Into the Maze: Surface and Center, Place, Person, and Potency

Abstract

If the poem, the painting, and the sonata can be “classics” in Steiners sense, why not places? The shrine (doany) of Ndramisara, home of the relics of the “four men” (efadahy) who stand at the foundation of the kingdom of Boina, is such a place. In this chapter I visit the city of Mahajanga and the shrine located in a small village on its outskirts. I begin with some of my own perspectives on these places—perspectives characteristic of first visits—and conclude with certain Sakalava reflections on first appearances, surfaces, and depths.

But I repeat: all understanding falls short. It is as if the poem, the painting, the sonata drew around itself a last circle, a space for inviolate autonomy. I define the classic as that around which this space is perennially fruitful. It questions us. It demands that we try again. It makes of our misprisions, of our partialities and disagreements not a relativistic chaos, an “anything goes,” but a deepening. Worthwhile interpretations, criticism to be taken seriously, are those which malie their limitations, their defeats visible. In turn, this visibility helps malie manifest the inexhaustibility of the object. The Bush burned brighter because its interpreter was not allowed too near.

—George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life

… [the] task is to demonstrate how those whom power-holders consider to be marginal are central to themselves.

— Maurice Bloch, Foreword to The Time of the Gypsies