"Collecting the words among the trash": Writing and poetics of waste in the work of Jean-Luc Raharimanana

This article analyzes the ways in which the work of the Malagasy writer Jean-Luc Raharimanana foregrounds waste both as a source of disgust and a symbol of transgression and insolence. It scrutinizes the symbolic dimension attached to garbage, including what it unveils about society and politics. Finally, it explores the aesthetic and ethical dimensions involved in the representation of garbage and shows how the literary works under consideration suggest another form of poetics, which relentlessly destabilizes through an oscillation between sublimation and desublimation of waste. Subversively accumulating words, humans and garbage, Raharimanana's writing angers at a society of exclusions and "democratic promises".