Beautiful State of Decay

As it falls apart before our eyes, Madagascar is a beautiful disaster. Roads disintegrate. Hillsides collapse. All crumbles and slides, helpless to withstand the irreversible acts of water. Overgrown trails run red with their own demise and wide, sweeping rivers empty murkily into the sea. Vegetation creeps, tendrils not long beaten back by human hands. The earth is in sway and civilization itself fights a slow-motion collapse. In villages of tumbledown shacks and ramshackle backways, even houses of residence share the architecture of those abandoned: a tilted geometry of failing angles.

My house too, though of stone sturdiness, is carved out from under and within by industrious ants and determined vermin. Vines creep up the porch and spiders extend their webs out of reach. Termite dust drifts down from the rafters, water leaks from the corners, and one awaits the day of total, irrevocable roof, or wall, or foundation collapse.

Even, or maybe especially, the cities of this country-- with their worn and tattered centers, their dirt-roaded, rust-roofed sprawl-- speak to the more prosperous days past and the steady corrosive passage of time since. In decrepit Diego, the university looms like a bombed-out, Soviet era establishment, the glassless windows of the dormitories aglow at night with the light of students' cooking fires. Palm trees twine their way up through the foundations of a colonial mansion, seeking the sun. Only the hulk remains- stone steps that lead to nowhere, shattered, spidery marble, frames that gaze emptily over the vast and placid bay- a remnant of something gone but not forgotten.

The fabric of the nation itself clings tenuously. Linked by an infrastructure that is frail and failing, the federal government- in perpetual limbo- attempts to right its ship and cohere its state. But as the vegetation enfolds, as stone houses crumble and palm houses tilt with the sliding earth, as rivers pour brackish-brown into the sea, Madagascar's periphery retreats to a local existence long-trusted. Compartmentalized, it follows ancient rhythms and disregards the call of modernity with few taxes collected and fewer services provided, a cycle of indifference further divorces national politics from the vast peripheral populations: police are supported by bribes, teachers are paid in rice. This is the state of decay.

But there is beauty of untold scale in this collapse. In those crumbling roads and failing angles, in the tattered cities and ramshackle villages, one finds a world apart and a world resilient. Here, one believes, what falls apart may once again be.