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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION:
“LOOK OUT! THE SLEEPING LOCUSTS AWAKE”
It was called the Umbrella Revolution, mostly by international press and campaign observers typically keen to capture the essence of any political event in the Third World as revolution.1 Hundreds of thousands of colorful umbrellas, rib to rib, undulating as a wash across the parks and plazas of Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital city, lined the dirt roads headed to city center. Under them: young people, even very young people, many not so young, and even more of the old, and rather old. For days and then months, these umbrellas sheltered from the harsh equatorial sun an enormous multitude of regular people who hit the streets for over seven months in an outcry over corrupt national elections. This post-election crisis, which lasted from December 2001 until June 2002, nearly thrust Madagascar into civil war as the presidential incumbent, Didier Ratsiraka, and mayor of the capital city, Marc Ravalomanana, vied for victory and threatened run-offs. To the Malagasy, the wash of umbrellas marked not a revolution but a familiar crisis followed by a populist awakening, what the Malagasy proverb aptly refers to as the moment when sleeping locusts rise. Look out, it says, for the sleeping locusts awake! Tandremo raha mifohaza ny valalabemandry!
The buzz of this critical mass pressed upon local political process a change in meaning, a change in discourse, and a shift in the paradigms and idioms of political legitimacy and power. After nearly seven months under the umbrella of “democracy,” Marc Ravalomanana secured a local and international victory, Didier Ratsiraka essentially exiled from both. Democracy was certainly not a new practice to ensure and protect in Madagascar; even with structural dissidence from colonial and recent postcolonial governments, there had always been some form of vernacular direct action, a verbal militia that managed to edge a democratic voice back into the system. But to the international community this was the kind of democracy that signaled less the significance of legitimately elected government and strong civil society and more the requisite “transition” to liberal democracy that allowed for a different set of consequences beyond politics. Under its own umbrella ribbed in tropes of development, freedom, participation, and empowerment, this democracy pointed more to the potential for transnationalization and neoliberal economic reforms and opportunities. Marc Ravalomanana would soon come to embody this narrative of democratic transition and economic progressiveness. But he would come also to represent its failure.
This book is about the possibilities and limits of democracy told through the story of the Ravalomanana administration and the civil society that emerged to bring it to victory in 2002 and to eventually escort it out through a coup d’état in March 2009. If we are to imagine all the ways we know our political leaders, what they look like, what they believe in, how they might resolve a problem, we come to realize that apart from some unique opportunity in which we see or meet them in person, we know them mostly through mediated talk: through a prepared speech, through newspapers, radio, television, and all the voices of these media who speak for or about these leaders. This talk, talk about talk, and representations of talk constitute and shape democratic process. The interactions between national and international political speechwriters and political speakers, political cartoonists (as audiences and to audiences), tell the unfolding of democracy as it organized and experienced, what is at stake, locally in Imerina and as it is construed (or misconstrued) by bi-national government and non-governmental organization (NGO) development experts. Democracy is most certainly dependent on what that relationship looks like in the capital province of Madagascar, Imerina. Also, democracy can only be reckoned with based on its productive role of a multiplicity of publics, which cohere through the access and legitimization of social actors’ access to linguistic and political markets. Most significantly, whereas democracy may be used to describe a state of governance, it is a mode of action rather than an artifice of governmental regimes with the power to regulate and control. It is a continual process of action productive of – even as it is reliant on – a market of communicative resources and their accessibility and distribution.
Within this local political economy, democracy can only be understood within the contexts of its postcolonial history and the global politics and publics circulating and undergirding how local governance is organized and experienced. And even still, all of this is always already mediated, by talk and the beliefs, opinions, and straight-from-the-gut feelings about what talk accomplishes, what it means. In thinking about the possibilities and limitations of democracy, then, we must consider the place of talk. This ethnography does just that, through the practices of political orators, their speechwriters, and political cartoonists who work in the capital-city region of Imerina.
