Antipode – Chapter 3
Inescapably Vazaha
Antipode was originally published in 2001. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here is chapter two (last week’s post).
Madagascar, it is true, is more isolated than most countries. Being an island, people do not flow over its borders, introducing food, custom, dress, or language. As a place that is historically difficult to access, people in the west have not spent great amounts of money or long periods of time fighting over it. The people of Madagascar have thus had few prolonged periods of contact with cultures beyond their own, though Madagascar itself has several distinct tribes, which have fought among themselves sporadically. All of which is an attempt to justify the unique feeling that the foreigner gets when attempting to do anything, including simply exist, in Madagascar. Eyes are constantly watching. Hands stray, too, but less often, as some of the tribes believe that monsters who steal children’s hearts come disguised as white people. It’s better not to touch such monsters. It would be best, of course, to avoid them altogether, but such a rarity, such a thing of strange make and color, how can one avoid staring? So they do stare, usually from within a group—for there is safety in numbers—and watch as the foreigners do whatever it is that we do.
Today, in Madagascar, there are still few enough foreigners—vazaha, in Malagasy, pronounced vaza—that the appearance of one inevitably prompts cries of “vazaha!” from all children and many of the adults in the vicinity. Why the urge to vocalize what we all know to be true—that the white person in our midst is a vazaha, by definition, a foreigner? Why point, and yell vazaha? Usually, it is tempered with “salama” before it, making the phrase, yelled from the street and shops, from windows and moving vehicles, “hello foreigner.” If any response by the vazaha is made, the Malagasy who provoked it will often fall apart in laughter.
There is a guide at Perinet, the first developed and easiest to access nature reserve in Madagascar, who was forever taking tourists, and occasional researchers, through the forest. This was most definitely his home. He felt comfortable in this forest, and knew the people who lived around it. Seeing all the tourists come and, inevitably, go back to their homes, he had to wonder what the rest of the world was about. He began asking people about their countries of origin, which is not a common practice among the Malagasy, who are generally very insular, almost as if they don’t really believe there is another world out there. One tourist asked him if he wouldn’t like to go to France, or somewhere else in Europe, to see how other people live. His response was quick, direct, and unflinching.
“Oh no, I never want to leave Madagascar.”
“But why? Not even for a visit?”
“No, no” he repeated, then gave his reason. “I do not want to be followed around everywhere I go, while people yell ‘Malagasy Malagasy’ at me.”
This guide had two misconceptions, both of which I find telling. First, he imagined that the rest of the world is just as insular as Madagascar, and thus responds to all foreigners the way the Malagasy do. Second, he thought the rest of the world would identify him as specifically Malagasy, rather than doing what is done in Madagascar, calling all foreigners simply foreigners. The implication is that Madagascar is so well-known a place that people from the rest of the world will surely recognize a Malagasy as such, even if people in Madagascar cannot tell a Swede from an Italian.
In 1996, I planned a scouting trip to Madagascar, during which time I would visit several possible research sites, looking for evidence of the frogs I would study, and assessing the viability of working in these places. Localities where the frogs had been seen and collected were known, but a spot with five or ten frogs wouldn’t be sufficient to undertake a behavioral study, so I had to go evaluate the sites myself. Bret was coming along to help.
This was to be a short trip—only two months—and I wouldn’t be collecting data, only finding a place to work the following year. Memories of that first trip as a backpacking tourist several years earlier haunted me as I prepared for this one. Most of what I remembered about Madagascar, now that I was going there with my biologist hat on, rather than my adventure traveler hat, was that it was incredibly difficult. The few guidebooks had assured us that the Malagasy were open, welcoming, and always wore a smile. I found, instead, a tremendous amount of suspicion, open wariness sometimes ceding into thinly veiled hostility, my white skin the subject of both fascination and intense distrust. As a traveler, rather than a researcher, when I would be staying in one place for a long period of time and getting to know the local people, I couldn’t convince many people that I wasn’t like the French colonials they remembered with such ire. Nor should I have been able to—I was young and used to privilege, and though my inclinations were to the left, believing that everyone deserved equal opportunity, I didn’t know what that meant for a people with no options.
