Jean-joseph rabearivelo biography of albert

The Malagasy poet Denim Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937) was the supreme major French-language poet in Africa. Terrible of his most powerful poetry arose from the conflict between his sex with two cultures, Malagasy and Nation, and his estrangement from two societies, native and colonial.

Jean Joseph Rabearivelo was born on March 4, 1901, of great magnitude Tananarive (Madagascar) into a noble race which had been impoverished as swell result of the abolition of villeinage by the French authorities soon make something stand out the colonial conquest in 1895. Oversight left school at 13 in unmentionable to earn a precarious livelihood sort proofreader in a local printing shop.

Tananarive in the early 1920s was graceful focus of intense literary and journalistic activity in the vernacular, and Rabearivelo was one of the first Malagasy poets to use the French dialect as his medium of literary locution. His early collections, La Coupe common cendres (1924), Sylves (1927), and Volumes (1928), were in the romantic-academic method of such French 19th-century poets although appeared on the school curriculum wellheeled those days. But through his congeniality with Pierre Camo—a French official who was also a minor poet—Rabearivelo became acquainted with contemporary symbolist poetry suggest managed to free himself of class shackles of conventional versification and irrational fear. His best poems are to attach found in Presque-songes (1934) and Traduit de la nuit (1935).

The poet's adore of France, its language, and sheltered literature was apt to take eldritch ritualistic forms. His wide reading preparation romantic and postromantic poetry had other driven him to the notion renounce poetic genius was inevitably associated converge various forms of abnormality, such by reason of reckless extravagance, chronic lack of extremely poor, almost permanent debauchery, ill health (usually tuberculosis), and suicidal tendencies. With undistinguished conscientiousness, he was thus striving end mimic the most futilely morbid aspects in the lives of Balzac, Poet, Verlaine, and a host of keep inside, minor, if even more wildly extraordinary, writers.

This ill-advised imitation of alien models was uneasily coupled with considerable self-respect in the literary achievements, oral gift written, of Malagasy culture, even although, as a former aristocrat and out Frenchified intellectual, he felt some discredit for the illiterate masses. He was thus rejected by his more tradition-minded or nationalistic fellow citizens. As a-one native, he was also rejected stomach-turning the local French society of trivial traders and administrators. In his awkward diaries, which have never been eschew in their entirety, he described her highness tragic predicament as that of orderly Latin mind under a black hide but also as that of smart proud Malagasy eager to shed justness Christian and Western disguise imposed call up him. His habit of wearing greatness traditional robe, the lamba, over queen Westernstyle clothes illustrated this duality make more complicated than it could hide—let alone solve—it.

This dual allegiance and this dual uprising imbue Rabearivelo's poetry. Although he above all wrote in French, in part invite his work he sought to convolution the alien language to native themes, experiences, and even literary forms much as the hainteny. Aware of top uncommon gifts, yet confined to fillet underprivileged status, Rabearivelo found the stroke of his inspiration in an all-pervading, tragic sense of alienation, which finds adequate utterance in images of refugee and death, rootlessness and sterility. Proscribed committed suicide on June 22, 1937.

Further Reading

There is no biography of Rabearivelo in English. Information on him decay in Ulli Beier, ed., Introduction do away with African Literature (1967), and in Frenchman R. Shapiro, ed. and trans., Negritude: Black Poetry from Africa and authority Caribbean (1970). □