An Essay:

For your enjoyment: this is an essay I wrote as a part of an environmental humanities course I took with Kathleen Moore, looking at environmental case studies from a philosophy/moral lens. This is a personal reflection from a research project I conducted while studying abroad in 2010, looking at viewpoints  in a village bordering one of Madagascar's National Parks. So...enjoy! Comments and feedback are always welcome. I'd be happy to share more photos and insights from this experience, as well as a link to my research paper if there's any interest.

Malio

First I notice the houses, the pock-marked dirt road, and the sunken green rice fields. Children run alongside the road and wave, joyful voices shouting ampelasoa . The air smells warm, open, free. When I lift my eyes I see mountains, some barren, some with patches of forest. A bright blue sky allows the sun to beam down. It reminds me of nowhere and everywhere I’ve ever been or imagined. Houses made of rough planks lean haphazardly. Bright red wild pineapples spurt out of the ground. Bulbous yellow jackfruits dangle from the tree nearby.

I climb out of the truck, setting foot for the first time in the village of Malio. Sosony, my growly-voiced professor gathers me and my translator-to-be Steve, towards a clump of villagers. Formalities and explanations in Malagasy commence. A slender woman, dark braids wrapped above her head, traditional lamba hoany around her waist, pulls out a grass woven mat, from seemingly nowhere. We all gather round onto mats. A couple of white aluminum bowls appear, heaping with sticky white rice. The rice is followed by another bowl dripping with honeycomb and a handful of spoons. I dig in, as do those around me. Spoons swerve around each other until we are voky be. Stuffed.

Sosony leaves in the truck with a promise to return the next day. In true Malagasy fashion, I shouldn’t be surprised when he actually does return to touch base. Five days later.

The fokontany, village commune president was one among many initial introductions I couldn’t keep track of. He said, “Tomorrow we will find someone to take you to the park.”

I tried to explain, “I’m not here to see the park. I’m here to talk to people about it.” Somehow my attempts to explain my purpose didn’t go through. It would take another attempt in the morning, and Steve’s help in explaining my point, before it was understood.

The commune president insists on leading me to my first interview: to someone I can talk to about the park. I settle to the ground on another woven mat alongside Steve. We are gathered in a circle with the man who estimates his own age to be over 70, the village president, and what seems to be the contents of every household within earshot, beneath the tree’s shade.

“What does the idea of conservation mean to you?” I ask my first question.

Steve translates into a musical tumble of Malagasy and then back into French. “He said, ‘conservation is good for the village, and that he likes conservation.’” Okay. Maybe not precisely what I expected, but I scribble down the response and ask him about the park.

The responses I received were different every time. Some said conservation is water. Some, “it is agriculture.” Some, “it is bans that the park puts on us.”

If only more people came with the desire to connect, rather than vacation, to escape. “All of the others; they come, they hike the circuit [in the park] and leave.” The villagers tell me they are happy that a vazaha is interested in talking to them. They hope that I will share their message, their stories.

Steve and I are in search of a place to swim, to cool off from the heat that climbs overhead and hangs in the air every morning. Tiakorene, the yellow shirted boy becomes our impromptu guide. We follow him through the village, making our way past houses and the scattering of inhabitants outside. Salama, we reply to their greetings. Yes, we are mistangastangana- out and about.

I dive eagerly into the jewel-surfaced stream. Blond hair floats up and around me. A gaggle of Tiakorene’s friends emerge from behind bushes to watch the vazaha, foreigner, that I am. Steve and I banter, that I have become the village version of television. “Programme de matin? Regarder la vazaha en train de nager.”  The morning programming? Watch the vazaha swim.

We sit inside, on the floor, leaning against the gapped boards that make up the hut’s walls. Flies buzz, clinging against skin, until swatted away. As usual, the interview I’m conducting is observed by family, children, and those of unknown relation.  After the interview, they told me how the man’s wife was dying, on her deathbed.

Two days later we are pushing aside shrubs and undergrowth to make our way into the forest, where a tree is being cut down for the coffin. It’s still morning, yet I arrive red cheeked and sweltering to our destination. We settle to the ground amongst the leaves, and a twelve-man crew in tattered athletic shorts. A lizard lurks casually nearby. And of course there’s rum. And axe thunks rhythmically. The rum is gone. Meaning time to head back .

On the day of the burial, they ran from the village to the family cemetery with the body and the coffin. I was amongst the followers. I follow the procession to treed edge of the sacred forest. The family cemetery. In the forest, time swirls in an uncanny fashion and becomes a blur. When we emerge the light has changed. The darkness of the night is broken by brush fires dotting the hillside.

Days later after talking to people, I’ve finally been to the park, the subject of all that discussion. It is beautiful as one might expect of a tropical forest. There are vines like branches that spiral their way up tree trunks. There are aloe plants and ferns and leaf litter. There is a boa resting casually in the path, for which the park agent guides us on a wide detour. At the crest of the loop we stop at a natural pool, a part of the chute d’eau with burbling waterfalls and a view of green tree-covered hillsides all around. It is a sight entirely different from that of the splotchy brown hills from the other side of the village, outside the park boundaries.

What makes me so sad is this seeming incompatibility of values. The beauty of the pristine forest, the natural world and its many wonders, I hold very dear. This need to protect the environment, to conserve biodiversity, is a central part of my own ideology and worldview. Yet I have found that the culture, the joy, the life of the people, are where I am most deeply touched. We don’t share the same conceptions on why the park is there or what conservation is. But maybe that’s not necessary. I am trying to understand their side of the story. And they have accepted me as family. They talk, tell stories, even when I’m not asking questions. About the park, about their history, about how exactly one goes about making toka gasy, the local moonshine rum.

I don’t know what’s to become of the forest and the park. What’s to become of its trees, its snakes, its birds, and the invisible lemurs. All I know is that the beauty here, the joy of life is not only in the quiet seclusion of the forest. Joyful voices, melodic whispers, spinning hazy images, burning toka gasy, are the powerful moments that linger in my mind. I visited the park, and the forest. But there is something beyond this pristine forest, a strength, a value, a sort of magic to be found outside the park and in the people who live here. I cannot firmly preach from my own conservation background, from my environmental values as to what or who is ultimately right. Not after taking off my shoes to enter the sacred forest. And leaving it, full with a power of the ancestors.

 Misaotra.