Background
Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo was born on March 4, 1901, in Tananarive (Madagascar) into a noble family which had been impoverished as a result of the abolition of slavery by the French authorities soon after the colonial conquest in 1895.
Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo was born on March 4, 1901, in Tananarive (Madagascar) into a noble family which had been impoverished as a result of the abolition of slavery by the French authorities soon after the colonial conquest in 1895.
He first studied at the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes school in the affluent neighborhood of Andohalo, then transferred to the prestigious Collège Saint-Michel, where he was expelled for lack of discipline, poor academic performance, and his reluctance to become religiously observant. He ended his studies at École Flacourt in 1915.
He left school at 13 in order to earn a precarious livelihood as proofreader in a local printing shop. Tananarive in the early 1920 was a focus of intense literary and journalistic activity in the vernacular, and Rabearivelo was one of the first Malagasy poets to use the French language as his medium of literary expression.
His early collections, La Coupe de cendres (1924), Sylves (1927), and Volumes (1928), were in the romantic-academic manner of such French 19th-century poets as appeared on the school curriculum in those days. But through his friendship with Pierre Camo - a French official who was also a minor poet - Rabearivelo became acquainted with contemporary symbolist poetry and managed to free himself of the shackles of conventional versification and diction. His best poems are to be found in Presque-songes (1934) and Traduit de la nuit (1935).
He was rejected by his more tradition-minded or nationalistic fellow citizens. As a native, he was also rejected by the local French society of petty traders and administrators. This dual rebellion imbued Rabearivelo's poetry. Although he mostly wrote in French, in part of his work he sought to bend the alien language to native themes, experiences, and even literary forms such as the hainteny. Aware of his uncommon gifts, yet confined to his underprivileged status, Rabearivelo found the best of his inspiration in an all-pervading, tragic sense of alienation, which finds adequate utterance in images of exile and death, rootlessness and sterility. He committed suicide on June 22, 1937.
His love of France, its language, and its literature was apt to take weird ritualistic forms in his work. With pathetic conscientiousness, he wanted to strive to the most futilely morbid aspects in the lives of Balzac, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and a host of other. This ill-advised imitation of alien models h uneasily coupled with considerable pride in the literary achievements, oral and written, of Malagasy culture, even though, as a former aristocrat and a Frenchified intellectual, he felt some contempt for the illiterate masses.
In his bulky diaries, which have never been edited in their entirety, he described his tragic predicament as that of a Latin mind under a black skin but also as that of a proud Malagasy eager to shed the Christian and Western disguise imposed upon him.
His habit of wearing the traditional robe, the lamba, over his Westernstyle clothes illustrated his duality more than it could hide.
He was also a womanizer and abused alcohol and opium, growing increasingly dependent on the substances after the death of his daughter. Rabearivelo constantly struggled with debt, and despite his growing fame and artistic success, he was unable to escape from poverty.
Quotes from others about the person
Academic Arnaud Sabatier identifies him as "one of the most important writers of the twentieth century". He has also been described by Radio France Internationale journalist Tirthankar Chanda as "the founder of the African francophonie" and "the enfant terrible of French literature". Jeune Afrique described him as "Madagascar's greatest poet".
In 1926, Rabearivelo married Mary Razafitrimo, the daughter of a local photographer, and together they had five children.