Malagasy Kabary, Narrative Fiction, and Identity Configuration: The Case of the Prologue, the Fialan-tsiny [Request for Forgiveness]

Introduction

In this article, I focus on Kabary, the Malagasy oratorical discourse of circumstance, and more precisely on its prologue, the Fialan-tsiny [Request for Forgiveness], viewed as a text produced from an act of enunciation assumed by a subjectivity. If it is accepted that enunciation gains consistency in discourse, Kabary, in its singularity, materializes in a verbal performance; performance here understood as the act of structuring and stylizing meaning, but also as the positioning of the subject within and through language. It is from this consideration that I formulate my objective of assigning three correlates to the Fialan-tsiny discourse: fictionalization, narrativity, and identity configuration. This is why I chose to title this article: "Malagasy Kabary, Narrative Fiction, and Identity Configuration: The Case of the Prologue, the Fialan-tsiny [Request for Forgiveness]." The underlying problematic that inspired this theme is that which confronts the Malagasy person and their society in search of image and identity, in the context of globalization. This problematic can be formulated as follows: how can we conceive the reality and authenticity of a primordial determinant of humanity in its individuality and sociality through a discourse that borrows the literary strategies of fiction and narration?

To reveal narrativity in the Fialan-tsiny within Kabary, I must resort to the resources of enunciative pragmatics, which will allow me to state that discourse is endowed with a dual dimension, cognitive and pragmatic. As for bringing to light the identity configuration, I will relate it to an analysis of subjectivity carried by enunciation, considered here in terms of discourse in action that participates in a mode of the subject's presence in the world; an act from which a double transitive relationship is established: the first, between a subject and an object of value, the second, between the speaker and the addressee. This double relationship can appear, in my opinion, as the locus for the deployment of an identity configuration manifested by speech that is both poetic and gnomic. A conceptual, theoretical, and methodological preliminary will first constitute the material aspect of this work; then will come the study of the relationship between fictionalization and the act of enunciation in Kabary; finally, I will conclude with the analysis of the discursive status of narrative identity.

1. Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological Preliminary

First of all, it will be a matter of developing a paradigm formed of notions which, in my perspective, are intended to interdefine each other:

1.1 Kabary

If there is one characteristic trait of Malagasy culture, it is indeed Kabary. It is one of the major genres of Malagasy oral literature. I would define Kabary as a ritual discourse of circumstance. In its functioning, it can be understood in the Saussurean sense of speech (parole), but it must also be noted that in the Malagasy sense, it can be presented as an act assumed by a subject, which consists of speaking within the framework of what I will call "social liturgy," and whose function and aim can be multiple. From this perspective, the term Kabary can be understood in light of the Benvenistean definition of discourse, according to which it is an act of enunciation implying a speaker and a listener, and in the former, the intention to influence the other in some way (Benveniste, 1966, p. 242). This idea is further reinforced by Kramsch's position, which maintains that discourse is the use of utterances in combination for the accomplishment of social acts (Kramsch, 1984, p. 10). However, this horizontal dimension of discourse remains insufficient for me, in the sense that the vertical dimension must be added to it, which includes: God and the ancestors. It is the double transcendence that involves the Malagasy person in their speech and action.

1.2 Tsiny and Fialan-tsiny

From a formal point of view, the structure of any Malagasy Kabary, as an oratorical art, respects the major canonical division: prologue, content development, and epilogue. Let us note immediately that the Fialan-tsiny constitutes the prologue. This introductory part is essential to any conventional public speaking in Madagascar. Briefly, it is a matter for the orator to justify speaking by apologizing, or rather by asking to be separated from fault. In short, if tsiny is the typically Malagasy way of asking permission to speak in any circumstantial discourse, here is, delving deeper into the question, what Sylvain Urfer says about it from his Western perspective:

It is important to observe the innumerable rules and customs that govern behavior and speech. Failing to observe them, whether through involuntary transgression or simple oversight, then becomes liable to tsiny (blame, censure). This, which can come from anyone, and about anything, somehow reveals the imperfection of man in what he does or does not do, and puts him in a situation to suffer the consequences (Urfer, 2012, p. 112).

