Here and There by A. A. Gill Read Free Book Online Page A

and chilli sauce. The room’s cheap. It has votive pictures of Christ and his mum, and fairy lights. It’s unmistakably Catholic. There are other people here. They look a bit Latin American, a touch southern Indian, a little bit northern African. There’s a woman with an elaborate ’50s hairdo and a man wearing a woman’s Sunday church hat without irony or, as far as I can tell, insanity. There’s another man in a suit with a pork-pie hat. Outside, the street looks sort of French, colonial, perhaps a bit West Indian. Run-down poor two-storey shophouses, but polite and nice. The road’s more holes than road. And there are human rickshaws. There are very few places in the world that still have human rickshaws, and there’s a big old Asian cow with a hump being reluctantly dragged by the nose by a small boy who is definitely African. It’s hot. And it’s a conundrum.
    We could be in Central America. Brazil, the Bahamas, the French bits of the Caribbean. Beyond the town, the landscape looks like central Asia in part, and Bali in another part. This is the most unexpected, mixed-up place I can remember. ‘It’s mad,’ said Tom, ‘really mad.’ And indeed that’s exactly where we were: Madagascar.
    This place, or these places, confirms a theory I’ve been incubating about the shape of the world. Countries that’ve been surrounded by sea grow up different from everywhere else. Nations whose borders are random lines in the sand or the snow or run along rivers or roads may not like their neighbours, but they grow to be like them. It’s a homogeneity that grows from propinquity, whether you like it or not. You only have to hang out in the Middle East for a couple of days to be surprised by how similar all the furiously denouncing and competing groups are, how similar their demands, how similar their fury, how it all seems like a series of echoes. European countries merge, one into the other, till at the edges they all become Monaco, or Switzerland or Holland or Belgium or Luxembourg. But the islands – the UK, Ireland, Corsica – are all still distinctively, for better or worse, their own places. It’s a geographical version of the old human quandary: are we formed by nature or nurture? Are countries made by culture or geography? Islands prove, I think, that geography makes people what they are.
    The most socially distinctive places I’ve ever visited are, in order, Cuba, Iceland, Haiti, Tasmania and Madagascar. Island people become vital and exotic. They make up stories about themselves and have obsessive fantasies and shared superstitions because over time those shared tics and eccentricities become communally held character traits. All people from small islands dance funny. When in Cuba, it’s funny, but brilliant and original, spectacularly erotic and deeply enviable, but it’s still odd. Cubans dance all the time. In the queue for the chemist, sitting down, in their sleep. Icelanders also dance weirdly, with strange Nordic exuberance, like men with imaginary salmon down their pants. As soon as we landed in Madagascar, I said to Tom, we’ve gotta find some dancers, they’re going to be terpsichorean gold. And they were. A sort of synchronised flashing, with cramp, to music that is the African version of the Macarena, played on guitars made out of fruit boxes.
    People haven’t been in Madagascar all that long. Still new here – still learning the ropes. A mere 1300 years. The oldest island on earth with the youngest human inhabitants. Actually, Iceland’s younger, by about 500 years. The original refugees here didn’t come as you might expect from Africa just over the way, but from right across the Indian Ocean from Indonesia. Later, people did come from across the strait from Mozambique to make a singularly attractive half-Asian, half-African people who rise above the sum of their parts and, thanks to a brief