Before I left for this scouting trip, I consulted heavily with Ron Nussbaum, a professor at the University of Michigan, where I was a graduate student. Preparations for Madagascar include a fair amount of paperwork before ever leaving the country. Ron has an ongoing scientific relationship with Madagascar, and the Research Accord he had worked out with them applied to me as well. The Accord, of course, was never quite in perfect shape, as he never gave them enough Land Rovers or computers in exchange for the privilege of working in Madagascar, so there were some hurt feelings from those not yet in possession of expensive “gifts.” I planned to go bearing several copies of the Accord, letters to various bureaucrats who would be pleased to be addressed by name, my research proposal, Curriculum Vitae, passport, and vaccination record. The rules, Ron told me, changed almost every time he had tried to get permits there, so it was best to be armed with everything. He suggested that I load up on bottles of Johnnie Walker and plenty of t-shirts as well. Such is the advantage of being a graduate student: the professor may have to dole out vehicles and computers to be allowed to conduct his research; the student must only discreetly supply small amounts of liquor and clothing to a few outreached hands.
In addition to these small tokens, I had to stuff everything I would need for two months of travel to a variety of sites and climates, into a backpack. How do you prioritize a second pair of shoes (the first is bound to get wet and rot), versus a rain jacket? Since research equipment was minimal for this trip, we mostly limited our gear to tent, sleeping paraphernalia, and clothes. We were also careful to bring our new, specially calibrated compass, rather than our old one, along with various pharmaceuticals appropriate for the tropics. A tropical biologist must make sure all of her vaccinations, for diseases ranging from tetanus to rabies, are up to date, and that she has filled all appropriate prescriptions to counter any number of eventualities. There have been plague outbreaks in northern Madagascar, so I take enough doxycycline, an antibiotic which happens to double as an anti-malarial, to kill off plague should I get it. I take anti-malarials as prophylaxis, but also carry quinine as treatment should it come to that. I carry several courses each of at least four kinds of antibiotic, which are specialized for various parts of the body. Self-diagnosis and self-medication are critical skills in the field. I take Flagyl, a nasty drug that kills most things flagellated (microscopic organisms with tails), and isn’t too kind on the human body either. Still, it’s what you need if you come down with giardia. I take topical and oral fungicides, for the creeping skin fungus that infects regularly. And topical bactericides, like Neosporin, for those small cuts which, in the Western world would heal quickly, but in the eternal hot wet environment of the rainforest tend to fester. I carry sterile medical syringes, and fervently hope I won’t need to dispense them to any doctor working on me. And of course, there is plenty of gauze, tape, and bandages. This was our medical kit—and though bulky and heavy, it couldn’t be switched out for another pair of pants or boots.
Finally we were off. There were only two international flights per week going into Madagascar at that time. Ivato, the international airport outside of Tana, rarely bustled, except when one of these two flights was coming in or going out. Our necessarily roundabout itinerary took us through New York, Paris, Munich, Djibouti, and Nairobi before finally depositing us, almost 40 hours later, into Ivato. We arrived at 4:00 am. I was jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, and generally unhappy with the prospect of dealing with permits and bureaucrats for several days before I had a chance of seeing the forest, and wondered idly what in the hell they were thinking when they scheduled the twice weekly international flight to arrive at such a preposterous hour. I was, at that point, decidedly unskilled at hiding my irritation under such conditions. Compound that with my poor French, and situations—several days, weeks, and months of awkward situations—were waiting to happen.
The rules of movement and etiquette for obtaining visas, baggage, and official stamps from various airport bureaucrats are inobvious, archaic, and often redundant. Furthermore, my name makes no sense to the Malagasy. None at all.