Malagasy people indeed believe that no one is infallible. One can err by word, by action, by inaction, and by omission. One is always exposed to society's disapproval whatever one does or does not do, whatever one says or does not say, as the proverb "Miloloha lanitra tsy maintsy lena, mandia tany tsy maintsy solafaka" [Having the sky above one's head exposes one to rain, treading on the ground exposes one to falls] illustrates so well. Thus, before speaking or performing any act before society, the Malagasy person takes this oratorical precaution that materializes in the Request for Forgiveness, the Fialan-tsiny. It is about acquiring, as a preventive measure, absolution from divinities, ancestors, elders, and the entire community regarding the wrongs, prejudices, or damages that a verbal slip, a protocol blunder, or an involuntary omission during the address could cause. Indeed, the slightest error will be unforgivable and will return to them in the form of tsiny, knowing that for Malagasy people, anything negative that can happen to a person, family, or community (bad harvest, miscarriage, failures of all kinds, illnesses, death, poverty, social conflicts, etc.) is tsiny.

Indeed, for Malagasy people, the one who assumes the responsibility of delivering a Kabary is an interpreter of the community's knowledge, memory, and wisdom, which confers upon them the status of officiant and ritual supplicant; their words and actions involve double transcendence. When they speak, the community expects to recognize itself in what its spokesperson articulates; they are required to inscribe themselves in the immemorial speech of the elders, which is the vector of the communal identity chain and the guardian of a communal jurisprudence that guarantees the harmony of interindividual relationships.

However, there is yet another theory regarding the relevance of the Request for Forgiveness that I would like to posit here, according to which the Fialan-tsiny, like any act performed within and through language, is situated upstream of the modification of nature and the ordering of the world. In this perspective, the Request for Forgiveness is not a formality of seeking prior absolution for potential verbal slips or other omissions, as many tend to think. The Request for Forgiveness would rather pertain to a prayer addressed to the divinity. Hence the necessity not to forget the central object of the discourse, which is in fact the modification itself. A funeral Kabary, for example, participates in the ritual that consists of transitioning the deceased from the state of death to the status of Razana (ancestor); similarly, a marriage proposal Kabary consists of transitioning the woman from the status of sister to the status of wife, and examples in this direction can be multiplied. In short, any modification of nature and the ordering of the world passes through an act of Fialan-tsiny, which is an act performed within and through language.

1.3 Identity

Identity represents the construction of an "I" implicitly relating to a series of questions about its existence, its origin, its destiny, and the society it inhabits. On the discursive level, it manifests as the representation, figure, or image of self and refers to what is unique about it, within the shared values of its community of belonging. Thus, it is composed of different feelings: a feeling of unity, value, belonging, coherence, and authenticity organized in connection with a will to exist within the group. Representing the social dimension of the subject, its constitutive elements are culture, knowledge, know-how, interpersonal skills, tradition, religion, and language.

1.4 Combination of the Semiotic Approach and the Stylistic Approach

The conceptual and theoretical considerations mentioned above lead me to resort to the articulation of two approaches: semiotics and stylistics. This combination rests on an initial postulate: meaning and style in discourse are the minimal units of culture and, consequently, constitutive of identity. The concepts and aims of these two approaches are not incompatible, so it is permissible to admit the methodological possibility of reconciling two axes in the analysis of this form of artistic expression: the semiotic and the stylistic.

First of all, it should be emphasized that the semiotic approach rests on two principles. The first lies in the fact that the constitutive elements of discourse as a text contribute to meaning through the interplay of relationships they maintain. The second articulates with the first in the sense that any discourse is primarily an assemblage of signs, but furthermore, it is a process of signification assumed by an enunciation in a social and historical context. Apprehended in this way, semiotics becomes a semiotics of discourse: it elaborates a theory of signifying wholes allowing the living discourse, the enunciation in action, to be grasped in its uniqueness. From this perspective, it allows Kabary to be approached not only as an utterance that would present specific forms, but also as a particular enunciation, a literary speech, an aspect of discourse that interests stylistics.

As for the contribution of the stylistic approach, I adopt the perspective that posits stylistics as a discipline allowing verbal literariness to be conceived within the framework of an aesthetics of reception, due to the intersubjective nature of the discourse that is the object of work here. By placing it within the epistemological framework of an aesthetics of reception, the stylistic analysis will be carried out as a hermeneutics that constructs a global meaning of the text, where this meaning results from an apprehension of the discourse, taken as a literary object, as a phenomenon that is both unique and social.

2. Fictionalization, a Discursive Strategy in the Fialan-tsiny

From the foregoing, it is now accepted that the Fialan-tsiny [Request for Forgiveness] can be understood as a verbal enunciation. As such, it is an act of language use and verbal production whose realization in a social interactional context is important to specify. It thus represents a verbal performance. Performance, understood here, is not merely the act of an interpreter or performer in the Anglo-Saxon sense. In other words, Kabary and the Fialan-tsiny act within Kabary do not simply stem from linguistic competence but from a performance in its strong sense. It is endowed with an ethno- and ethico-literary dimension, as Catharine Mason attests in a passage from her article "Ethnography of the Poetics of Performance":

Negotiation of psychic, social, and also political means to better live, understand, and share the human experience. It may be that a poetic expression, repeatedly and singularly envisioning social experience, leads to a singular stylistic formulation particular to its context. It is precisely the re-creation of meaning and cultural forms in a real context that leads to the very essence of the art of performance (Mason, 2008, pp. 262-294).

