Antipode – Chapter 20

Now We’re Cooking with Charcoal

Antipode is a true account of my experiences while doing research in Madagascar from 1993 – 1999; it was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2001. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here are all of the chapters posted thus far.

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As static as many aspects of life on Nosy Mangabe were, it seemed I was often in a state of transit—going to or from the forest, the waterfall, or town. The boat ride from Nosy Mangabe to Maroantsetra is but three miles, but can take three quarters of an hour, depending on conditions. Under the rubric of “conditions” falls everything from the size of the swells to the mood of the captain. The rich warm greens of the forest recede as Nosy Mangabe darkens to a silhouette, and the only color at hand is blue, the water deep and rich, the sky pale and infinite, the distant mountains an indefinable hue that seems blue though you know it can’t be, really. Seabirds fly by, their gullets hanging low over the water. Flying fish occasionally make an appearance, jumping silently out of the way of the boat. Pirogues with fishermen in them pass silently, rarely looking hurried as they paddle out of the way of the motorized menace approaching them.

Finally, a turn to the right, into the broad river that is, at this point, indistinguishable from the sea, then bank left, and we are amidst reeds and water hyacinth. The wholesale general store appears, a one room barn where you can buy mints, in 50 package bundles, or car batteries, in this region with hardly any motorized land vehicles. The hulls of boats, once brightly painted, are now flaking, streaks of blue and red flashing from otherwise dulled corpses. Interspersed among them are live boats, with crews aboard who nap, or gaze out to sea.

Town was more full of possibilities this year, with not just more hardware, but more food to buy as well. Lebon and Fortune were not cooking for us, as they had been advised that it was against the rules. Cooking for ourselves added several hours to every day’s tasks, but we didn’t risk serving ourselves rancid crustaceans. In the market and stalls around its perimeter, I was able to find real cheese, soy sauce, vinegar, hot peppers, potatoes, garlic, cucumber, and even thyme. In one store, there were sometimes outrageously priced boxes of European cookies, which we bought and hoarded. And there was still ample rice, beans, onions, and cooking oil to go around. Not exactly a full pantry, for our American palates, but good enough.

The act of cooking proved to be extraordinarily arduous. We bought charcoal in town, and carried it to the island in massive woven nylon bags. Everything the bags touched turned black with sticky, tar-like soot. We bought small rectangular metal “stoves,” into which we poured and arranged charcoal, and then tried our damnedest to light. Being extravagant vazaha, when we found kerosene in town, we bought lots of it to help light fires for cooking. It still took twenty minutes to get a fire going well enough to cook on, even with copious amounts of kerosene added to the mix. Between handling the charcoal, pouring the kerosene, trying to light the thing without burning your hair, and fanning it furiously for ten or fifteen minutes, the cook required a bath after getting the fire started and before actually beginning to cook. We tended to work in pairs. While one person was working on the fire, the other would retrieve onions and garlic from the baskets I had strung up from the roof of the lab to keep the rats out. We still found evidence of rats in our food sometimes, but the basket pulley system was an improvement. With one of our lock blade knives that was too small for the task, we would peel the tiny onions and garlic and chop them. One of two cocottes—cast aluminum pots we had bought in town—went on the fire, then some oil inside, followed by onions and garlic. If someone had remembered to soak beans the day before, we could start cooking them in a lot of water now, so long as we didn’t want to eat within three hours. Rice took about an hour from start to finish. Vegetables to go with the rice, the same.

We ate rice and beans, or rice and vegetables, every day, and I came to appreciate more what Lebon and Fortune had done for me two years earlier, even though I was eating better now. It still wasn’t worth it. Cleaning up took another hour, scrubbing the metal pots “clean” in a shallow pool with a combination of local sand, and a scotch brite pad we had carried halfway around the world.

We did have our small victories with food. One day, after coming into town through water hyacinth and faded boat hulls, we found pineapples, tomatoes, eggplant and ginger. Oh, luscious ginger. The wonder of the marketplace in Maroantsetra is that, as a vazaha, with clear evidence of fantastic wealth, all one has to do is make a fuss over a particular food item, and there is a good chance it will show up again the next time you come to town. We never went without ginger again.

