Poetry
Antsa
Not translated into English
Jacques Rabemananjara · 1948
Synopsis
Written in May 1947 in Antanimora prison in Antananarivo, after the Malagasy uprising, a long song to the native island in the tradition of the antsa, which the poet glosses as the deep song of the ancestors. It invokes Madagascar, caught in the nets of the trade winds, red under the bites of the sun, the endless dream of the laterites, a lighthouse on the reefs and the enchanted haven of morning; it brings back the round of the girls beneath the village's sacred tree and the hymns of the fathers, and returns in every stanza to the same cry: freedom.
Context
A first printing of the poem appeared in 1948, in sixty-one pages, with no publisher's name, according to the Bibliothèque nationale de France; Présence africaine published it in Paris in 1956, with a preface by François Mauriac, the year its author was pardoned. It was composed in the prisons where the poet had been held since the suppression of the 1947 uprising, like two other collections of the same period, and it was through them that critics came to know his poetry.
Who it is for
A long chant, in French, of oratorical breadth; it is best read in one go, aloud.
Prizes and reception
The poem for which its author was hailed as a bard of négritude; it opens the series of his great prison texts.
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