Florent Bédécarrats

Flore Dazet

Isabelle Guérin

Mireille Razafindrakoto

François Roubaud

Tracking the Cost of Living, for Whom and at What Price?

Introduction

Measuring the cost of living is a crucial aspect of a country's economic, social and political life, and at the same time a source of much controversy: who defines what is meant by "cost", who measures, how, for what purpose and for what use? An indicator is never neutral. It involves conventions (and therefore values), technical devices (and therefore skills and dedicated resources) and power relationships (Martin, 2020). What is more, the statistical tools and indicators in use in a given context at a given time are both a reflection of and a catalyst for modes of government [START_REF] Desrosières | Prouver et Gouverner[END_REF][START_REF] Stapleford | The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000[END_REF][START_REF] Tooze | Statistics and the German State, 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge[END_REF], including postcolonial ones [START_REF] Glasman | Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs: Minimal Humanity[END_REF]Hibou, 2011;Jerven, 2013;[START_REF] Samuel | Calcul macroéconomique et modes de gouvernement: les cas de la Mauritanie et du Burkina Faso[END_REF]. These involve numerous actors at different scales, including international organizations (Iversen et al., 2023;Naudet, 2000) and increasingly, the humanitarian world [START_REF] Glasman | Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs: Minimal Humanity[END_REF].

Among public statistics tools, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is probably the most controversial because it has a prominent "retroactive" role on reality [START_REF] Desrosières | Prouver et Gouverner[END_REF]. The CPI is used both as a reflection of reality (inflation indicator, parameter in the measurement of poverty rates and purchasing power parities, deflator for the share of GDP corresponding to the informal sector, etc.) and to index or negotiate wages, pensions, social transfers, aid programs or financial obligations (Jany-Catrice, 2020). These two roles vary significantly according to time and place. The CPI is nothing more than an index tracking the evolution of consumer market prices. This is quite different from the cost of living, defined in a broad economic sense as "the cost of maintaining a given standard of living" (Graf, 2020b, p. 1). The notion of 'standard of living' then lends itself to multiple interpretations, as does the idea of cost (which may or may not be monetary). Despite the many limitations of the CPI in estimating the cost of living (which we will detail in the paper), this indicator is still used and understood by many as the least bad approximation of the cost of living, whether by economists [START_REF] Deaton | Getting prices right: what should be done?[END_REF] or international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (Graf, 2020a).

The socio-history of the CPI has been conducted mainly in the countries that have shaped it (Europe, North America) [START_REF] Hayes | The social history of quantifying inflation: a sociological critique[END_REF]Jany-Catrice, 2020;[START_REF] Stapleford | The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000[END_REF], in hyperinflationary contexts (Argentina, Brazil) [START_REF] Daniel | Battles over numbers: the case of the Argentine consumer price index (2007-2015)[END_REF]Neiburg, 2011) or contexts of very strong contestation (example of Guadeloupe, a French overseas department) [START_REF] Boris | Statistics and political violence: reflections on the social conflict in 2009 in Guadeloupe[END_REF]. This socio-history reveals the CPI's pivotal role in the making of welfare states and the regulation of wage and social conflicts. Its successive transformations over the past century clearly reflect the shifts of power relations between capital and labor [START_REF] Hayes | The social history of quantifying inflation: a sociological critique[END_REF][START_REF] Stapleford | The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000[END_REF], the uneven role and autonomy of experts over time and space (Neiburg, 2011), the highly variable influence of social reformers, trade unions, consumer associations and other civil society bodies [START_REF] Hayes | The social history of quantifying inflation: a sociological critique[END_REF]Jany-Catrice, 2020;Neiburg, 2011). It also reveals the unequal but often key role weight of private players [START_REF] Daniel | Battles over numbers: the case of the Argentine consumer price index (2007-2015)[END_REF][START_REF] Stapleford | The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000[END_REF] and the growing role of financial markets (Jany-Catrice, 2020).

