She by jean joseph rabearivelo biography

The Malagasy poet Jean Joseph Rabearivelo () was the first major French-language poet in Africa. Some of his most powerful poetry arose from the conflict between his intimacy with two cultures, Malagasy and French, and his estrangement from two societies, native and colonial.

Jean Joseph Rabearivelo was born on March 4, , in Tananarive (Madagascar) into a noble family which had been impoverished as a result of the abolition of slavery by the French authorities soon after the colonial conquest in He left school at 13 in order to earn a precarious livelihood as proofreader in a local printing shop.

Tananarive in the early s was a focus of intense literary and journalistic activity in the vernacular, and Rabearivelo was one of the first Malagasy poets to use the French language as his medium of literary expression. His early collections, La Coupe de cendres (), Sylves (), and Volumes (), were in the romantic-academic

One of Africa's most important French-language poets, a prominent figure in the literary revival known as the Mitady ny Very, which swept Madagascar in the s. Jean-Joseph Rab�arivelo wrote both in Malagasy and in his own unique version of imperfect French. He was passionate and restless, drifted from one job to another, and suffered from drug addiction and depression. Rab�arivelo took his own life at the age of

And you witness of his daily suffering
and of his endless task;
you atch his thunder-riddled agony
until the battlements of the East re-echo
the conches of the sea &#;
but you pity him no more
and do not even remember that his sufferings begin again
each time the sun capsizes.
(from Traduit de la nuit, )

Jean-Joseph Rab�arivelo was born in Antananarivo (Tananarive), the capital of Madagascar, into a relatively poor family. His mother, who married a tailor, was an aristocrat, related to the royalty of the largest Malagasy ethnic group, the Merina people. In Malagasy armed forces had been defeated by the French, and the new administration led to the pauperization of most of the Merina royalty. The loss of her family's property was also p