We found peanuts too, a fantastic, easy source of protein. We commissioned a wooden mortar and pestle, hoping to fashion peanut butter. And so we did, one peanut at a time. Each of us, Bret, Glenn and me, tried our hands at it, but none of us had much success. Bret estimated the number of poundings required to fully smash a single peanut at ten. A whole afternoon could be killed making enough peanut butter for a single meal.

One of the family members at the Maroa offered to make peanut butter for us. Our interaction beforehand suggested that they had a blender of some sort, but when the nut butter was delivered to us, it was clear the man had spent an entire day smashing nuts by hand, just as we had. And he would get no benefit from doing so, beyond what we paid him—there was no pride in craftsmanship to be had in smashing peanuts. But he refused to tell us how much we should pay him for his hard work, saying he wanted no money. Finally we gave him an amount that made him smile and thank us, but it is impossible to get past the layer of politeness in these moments, and we never knew for sure if a gaffe had been made. Although our protein- and fat- starved selves continued to crave peanut butter, we never again asked the people at the Maroa to spend their time making it.

We also found a little old lady sitting on the stoop of an old building with a plate of, could it be? Macaroons! In my first-world life, I am not a fan of coconut, but nothing sounded better than freshly made macaroons that sweltering afternoon in Maroantsetra. We bought ten, and devoured them. The old woman spoke no French, but her little granddaughter who was helping did, and I managed to convey the idea that no matter how many macaroons the woman could produce by the following morning, we would buy all of them. Early the next morning we found ourselves in possession of 147 macaroons.

We needed beans even more than we wanted macaroons, so I took another basket, not the one brimming with macaroons, to the friendliest looking bean vendor, and proceeded with the complex machinations that these transactions always involve.

“How much for the lentils?”

“750 a kapok.”

“Okay, I’d like ten kapoks.” Blank look. Hesitation, a reach for the kapok, a nervous laugh.

“Ten?” She looked at me, doubtful.

“Yes,” I tried to say in my most confident voice, not revealing that “ten” was rather arbitrarily picked, in deference to our decimal world. She delivered the lentils to my basket. I also received 10 kapoks of red beans, at 900 per kapok, which was going to be difficult for the bean-seller to calculate, largely because she had little practice with such enormous transactions (16,500 FMG by my math, about $3). Most local people have so little cash that they pay with exact or nearly exact change for a couple kapoks of beans—handing over two or three bills totaling ten or fifteen cents. The largest currency in Madagascar was still the 25,000 FMG note—less than $5 at this point—and very few vendors or even shopkeepers could easily give change for that large a bill. The vendor probably wouldn’t sell this many beans again for the next week.

I took out my wallet and handed her a 25,000 note, all that I had. One of the difficulties in switching between first and third world economies is that when I change $300, I receive several stapled packets of 25,000 FMG bills, which few people want. But the banks were unwilling to part with an equivalent amount of 10,000 FMG bills, so I was stuck with stacks of these bills that were enormous by local standards. I had seen local people wait in line at the bank for upwards of an hour to take out a total of 10,000 FMG, less than $2, and walk away with a handful of bills of various denominations.

Not only would it take the vendor a while to calculate the total, she would have to physically find the change for me. Calling on an intricate network of kin and neighbors, she disappeared behind several stalls, where shadowy figures passed, handing off money. Finally she reemerged, with enough bills to give me my change. Often the change given seems random, bearing little resemblance to what is actually due. I make a point of just accepting what they give me, unless, as rarely happens, I am given too much, in which case I return it. It is pennies to me, but sustenance to them.

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When we returned to Nosy Mangabe, provisions replenished, I made an attempt at forest risotto. This was in the same tradition as jungle pie, which Bret and Glenn had invented. Jungle pie was a mixture of pineapple, bananas, sugar, and crumbled crackers—plus fresh cinnamon and cloves, when the spice boats came in—packed into a cocotte and cooked over a charcoal fire. Like the relationship between pie and jungle pie, forest risotto was to be the closest approximation of risotto I could make under the circumstances. We didn’t have arborio rice, of course, nor stock, nor Parmesan cheese, nor asparagus, spinach, red peppers, olives, chicken, prosciutto or any of the other fine ingredients which can be used to create luscious risottos.

