Written July 23, 2012, 10:00
Manambaro
Back in October I got the idea to show movies to my friends on my laptop. I thought it could be a constructive activity to teach them English by going over vocabulary words that they probably wouldn’t have encountered in school: “princess,” “sword,” “poison,” “swamp,” “miracle.”
The first film was The Princess Bride. The closest I could come to translating “Rodents of Unusual Size was voalavo lehibe hafahafa: “crazy big rats.”
Afterwards came Princess Mononoke, 28 Days Later, District 9, Avatar, Kung Fu Panda, a Season 4 episode of True Blood, and all the episodes of Firefly. The English lessons got swept away as I realized that none of my friends had no desire to mix school with this heretofore unrivaled level of entertainment. We watched one just about every week.
But nothing prepared them for Lord of the Rings. Twelve hours of hobbits, heroes, monsters, battles, walking trees... all set in the impossibly grand landscapes of New Zealand. My laptop only holds charge for an hour, so that means the trilogy runs almost as long as the fourteen Firefly installments.
Right now we’re right before the Battle of Helm’s Deep, where the old man fires the first arrow. It’s interesting to see what rural Malagasy teenagers make of historically accurate medieval European weapons and armor. Throughout Madagascar’s history the Antanosy have prided themselves on being a peaceful tribe. Their cousins, the Antandroy, were much more warlike, but as far as I can tell they never fought with armor or even shields.
But then, it’s not like the Madagascan school system is a stellar example for teaching history.
Watching the soldiers prepare for Helm’s Deep, Desmot asked, “Why don’t they have any guns?”
Of course the movies are in English, with no subtitles. So it falls to me to explain the finer points of the story, like how Faramir is Boromir’s younger brother. The rest of the action is more or less self-explanatory, to a point. That doesn’t stop my friend from interpreting the films in their own way:
The orcs are biby, “animals,” just like the zombies in 28 Days Later and the aliens in District 9. The Uruk-hai are “the Rasta guys” because of their long hair. The elves are “the really white people.” Gimli is ny boribory, “the round one.” Gandalf is “the old man.” And Gollum is ny zaza ratsy, “the bad child.”
I tried to explain the differences between the races, to little avail.
“The ugly ones are orcs.”
“Wucks.”
“And the pretty ones are elves.”
“Evvs.”
And then they went back to calling them biby and olo tena fotsy. But a certain dichotomy did not escape Rodin:
“So the blackish guys are evil and violent. And the white ones are good and generous?”
Yes. You are not the first to comment on this aspect of Tolkien’s work. Not a very unifying message coming from a Peace Corps Volunteer.
They’ve enjoyed all my movies, but Lord of the Rings has reached a whole new level. I promised I would charge my computer on Friday so we could conclude The Two Towers. I was biking into Fort Dauphin to check for a package at the post office.
That was before the twins’ grandfather, Dadabé, invited me to a wedding in town on the same day. The wedding would leave me too little time to do any Internet, so I left my laptop at home.
After I finished my errands in town I biked to the Ivorano neighborhood, in a depression near the northern salt marsh. I had no address for the wedding, so I just wandered around until I met Fafa on the main stone-paved road. He led me up a dirt road to a cluster of houses where dozens of people were gathered, packed tightly into what must have served as a yard. I had a change of clothes in my backpack, but Fafa and Dadafara ushered me to a seat before I had time to protest. I spent the whole ceremony in the tank top and shorts I rode in in.
The families sat under awnings, facing each other with a space in between. Every so often the bride’s father would ask for music or more drinks, and the groom’s father would grant the request beneficently, in a ritualized way. I stuck to Three Horses Beer, but they had several 20-liter jugs full of toaka gasy, unspeakably foul moonshine.
Of course they killed a zebu, right behind where the bride and groom were sitting. The beast was silent as they cut its throat, and the butchering process continued unobtrusively as the guests laughed and danced just feet away. Every so often someone would come away holding an armful of viscera or other organs. A child carried away the intact head by the horns, still dripping gore. They chopped the bones apart with wood axes, no easy task.
Unfortunately, the butchering took time. I had to get back to Manambaro before dark, so I begged my leave with utmost politeness,
“Look! The vazaha is leaving!”
and had a late lunch at HK, the halal restaurant Israel showed me right before he left. It’s fast food, in the sense that one hardly has to wait for the 75¢ plates to arrive. It’s straightforward Gasy fare, usually beans or greens over rice, but it’s not bad at all. They’ve even started putting some cumin in the beans, a very daring move in a normally bland cuisine.
There was no Lord of the Rings that night, because of the wedding. But now that I’ve written this blog post we’ll have charge.
Let the saga continue!
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