Speakers and audiences of urban Imerina confront the political here-and-now and negotiate particular social relations through intertextual, discursive, complex genred events known well throughout Imerina as kabary politika (political oratory) and kisarisary politika (political cartoons). This story of democracy is told through the lens focused upon the daily use and interplay of these two forms of public speaking and communicative performance in Imerina as they reflect and shape shifting dynamics of political engagement and emerging modes of public participation in national democratic process. Political oratory or kabary politika is a highly stylized performance genre common since the first Merina Kingdom of the eighteenth century and still the norm for state political oratory. Elinor Ochs and Maurice Bloch first brought knowledge of kabary styles and their social and political significance to anthropology in the mid-1970s (Bloch 1971, 1975, 1985, 1986; Ochs 1975, 1996). Bloch argued in his seminal essay on language and political action that politics is primarily constituted on various kinds of speaking, and that to understand a political system is to look at that political oratory and beyond the event at other forms of talk circulating within and around it (Bloch 1975: 12). Whether it is a kabary for weddings, funerals, or, as this story follows, the political style, kabary is crafted and delivered according to a formalized structure of greetings, preemptive apologies for handling words publicly, and allegorical-type narratives brimming with proverbs, riddles, and poetry. For a sense of the greetings, the apologies required to speak, and just how poetic this oration can be, consider this small excerpt of a kabary delivered by a member of the AVI political party to a delegation of provincial leaders in the capital city of Madagascar, Antananarivo (known affectionately as Tana) in 2008:
Ladies and gentlemen,
We greet all of you here. Let us thank our ancestors and God’s name because they took care of us in finding our way to this place to attend this great celebration. We must thank the State rulers … I greet as well the bekotromaroholatra [war survivors] and the Army. You are the wall protecting the town, the horns protecting the neck so you are our pride. Thank you to Andrianampoinimerina, great ruler of Madagascar, who declared the limit of his ricefields are the seas. We are all Malagasy.
I must ask you to excuse me because, that’s the first thing to say in a speech to honor you and to ask for permission. Don’t give me the tsiny [blame] as well as we are used to say that the tsiny is light and heavy at the same time. It’s a deep ravine, you’ll get the vertigo if you look into it and you’ll die if you fall into it. You must get rid of the tsiny so that you can speak without reproach.
All of us are here to preserve and to promote the Malagasy language. The ancestors’ customs are neither for sale nor to be exchanged. They are carefully folded clothes so they are worth being shown. So we, the Malagasy people, lift up our Malagasy identity with this practice of kabary.
If the young ox feeds itself with its mother, it’s not because it wants trouble, it just remembers the past. Even if little crabs move sideways, even if their gait looks weird, it’s not because of danger or honor but because that’s how the ancestors used to walk so that’s what they should do. So it’s with our tongue and with kabary that we show national unity now.
As Elinor Ochs describes in her comparative studies of the unmarked conversational style of talk (resaka) and kabary, “one who uses the kabary mode must manolaka ny teniny [sic], ‘wind his words’” (1975: 226). That is, he must speak in an allusive manner. Elders say that kabary differs from resaka in that the former requires that the speaker draw circles around an idea (miodidina) whereas the latter does not. In both resaka and kabary, winding speech is highly valued. Grammatically, it is rife with the passive voice and markers of verbal politeness. Temporally, it can go on for hours.
Bloch and Ochs brought the discussion of kabary into anthropology at a time when this centuries-old practice had come back into the arena of national politics. This book returns to the topic of kabary politika to recenter it as one of the key modes of communicative practice in today’s democratic national politics in Madagascar, particularly as it has come to play a central role in emerging state formations. Today kabary politika’s role is situated in a very different political climate than that of colonial Madagascar (1890s–1960), when the practice had been defanged of its political salience, or of the postcolonial socialist context of the 1970s that Bloch and Ochs studied, when the practice had recently reentered public political life.