“Name?” The man asked, in French, after he flipped through my passport in disbelief. He looked up at me as if I’d handed him a grocery list in Serbo-Croatian, rather than an American passport.
“Heying,” I said, already weary. “Heather Heying.” If only I had a simple, eloquent name like James Bond. Even one with a hard consonant thrown in to the middle. But no. This ridiculous mix of vowels and aiches rolled off this man’s tongue and onto the floor, where he promptly kicked it under a desk for later disposal.
“Eh?” he grunted. Apparently he was feeling generous. I reached over the glass partition to point to my name, knowing that any effort to spell it, in French, would fail. He recoiled, and barked at me to do the same. I sighed. This went back and forth for a while, until he finally gave up and wrote down some random word he found on the passport as my name. Now I remembered my first trip to Madagascar. Because of my interaction with a similar man in this very airport, I had to travel through Madagascar as “California,” the name given me by the authoritative bureaucrat, having pulled it off my passport under “state of birth.” This time I was labeled “Los Angeles,” handed two well-stamped pieces of paper, and summarily pushed ahead to the next trial.
I had had enough experience working in Latin America to realize that nobody there can pronounce my given name either. Once I was through with the bureaucracy, and on to interacting with people in Madagascar, I wouldn’t have to stand by my given name and continue to confuse everyone I interacted with. The plants called “heathers,” which appear in various Bronte novels and Monty Python skits, are in the Erika family (Ericaceae). This prompted one of the botanists on the faculty at the University of Michigan to say to me, upon our first meeting, “so, how do you like being an Erika?” Erika has a nice crunch to it—a hard sound you can attach your tongue to and stop at, knowing decisively where to parse the word. The Malagasy I know can pronounce it—and more importantly, remember it—just fine. So in Madagascar, I am Erika.
From the first uniformed guard, I got passed on to several more, each asking for some unique combination of passport, stamped pieces of paper, and money. I didn’t have any Malagasy money yet. It was illegal, at the time, to take Malagasy money out of the country, so you couldn’t exchange dollars for it overseas, and therefore couldn’t enter the country with any. There hadn’t yet been an opportunity to change money in the airport. Still, the men I interacted with all showed surprise when I explained that all I had were dollars. Surprise, but not upset. Sure, they would take my dollars. They wouldn’t give me change, but they would take the bills. They feigned ignorance of the exchange rate, and managed to take twice the amount of money I should have paid. My annoyance at the entire scene was clearly showing, and it just egged them on.
We escaped the bureaucrats and fell in among masses of ragged men with bent spines who were eager to carry our bags to a taxi for a pittance. I could barely hear, over the ruckus, the yelling of another sort of entrepreneur that graces the exit of Ivato—the money changers. Technically illegal, I didn’t intend to change much money with these men, but I knew that we needed some Malagasy francs (FMG) for the taxi ride into the city, and our first night in a hotel. I was sure they wanted to take advantage of me, knew it in my exhausted, bitter heart, and so fought them from the beginning. Walking into an interaction distrustful, hackles already raised, rarely works. Nothing went smoothly. When I emerged from that seething crowd—a money changing event always draws layers of people as spectators—I had a thick wad of FMG, and slightly fewer dollars. The exchange rate was a bit under 4,000 FMG to the dollar, and the largest bill in circulation in Madagascar was a 25,000 FMG note—about six dollars. And as it turned out, the money changers’ rate was almost identical to the one I received in a bank the next day. Via the government, or a man on the street, change $250, and you’re a millionaire in Madagascar.
