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AUTHOR’S JOURNEYS
An island, many souls
Madagascar does not have a single face. In
the coastal villages, the Vezo fishermen fo-
llow the rhythm of the sea; in the highlands,
the Merina, an ethnic group, build brick hou-
ses and celebrate the famadihana, the “re-
turn of the dead”: an ancestral rite in which
families unearth their ancestors to wrap
them in new cloths and dance with them.
Life and death, the visible and the invisible,
coexist here naturally. Nothing is extreme or
exclusive: everything is intertwined. Mada-
gascar is a frontier in itself, between Africa
and Asia, between what is ancient and what
is yet to come.
Every gesture, every glance and every
colour seem to remind us: in Madagas-
car, diversity is neither an exception nor
an accident, but the very essence of its
existence, the pulse that unites its peo-
ples, its landscapes and its beliefs.
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