Antipode – Chapter 2

Waiting for Brousse

Antipode was originally published in 2001. Here is chapter one (last week’s post).

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During my first trip to Madagascar, my college graduation trip, very little went smoothly. Smooth, in my Western opinion, suggested efficiency, timeliness, and a world that bore some resemblance to that promised. Smooth was not part of the culture that we found.

In the decrepit coastal town of Manakara, where it seemed it would rain forever, we befriended several young men who talked excitedly about crocodiles that lived nearby. I had never seen a crocodile in the wild, but not for lack of desire. The men said heartily that the crocodiles were easy to get to, and they would take us there, by canoe, tomorrow. With promises of an adventure the following day, they slipped away, leaving us standing on a tropical beach, coconut palms overhead, the Indian ocean slate and emerald, by turns, in the wind.

“We could swim,” I suggested, as it had finally stopped raining. A woman with a basket on her head walked by. I stopped her.

“Is it safe to swim here?” I asked, in French. She appeared to understand perfectly, and nodded yes, it is safe. She was off, a smile playing at her lips. I stopped another woman, and received the same answer. She walked away, balancing an improbable basket full of ducks on her head. Still, we sat, not quite certain, waiting for something to develop. A gaggle of schoolchildren arrived, boisterous and loud, leading two teachers, pulling them towards the water. The children were reprimanded in rapid Malagasy, which I didn’t understand. They immediately quieted down, and sat on the sand.

“Is it safe to swim here?” I asked one of the teachers. She, too, laughed.

“Oh no,” she said, “not at all. Last year, a woman was in only to her ankles, and a shark came up and dragged her out to sea. She never came back.” My eyes bugged out.

“Her ankles?” I repeated, gesturing low on my legs to make sure I had understood.

“Yes, her ankles.” This I did not find smooth at all.

The following day we set off with the three young men to find crocodiles. The five of us sat low in the unstable canoe, while they took turns paddling down a wide freshwater canal.

“It is very important that we stay in the middle,” they said, over and over again, as we hugged the shore, where tall grasses obscured undefined dangers.

“But…” I began, then stopped, resigned. We were, after all, looking for crocodiles, from a little rickety boat. Tasty morsels, easily capsized. What risks from the reeds could possibly outweigh the ones we had designed ourselves?

In the end, we found no crocodiles. The fierce reptiles were too far away, the men admitted, arms exhausted from rowing. We had been on the water since shortly after dawn, and the sun was now past its peak. We pulled up instead on a small beach, with the promise of a shark skull awaiting us there. Bleached in the sun, its teeth in razor rows along the inside of its massive jaw, here were the remains of an immense shark. Soon locals from an invisible village appeared, and stood with us as we admired the shark.

“Do you want to eat?” they asked us, and when we agreed, they led us to a few small dwellings, the yards immaculately taken care of, with glossy-leaved plants growing in small clumps. They were grilling a large fish on an open fire. We were to sit around the fire, and to make us comfortable, they began tearing apart their plants, to give us leaves to sit on.

“No, no, that’s not necessary,” we objected, startled to see them destroying their beautiful foliage. “We don’t need leaves. We can sit on the sand.” They looked at us, then at the leaves, artfully arrayed, and nodded.

“Bad leaves!” they said, kicking them away. “Our guests do not want leaves!” They smiled at us, pleased that they had understood our intense dislike of leaves.

We had a delicious meal of fish and rice, and afterwards broke out an object that quickly provoked giggles all around—a frisbee. Nobody had ever seen one before, so we demonstrated, and shortly all the little boys of the village were trying their hands at it. The girls hung around the edges, curious and shy. We threw to them persistently, and when the girls grew bold enough to try, the boys, now ten minutes into their careers as frisbee throwers, laughed at them mockingly.

When the fire died down and the breeze off the ocean began to feel cool, we got in the canoe and headed back to Manakara.

“It is very important that we stay in the middle,” the men echoed, a mantra destined to be disobeyed. The sharp edge grasses glanced against our faces as the moon came up, and we began seeing the predatory eye shine of crocodiles, if only in our imaginations.

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Back in Manakara, we became mired in a waiting game that was not of our own devising. We wanted so to escape, to explore other parts of the great red island, but we were not in control of our destiny. Waiting is an art form unknown in the developed world, though its many mundane shapes are familiar. In Madagascar, one waits for the official bearing the appropriate stamp. One waits for food while children are sent to find eggs. One waits for rivers to recede. For any task at all worth accomplishing, to wait is imperative. If it is possible to perform a task without waiting, it is either a banal task not worth mentioning, or so critical to the everyday functioning of the vast majority of people that the laws of supply and demand have actually become evident, even in a place where demand cannot always be followed by payment.