Tana may once have been a beautiful city. Set on the haut plateau, its elevation makes it cool, its hills keep one neighborhood hidden from the next, and the rice paddies in the middle of the capital hardly seem incongruous, so focused is the culture on rice. There are stalls selling food along most streets, as well as children in nothing but tattered shorts playing in the black swill that runs through them. Electric reds, oranges and purples greet visitors to the “lower town” during the flower market; adjacent are stalls selling small pieces of twine, lengths of rubber, and men offering to repair and refill bic lighters which were designed, in the developed world, to be discarded when empty. Everything is recycled, used in all possible ways, yet the trash in the streets grows, trash already sifted through infinite times. Plastics, paper, string—no such things are thrown out, so what mounts in the streets are banana peels, chicken bones, the sludge from engines, human and animal waste, dead rats. The lake in the middle of town, still retaining a superficial air of peace and beauty, is reputed to be the receptacle into which the hospital dumps medical waste.
There are few vazaha in Madagascar, but the highest density is in Tana. The most obvious and pervasive vazahais the aging French male expat. He comes in many shapes, sizes, and reasons for being there, but almost without exception, he will have acquired, usually through payment, a beautiful young Malagasy. Sometimes the slinky young things are girls, sometimes women, but what is always true is that, once they have been rented by their parents, or sold by themselves, to a white man, they will never fully reenter normal Malagasy social life. It is difficult to go into a restaurant in Tana without observing yet another odious white man with his slinky young thing.
Walking through Tana, snapshots of a city simultaneously rotting and proud present themselves. In the lower town, near Avenue de l’Independence, a long, broad avenue with the train station at one end and the showy outdoor flower market at the other, is the shell of the Rex. It what was once the only movie theatre in Madagascar. Now there are none. A thin man with an intact shirt but no shoes carries a large wooden crate on his head. It is stuffed to overflowing with fresh baguettes. He weaves his way through the crowds, through sidewalk vegetable vendors, piles of trash far higher than he, and cars with relative ease. He has carried hundreds of baguettes on his head before.
In the upper town, land of the vazaha, where Embassies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) vie for space on the steep narrow streets, men with flat open baskets of orange mushrooms or startlingly red strawberries approach cars, especially those containing vazahas, calling out their wares in French. Women vendors sell roses, lilies, lemons, and larger fruit back on the sidewalk. Just steps away, suddenly, the items for sale are no longer edible, or aesthetic, but seem as if they represent a stolen delivery. One man offers pruning shears and car mats. Several men proffer shiny new scissors. Another peers into a car with fingers full of sunglasses, sure that the white faces inside need dark glasses to hide their eyes.
Descending from the upper town towards the once majestic lake, a form, genderless behind swaths of rags, back turned to the road, has made a home of a cliff overhang beside a road on the lake. A fence, perhaps one foot high, two long, has been erected, as if to say, “this is mine, and none shall tread here but me.” I wonder—does the fence attract people who otherwise would never think to crawl into that cold and muddy place?
Throughout Tana, old women, toothless, wander the streets, perhaps knowing where they go, perhaps not. Their hands are always out when vazaha or well dressed Malagasy pass by, but fewer people give coins to them than to the children. What has been their life? Always begging on the streets? Recent ill fortune? What do they think to themselves as a vazaha in Western clothes passes? What do they think when their pleading is met with a steely gaze in another direction, no eye contact, no recognition of their presence, or even their humanity?
We stayed in a dank, cramped hotel in Tana at first, then moved to a communal house established for researchers by some American universities, when it became clear that we would be stuck in Tana for a while. There was no escaping the suffocating masses of people. I almost pepper-sprayed a gang of little boys who were attempting to steal my wallet. Their tactic was clever: most of the children surrounded me with their hands outstretched, covering the myriad of little hands below who were unzipping the bag I had secured at my waist and neck. There seemed no end to the misery and fumes that Tana offered, and very little to be at peace with. The poverty was unmatched by what I had seen previously in Central America. Even in the interior of Guatemala and Honduras, people usually seemed to have enough food to eat, and families seemed to take care of each other.