First I had to get two charcoal fires going. Thirty minutes and a mini-bath later, I sautéed onions and garlic in vegetable oil obtained in town from a large bucket. After a poor vazaha attempt at winnowing the rice, I sat down and culled by hand the medium-grained rice that was the only kind Maroantsetra vendors were selling, and poured it into the oil and onion mix. I added the water, which was boiling on the second fire, slowly, in small increments. And I planned, at the end, to add some precious Swiss cheese, and a miniature can of tomato paste. But Rafidy found me first.

Rafidy is the Maroantsetra radio repairman. There are but a few radios in town, so he seeks other work as well. At this time, Vonjy (pronounced Voonj), a Malagasy graduate student from Tana, was living in a tent, in the lab, on Nosy Mangabe. He was studying wild pigs. In my seven months on Nosy Mangabe, I saw pigs only once. Vonjy had an assistant to help him study pigs, and this was Rafidy. Even the two of them together rarely saw the animals. They did find and collect droppings relatively often, carefully packing them away to look at in a different place, in another time. We were curious about each other’s work, but clearly didn’t understand it, and our attempts to explain it to the other seemed to fly past one another without comprehension.

Vonjy was extremely shy, and never talked much, even to Rafidy. Rafidy, on the other hand, suffered from gregariousness on this lonely little island. So, though his French and mine were comparably mediocre, and had largely non-overlapping vocabulary sets, we often found ourselves in conversation, especially when I was doing anything in camp that he couldn’t begin to comprehend. An attempt at forest risotto was just such an activity.

“Erika!” he cried, running over to my fires, “You can’t make rice that way! Let me show you.” Rafidy is actually a very good cook, and produced a few meals which were, to my starved palate, quite delicious. He usually wasn’t quite as interested in what we made, but he couldn’t let me make such a tragic mistake with rice.

“This is a special, Italian way,” I told him. It felt sacrilegious to liken what I was doing to Italian cuisine, but I didn’t have any better words.

“Italian?” he was, by turns, disbelieving, then amused, then curious. “I’ve never seen rice made this way.” He reflected. “I thought I knew all the ways to cook rice.” As good a cook as Rafidy was, he, like all Malagasy, only cooks rice one way, the same way, three times a day. He puts it in a large pot with a lot of water, and burns the bottom of it, producing a thick, black crust stuck to the bottom and sides. The top, fluffy white rice is eaten with whatever “broth” he has prepared. Ranon’ ampàngo is then made by adding fresh water to the burnt rice shell, and simmered over the dying fire. It is drunk with and after every meal. We vazaha were never able to retain any Malagasy eating with us for more than two meals, as we either failed to burn the rice, or forgot to make the ranon’ ampàngo after doing so. A meal without ranon’ ampàngo is pretty much a meal without eating. Risotto, it occurred to me now, had no chance of producing ranon’ ampàngo from its dregs.

“Why do you cook it this way?” Rafidy was deep into curiosity now. As a Malagasy, he wasn’t sure he was going to like the end-product of what I was doing, but as a cook, he wanted to know.

“To bring more flavor to the rice, to make the ‘broth’ part of the rice,” I suggested. He took a step back.

“Part of the rice?”

“Yes.”

“But…” He couldn’t continue. There weren’t any words. Rice is so integral to the Malagasy’s being, it is like a god. You don’t sully your gods by mixing them with broth, even if you do occasionally pour broth over them. Instead he changed the subject back to territory he was sure of.

“Let me show you how to winnow the rice.” His eyes twinkled deviously. I laughed.

“You’ve shown me so many times already. I just can’t do it.” It was true. The wide, flat basket used so expertly by women and men alike to separate out the debris from the rice was unwieldy and unpracticed in my vazahahands. With years of experience, I would learn, but for now, I always ended up inadvertently throwing much of the rice onto the ground. At that point I would give up, and pick through the rest of the rice by hand for the remaining rocks and grit.

