Marina Ortrud M. Hertrampf

• French-Madagascan colonial history is full of dark chapters. After Madagascar’s independence the French general public forgot the country very quickly. In Malagasies collective memory, the wounds of colonial injustice are still open even if they are generally considered as fady (‘tabooʼ). Désiré Razafinjato is the first Malagasy author writing in French who dares to approach the difficult relations between Malagasy-French and indigenous Malagasy as well as between indigenous Francophiles and indigenous anti-French nationalists. In his taleFrench-Madagascan colonial history is full of dark chapters. After Madagascar’s independence the French general public forgot the country very quickly. In Malagasies collective memory, the wounds of colonial injustice are still open even if they are generally considered as fady (‘tabooʼ). Désiré Razafinjato is the first Malagasy author writing in French who dares to approach the difficult relations between Malagasy-French and indigenous Malagasy as well as between indigenous Francophiles and indigenous anti-French nationalists. In his tale «Tahiry. From Madagascar to the Algerian djebel, the bitter-fatherland», the narrator speaks about the painful loss of any fatherland for all those Malagasy who during the War of Algeria got involved as French soldiers. Indeed, it is the sad history of the despoliation of an ideal Motherland on the French side and of the refusal of membership in an ancestral fatherland on the Malagasy side. What remains for those ancient French-Malagasy combatants is the feeling of a ‘bitter-fatherlandʼ and the feeling of living in ‘between everywhereʼ in some kind of ‘non-fatherlandʼ.…