust that I tried to avoid ever letting the topics of “taboo” and “Miadana” both come up in the same conversation. But I did hear rumors that Ratsizafy had been sniffing around their fields. Toward the end of my stay, even Armand made a point of uncomfortably remarking to me that “a lot of people” were very upset about the possibility of damage to the crops. I passed it on to her. Two weeks before I left, Miadana herself suddenly announced to me that she had discovered there was really something to those warnings after all. One evening, she said, they had sat down to a meal spiced with liberal amounts of garlic; almost as soon as they had put the first spoonful of rice to their lips, a splatter of hail came crashing against the rooftop. It was a small, localized attack of hail that seemed to primarily affect the area of their own house. “We were amazed,” she said “It’s really true.”

I dutifully told Armand.

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