Laura McCullough
Speaking Malagasy on the Isle of Vanilla

The economy of Madagascar collapsed overnight when Coca-cola changed its formula, switching from real vanilla to a synthetic and didn’t bounce back until New Coke failed and Classic Coke was reintroduced, with vanilla back in. Malagasies were relieved, but conspiracy theorists thrilled to the fact that sugar was gone, replaced by High Fructose Corn Syrup.

 

Vanilla comes mainly from Madagascar, and grows

on a vine, its flowers both male and female; from planting

 

to pod can take 5 years. The language of Malagasy has no

grammatical gender. It is not a Romantic language, but has

 

borrowed a little from the French who took so much.

It’s an island language, Austronesion, and plurals are managed

 

with a beautiful efficiency: more than one book: book-book;

more than one child: child-child. It’s hard for the Latinate

 

mind to imagine. They say men give love to get sex and

women give sex to get love, and today a man told me

 

he doesn’t trust a woman who gives blow jobs. It’s all

about power, he said, and her need to control the man.

 

I didn’t buy it; I have my own conspiracy theories, prefer

real vanilla to synthetic, sugar cane to HFS. I rarely give in

 

to a sweet tooth, but now and then, I do, and when I do,

I want it, not like jet fuel, but a slow, complex burn,

 

the line between control and surrender delicate and uncertain,

like dependent economies, and tenuous like the vanilla flower

 

blooming for only one day, both male and female, the thinnest

of membranes between them waiting to be stripped away.

 
Found In Volume 37, No. 06
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  • Laura McCullough
Laura McCullough
About the Author

 Laura McCullough’s books include The Wild Night Dress, finalist, Miller Williams contest (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), Jersey Mercy (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (2013), Ripple & Snap (2013), and Panic (Alice James Books, 2011).