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Overview

The two elder brothers in Renel’s unfinished Antankarana Faralahy leave their younger sibling with a week’s food and travel to seek more. They decline wild bananas requested by tomb-dwelling angatra. Reaching the house of a Zanahary, they use a cooking pot, eat and depart without meeting their host. On returning, the deity discovers the place disordered and angrily commands that both be changed into fandrama. The text says the transformation occurs immediately. A footnote explains fandrama as bamboo used to conduct water across a rice field or ditch, making the resulting form a plant conduit rather than an unnamed animal.

The younger brother subsequently gives cooked bananas to the tomb spirits and follows their advice at the same house. His hospitality and cleaning earn a reward. Zanahary explicitly explains what happened to the elders. The boy then reaches a ford where his transformed brothers are present. They retain speech and ask where he is going; he answers that he is travelling to the silver market. He crosses and continues into the marriage episode, while the brothers remain at this narrated location.

No act changes them back into human bodies in the surviving text. Their later fate is also unrecorded: the heading states that the tale is unfinished because the narrator disappeared. The remaining pages concern the younger brother’s marriage and a magically provided gun. Those later benefits do not establish a rescue or new powers for the bamboo brothers. The episode’s specific plant form and retained voices distinguish it from the separate Besorongola account, in which elder brothers become dogs through leaves and lake water.

Two distinct brothersHuman-to-bamboo transformationFandrama glossed as water conduitRetain speech at a fordNo recorded restoration in the fragment
01

Origins & earliest records

Renel 1910, second volume, tale 142, pp. 277–282. The heading explicitly calls the tale unfinished because of the narrator’s disappearance; individual narrator unnamed.

02

Records & interpretation

Complete surviving tale 142, pp. 277–282, heading and notes read. Unfinished ending retained, without reconstructing lost events or copying the spoken request formula.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

  1. 01

    Contes de Madagascar, deuxième partie: Fables et fabliaux

    Charles Renel, editor and translator; Malagasy collection intermediaries · 1910

    Tale 142, Faralahy, pp. 277–282: complete surviving, explicitly unfinished account.

Family & connections

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References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

  1. Historical collected French narrative fragmentRenel 1910, unfinished Antankarana FaralahyResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

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