Nevertheless, what role does the CPI play in fragmented economies, where self-subsistence persists and partly escapes the market due to self-consumption farming, hunting and gathering? How can we measure the cost of living in a context of chronic food insecurity and recurring famines, where it is rather the absence of goods, services and expenditure that are problematic and threaten the very reproduction of life? What place is there for national indicators when the State is failing, under an aid regime and when many policies are driven by international organizations? This article proposes some answers to these questions, using the example of Madagascar, a former French colony that combines chronic food insecurity, extreme poverty and a fragile state under an aid regime.

The Malagasy population's monetary standard of living has fallen steadily since independence (1960). After twenty years of "socialism" , the transition to a market economy failed to deliver the economic growth and social progress expected. Urban per capita consumption fell by half between 1962, the date of the first existing survey, and 2010 (Razafindrakoto et al., 2020: 14). Droughts, cyclones and endemic poverty cause repeated famines and chronic food insecurity, particularly in the South, nicknamed the land of "kéré" (famine). Monetarization remains weak in this region. Coping with the cost of living means, above all, producing one's own food (rice, maize, cassava), having a small amount of livestock to sell in the event of a hard blow [START_REF] Bidou | Pauvreté et vulnérabilité alimentaire dans le Sud de Madagascar : les apports d'une approche diachronique sur un panel de ménages[END_REF][START_REF] Blanarova | Etude de faisabilité pour la mise en place de transferts monétaires pour la prévention de la malnutrition chronique à Madagascar[END_REF], mobilizing social networks and negotiating eligibility for humanitarian aid, which has been massively present since the great famine of 1990-1992 [START_REF] Gondard | Comprendre les systèmes locaux de protection sociale. Éléments d'analyse dans trois Fokontany du Grand Sud Malgache[END_REF]. On a national scale, Madagascar is characterized by high levels of aid in relation to public spending,1 but relatively low in relation to other comparable countries (Naudet and Rua, 2018). Above all, the irregularity and "selectivity" of aid (i.e., conditional on "good" economic and political results, which the Malagasy state has often failed to achieve) have helped to shrink and weaken Malagasy state institutions over time (Razafindrakoto et al., 2020: 173-184). Since independence, political crises have succeeded one another, to the extent that they have been described as an "iron law" (Razafindrakoto et al., 2020: 3). In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, UN agencies and humanitarian NGOs, mainly international, play a significant role [START_REF] Berrou | Qui pilote si personne ne gouverne? La politique publique de protection sociale à Madagascar au prisme de l'analyse des réseaux sociaux[END_REF]. They steered the timid beginnings of a social protection policy, promoting a pro "assistance" approach based on cash transfers, to the detriment of a universalist approach based on structural policies of access to rights. The Malagasy State is present via various ministries, but these mainly play the role of intermediaries, often in conflict with each other [START_REF] Berrou | Qui pilote si personne ne gouverne? La politique publique de protection sociale à Madagascar au prisme de l'analyse des réseaux sociaux[END_REF].

Our analysis required in-depth statistical expertise, as a precise understanding of the technical underpinnings of price measurements is essential to identify and analyze their strategical implications properly. We also mobilized a political economy approach, which is a critical examination of the social and political construction of numerical data, recognizing that statistics are both tools of evidence and instruments of governance, shaped by societal beliefs, power dynamics, and historical contingencies (Labrousse, 2014). The article questions the making and use of indicators resorted to as an imperfect and unsatisfactory proxy to account for the cost of living, and shows that technical modalities reflect contrasting visions of what counts and who counts or not; and are also indicative of who governs and for what purpose. Roles were divided within the team of authors to promote both access to reliable sources and axiological neutrality: three authors had an insider experience of the study object and provided relevant information and a close understanding of the matter, while the two other authors had no involvement and emphasized a distanciated and critical analysis. We therefore were able to draw on several sources: over twenty years' experience in the production of Malagasy statistics, including in collaboration with the Institut National de la Statistique de Madagascar (INSTAT) and a series of research-oriented household surveys (Razafindrakoto,and Roubaud), three months' participant observation in a humanitarian NGO as part of a doctoral thesis (Dazet), interviews with a dozen actors involved in the production and use of indicators related to the cost of living issue (INSTAT, Afristat, World Bank, AFD (the official French aid agency), NGOs) (Bédécarrats and Guérin).

