The Time Paradox

Time is an unreliable property; here in Madagascar it performs particularly convoluted tricks. Mornings, afternoons, hours, days can stretch on interminably, punctuated only by the cicadas’ buzzing, the roosters’ crowing, the cries of children’s games- a time loop infinitely folding back on itself. Yet when the sun goes home (masoandra mody), it somehow feels as though the day has been snatched away. Whole blocks of time disappear in such a manner; weeks, months are suddenly past and I am left wondering at the crosses on the calendar.

I call this the Time Paradox and despite dedicating endless afternoons of thought to the matter, I can offer little account as to the occurrence.

The Malagasy conceptualization of time is a world away: it is as though the modern, western 12-month calendar has been transposed over a considerably more fluid, elastic construct. Malagasy time stretches and bends, flows through and around the structures of the 7-day week, the 24-hour day, refusing to conform to its mandates, its expectations. Time is not indicated by the workweek and weekend, the onset of a new month or quarter or school year, but rather by the rising of the river and the running of muddy water, the ripening of the mangos, the Northern winds.

As the seasons melt into each other- hot, hot and rainy, hot and windy, slightly less hot, hot and it might be cycloning- a semi-nomadic population meanders about from the roads to the rice fields to the rivers, following the dictates of an unreliable weather God. In town, hot days run into hot nights run into hot days and it all sort of makes you lose your train of thought…did I mention how hot it is?

For the Malagasy this is how time has always proceeded and how they will continue to follow it. For me, this rootlessness, this state of perennial summer, remains fleeting in my grasp. Of course that’s the rub, but it often leaves me perplexed- unable to name the month, unable to summon the season- caught bewildered between a fluid, flexible shifting time and its modern manifestation I can no longer trust.

Thus, I am trapped in what an insightful outsider once called a Bird’s Nest of Time. A place where a day often feels like a year, but after a year I look back and it feels like one strange day.