The highly illustrated entanglement of the pirates of Madagascar

It is impossible not to tremble with emotion and literally fall to your knees when in the preface of a book you find this: “Let us tell, then, a narrative of magic, lies, naval battles, kidnapped princesses, human hunting, shoddy kingdoms and fraudulent ambassadors. , spies, jewel thieves, poisoners, satanic worship and sexual obsession, which is what underlies the origin of modern freedom. After which the author writes: “I hope the reader has as much fun as I have.” And what's more, the thing is about pirates!

Unfortunately, after such a formidable incitement to reading, what the American anthropologist and activist David Graeber offers in

Pirate Illustration

(Ariel, 2024)

,

subtitled “buccaneers, cheerful legends and radical democracy”, is less a fascinating book than, alas, a real gibberish. What is presented to us as a revolutionary and daring (and friendly) work about pirates, with the thesis that the buccaneers settled in Madagascar had, when the egalitarian forms of government with which they experimented spread in Europe, a role in the genesis of The Enlightenment (nothing less) ends up being an exhibitionist and almost onanist exercise in historical and anthropological knowledge.

The author leaves the reader (yes) stunned with his handling of the most detailed data on Malagasy history and ethnography. It is not in vain that he did extensive field work there and knows that complex island world of intimidating names (Betsimisaraka, Ratsimilaho, Ambonavola, Varangarombato) like the back of your hand. The dissertation is brilliant and funny, and provocative, but also enervating: it is impossible, even if you try to stay engaged, to maintain interest when Graeber is great and makes you lose the thread again and again by bringing up facts, true and false (he admits this himself), like a magician rabbits out of a top hat. All to bring water to his mill.

Graeber (New York, 1961-Venice, 2020), son of a member of the International Brigades and a trade unionist, was a brilliant, rebellious and iconoclastic thinker, who brought together anthropology and anarchism in a curious synthesis. They kicked him out of Yale because of his radicalism. Maurice Bloch considered him the best theorist of anthropology of his generation and Peter Frankopan and Simon Sebag Montefiore, two historians who should always be paid attention to, have praised him. Among his works, many of them published in Spanish, are the groundbreaking

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,

with David Wengrow;

In Debt: An Alternative History of Economics

and

Shit Jobs: A Theory

(all three also in Ariel).

Blackbeard or the fictional Long John Silver and Sparrow would probably be surprised that we can see them as proletarian figures of liberation

In

Pirate Illustration,

one of the most attractive ideas related to the Golden Age of piracy is explored: that those scoundrels who cut throats who could make you walk on the plank were actually pioneers of libertarian thought. In truth, Blackbeard or the fictional Long John Silver and Sparrow would probably be surprised that we can see them as proletarian figures of liberation and their ships, whether

Queen Anne's Revenge, The Hispaniola

, or The Black Pearl

, as democratic experiments in egalitarian communities that waved the flag of utopia alongside the Jolly Roger. But Graeber takes the idea further by suggesting that the real and imaginary pirate kingdoms of the east coast of Madagascar in the 17th and 18th centuries (a sort of

Black Sails

in the Indian Ocean) inspired the Enlightenment movement (patapalo and Voltaire!). And they did it together with sectors of the Malagasy population itself, women included.

Having said all this, after the gale of episodes, names and hypotheses that Graeber throws at you (even notes in Malagasy!) from which you come out distraught and thinking that you lack the intellectual punch to follow him (don't worry, we're grown up now: it's fault of him), reading

Pirate Illustration

leaves you with a bittersweet residue of unintelligible things but also fragments of wonderful stories and legends. Among them, the myth of Libertalia, the image of John Plantain, king of Ranter Bay receiving on the beach with two pistols at his belt and his many wives; the adventures of the trickster adventurer Count of Benyowsky who believed himself to be the white rajah of Madagascar; the love magic or

fanafody

of the Malagasy women to get foreign men... In short, what a shame the distance between the book you have read and the one you could have read.

Look for it in your bookstore

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