Our analysis reveals three ways of grasping the cost of living: the National Statistical Institute's CPI, used for macroeconomic steering and negotiations with international donors; alternative analyses and sometimes surveys produced by research teams concerned with accounting for the persistence of poverty and inequality; indicators and surveys of humanitarian aid actors, aimed at steering aid distribution and focused on areas and populations at risk of famine. This profusion of indicators, surveys and analyses -referred to here as "cost of living numbers", with little coordination between them, illustrates the different approaches to the cost of living. The latter can be understood as an average consumer price supposedly valid on a national scale (the consumer price index of the National Institute of Statistics); as the result of individual (or household) consumption behaviors that vary according to social groups, space and time (microeconomists specializing in poverty and inequality); or as a physiological minimum necessary to avoid malnutrition (humanitarian actors). The diversity of cost of living numbers also highlights the fragmentation and the incommensurability of the economic lives of the Malagasy population, in a context where the subsistence economy remains significant, combining material, social and symbolic values. Last and not least, the diversity of cost of living numbers illustrates a fragmented mode of government, in which NGOs and international organizations play a leading role (Lavigne Delville, 2017).

The CPI in Madagascar: An indispensable yet flawed official price tracking

The fitness of the CPI for the purpose of assessing the cost of living is a thorny issue among economists. Historians of economic thought have shown that the CPI emerged in North America and Europe between the end of the 19th century and the First World War as an attempt to assess the cost of living, primarily as a way to arbitrate wage disputes, and CPI calculation became from the outset one of the primary missions of national statistical offices (NSOs) (Goldberg and Moye, 1985: 34-38;[START_REF] Stapleford | The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000[END_REF][START_REF] Tooze | Statistics and the German State, 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge[END_REF]. Interest in this aggregate grew even stronger during the 20th century, with the rise of Keynesian policies, which made lower unemployment conditional on higher inflation (through the price-wage loop), and then with the advent of neo-liberal approaches, which considered that low inflation was necessary to achieve sustained growth. Its central role in wage adjustment and key macroeconomic management led to the extension of the CPI by colonial empires to colonized territories, then to its improvement after independence.

Several features of Madagascar CPI show that its use for monitoring the cost of living has always been key. A price index restricted to European families dates back to 1949, and we had to wait until 1964 for an index specific to the Malagasy population living in the capital [START_REF] Rakotomalala | Le nouvel indice des prix à la consommation de Madagascar[END_REF]. Created in 1947, and having changed its name several times, the current Institut national de la statistique de Madagascar (INSTAT) has always included consumer price monitoring among its core functions (Conseil d'Etat, 1947, Article 28; Ministère de l'Economie et du Plan, 2017, Article 1). Until 1996, the INSTAT did not compute a single CPI, but instead kept on producing two separate ones: one index for "European and modern family consumption" and one for the "Malagasy or traditional family consumption" [START_REF] Rakotomalala | Le nouvel indice des prix à la consommation de Madagascar[END_REF]. This reflects the concern inherent to the colonial system that the remuneration of colonists and expatriates should be indexed appropriately, and the fact that local elites profoundly shifted their consumption patterns to adopt habits similar to the Europeans' [START_REF] Tisseau | Le pain et le riz, emblèmes identitaires en situation coloniale (Hautes Terres centrales de Madagascar, 19ème-20ème siècles)[END_REF]. At the interface between the traditional and the colonial systems, plantation workers suffered steep stalls in their nominal wages and it is only after the 1947 anti-colonial uprising (savagely repressed by the French) that worker unions started organizing and bargaining for nominal wages to follow the rise of staple prices [START_REF] Waast | Salaires et prix dans le nord malgache au 20ème siècle[END_REF].

Substantial changes in CPI methods were introduced in 2000 in the wake of the devaluation of the CFA Franc. The West African Economic and Monetary Union, France and the European Union feared that this measure would destabilize West African economies and societies and cause populations to "spill over" -in the words of an Afristat expert involved in the discussions at the time2 . It was then decided to improve price monitoring techniques, and these were transposed over the following decade to Central African countries and then to Madagascar. These improvements included collecting prices in several towns and no longer just in the capital, diversifying and stabilizing the products and outlets monitored, and adapting the techniques to the particularities of local economies, with two notable innovations. Making actual purchases aims to take into account the omnipresent haggling that makes posted or declared prices meaningless. Weighing products aimed to capture the real price of products whose units of measurement (a cup, a heap, a bucket, etc.) are not standardized.