To buy the uncooked rice that keeps the Malagasy people alive, there is no need to wait. For everything else, one waits. The people do not raise their voices or weapons in anger. When faced with increasingly humiliating reasons to wait, and delays which stretch interminably, they do not threaten to abandon the system. There are no other options. The vast majority of the population have never been more than 20 miles from their birthplace, and for them, the system that exists is the only one conceivable. To abandon it would be a lonely and purely symbolic act.

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Having finally escaped Manakara by train, Bret and I needed, on several more occasions, to get places. Madagascar is a large country, and we hoped to see a lot of it. Over the next several years, I began to realize that the rate of life in Madagascar could be beautiful and is strangely effective. On that first trip, I merely engaged in banging my head against the bars of Malagasy life. The act of trying to get elsewhere, overland, was a particular quagmire.

Taxi-brousse means bush taxi, but I came to regard it as a constant, willful adversary. In my mind, ground transportation in Madagascar is overseen by the minor deity (Taxi) Bruce. Bruce is a god of many things, among them prolonged discomfort and fictitious departure and arrival times. Though he makes sporadic appearances in airports throughout the world, his expertise lies on the roads of Madagascar.

Taxi-brousse is the blanket term for public ground transportation between towns in Madagascar. Taxi-brousses come in many forms. There are putt-putt Renaults, vehicles designed for private transport, perhaps for a cozy family of four, into which Bruce will cram nine or so passengers and their baggage. At the other size extreme are Elephants de la Piste (elephants of the trail), large trucks designed to port cattle long distance, which have been fitted with wooden benches. Probably the most common morph of taxi-brousse is an old Peugeot pickup truck, with a wooden frame on the back, covered in thick green canvas. In the bed of the truck are deposited upwards of twenty-five people,

sitting on the wheel wells if lucky, on the floor if slightly less lucky, or on another person if utterly luckless. Regardless, there is never enough room to move in any way when the taxi-brousse is properly packed. Whole portions of your body are covered in other people, limbs fall asleep from being twisted into positions they were never designed to be in, and it is possible to forget that you even have a lower half. We have all experienced the discomfort of having a leg fall asleep, but having one remain asleep for an hour or more is an entirely different experience. It takes the issue of waiting from the realm of the philosophical and emotional and catapults it to the physiological. Waiting for something to start is nothing like waiting for something to end.

There are usually at least a third as many children as adults on taxi-brousse, and though extraordinarily well-behaved, given the circumstances, one of them will generally be excreting fluids from some orifice. The children who are not suffering thusly from stomach flu or a mere runny nose are frequently treated by their satisfied parents to a whole fried fish, available from roadside vendors. Children everywhere play with their food rather than eat it, and in a space crammed with bodies, playing with whole fried fish usually involves gripping its body tightly in one’s little palm, while the combination of an unpaved road and poor shocks does the rest. The head of the fish inevitably ends up being thrust into the other travelers’ faces, causing much merriment to the little keeper of the fish. After an hour or so has passed, in which the child is in possession of an increasingly grimy fish, Mom or another relative will unarm the child, take a few bites, and finally toss the thing out one of many holes in the canvas tarp. Soon the cycle begins anew, when the next fish is bought.

As gasoline is hard to come by in Madagascar, some taxi-brousses carry their own supply. When the hose is threaded above the heads of the passengers, residual fuel often leaks onto their heads. To make a few extra Malagasy francs, taxi-brousse often doubles as cargo transport, so the travelers may find themselves sitting on bags of tire irons, cement or rice, and taken several hours off the “direct” route in order to make a delivery. As in much of the developing world, the baggage of many Malagasy travelers includes at least one live animal, most often a chicken or a goose, and it is the rare animal that has been secured inside a basket for the journey. Quick stops produce a flurry of squawks and feathers from the avian passengers, who quickly find that flight is beyond their capabilities, so settle down on whatever is near.

There is the theoretical ability to control the climate on taxi-brousse, but Bruce prevents this. When the world is hot and dustless, in the usually arid south after a rain, the windows are whole, but inoperable. Then the heat of everyone’s bodies, the exudate of sick children and the disintegrating fried fish wielded jubilantly by healthy children, combine in a thick fog which can almost be seen. When, on the other hand, the world is cold, dusty, wet or dark, the windows are typically broken, absent, or intact but permanently open. This is true on the high plateau, when the air is cold; it is true in the dry south when it has not rained, and copious amounts of dust blow in and stick to all surfaces; it is true on the east coast, where it is usually raining; and it is true at night when, despite extreme physical discomfort, you are exhausted from the inaction of the day, and from attempts to avoid unidentified fluids and foods and to wrench your foot from between a bag of rice and the (flat) spare tire. It is then that the windows are down, or the green canvas develops a mortal wound, causing air to rush in with a high-pitched squeal, making sleep ever more distant. At night, too, the "dome light"—a naked bulb hanging from a wire—is turned on. The drivers are often in possession of a single tape of bad American music, which is played at high volume over and over and over again.

