Courtesy of Giorgio Vanille
APRIL 5, 2015 | 
ALEX MEETS WORLD
In Nosy Komba, I am almost always topless: no shirt, no socks, usually no shoes, and I haven’t worn underwear since October. My attire is simply basketball shorts or my dirty swim trunks if I’m in between dives and haven’t showered. It’s just too darn hot and humid for anything else.
On occasion however, there are times, such as when going to adult class, where it is necessary to look a little bit nicer, so in my Camelbak, I always am equipped with the same essentials: two water bottles, my camera, my malaria pills, my wallet (the ChicoBag has finally been replaced), a headlamp, a t-shirt, and tennis shoes tied up to the back.
Today though, the load was heavier than normal because it wasn’t only a shirt but a suit, Zip-locked and freshly hand-washed and left out to dry the day before.
Now, keep in mind that, in my traveler mode, standards are shifted down a notch. I am a bit stinkier, a bit messier, a bit wilder than I am at home. Things like deodorant, pillows, and hand soap I am not as anal about, so when I write a suit, it is not a suit like one would think of in America. In one bag, there was neatly folded and zipped away my one collared shirt, which I have not worn since my first day in Hell-Ville, and in the other, black Dockers pants with a secretive, black money belt to keep them in place.
But at eight in the morning, I walked to the village in my same old Harvard-Westlake basketball shorts, and once in Ampangoriana, I kept them on still as I walked with Dodo and Ariana to the catholic church on a hill before unzipping my Ziplocs and putting on my Easter Sunday best.
My shorts became boxers as I slipped my pants on right over them. The small stains in my shirt I tried to hide as I tucked it into my Dockers. For shoes, the options were only flip-flops or tennies. I chose the flip-flops. They were classier, less smelly, less muddy, but as I went in with Django to the church full of people, I learned that either choice would have been okay.
Django was barefoot and in his usual long johns, scarf, and a ratty collared shirt, and though many people were dressed nicely, quite a few looked as they always do: a Maki t-shirt and shorts, a used shirt and jeans, nothing really special. Even the people who were dressed up would only be regarded as acceptable for just any old Sunday back home. There were none of the elaborate Easter hats and dresses on the attractive, old church ladies as there are in front of West Angeles Church of God in Christ in L.A. at this time of year.
Django and I found a place to sit, and I relaxed into godly attentiveness with my feet on the prayer kneel stool thing at the end of the pew and my ass on the bench as the service began.
It was my first time in this church, and I found it far less imposing than the other catholic churches I’ve been to. Rather than a gruesome, over-sized, overdone depiction of Christ on the crucifix, the room, which was almost full and could fit between one to two hundred people, was as plainly decorated as its modest congregation.
The priest, whom I had disturbed when trying to get Django a Gmail for the first time, stood at the front behind a podium wearing a white robe that had “Jesus” written on it with the middle s overextended so that the name looked like a cross.
Behind the priest, three woodcarvings adorned the white wall. Straight back, a two-foot tall Jesus had his feet bound, his head down, and his arms splayed out onto nothing. To the priest’s right, an equally long statue of the virgin Mary stood on a shelf behind a candle with her hands together and her face eternally encapsulated in thoughtful repose. On the opposite end of the wall on another shelf behind another lit candle, two brown hands held a circle in the middle of which the shape of Madagascar was imposed into the wood.
Those three were the main attractions, and all else was even more unostentatious: the six inch square wood carvings depicting Bible scenes on two of the other three walls, the foot-long orange green and blue tinted windows around the top of the church that were a humble substitute for stained glass.
Aside from the carving of the country and the church’s all-black kin, there was nothing Malagasy about the building. It was unimpressive and standard, and the Easter sermon was the same.
As the pastor spoke, I leaned in close to Django, who translated for me in low tones.
“He say fiegnana mandrakzay. You know what means fiegnana mandrakzay,” he’d ask me.
“No,” I’d say.
“It mean eternal life.”
All was read twice: once in Malagasy and once in French for the few expats also in the crowd.
Life after death, resurrection, love, unity. Django explained all these to me, and even without the sentences he said if I only had those words alone, it was enough for me to know the message the priest was trying to relay. I’d heard all of it before during Easters in America.
So it was the music, not the message, that brought the service to life.