Today, the CPI is calculated by taking 19,000 monthly price collections for 539 "product varieties" at 1,810 sales outlets (supermarkets, specialty stores, grocery stores and weekly markets) in the capital and six major provincial cities. In each locality, on average, three agents are in charge of visiting the sales outlets at recurring times and on recurring days to collect sales prices. Aggregate price variations are calculated by applying to the variation of each variety-product a weight corresponding to the sum of consumption of this varietyproduct measured by a household consumption benchmark survey. The resulting index is referred to as a base 100 for a reference year.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) establishes standards and best practices to bolster the credibility and global comparability of CPIs produced by NSOs. The CPI frequently garners media attention (Graf, 2020a) and in Madagascar, our interviews confirmed that it is a common topic in everyday discussions about the cost of living, at least among urban wage workers. Yet, there is a prevailing skepticism among journalists and the general public regarding the reliability of the price index published by INSTAT. Many often lean on the prices of specific goods and services, such as rice, gasoline, and public transport fares, as more trustworthy indicators. This public skepticism towards the CPI is frequently dismissed by professional statisticians. In our interviews, several experts from INSTAT and Afristat or other macroeconomists spontaneously drew an analogy to the "perceived temperature," suggesting that the public's sense of rising living costs might be analogous to a "wind chill" effect -a perception not necessarily aligned with the actual reality and biased by the specificity of their position. Well beyond public opinion, criticism is also coming from microeconomists, especially those concerned with issues of poverty and inequality.

Household surveys, microeconomic analyses and the mirage of a national cost of living index

Microeconomists regularly highlight the inadequacy of national indices that are blind to the extreme heterogeneity of Madagascar's economy and society. Criticisms relate to aggregation methods, the composition of the 'basket', and the ways in which public services, the informal economy and selfconsumption are taken into account. These criticisms are based on household surveys carried out by various research teams specializing in poverty issues, mostly foreign, sometimes in collaboration with Malagasy universities and INSTAT.

The issue of aggregation refers to the way in which weights are established between the goods and services, making up the consumer basket (the "product varieties" referred to in the previous paragraph). INSTAT, like all national statistical institutes (NSI), uses a method referred to as "plutocratic" [START_REF] Prais | Whose Cost of Living?[END_REF]. The CPI draws on the relative importance of each good and service in the total expenditure of surveyed households. In so doing, it predominantly reflects the lived reality of rich households, who account for a larger share of the total expenditure covered by the CPI. Conversely, the method minimizes the lived reality of the poor, who weigh only in proportion to the amount of their -smaller -expenditure. There is an alternative and "democratic" approach, which consists in calculating a ratio of expenditure per good and service at household level, and then averaging these ratios to calculate the weights. This method equally represents the rich and the poor. In Tanzania, Mkenda and Ngasamiaku (2009) show that the "plutocratic" method tends to underestimate inflation, which turns out to be higher on products proportionally more consumed by the poor. The International Monetary Fund admits that the plutocratic approach remains the norm for NSOs, as it is better suited to generating a macroeconomic measure of inflation and deflators3 for national accounts (Graf, 2020a: 5). But this means that it does not really reflect the cost of living, even when aggregated nationally. In Madagascar, the CPI is restricted to urban areas, while 85% of the urban population belongs to the two wealthiest quintiles of the national population4 . The plutocratic bias is therefore particularly acute.