The final defining character of taxi-brousse is the rate of progress. The Western mind strains against the endless delays and false starts, but the Western body, finding itself on taxi-brousse in the middle of a vast wasteland, has no choice but to succumb. Succumbing gracefully to the sorts of insults Bruce offers is a strength of the Malagasy people. It was not, during my first trip to Madagascar, a trait I yet had in my arsenal.

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Huddled on a rickety wooden bench, our backpacks lying in the dirt, we were waiting for a ride across the southern half of Madagascar. At two in the morning, flimsy tickets for our journey grasped in our cold hands, we were ready to leave.

“What on earth is that noise?” Bret asked, referring to the chattering, gurgling sounds emanating from a nearby tree. Ackity grackity prack! Slowly, he reached his hand up through the tangled branches, looking for he knew not what. Then—an explosion of wings and screams. Flying foxes sprayed out of the tree, filling the sky, fox faces masking their bat heritage. Malagasy in the vicinity looked at the two white people in disbelief, laughing at us as we cringed.

We were trying to go across the southern half of Madagascar, by taxi-brousse. While chasing mudskippers in a mangrove swamp outside of Tulear, Bret had cut himself open, requiring stitches from the local nuns. We took this as a sign to move on. The resultant taxi-brousse ride, between Tulear and Fort Dauphin, a distance of less than 400 miles, took 61 hours. We were told, before heading out, to expect two days of solid travel, with one night of sleep in some unspecified village in between. About 36 hours from start to finish. Estimates of time, in a country with deadlines not marked in hours or days, but in seasons, should never be taken seriously.

We had by this time become well acquainted with taxi-brousse, having already traveled several hundred miles in its various guises. In this case, we were told the day before to arrive at the station at 2:00 am, and we did so. The brousse was packed and moving by seven—a very auspicious start. Three hours later we stopped for a large plate of rice, breakfast, in a small town. Later, we would reminisce about that first morning. Oh, those three hours, how blissful and uninterrupted—the longest stretch of time on the entire trip during which we were actually moving, during which time we made such rapid and unceasing progress that it was startling, truly, to discover that we had gone but 50 miles.

Within an hour of leaving the town of our breakfast, we stopped again. The taxi-brousse had run into what appeared to be a totally unprecedented situation: a flat tire. The road was deeply rutted dirt, mostly dry because of the season, with occasional sharply spined plants growing unexpectedly in the middle. A flat tire had everyone stumped. We had neither a jack nor a full spare tire. The only useful tool we had on board was a cross-shaped lugnut wrench. That, and the ingenuity of a lot of Malagasy men.

I sat in a nearby field that was dotted with cactus and cattle, the latter bearing the single large hump identifying them as zebu. Children nearby made music with found objects—pieces of bone and horn, dried cactus, or simply their palms on the ground. Zebu with rope through their noses nibbled at corn husks. Bleating goats were dragged past by local villagers. Nearby, there was a walled tomb with several wooden stellae—carved totems celebrating the dead—and zebu skulls placed around it, proclaiming the wealth of the dead man it marked.

Twenty-five hours into the journey, I had accepted that we would not be stopping anywhere to sleep. I was numb from the waist down. The brousse stopped often, at the whim of the driver—to greet old friends, new women, pigs by the side of the road.

We had several breakdowns, during which local men appeared out of nowhere to help fiddle the engine back into working condition. Sometimes the stops were brief—barely long enough to crawl out the windows and stand on tingling feet with numb brains while the locals pooled around the foreigners, whispering among themselves. Sometimes they lasted an hour, long enough to find a hotely, where we could buy a plate of rice.

In a town called Betioky, people began spilling from the windows of the brousse as soon as it stopped, which suggested to us that we would have at least a few minutes here, and that it might be a good town in which to find a place to pee. Peeing in a land without holes dug in the ground for that purpose, much less toilets, is hard enough without being white, and thus the object of endless fascination. There is no place to hide. The stealth pee is not possible. The sexes are roughly segregated for this activity—one side of the road for each. All of the locals, who swarm out to meet the brousse selling fried fish and brightly colored liquids in plastic bags, are immediately drawn to the foreigner. The Malagasy women, not themselves desirous of an audience, try to escape from the lumbering white woman who follows them, looking only for an appropriate place to drop her pants, not wishing for the crowd that surrounds her. The only solution is to focus on the task at hand—squat with my pants around my ankles and pee, and not give the locals more reason to laugh by losing my balance or peeing on my shoes. Make no eye contact. Gales of laughter will erupt from the Malagasy in attendance, and concentration will be broken. Let them see you piss, but never let them see you piss on yourself.

