Precolonial Remains: Michèle Rakotoson and the Neo-Andevo Narrative

Set against the prelude to the 1896 French conquest, Michèle Rakotoson’s novel Ambatomanga, le silence et la douleur (2021) stages opposite perspectives on Madagascar’s colonization, notably those of Félicien Le Guen – an officer deployed to Madagascar – and Tavao, a Malagasy ‘ andevo’ (slave). I argue that in attempting to archive the traumatic experience of invasion and its lingering remains on the future postcolony in distress, Rakotoson creates what I call a ‘Neo-Andevo narrative’, a neo-slave narrative recontextualized around the cultural and historical specificities of the Malagasy experience of fanandevozana (enslavement). Through carving a space for the ‘ andevo,’ Rakotoson breaks off the tabooed topic of enslavement, which is still in pursuit of sustainable historicity on her island. I demonstrate how she resurrects her island’s precolonial and colonial past to expose the afterlife of slavery in the present, simultaneously expanding knowledge of African diasporas and Blackness from a uniquely Malagasy perspective.