From this point of view, the discursive performance manifest in the Fialan-tsiny is a dialogue between, on the one hand, the orator who performs an individual work of arranging ideas animated by stylistic elements with their literary aim and, on the other hand, the society guaranteeing the common cultural background from which the orator draws their art. Indeed, if we must recall the particular communication situation established by the realization of Kabary, it involves a discourse delivered by an orator before an assembly; its object is circumstantial but is always articulated within the register of collective memory. To this end, society, as the custodian of its own memory, holds a dual status: both sender and receiver of speech through the delegation of the mpiKabary [orator] who, overwhelmed by the weight of their mission, must offer numerous apologies before delving into the core subject of their discourse. Under these conditions, having become the spokesperson for society, they cannot in any way present themselves as the owner of their discourse.

It is precisely here that fictionalization operates as a discursive strategy. The orator will not deploy a whole logical apparatus of demonstrations to justify their speech; this would indeed be useless since the question is no longer about what is said, the object of saying; in this specific case, relevance lies rather in the doing and the why of the doing. Indeed, the orator will instead resort to an argumentative strategy that will exploit the operativity of fiction. In this operation, everything is done to create an anthropomorphic process between human doing and fiction, an operation whose primary function is to project the recipient into the universe of the possible. A form of fiduciary and tacit contract between orator and recipient then takes place where the latter willingly accepts, that is, of their own free will and for their own pleasure, to suspend their critical judgment, in other words, to put reality on hold.

Let us observe this effect of fiction in the following excerpt:

The same applies to the first quatrain, which shows the presence of the enunciator-narrator in the manner of the "Once upon a time..." of popular tales. But we can also highlight parenthetical clauses such as:

or again:

These passages contain markers of subjectivity that show interest in the addressee under the sign of face preservation: note this shift from "I" to "we" when it comes to the orator explicitly expressing the difficult role they assume by speaking. These are therefore all indications that Kabary in general proceeds from the act of creation and that it is constructed with an aim: it is "constructed for someone," to use Grize's expression, that is to say, with a view to producing an effect on the addressee. This is what authorizes the translation of Kabary by the word discourse, and this, in the very linguistic sense of the term. We indeed speak of discourse when the author or the instance of enunciation, the narrator, makes themselves felt, when we perceive the intentions of communication in the utterance.

That being said, the problem raised by my excerpt is therefore to know to what extent we can speak of diegesis through the text which visibly behaves as discourse. The fact is that if every narrative contains or is a discourse, a discourse rarely contains a narrative. That said, in most discourses (documentary, plea, sports commentary, etc.), there are narrative effects in the way of envisioning, reporting, and arranging actions and events. Following Aristotle, it is appropriate to stipulate here that this introductory part of Kabary can be seen at a single glance in the sense that it presents a period of beginning, an intermediate period, and an end; which allows us to affirm that the mere unfolding of the Fialan-tsiny is already narrative.

But the approach that seems most fruitful to me for envisioning the relevance of the narrative in this passage is that proposed by the Italian semiotician, Umberto Eco, who, following a dual generativist and transformational perspective, affirms:

Faced with the order “Come here,” one can expand the discursive structure into a narrative macroproposition of the type “there is someone who imperatively expresses the desire that the addressee, towards whom he manifests an attitude of familiarity, moves from the position where he is and approaches the position where the subject of enunciation is.” It is, if you will, a small story, albeit an unimportant one (Eco, 1985, p. 138).

According to this point of view, the narrative is centered on the assertion of utterances of doing. And here, the doing underlying the narrative enunciation manifests on the surface through an ordered and coherent sequence of narrative textual sequences. Indeed, to become a narrative, an event must be told in the form of at least two temporally ordered propositions constituting a story, for example:

There is another theory that also goes in the direction of the Italian semiotician's intuition and which relies on one of the fundamental aspects of human language. Indeed, the subject only exists through recognition via language, which means that the subject is an existent through language that is realized in the materiality of discourse. In other words, if there were not the desire to make the addressee move, the discursive structure "come here" would have destroyed itself; one would have concluded the non-serious character of the injunction when the opposite case would have realized, so to speak, the "felicity condition" to achieve what the discourse was implemented for (Bourdieu, 1982, pp. 68-69).

