The Malagasy poet Jean Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937) was the first major French-language poet in Africa. Some of his most powerful poetry arose from the conflict between his intimacy with two cultures, Malagasy and French, and his estrangement from two societies, native and colonial.

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 left school at 13 in order to earn a precarious livelihood as proofreader in a local printing shop.

Tananarive in the early 1920s 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...