We relied on taxis to get us where we needed to go—to the government ministries for resident visas, to administration buildings for research permits. The Tana taxis are tiny, tinny little cars, usually French, mostly rusted out, engines barely able to mount the hilly streets of Tana with two passengers inside. The taxi-drivers are so close to poverty that one time in three, when we got in a taxi, the driver promptly maneuvered to a gas station, requesting payment from us in advance so he could put a quarter’s worth of gas in his car.
Acquiring research permits usually takes a tremendous amount of time. A frustrated vazaha researcher such as myself, who saw nothing but corruption and inefficiency in the system, was exactly what the bureaucrats expected. As such, they treated me the way they treated everyone else. “Come back tomorrow, with four copies of your research proposal, two in French. No we don’t have any copy machines.” Upon returning the next day: “We need two more copies in French. Come back in two days, between three and five in the afternoon.” Attempts at reasoning with the bureaucrats were perceived as argument only, and treated as games. “You want to come back sooner? How about in two weeks? Yes, by then we might have your permits ready for you.” I would back-pedal, then gain a slight feeling of triumph when I was able to win back the original proposition: return in two days.
All of this made me desperately unhappy, only exacerbated by the fact that I didn’t yet have a research plan. I knew the kinds of questions I wanted to ask, and what group of species I intended to work on, but the whole point of this trip was to find a research site, and hopefully make some preliminary observations on animals so that I could return the following year with more carefully crafted hypotheses about the system. Now the bureaucrats demanded details from me.
“Exactly how long will you be in Ankarana? Why are you going? What will you learn?” What will I learn? If I knew that, I could have stayed home. My disgust with the system annoyed them further, and they kept me a while longer, seeming to toy with me like a cat does with a battered mouse, ripping into the prey more fiercely at weak signs of life.
As time wore on, our planned departure date from Tana repeatedly moved back, and I became dark and bitter. I was transported back to a conversation I had had with two friends, also graduate students in biology, just before leaving the States. Neither of them work in the tropics, and wondered aloud to me what my motivations were. At this point, I had to wonder myself if there was any good, solid, constant reason to be attempting whatever it was I was attempting. If only I could be back home, with the long summer days and the predictable and unhungry people and the accessibility of everything and the comfort. Instead I found myself in a land so foreign it brought me to tears many nights. The people would smile, but there was a feeling of underlying hostility—they were so unknown to my world, and my world wholly unknown to them. Most of the other vazaha I saw separated themselves completely from the scenes around them, not taking in the hostile stares, the pleading eyes, the depth of poverty of people who regard us as potential saviors, even as we are acting only callous.
Walking through the streets, children beg money off vazaha, as do women with babies. The poorest on the street, with black grit for teeth and holes for eyes, deep expanses which perhaps see, perhaps do not, hold their hands out, hoping. Sometimes I try to communicate, but am left alone, empty, without recourse. Walking up a street, biding our time, waiting for the current permit deadline established by the bureaucrats to elapse, two women with children demanded money from us. Usually such women fade into the background after we pass, erased. These women spat at us, called us dogs—chiens. Later we walked back the same route, and these same women demanded money again. They didn’t recognize us. We were anonymous in their country, but never invisible.
On an empty street, little girls with big heads carry woven handbaskets, and look startlingly like old grizzled women. Their siblings have already grown to lankiness, all legs and arms, scarcely covered in torn skirts and t-shirts. Pre-pubescent boys eye the vazaha languidly. The eyes of adults flit rapidly, from the engine of a broken vehicle, to the street garbage and the women and old men picking through it, to the vazaha and their jeans. Some children smile broadly at the vazaha and shout “salama!” Others are wary and scurry off, hiding behind trash or their siblings as we approach. Oh, to be gone from Tana, city of trash and anonymity.
Next week: Chapter 4 – Peut-être, Ongomba, Maybe
“…my inclinations were to the left, believing that everyone deserved equal opportunity, I didn’t know what that meant for a people with no options.” hit me pretty hard in my gut
Next time those women call you dogs, you should bark or howl. Which chapter has the frogs? How big is Madagascar compared to USA?