From this example and in light of Umberto Eco's model, but in a synthetic approach, we can then propose for this passage a relationship of micropropositions that will allow for a more global view of the text, to apprehend it as a narrative program that I will conceptualize with Greimas as the conjunctive journey of a subject in search of an object of value (Greimas A. J., 1966, p. 61). Thus, the synthetic reading of the excerpt will allow establishing from the deep discursive level the following propositions, I remind again that I have only considered for my analysis the Fialan-tsiny part:

"There is a subject who stands before society to speak on its behalf and whose objective is to be disjointed from the tsiny."

Thus, the initial assertion constitutes an act that consists for the orator in adopting a narrative posture, such that the passage from the initial state to the final state, fundamental to any narrative, can be read here as the project or, if you will, the desire of the subject of enunciation to separate themselves from the tsiny. Generally speaking, this logic of desire, a corollary of the logic of lack, is at the base of any narrative; in other words, a character (in the broadest sense of the term) seeks to acquire or separate themselves from an object (also in the broadest sense of the term). This is what theorists of narrative semiotics call the character's narrative program. From there, it is permissible to say that the story underlying the excerpt studied here tells the transformation of the orator. Consequently, the conclusions to be drawn from this transformation can be the fact that nothing is ever acquired in terms of moral integrity and, in terms of rhetorical know-how, that no one is without fault, "Tsy misy olombelona tsy manan-tsiny" [There is no living human who has no fault], in short, that there is no perfection on earth, hence the interest in apologizing, in asking for forgiveness before speaking or performing any act before society. Indeed, taking the floor is taking power, because narrating or discoursing supposes breaking the normal thread of social exchange, namely the speech that circulates through conversation, according to J. M. Adam's intuition: to narrate, one must monopolize the conversation (Adam, 1996, p. 11); in this sense, taking the floor is understood as taking power. Furthermore, the Malagasy conception is even more radical; any taking of the floor is understood in terms of necessary aggression or violation insofar as it brings a modification in the interlocutory relationship, even in the organizational structure of the community and in the ordering of the world:

Thus, the transformation between the initial state and the final state would here be interpreted in terms of morality, and it is the inference of morality that guides the understanding of the narrative underpinned in the excerpt.

As lapidary as the minimal narrative contained in this Fialan-tsiny passage may be, it is appropriate to consider that it constitutes the thematization and objectification of a more fundamental question: how can the subject of enunciation give meaning to their existence? That is to say, to traverse the distance between the question "who am I?" and the question "who do I want to be?". In other words, what path does the subject adopt for the liquidation of the lack that I have defined as the vector of any discourse? In fact, the examination of this path refers to the themes of existential analytics following the intuition of Binswanger who affirms that one of the characteristics of the subject as a present-being lies in their capacity to express themselves about themselves, to let themselves come to the word (Binswanger, 1981, p. 65): this is exactly the posture of the subject of the enunciation of the Fialan-tsiny above.

Furthermore, the analysis of the narrative path thus defined also allows recalling Ricoeur according to whom man is always in the mode of becoming. He is never anything but the meeting point between what he has become, here the taking of the floor, and what he is orienting himself towards, namely the disjunction from the tsiny. Consequently, he can only constitute his identity through a narrative telling how he arrived there; this is how he constructs his life as a totality and how the receiver manages to read it as such (Ricoeur, 1990, p. 51).

3. The Effect of Narration and Malagasy Kabary: Discursive Status of Narrative Identity

It is now a matter of illustrating the operativity of the concept of narrativity in the approach to Malagasy Kabary, particularly in its introductory part, the Fialan-tsiny.

First and foremost, a clarification is necessary: Kabary is not like poems or novels susceptible to deferred communication; it is rather to be considered as discourse in situation. It is produced by the orator in a specific place and at a specific time and is always addressed to a precise recipient immediately. Indeed, Kabary does not have a distribution that contradicts everyday communication. Derived from conversational discourse, it is its marked form. Its realization attests that the interlocutors enter into a solemn time, or an institutional time, or even a sacred time. The strong moments of community life therefore constitute its contexts of realization. Its essential function is to highlight important communal events such as engagements, marriages, births, circumcisions, turning of the dead, funerals, etc. It is also used in the resolution of conflicts and social disputes of various kinds. Kabary presents itself as both a functional and ritual discourse that falls within the double vertical and horizontal dimension of speech. In other words, it is speech taken as a means of communication and communion, blending invocations to gods and ancestors with discourse addressed to the assembly.

