For You ... / For Us ...

I've studied in Madagascar twice--first as a college student during a semester abroad, and then as a college graduate on a fellowship to investigate meanings of "traditional" among Malagasy musicians living in Madagascar, and, later in the year, Malagasy musicians who had moved to London or Paris to pursue their art. I know that much of what I learned and questioned in Madagascar will relate to the texts and conversations of this class. For now, a memory, triggered by Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place:

As a treat when I finished my independent research project at the close of my semester abroad, I traveled to the coast with a few of my fellow American students. We planned to rent a little bungalow on the beach for a couple days before leaving the country. By 5:30 in the morning we were at the taxi-brousse station, watching vehicles laden with baskets of fruit, fowl and vegetables churn in the mud. Young boys roamed the parking lot selling little naked white dolls that squeaked. Finally we boarded our car--a Renault station wagon with a flat rear tire. The three of us sat in the very back seat. I had terrible cramps and diarrhea (I only mention this because I remember thinking that putting my body through such discomfort was surely a sign of my hardcore and adventurous spirit--I thought my little day of suffering vetted me with "real life" credentials). The trip took most of the day, the driver stopping every hour or so to patch the flat or offer paperwork to the gendarmes at the frequent checkpoints. Eventually we made a transfer to a truck. We joined the dozens of passengers already crammed in the open back, feet crossed and tangled over the burlap sacks of cargo. It was raining. We still had hours to go. Then we had to cross a river. The truck was poled across the fast water on a slippery raft. We rode the raft with it. A Malagasy woman on the raft with us, in the rain, commented that everything is hard in Madagascar. At first we thought she was apologizing to us. So often during our stay people had apologized for the food that was served or the hospitality offered. My friend Alex rushed to reassure our fellow traveler that we weren't upset by the wet, the delay or the discomfort. We were fine! We loved her country! The woman shook her head at us. She said, "Oui, mais pour vous c'est les vacances. Pour nous c'est toujours." For you, this is vacation. For us, this is always/everyday.

Prior to this stranger's comment, I had thought of myself as occupying a different category from other white foreigners in Madagascar. Even though I was a vazaha--a white person--I wasn't a tourist; not exactly. And I wasn't a drunk expat with a hairy chest and prostitutes on my arm. I wasn't rich (compared with other students at my small liberal arts college, that is). I was a student! With massive loans and a work-study job! Besides, it was the French who had colonized Madagascar. I was American. I was off the hook! I was there to delight in learning the language and culture! I was learning a lot and having an adventure!

Many passages in Kincaid's work shake me from complacency in the way the woman on the raft in early December, 1994,did. Imperialism, exploitation, oppression--these are shared legacies, and no one's exempt, no matter when or where she was born. Kincaid writes, "So when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself" (19). I'm not just the rhetorical "you" to whom she writes.

- Esme