The issue of composition refers to the contents of the consumer basket. The composition implies choices that cannot be neutral; they reflect spending that is deemed necessary and desirable or, on the contrary, problematic or undesirable. This in turn reflects both value judgments and political choices. The socio-history of the CPI shows the recurrent criticism of the omission to take into account certain expenses such as taxes, housing costs, so-called luxury expenses (including tobacco), etc. [START_REF] Touchelay | Les ordres de la mesure des prix. Luttes politiques, bureaucratiques et sociales autour de l'indice des prix à la consommation (1911-2012)[END_REF]. Moreover, the composition of the basket is assumed to be relatively stable over time, and reference baskets are rarely updated: at the time of its revision in 1997, the INSTAT basket of goods was over 25 years old [START_REF] Brilleau | Mise en place d'un indice des prix à la consommation dans les 7 grands centres urbains du pays[END_REF] and the one used in 2023 dates back from 2012. In line with a neoclassical economic understanding of behavior, these goods are assumed to reflect household "utility" (defined as the satisfaction derived from the consumption of a good or service), which is also assumed to be stable over time so that the basket reflects a constant standard of living. The underlying assumption is that of the "rational" consumer, who seeks to maximize her utility independently of constraints other than prices and incomes. However, we know that consumption is driven not only by the search for utility but also and sometimes above all by subsistence imperatives, social norms and imitation. The quality of goods may evolve more by constraint than by choice (Jany-Catrice, 2020), due to changes in product supply or social consumer expectations, which sometimes increase quickly.

The capacity of the CPI to adequately translate the cost of living depends on the representativeness of the spending patterns factored into the consumption basket and their weights, which are derived from household surveys [START_REF] Graf | Introduction, Overview, and Basic Steps for the Consumer Price Index Development[END_REF]. The more frequent and reliable household surveys are, the better the CPI can reflect current population behaviors and living conditions. However, striking a balance between the quality of consumption data and the associated costs of regular, detailed surveys remains particularly challenging for an underfunded statistical apparatus such as the Malagasy one. Yet Madagascar faced significant changes in consumption patterns. For example, between the 1960s and 1990s, while the country was going through a severe economic recession, inflation, combined with an explosion of informal employment in services, led to a dramatic fall in real incomes [START_REF] Ravelosoa | Dynamiques de la consommation dans l'agglomération d'Antananarivo sur la longue période, et stratégies d'adaptation des ménages face à la crise[END_REF]. This in turn led to an explosion in the proportion of income spent on food (almost half in 1995, compared to 38% in 1961), and a substantial change in the type of food consumed. The share of cereals in the food budget increased on average from 28.4% to 46.4% between 1962 and 1995. During the same period, the share of meat fell from 40.1% to 24.2% [START_REF] Ravelosoa | Dynamiques de la consommation dans l'agglomération d'Antananarivo sur la longue période, et stratégies d'adaptation des ménages face à la crise[END_REF]. In other words, it is drastic changes in consumer behavior that made it possible to cope with a chronic crisis.

The CPI is supposed to reflect the price households must pay to maintain constant living conditions. In essence, it is not intended to include public services, which are considered free. However, the omission of public services poses three particularly acute problems in Madagascar. The use of public services is a first indicator of their quality, yet the rate of use of health and education services has fallen sharply in Madagascar over the last few decades 5 . Next comes the fact that public servants often demand payments from the users for services that are supposedly free, which is well documented through specific localized surveys [START_REF] Garchitorena | In Madagascar, use of health care services increased when fees were removed: lessons for universal health coverage[END_REF]Honda et al., 2011;Lesne, 2013). But national household surveys collect this information only partially and without regular follow-up over time 6 . By way of example, health represents 1 % of expenditure in the Malagasy CPI basket, whereas according to the World Health Organization (WHO)'s sector accounts, in 2020, 34% of the country's health expenditures were "out-of-pocket expenditure" (i.e., paid by households) 7 . The third problem relates to the travel and waiting times required to access public services; these represent significant "opportunity costs", which may change over time depending on the State of public administrations, roads or climatic variations [START_REF] Evans | Geographic barriers to care persist at the community healthcare level: evidence from rural Madagascar[END_REF].

