42 The Last Fight

Le dernier combat

Tananarive |

Madagascar

French

Behind the scenes

This text was born from a real experience that left a deep impression on me: attempting cardiac resuscitation to bring someone back to life. In those moments, the world seems to fade away, and you find yourself alone with a body you are trying to bring back among the living, holding on to learned gestures – sometimes even to the rhythm of a song like “Staying Alive” to keep the pace.

I imagined this scene in Antananarivo, Madagascar, where cockfights sometimes draw passionate crowds. The shouting, the dust, and the money at stake are enough to ignite the fervor of the crowd.

In both the text and the illustration, two fights for life intersect: that of two roosters driven by the crowd, and that of a human being whom others are trying to save in silence.
The narrator’s gaze shifts between the two, like a troubling mirror of our relationship with life.

Echoes of the world

In Madagascar, the everyday language is Malagasy, an Austronesian language whose distant origins trace back to Southeast Asia. French, inherited from the colonial period, remains an official language and is still widely used in administration, education, and the media, but it is not the primary language for most of the population.

In the text appears the word lamba, a traditional Malagasy cloth that plays an important role in daily life. It can be used as clothing, as a covering, or during important moments in life.

In Madagascar, certain lamba are also linked to funeral rites, when the deceased are wrapped in cloth during ceremonies.

In the story and in the illustration, the colorful lamba left on the ground becomes more than a simple object: a fragile trace of a life that has just changed forever.