The Edge of Aurelia’s World

I think it's important to talk about how ideologies can convince so many people to fight for social structures that were never built with their interests in mind. That's as true today as it has been throughout history. But before I get to that, I need to describe the world these ideologies build, because Fire Tree and Shadow Tree both take place inside structures designed to keep control in the hands of the privileged few. Aurelia's life, and the lives of her daughters Martine, Daphne, and Mariclou, are shaped by exactly where their family stood within it.

Diego-Suarez in the 1930s ran on rank the way a ship runs its watch rota. Everyone on board knows their place without having to be told.

Grands and Petits

The French who settled Madagascar called themselves 'Colons', but the word did a lot of hiding. At the top were the grands colons, the plantation owners, shipping agents, senior officials, families with land concessions dating back to the conquest of the island in the 1890s. They sent their children to private schools in Tananarive, Diego Suarez, or better, to France. Their wives did not work. Below them, more numerous and far less secure, were the petits blancs: clerks, mechanics, café owners, small traders, the wives who kept the accounts because there was nobody else to do it. Many of these families had arrived with nothing and built a shop or a bakery out of a rented room and a loan from someone with better prospects than they had. French law made no distinction between a petit blanc and a grand colon. Custom did, and custom did not need a legal system to enforce it.

Governor Léon Cayla ran the colony for most of the decade, from 1930 to 1939. The system he presided over was built to preserve this hierarchy. It didn’t need anyone in Paris to write it into law. Underneath both classes of colon stood the Malagasy majority, governed by a separate code, the indigénat. This could let an administrator imprison a Malagasy subject without trial for minor offences that would never have troubled a French citizen at all. For example, a tax paid late, a bow not deep enough, a road not cleared quickly enough for the passage of an official. Forced labour quotas fell on Malagasy men. They never fell on the poorest petit blanc, however poor he was. Where the law refused to draw a line, custom drew it instead, in indelible ink.

People Who Didn't Fit

None of this was as tidy as the colons liked to pretend. The Merina, the highland people who had ruled most of the island as a unified kingdom before the French arrived, kept a fluency in French education and French bureaucracy that the colonial pyramid was not built to accommodate. A Merina schoolteacher might write better French than the harbour master who outranked him on paper. The old queen had been in exile on La Réunion since 1897, but the manners of a court that had once dealt with London and Paris as something close to an equal did not vanish with her passport. Colonial society dealt with this the way it dealt with most things it found inconvenient. It built a second, smaller hierarchy alongside the first one, so that a Merina civil servant could outrank a coastal Malagasy while still being refused entry to a tennis club that let in a harbour master's clerk.

Then there were the families that didn’t fit into any box. Children of French fathers and Malagasy mothers were sometimes acknowledged, given a name and a place in a French school. More often they were not and grew up belonging fully to neither of the two worlds the town was so determined to keep apart.

Where Aurelia Stands

This is the world I placed Aurelia in, and not at the top of it. She runs a bakery financed by a lover rather than inherited from a husband, in a town where that single fact would have been noted, and repeated, at every table she was never invited to sit at. At least, though, she made an effort to conceal the history. Her youngest two children carried her husband's name, not her lover's, the same name as their older half-siblings, a distinction that remained unspoken and was acknowledged all the same, with a knowing look. This didn’t make Mariclou and her younger brother outsiders exactly. They were Girauds. It made them precisely what they were, French enough to matter and poor enough to be watched, one bad harvest or one broken engagement away from a fall the grands colons never had to think about.

I did not invent the precariousness. I found it in the research and then had to decide how much Mariclou would be permitted to notice about her own life, and how much she would simply have lived inside without naming, the way you don't notice the tilt of a floor you've walked across for thirty years. Mariclou wanted the uprooting itself, a world where no one would ever know traded for a world where everyone already did, just as much as she wanted James.

By 1942, when the war finally reached the beaches near Diego-Suarez, none of this architecture had gone anywhere. It just had less time to enforce itself. That's the world Operation Ironclad exploded into, and the world Mariclou carries out of the country with her four years later, onto a ship bound for Toulon and a family in England with a hierarchy of its own, no less rigid for being unspoken, and considerably colder. A world that would, if it knew, take a very dim view.