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Funk Factor There is no McDonald's in Madagascar. By Susan Zakin THIS MAY SOUND CRAZY. I came to Madagascar because I wanted to understand Tucson. In this country of red hills whose Southwest is so much like our own, I wanted to find a variation on the theme of cactus, perhaps a poignant analogue for the disappearing life of our North American continent. Humans arrived in Madagascar only 2,000 years ago, you see, about 10,000 years after they arrived on the North American continent. The plants and animals here are relics of an earlier stage of evolution, about 160 million years ago, when Madagascar split off from Africa. The people who arrived here probably made a lot of the animals extinct, just like humans did in the U.S. But the blood trail is more recent. Madagascar's remaining lemurs and chameleons, surreal creatures abandoned by time, seemed to offer both future and past, a frame for our more distant narrative of conquest. Travel has a way of thwarting expectations. To start with, I had to work my way over. Teaching journalism may not sound like shoveling coal into the belly of a tramp steamer. But it means I've spent six weeks stuck in the capital city of Antananarivo, a place most tourists flee immediately. There are no lemurs in Antananarivo, also called Tana, except in the zoo. Tana is the second most-polluted city in the world. Deep-fried leaded gasoline fumes from countless ancient Peugeots and Renaults mix with the rankest odors of humanity: sweat, shit, piss. More than a million people live here. There is no sewage treatment plant. Everything goes into the canal. The canal drains to the river. The problem, says the official at the country's newly created environmental agency, is not the lack of a treatment plant. It is the squatters living along the sewage canal who dump their garbage into it, impeding the flow to the river. The unemployment rate in Madagascar is something like 45 percent. In the private sector, Madagascar lives off vanilla and ruby smuggling. But the country really relies on funding from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and U.S. AID. Mothers with children beg from you. Five-year olds carrying their baby sisters or brothers beg from you. Twelve-year-old girls follow you down the street saying, "Give me money." You get used to it. But poverty is only part of the story. On streets full of beggars, in worse squalor than I ever imagined, I stumble on unexpected snatches of redemption, moments of otherworldly transport. Most often, it is Malagasy music, an analogue for these people too gentle to fight off conquerors, people who have not yet fully experienced the neo-capitalist fervor gripping the world. "It's an escape, the music," says a British scientist. He's right. In front of the cobblestone steps leading to the swank French Hotel Colbert, a tiny, deformed man curls on the ground. His hands and feet look like pink yams wrenched from the earth. They bear stains that are like signs, maps of dark, burrowing soil. The man plays guitar. He plucks with his toeless feet that look like an anteater's nose. He is remarkably good. Soon I will dream of America. A certain image sticks in my head. It is those white strips of paper that cordon off the toilet seats of countless motels. These proud banners "Sanitized" certify that we have left behind medieval darkness. Darkness is not buried in our memories. It has been surgically removed. I walk up the city's highest hill toward the Queen's Palace, breathless from the bad air. I ask directions from a young couple. The couple walk me toward the palace, which was half-destroyed by fire in the mid-1990s. It is beautiful, an ironic comment on history, syncretism, the ruin of the old without anything new to replace it. We run into other English speakers at a restaurant. Together all six of us hunt down a South African guy named Ray for reasons that turn out to be unimportant. Ray blasts the foreign aid that comes into the country. "They should just leave them alone," he says. People in the West say the same thing about Indian reservations. We say goodbye at dusk. This will happen to me countless times, meeting people who spend hours or days helping me and want nothing in return. Delicie, the chic owner of a large business, figures out quickly that my French is inadequate. She spends an entire afternoon on the telephone helping me make appointments. We laugh at the incongruity once we realize that this 31-year-old CEO is effectively posing as my secretary. This is what blows people's minds about Madagascar. The people are, well, nice. They're friendly. They're not in a rush. Despite the stunning disparity between my income and theirs, they don't look at me and see a dollar sign, at least most of them don't. In short, they're like the best of us Tucsonans. As much as I love the desert, I wonder if the most painful consequence of the developer greedfest we're suffering through will be the loss of Tucson's small-town warmth. But it would take more than Don Diamond to change Malagasy culture. The French couldn't do it in almost a hundred years of brutal colonization. Even the stinking crowded city of Tana has a certain charm. At dusk, the city glows paintbox colors of a Mediterranean hill town. As the sun falls behind the red hills, the city seems poised to enter a dream. Somewhere I can hear the sound of Malagasy music, as delicate as a small bird, as gentle as breathing. The music transforms the night, the city, the country. The world.
E-mail zakin@tucsonweekly.com.
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