“Don’t you do this at home?” Rafidy asked, as he effortlessly flung a new batch of rice on the winnowing basket.

“No, we don’t have to. The rice we get is already winnowed.” He stopped winnowing for a moment.

“By whom?”

“Er,” I paused. I wasn’t sure. “By machine, I think.”

“You must have a lot of machines at home.” Before I could parse this bit of wisdom, I had to turn my attention to one of the fires, which was getting low. Ungracefully, I managed to get the cocotte off the fire, and wedge in new pieces of charcoal, before balancing it back on the fresh, pointy charcoal. The result was barely functional, the pot perched precariously at a wild angle. Vonjy approached as I was doing this, and he and Rafidy watched me in my ineptness. Usually shy and exceedingly proper, Vonjy couldn’t restrain himself this time.

“Don’t you cook with charcoal at home?”

“No, we don’t. Isn’t it apparent?” I asked. He nodded.

“But how do you eat?” It was the obvious next question.

“We cook with gas, lit on fire. It’s piped into our homes.” They both gaped at me.

“You cook inside?” they asked.

“Yes.” I thought about this. Vonjy was a middle class family man from Tana, on the haut plateau, where it gets quite cool in the winter. Surely he cooked inside? “Don’t you?” I wondered.

“No. We have a shelter, attached to the house, with two walls. But not inside. That would be dangerous.” Indeed it would.

“We have pipes, that keep the gas contained. It’s not so dangerous.” I reassured them.

“Is it very expensive?” Hmm. Good question. Dollar for dollar, the natural gas we use to cook with is extremely expensive compared to the charcoal they use. But relative to income, our gas is much cheaper than their charcoal.

“No, not so expensive.” I didn’t mention all the years of developing an infrastructure necessary to provide such a luxury at a low price.

The concept of gas stoves was remarkable to this middle class, educated man, who happened to be born into a country with few amenities. How surprising he would find our lives, so simplified of the daily, life-sustaining chores, but so much more complex in order to afford the simplification.

Time is of the essence in America, but we spend it working at trivial things in order to buy those objects which save us time. In Madagascar, time is worthless, so common as to not be worth watching, counting, or saving. People here claim to know how old they are, but I believe that they are estimating. Pascal, the captain, assured us that the large shipwreck off Nosy Mangabe had been there for three years. I know that, less than two years earlier, it was not there. In a world where day length is constant, it may be harder to keep track of time passing. More to the point—why should you? Once an adult, you monitor the important events—your life's relationships, your children being born, deaths in the family. And perhaps you know, for a while, how old your children are, but once they are grown, they, too, will forget exactly how many years, or moons, or rice harvests, or rainy seasons they have lived through. They will remember that there was a hurricane, several years ago, when the waters rushed down from the hills bearing both corpses and the decimated rice harvest. They will remember that this time of year it usually rains, and that in a few months, things should be drier again. They know that two days a week the market is more full than usual, and these are the days to dress up, walk around the muck and the chickens in one's best clothes, looking, and being looked at.

Time does not factor here. At Projet Masoala, they speak of the programme with some regularity, although it is rarely followed. The programme exists, I presume, to allay the fears of the white people in charge. Without a programme, nothing would get done. This is a truism in the developed world: without deadlines and fear of reprisal for missing them, what incentive is there? But in Madagascar, most people's work directly affects how much food they have in their stomachs. If you are a fisherman, you cannot be lazy and fail to go out in your pirogue for a week. This does not require attention to a programme, merely what natural selection gave us—hunger to prompt us to eat. Being scenario-building humans, we can estimate that, having been hungry before, we will be hungry again, unless we act preemptively to secure food before the hunger hits.

The guide Augustin explained the Malagasy passion for rice this way: the Malagasy are born and raised on rice, three or, minimally, two times a day. They become accustomed to having full bellies—not just feeling sated, but feeling physically full. To a vazaha it is a feeling of dead weight in the stomach, after eating a bowl of rice as large as a Malagasy eats. The Malagasy learns to equate physical fullness with satiation, and when rice is absent, no matter how many nutrients and calories enter his body, he feels he will die of hunger, for his belly does not feel full.