Kisarisary politika are political cartoons that appear daily on the front pages of newspapers across the capital-city province. They are featured in both Malagasy and French, depending on the paper’s publishing language. They were a regular aspect of news just before colonialism, in the early 1900s, and following independence in 1960. Small crowds still assemble around the newspaper stalls each morning, usually gathering to read these satirical cartoons and discuss their relevance and significance.
Throughout the precolonial monarchy and postcolonial socialist and democratic periods, politicians and pundits have engaged one another between these “two coordinates … each serving to differentiate the other in productive rather than distinctive ways” (Bakhtin 1981: 191). Today, however, actors in the rather longstanding genres of political kabary are now invigorating new forms of communicative interaction that figure more closely to the US rhetorical style. In turn, contexts such as political cartoons have rebounded with recontextualizations of this shift in kabary through rhetorical devices such as iconicizations, parody, and reported speech of its agents. Recoding various aspects of syntax, registers, and even contexts, they discursively forefront the inherent disjunctures between heteroglossic voices that politicians just assume ameliorate under the gloss of sound bites like “Malagasy unity,” “development and modernity,” “progress,” and “transparency.”
As vehicles of rhetoric and information, and as means for enacting public identities and shaping participant roles, political oratory and political cartooning mediate social institutional change as particular performers deploy them, representing particular interests. Orators and cartoonists move in and out of multiple subject positions in order to negotiate political claims that figure into a more complex, everyday semiosocial matrix, reflecting and producing new social imaginaries undergirding the public sphere. While kabary speakers mediate between an audience and an authority of the mythic past they embody and that is presupposed in the form itself, political cartoonists break the indexical power of the politician to do that. They thwart this authority and the otherwise tidy and ordered social imaginary put forth by kabary speakers in the frames of their cartoon worlds. These modes of linguistic praxis, then, as historically and culturally contingent, serve as new forms of political representations to express ideas and to index emerging social formations shaping the state and civil society, and therefore, what democracy looks like.
This ethnography explores and clarifies three important issues that consider the productive role of political oratory and cartooning in political process. First, it explores the relations between political agency, social identity, and culturally situated modes of political representation at play in democratic process. Second, the story follows the role of language in the production and negotiation of social relations, especially those cosmologies of assembly burgeoning at the fluid boundaries between state and civil society. Third, through the daily work of speechwriters, politicians, and cartoonists, this project illuminates the ways in which “democracy,” as a political imaginary, is mediated by arguments about how truth is represented in language, and how such arguments serve as tropes framing transnationalization and neoliberal economic reforms as driven by a moral imperative of development.
In the explorations of each of these lines of inquiry, this story intervenes into taken-for-granted readings of what constitutes democracy to show that democracy in Imerina is not so much predicated on individual informed choice and representative government, nor is it based on the models of liberal democracy bearing down on its governance structures at present. Rather, it is vernacular. It is historically contingent, its trajectory embedded in the longue durée of state formation and the social relations underlying that formation. It is understood, measured, negotiated, fought for, and celebrated based on the ways in which social agency comes from the creation of community or shared stances productive of publics rather than individual participation, pre-packaged bi-national initiatives or singular top-down power. Its political process relies on an economy of both tactile and symbolic resources, their availability, and their distribution. In this case, kabary and political cartooning forms stand as part of that market of resources and their apportionment enables and organizes participation of these publics in particular ways. Vernacular democracy may unfold locally through local modes of sociality such as oration and punditry, but it is a product of zones of contact between an accretion of agents, at home and that extend far and wide beyond the shorelines of Madagascar. In fact, Madagascar is important to those in the Western world because its story of democracy in a time of fast-paced large-scale neoliberal global exchange is also the West’s story. We are implicated in its history, its possibilities. We are closer to its shores than the map would suggest.
Consider this: “I want to run for president and I want to know what it will take to win.” In May 2001, a yogurt mogul and mayor of the capital city phoned a longtime friend and the mayor of a large east-coast city in the United States. He announced his intent to run for president and asked his friend’s help to run what would surely take him to victory – an “American-style” campaign. These two mayors had becom...