From a formal point of view, the structure of any Malagasy Kabary, as an oratorical art, respects the major canonical division: prologue, content development, and epilogue. It should be noted that within the framework of this contribution, I am only focusing on the introductory part, the Fialan-tsiny, that is, the indispensable prologue to any conventional public speaking in Madagascar. Briefly, in this introductory part of the address, the orator aims to justify speaking by apologizing or rather by asking to be separated from fault, the tsiny; in short, it is the typically Malagasy way of asking permission to speak in any circumstantial discourse. Regarding the tsiny first, here is what Sylvain Urfer says about it:

It is important to observe the innumerable rules and customs that govern behavior and speech. Failing to observe them, whether through involuntary transgression or simple oversight, then becomes liable to tsiny (blame, censure). This, which can come from anyone, and about anything, somehow reveals the imperfection of man in what he does or does not do, and puts him in a situation to suffer the consequences (Urfer, 2012, p. 112).

Malagasy people indeed believe that no one is infallible. One can err by word, by action, by inaction, and by omission. One is always exposed to society’s disapproval whatever one does or does not do, whatever one says or does not say, as the proverb “Miloloha lanitra tsy maintsy lena, mandia tany tsy maintsy solafaka” [Having the sky above one’s head exposes one to rain, treading on the ground exposes one to falls] illustrates so well. Thus, before speaking or performing any act before society, the Malagasy person takes this oratorical precaution that materializes in the Fialan-tsiny. It is about acquiring, as a preventive measure, absolution from divinities, ancestors, elders, and the entire community regarding the wrongs, prejudices, or damages that a verbal slip, a protocol blunder, or an involuntary omission during the address could cause.

Indeed, for Malagasy people, speaking is a mission of paramount importance; the one who assumes the responsibility of delivering a Kabary is a privileged interpreter of the community’s knowledge, memory, and wisdom, which confers upon them the status of officiant and ritual supplicant; their words and actions involve double transcendence. When they speak, the community expects to recognize itself in what its spokesperson articulates; the slightest error will be unforgivable and will return to them in the form of tsiny, knowing that for Malagasy people, anything negative that can happen to a person, family, or community (bad harvest, miscarriage, failures of all kinds, illnesses, death, poverty, social conflicts, etc.) is tsiny. Such are, therefore, the meaning and relevance of the Fialan-tsiny in Malagasy Kabary. To understand the value of the Fialan-tsiny, one only needs to find a parallel in Catholic liturgy: the Fialan-tsiny as a speech act presents itself as the chanting or recitation of the act of contrition, which constitutes an important moment and an obligatory passage, without which the mass ceremony would be invalid.

Now, concerning the Fialan-tsiny, I will attempt to apply the method of narrative analysis, meaning the text in its entirety will be considered as a narrative account of a given subject, which here is the Fialan-tsiny itself. But first, an observation of the phrase “miala tsiny,” generically translated into French as “to apologize,” will allow for the clarification of an operational notion I will call “flight from reality,” which constitutes one of the correlates of discourse on belief. Indeed, if we refer to reality, this expression is reprehensible because the one who committed the fault cannot arrogate the right to absolve their own wrong: “Miala tsiny aho” [I remove the wrong] or [I evade the wrong] or [I reject the wrong]. Thus, we must seek the validity of the expression by reference to enunciation and not by reference to reality. If the definition of performativity (Austin, 1999, pp. 40-41) as efficient speech is accepted, the phrase is understood by the fact that by uttering it, the subject recognizes, whether a priori or a posteriori, their wrong and thereby asks not to be held accountable in the form of tsiny, which is invariably granted within the limits of daily exchanges or interactions.

Conclusion

In sum, it is appropriate to note that the discourse of the Fialan-tsiny as it presents itself here becomes the time and place of constitution as a subject and of its orientation in moral space. Concretely, the human being can only situate or orient themselves in history and, above all, inscribe themselves in the immemorial cultural chain of their community by constituting themselves as the subject of a global narrative program. Constituted, but above all instituted, as a subject in the narrative discourse, the orator determines their place in relation to the value object, in this case the tsiny, which materializes the object of their quest and from which they want, in fact, to be absolved, to be disjointed before society. In this diegesis, the end marker being indispensable, it is towards this closure that the narrative logic is supposed to converge to confer its completeness upon it. Let us specify that as soon as a story takes shape in a narrative, it necessarily inscribes itself between an absolute beginning and end with, in its middle, a complete transformation as in lines 103 and 104, which represent this temporal succession following a double chrono-logical relationship of causality. Formulated in terms of traditional communal morality, this clausular passage constitutes the mise en abyme of the entire narrative telling the orator's journey before society. This double relationship becomes the spring of an acquisition by the subject of what Ricoeur calls a vaster self (Ricoeur, 1986, pp. 116, 117) consecutive to the transformation inherent in any narrative.