Bret & Rafidy cooking over charcoal outside the lab

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None of us vazaha were afraid we would die of hunger on Nosy Mangabe—though we all lost a lot of weight inadvertently—but we had moments of fearing death from other causes. The Malagasy are accustomed to having primarily rice meals. The vazaha are accustomed to having constant body temperatures. When Glenn began complaining of fever and weakness in the middle of our season, I assumed at first that this was another inexplicable tropical fever, the likes of which everyone there seems to get and recover from without the apparent aid of medicine. But as Glenn grew worse, it seemed necessary to take him to town, which Bret did, so that I could remain on the island and continue my work.

Shortly the diagnosis came back: Glenn had malaria. The doctors in town, with the exception of the good doctor who was now gone, apparently diagnosed everyone presenting with fever with malaria at first. But Glenn responded to a quinine drip, which was set up inside a bungalow at the Maroa, while Bret nursed him back to health. My emotions at this news were chaotic. I felt horrible that I had brought someone to Madagascar who had never before traveled this way, and it had been him, not one of us, who had fallen ill. I felt responsible for his illness, which I really wasn’t, but also for his overall well-being, which I was. I seriously considered sending him home, so that nothing more could happen to him. As much as I wanted a field assistant, I needed him to be safe more. How would I answer to his mother, or myself, if he died in the field?

But Glenn wanted to stay and, as if to prove his increasing strength when he heard that I might put him on a plane home, he recovered quickly. Meanwhile, Bret was in town with little to do, so he began surreptitiously introducing the word “snorkel” to Maroantsetra. He had brought a snorkel to Madagascar, which Paul, the guide, had seen and admired, so he had an easy jumping off point. Running into Bret on a dusty path, Paul would smile widely and ask Bret about the news.

“Inona no vaovao, Bret?” What’s the news?

“Tsy misy vaovao, Paul.” Bret responded, as was required. No news. But then he would veer somewhat from convention, and switch to English. “Will you go snorkeling today, Paul?”

“Oh yes, today is a good today to snorkel.” Paul would agree heartily, enunciating carefully his newfound word. Bret disseminated the concept of snorkel primarily through Paul, but also dropped it casually into conversations with people who had the barest rudiments of English, their third language. As Bret began infecting the town with this concept, snorkels began to appear. Two days after Bret and Glenn came back to the island, I watched a sailor come to land to get water. Usually, when a sailor was sent from a boat to get drinking water, he jumped overboard with a large hollow plastic canister, and swam until he could wade ashore, pushing the canister ahead of him. This time the man wore a snorkel. It was as if they were only waiting to be named.

Later the same day, on his way back from washing clothes at the waterfall, Bret found a remarkable lizard—very large, with a flash of yellow. It was on a rock, sunbathing, and when it spotted Bret, it dove into the shallow pool and disappeared. Bret wasn’t sure that such an animal even existed, and briefly convinced himself that he had imagined it. But it did exist, and he caught it, and brought it back to camp for all to see. It was the most gorgeous, largest skink I've ever seen. It was well over two feet long, had a long thrashing tail, and a bright yellow underbelly. It was strong, and could wrap itself around you like a boa. When it swam, its reduced arms and legs folded back, and it moved like a water snake. Amphiglossus astrolabi.

I held it on the stoop of the lab as Glenn retrieved the field guide to figure out conclusively what it was. Rafidy came up to us.

"Très grave," he said, pointing to the lizard. Very dangerous. We looked up at him, down at the lizard, and back at him. None of us believed this—poisonous lizards are rare, and between Glenn and me, at least, the nominal herpetologists, we would have heard of one that existed here. Of course, we didn't know this animal existed at all, so it was just possible.

“It’s the teeth that will get you,” Rafidy continued in French. “They are poisoned.” We nodded non-committally, while Glenn found the descriptor in the field guide. He read: "…Malagasy people are very afraid of this species and told us that they are poisonous." We looked around expectantly, hoping to find the invisible hand that was writing our script just before we read it.

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Next week: Chapter 21 – A Team of Men, and Some Cookies