The partial inclusion of the informal sector is an additional challenge and undermines the ability of CPI to properly aggregate prices at national and macroeconomic levels. Price collection is limited to weekly market outlets in major cities, obscuring a myriad of other outlets. The latest available data, in 2012, estimated the informal economy at 36% of non-farm market GDP and 93% of the working population (INSTAT, 2013). Faly Rakotomanana, a statistician at INSTAT (whom we interviewed for this paper) points out in his doctoral thesis (2011) the various biases related to the low coverage by the CPI of the informal economy. Based on an extensive survey, he shows that, in a period when the CPI increased by 65%, supply prices in the informal sector rose by 75% to 85%. Not only is the CPI biased in favor of the formal sector, but the calculation of macroeconomic aggregates is also biased. Thus, applying the classical CPI to the share of GDP devoted to the informal sector leads to an overestimation of the latter's volumes by 10 to 20%, or even by almost 40% when it comes to estimating the added value of informal businesses.

Self-consumption is another major issue that the CPI struggles to include. In subsistence economies, which persist in many parts of the world, self-consumption accounts for a large proportion of consumption. This is clearly the case in some parts of Madagascar. Household surveys measure self-consumption by asking each household how much of their agricultural and livestock production activity they consume. A 1994 national household survey estimated self-consumed rice production at 75% (Roubaud, 1997: 48). According to a regional 2015-2016 survey, depending on the time of year, the quantity of rice self-consumed each month varied between 18% and 98% [START_REF] Bouquet | Sécurité ALimentaire des Individus des Ménages Agricoles à Madagascar (SALIMA)[END_REF]. This can then be translated into monetary equivalents by comparing with "market" prices in order to obtain an estimate of the population's poverty levels and standard of living.

It is worth noting that what microeconomists describe as self-consumption can also obey a long-term logic of sharing and giving, where value and "utility" are primarily social and symbolic. This is typically the case in southern Madagascar with zebus and rice. While Zebu breeding is considered by economists to be the main savings strategy, zebus are primarily intended as ceremonial gifts at funerals, and the animals are only sold in the event of prolonged food shortages [START_REF] Bidou | Pauvreté et vulnérabilité alimentaire dans le Sud de Madagascar : les apports d'une approche diachronique sur un panel de ménages[END_REF]. In the same vein, part of the self-consumed rice is distributed as gifts. This includes gifts to ancestors during "turning over the dead" funeral ceremonies. It also includes gifts to relatives during other types of ceremonies, gifts to school teachers, or to farm workers. Long documented by anthropologists and a few economists, these practices seem incommensurable and are therefore ignored. Yet they are incompressible expenses that enable people to lead a life "worth living"

5 For example, the net primary school attendance rate fell from 77.9% in 2008 to 73.3% in 2021. Over the same period, among prenatal medical consultations, the share of doctor-led consultations fell from 26.2% to 12.8% over the same period. Statistics from demographic and health surveys carried out in the corresponding years, available at https://dhsprogram.com/data/statcompiler.cfmconsulted on 13/06/2023. 6 According to questionnaires and reports available at https://catalog.ihsn.org (consulted on 06/25/2023), expenditure on education and illness/injury is well collected and analyzed in periodic household surveys (1999,2005,2010 and MDG survey 2012), but without inter-annual comparisons. The LSMS survey carried out by the World Bank in Antananarivo in 2016 does not take into account school fees, which are nonetheless key according to previous surveys. None of the surveys mentioned here explicitly includes expenses related to pregnancy and childbirth followup, while they represent significant amounts of household budgets (Honda et al., 2011).

(Narotzky and Besnier, 2014), both for reasons of dignity and to maintain a material network of protection [START_REF] Blanarova | Etude de faisabilité pour la mise en place de transferts monétaires pour la prévention de la malnutrition chronique à Madagascar[END_REF][START_REF] Gondard | Comprendre les systèmes locaux de protection sociale. Éléments d'analyse dans trois Fokontany du Grand Sud Malgache[END_REF]. They are, therefore, at the heart of a substantive vision of the cost of living while being difficult to capture quantitatively.