There was no choir. Whenever a song was sung, it was by everyone. The church was reborn with the holy clarity of the people’s voices cued by four young girls who’d start each song from the room’s front. Their words were gospel, but liberated from the intensity of black American church songs, they were uplifting in their unadulterated honesty of spirit and the wholly forward crispness of the singers’ lyrical delivery.
Freed from the emotional extremities of all-encompassing joy, overbearing pain, exultant humility before God, the songs were a capella, and I received them easily although they were expressed in a foreign tongue.
It was Malagasy as I never knew it could be (the Malagasy of salegy, the Malagasy that is energetic without effort, of the people on the path who talk too loud when they speak), but now, I was seeing it from another side. The words were just as they always had been, but somehow, the church had turned them from letters to be shouted to hymns to be praised, and they lit the room with more force than the morning light.
Forget about Herbie Hancock. This is the music of Mitsio.
With the singing, there was praise dancing. The drama and fluff of Negro praise was stripped away so that only the most elemental movements survived. It was praise in its barest form. The young girls in white dresses walking down the aisle singing whilst their arms and feet rocked in rhythm reminded me of the Women’s Day dancers on the basketball court, but here was a holy place. This was holy music.
For one number, everyone stood up from the pews and held hands with their neighbors. Each row swayed its union to a different beat than the one before so that, all together, our swinging arms and clasped fingers looked like, in Disneyland, the rolling horns of manufactured fake water moving musically to the sound of “It’s A Small World”.
For another song, we all clapped whole notes until a group roused the rombo, the crazy clap claps that only the Malagasy can do.
Towards the end of the service, Django, three other volunteers, and I lined up in the center aisle for Holy Communion.
“Say Amen,” Django whispered to us, and he gave instructions on how to hold our hands out in front to receive our circle of bread.
I was slightly nervous. Away from the safety of the benches, the entire church could see what I was doing, and I could feel the pressure beating down on me like the sun.
When it was my turn at the front of the line, the priest asked me a question in English. I think he said “Are you Christian or Catholic?” but I didn’t know how to tell him that I am neither. Agnostic isn’t a word I thought he’d know, so awkwardly, I said my “amen” with an upwards, questioning tone, and I scurried away back to my bench while attempting to prolong the illusion that I knew what I was doing.
However, when I sat back down and uncertainly put the bread in my mouth, the children near me giggled, and Django put his head down in laughter when another non-religious volunteer and I told him that we’d said to the priest “amen”.
I don’t know where we messed up. I had thought we were supposed to say “amen”.
Ugh. Religion is confusing.
After Easter service, we were was blessed with the chance to observe a baptism. It was for Rene’s baby daughter. Among the speeches that followed was one given by Antonas, a schoolteacher and a student in adult class. He spoke first in Malagasy, and as the others had done, he spoke again in French, but when he had finished his translation, he kept on. I couldn’t be sure at first because of his accent and because it was so unexpected, but then, there was no question.
“He’s speaking English,” I whispered in shock to the volunteer next to me. It was the first English spoken in the entire service, and it was directed right at us, the only natural English speakers in the room.
“Thank you for coming about Malagasy, about Jesus Christ,” he said.
The service concluded with candies passed out in front of the church on the hill to all the little, black Malagasy children dressed real nice.
Having stepped out of the feeling of forced formality, I unbuttoned my shirt, yanked down my pants, and forced both garments back into my bag.
I was on my way with Django and the rest of my group back to the main path. We wanted to go to camp to eat lunch before coming back to see the Easter Sunday boxing match and basketball court concert later in the day, but when we got to the path, instead of heading straight home, I quickly unzipped my bag and tossed the fancy back over my body.
The tiny classroom church that Moa and I had found one Sunday when we both had not much to do was banging Easter out on its instruments and the singing and dancing of all the people packed behind the desks of the little schoolroom.
I rushed in right before the finish, and my blessed contemplation went out the room’s wide-open windows as holy vim stimulated my veins and my bones bopped to the blasting beat of Protestant prayers escaping to Heaven in lively, upbeat songs and dances of praise.
Oh yes! Much as I had appreciated the church on the hill, this was the Christian experience that I love: the fast-moving, prayer shouting, loud manifestations of Christian joy like the black Baptists of my home whose priests speak stylishly with the organ and whose followers run laps of rejoicing ’round the room.
The teeny church’s big, fat feeling reigned over more hearts and ears and souls than even the Catholics could muster from up in their sizable building on the hill. The second service was just the wake-up I needed before walking that mile back in the heat.
The Catholics are cool, but the Protestants… man! Those are my people.