Allison M. Charette
Photo by Devon Rowland Photography
Bio
Allison Charette is a translator and writer whose work has been published by Restless Books, the New York Times, Words Without Borders, The Other Stories, SLICE, and others. Her translations have also been used as supertitles in various venues, including Carnegie Hall. Charette founded the Emerging Literary Translators' Network in America (ELTNA) and currently advises the Emerging Translator Mentorship program at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
For the past four years, I’ve been very singlemindedly working on introducing the English-speaking world to novels from Madagascar: up until 2017, none had ever been translated into English. It’s a daunting undertaking, and it has felt very overwhelming many times over. Receiving an NEA Fellowship at this stage is an honor and a relief. Not only does it give me heart and renewed determination, it also allows me to return to Madagascar for an extended stay, both to work closely with Michèle Rakotoson on her exquisite novel and to immerse myself more fully in Malagasy culture and literature.
Lalana is the story of a disenfranchised young man dying of AIDS in the slums of Antananarivo who takes a cathartic voyage to the ocean that leads him through the countryside and his own history. Rakotoson’s writing seamlessly weaves the structure of a French/Western novel together with Malagasy traditions of oral, circular storytelling. This novel is a masterpiece of literature, and I’m excited to bring this powerful story to American readers.
Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Lalana by Michèle Rakotoson
[translated from the French]
You cannot walk fast in Antananarivo. There’s a weight in the air, a heat that makes everything slow and viscous. There’s a constant small of noxious gas, an acid odor that gets into your lungs, infests your muscles. There’s the red dust, blackened by exhaust fumes, and the perpetual suffocation of the city, so precariously perched, so dry.
You get smothered in Tana, when it’s hot.
But it’s not always hot. Not always dry. There’s also the rainy season, every year: cyclones, floods, washed-out roads, crumbling houses that collapse onto themselves, like a pile of mud reborn under the water, running everywhere, penetrating everywhere, racing toward long-blocked egresses.
You suffocate in Tana, in the sticky water vapor rising from the parched ground, unable to contain the thousands of liters of water that pour out in a few months, leaving the earth even more arid than before, carrying the humus toward the Betsiboka River and the sea over in Mahajanga—red, so very red, from having ripped the flesh from the scorched earth over decades and decades, a scarlet sea, crimson, thick, equally heavy, like a woman pregnant with a stillborn child.
You cannot walk fast in Antananarivo; the stench of the air forces a body to inertia. And yet Naivo is almost running, he runs through a sun exploding color, shimmering light, diffracting nuances and forms, melting everything into a strange halo that contorts perspective. It’s not the rainy season. Not yet. Fortunately. The air shimmers and colors the sky blue, a blue to pierce through the layer of exhaust fumes.
It seems to Naivo that he’s been running for hours. He is smothered, he suffocates, his heart pounds like a drum, the wet heat is unbearable.
At least we don’t have cholera, he thinks. Or mud, or stagnant water, or sewage, at least, not yet.
Thirty. Naivo, he’s thirty years old, thirty years of hell, a thin body, skinny, not very tall, already slightly stooped, his face resigned. Five years ago, he was still happy, laughing. Now, he’s tired, drained of enthusiasm. The riots stretching back to his youth, then unemployment, watching other people getting rich quick, very quick . . .
It’s the in-between season, just before the rain, the air is starting to get humid, and it’s sweaty, sticky, the birds aren’t singing. But are there really any birds in this city, a city choked by cars? Everything seems broken in Antananarivo, everything. And everyone feels like there’s no point in moving in this heat. They should have made artificial rain, it’s already two months late, water is scarce, hills are burning all around the city and pretty much everywhere on the island. The farmers are scared. They say it’s bad, very bad, the earth is too dry, the seeds are parched and will die out in the ground, perish in the floods, because the dry ground will just flood when the rain comes, the earth won’t be able to contain the water. But they keep burning the earth, burning it without end.
The harvest is lost. But what can you do? There’s the sun, the heat, the late rain, the twenty predicted cyclones, and they’re all used to misfortune.
About Michèle Rakotoson
Michèle Rakotoson (b. 1948) is one of the most successful authors in Madagascar with an oeuvre of dozens of novels, short stories, memoirs, plays, and children's literature, as well as a track record of championing the next generation of Malagasy writers through readings, salons, conferences, and publishing assistance. Compared with the rest of the Francophone world, literature from Madagascar is underrepresented in English translation; the first ever English translation of a novel by a Malagasy author is scheduled to be published in 2017. Lalana tells the story of a young man dying of AIDS in the slums of the capital city who is so desperate to see the ocean for the first time that his friend borrows a car, springs him from the hospital, and drives him east into the country where they encounter a cast of characters trying to reconcile old beliefs and traditions with a contemporary world.