The trip continued. I became ill, and vomited out the taxi-brousse, afterwards realizing that a gaping hole in its side meant I had thrown up on my own leg. The gas line running overhead began leaking, which eventually burned holes in our synthetic jackets. Someone’s chicken landed on my shoulder, and decided to stay. We stopped in a landscape with a single shack. The driver hurried away. Forty-five minutes later he emerged, zipping up his pants, a pert young woman waving good-bye from the open doorway. Leaning against the brousse, he paused for a cigarette before resuming our trip.

The many bags of concrete were unloaded, and we were able to position ourselves such that our ankles were not bent back at odd angles. Fifteen minutes later, bags of rice replaced those of concrete, and we were back to starting position. Throughout this journey, the Malagasy around us chatted among themselves. Nothing that happened surprised them. I schemed constantly, through my helpless, hopeless anger. The poorest in Madagascar cannot afford to go anywhere beyond the village in which they were born, even by taxi-brousse, so we were surrounded by middle-class folk. I wanted to yell at someone that this must be changed. But this is what is, what is known.

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Finally we reached Ambovombe, the last town before the dirt road became paved for the final forty miles. It was evening, and as we came into town, I grew increasingly excited at the almost palpable proximity of Fort Dauphin, town of my dreams, renowned in my own head for its comfortable beds and cooling showers. The taxi-brousse stopped in an empty field. Fires glowed through the open doorways of shacks. Most of the passengers crawled out the windows and drifted away. I stayed near the brousse, waiting for us to be on our way, in the same way a child waits until dawn before waking her parents on Christmas morning. This is not waiting, but an irrational attempt to force time forward.

Then, the driver and his assistant began unloading our bags from the roof of the brousse. I panicked.

“What are you doing?” I demanded in French, verging on tears.

“Tonight we stay here. Tomorrow, we go.” He had lost two passengers, and would force the remaining fifty of us to wait until morning, when he might pick up replacements. If I had offered to pay the extra fares, he would have accepted the money, but forced us to wait anyway. As long as there was space that could conceivably be filled with more people, more money could be made.

I snapped. My French was poor, but my meaning clear. How can you be doing this to me, to us? I realized, in my furious, exhausted, miserable daze, that I was speaking with the voice of someone accustomed to privilege. I was here, a new college graduate, believing myself an explorer, a sympathizer with the poor and down-trodden of the world, demanding something different for myself than most of the world even knows exists. I needed a shower, a change of clothes, a bed. Ambovombe offered none of this. It seemed, in that moment, that the man responsible for bringing these things to me was the driver of the taxi-brousse. I couldn’t tolerate his selfishness, but I was demanding that he tolerate mine. Of course, he refused.

His rejection of my first-world demands brought us experience we never could have had otherwise. Two young Malagasy insisted that we accompany them to their grandmother’s house. It was well past midnight by now, but the entire household was awakened for the coming of the foreigners. A bucket of rainwater—precious in the scorched south of Madagascar—was brought for us to shower with. A twin-sized hay lined bed was, despite our protests, taken from Uncle Edward and provided to us. Edward proved a fascinating man, well versed in the dangers of over-population, and the particular concerns of conservation in Madagascar. Grandma—always referred to only as such—was a cultured, southern rural Malagasy, and insisted that we sit and have ranon’ ampàngo (pronounced ranopango), which is effectively the national drink of Madagascar. After the rice is cooked for every meal, and is burned to the bottom of the pot, water is thrown in the pot and heated, unsticking the burnt bits of rice on the bottom. The liquid is infused with the taste of burnt rice, and little bits of rice often sink to the bottom of glasses of ranon’ ampàngo.

While we sipped ranon’ ampàngo, all the members of the family filed through, shook our hands and introduced themselves to us, explaining their relationships to everyone else. Cousin Hadj wanted to know about life in America—do we live in towns or on farms? Do we, like them, eat rice three times a day? Is it a very big place, like Madagascar?

Soon we went to bed, so comfortable sharing that tiny hay bed after days in a taxi-brousse that it seemed just moments later that Jean-Claude, one of our rescuers, woke us. We must have breakfast, then go. We were included in the morning meal as honored guests, and it was arranged that, when we got to Fort Dauphin, we would dine with the rest of the family there. In this way we met a female judge and her family, and learned one Malagasy family’s take on the place of their country in the world and the role of religion in changing times. On Western time, with the success of my Western demands.

Nightjars. Photo by Bret Weinstein.

Next week: Chapter 3 – Inescapably Vazaha