Pier M.

Larson’s Ocean of Letters recounts selected events from the written history of the

Western Indian Ocean between the seventeenth- and early nineteenth-centuries in order to argue

that previous scholars have erred in attempting to map Atlantic notions of créolité onto the

region. Whether creolists who emphasize the mixed European-African nature of créolité or

“revisionists” who point to the survival of African identities within the colonial space, Larson

posits that these scholars have tended to construct a binary between assimilative creole

culture/language and a “pre-creole” African identity. Larson sees this binary as untenable in the

Western Indian Ocean, due to a combination of the social stratification of colonial polities in the

region, relative linguistic homogeneity of Madagascar and its diaspora, and local peoples’ unique

relationship to writing in the Malagasy language, all of which resulted in the widespread use of

Malagasy (and possibly other ancestral languages) amongst said diaspora well into the

nineteenth-century. For Larson, this persistence demonstrates that Indian Ocean créolité

functioned as a kind of multicultural agility that allowed its practitioners to strategically adopt

languages and identities in order to survive within the complex hierarchies of the island’s

multinational, multiracial colonial societies.

Although Larson’s argument is quite ambitious in its scope, he makes a convincing case

that the Malagasy-speaking Christian diaspora retained a predominantly written network of

communication throughout the nineteenth-century, and that this language (and its long history of

colonial-imperial appropriation and contestation) was an essential component of the Malagasy

diasporic identity. Similarly, I found that Larson’s readings of patterns of language use and

personal association amongst enslaved people, which he conceives of as markers of a process of

cultural and ethnic distinction that occurred simultaneously alongside a parallel process of

hybridity, resonated with a number of our recent readings (in particular the Thornton and Sweet
articles, despite the very different direction of each of their respective inquiries compared to

Larson’s) while usefully contrasting with others. For example, I wondered while reading whether

Larson’s model could be used to interrogate the actual commonality of Scott’s “common wind,”

perhaps with an eye towards understanding the way that the subaltern communities Scott is

writing about asserted particular group identities, or to provide critical nuance to the largely

untheorized ideological and cultural hybridity that Heywood sees in the late period of Djinga’s

rule? Likewise, Larson’s notes on the strategic dimensions of créolité, and the ability of certain

colonial subjects to represent or deny “ethnic” affiliations through language choice, could be

read as both supporting and complicating Krug’s analysis of the “Kisama meme”—while on the

one hand it partially disentangles the linguistic construct of Kisama-ness from geographic

Quisama by raising the possibility that the former is a strategic and temporary response to

colonial opposition (rather than an essential identity translated across continents), any

understanding of Kisama as a creole identity runs the risk of displacing the concept’s pointedly

Afrocentric political focus. These questions are, admittedly, based on a fairly loose interpretation

of Larson’s model of créolité that lacks his narrow concentration on language use by enslaved

and formerly enslaved Malagasy and their colonial interlocutors.

While Ocean of Letters’ linguistic focus is one of the book’s strengths, it nevertheless

results in several notable historical gaps, particularly for readers who lack Larson’s conviction in

the virtual synonymity of language and identity.1 For example, while a significant portion of the

book recounts how early missionaries would adapt their language, ritual conventions, and even

theology (especially the theology of baptism) to resonate with their Malagasy audiences,

1
Although Larson clarifies that “language… is in many respects a proxy for identity, though certainly not in any
mechanical or clear-cut way,” this qualification sits oddly alongside his later argument that the Malagasy diaspora
conceived of their shared identity in a uniquely “non-adjectival” way, as evinced in the structure of their language
use (21,320-322)
Larson’s descriptions of the seventeenth-century Malagasy understanding of such practices

remains largely indistinct beyond vague references to water-based healing. The question of how

a person may have actually integrated the nearly simultaneous experience of enslavement,

transportation, catechism, and subsequent healing is essentially waved away, with Larson

claiming that “…sufferers were far less interested in theory and theology than in results” (82).

While Larson is correct to point out that Malagasy “converts” often sought multiple types of cure

and may not have considered themselves Christians, the fact that their understanding of the

process and theory of spiritual healing differed from that of their healers does not imply that they

lacked spiritual convictions of their own. It may be worth examining whether traces of these

beliefs may yet be found in the sources that Larson has chosen to examine, and in particular in

the handful of Malagasy dictionaries produced during the period.