Ultimately, and despite attempts to adapt it to the Malagasy context, the CPI reflects a partial reality, biased in favor of a formal economy, a well-off urban population and based on outdated consumption behavior, ignoring the failure and degradation of public services and the various costs (additional price, loss of "utility" or well-being, loss of time) that this implies for the population. The statisticians at INSTAT and Afristat are not fooled and readily admit the urban and formal bias. This was clear in the interviews conducted with them. However, given their budgetary constraints, they do not see any way of overcoming these limits, since multiplying the number of collection points would necessarily mean sacrificing quality. In other words, it seems that CPI experts prefer rigor on a small portion of Malagasy reality to an approximation of a more representative reality. Given INSTAT's current financial difficulties, one might even wonder what remains of the rigor to which its staff are committed. After Cameroon, Madagascar is the country with the highest number of graduates from the CESD8 , the benchmark training course in public statistics [START_REF] Charoy | Le CESD -Paris : au service de la formation statistique[END_REF]. However, INSTAT is suffering from a severe funding crisis: in 2023, the team in charge of calculating the CPI has around thirty employees, including three who centralize, calculate and disseminate the results. This is very little compared with other countries or even with local NGOs (see below). Due to a lack of funding, the agents have officially stopped buying the monitored products on the markets since 2016, which in turn degrades the quality of the data collected. Keen to produce a quality "public good," as one of them told us, some use their own per diems to buy the products most subject to negotiation or non-standardized units of measurement. They remain convinced that the CPI, despite its imperfections, remains the least bad macroeconomic price indicator. Implicitly, the economy that "counts" is the urban and formal economy, as if the rest were insignificant or doomed to disappear in the long term.

Far beyond the cost of living, the CPI is supposed to reflect the economy's State of health and stability and plays a strategic negotiating role for multiple players: unions for wages (for formal jobs), with regular challenges on the plutocratic side of the CPI, but without, to our knowledge, any alternative indicators other than the price of rice; landlords to adjust rents; banks and the central bank for their interest rates; IMF, World Bank and bilateral cooperation for loans and aid granted to the Malagasy State. Here again, our interviews show that the experts from these institutions, or at least some of them, are well aware of the CPI's limitations but lack the means and the time to do better. As an executive from a bilateral aid organization told us, "To save time, people quickly forget that the figures are not of good quality; it is at the time of social unrest that the quality of the figures will be questioned".

Humanitarian aid: alternative measurements to combat famine

Analyses and debates dealing with the cost of living most often omit the humanitarian perspective. Yet in contexts of high food insecurity, the two issues are closely linked. Today, quantitative expertise is essential in the humanitarian world, both to prove its legitimacy and its impartiality [START_REF] Glasman | Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs: Minimal Humanity[END_REF]. Madagascar is no exception, and the quantitative expertise deployed by humanitarian actors includes different kinds of price surveys. These actors include UN agencies (such as the World Food Programme, FAO, Unicef and WHO), NGOs, public administrations, sometimes including INSTAT, and Malagasy and international research teams, including the teams of microeconomists mentioned earlier.

Although the aim of these surveys may seem close to or complementary to that of the CPI, they are, in fact, very different in terms of the meaning of cost of living, methodological rigor, and the operational and political use of the data produced. Unlike the INSTAT CPI experts (and microeconomists), price monitoring by humanitarian actors is not intended to be representative and instead focuses on a particular population segment deemed to be at risk of food insecurity. Humanitarian actors focus both on the poorest populations and on localized markets, with the idea that there is not one national market but rather a multiplicity of fragmented local markets. As with microeconomists, the production of data and indicators aims at gaining a better understanding of behaviors, but with a focus on eating habits and a clear operational objective: in the short term, the purpose is to identify and target the segments of the population most at risk, and in the medium and long term, to anticipate crises and avoid or correct the malfunctions that are supposed to cause food insecurity.

In the history of food aid, nutritional objectives -feeding populations -and structural objectives -acting on the roots of hunger -were often dissociated, pitting "emergency" and "development" actors against each other. Today, this opposition has become blurred, giving way to a relative convergence in the way actors think about and combat food insecurity (which obviously does not exclude divergences between actors on other aspects), by placing it within a broader vision of assistance-type social protection. In short, the aim is to feed populations while correcting behaviors deemed "inappropriate," correcting market "imperfections" and avoiding "distorting" them (in line with long-standing concerns of international organizations [START_REF] Razafindrakoto | Puzzle and Paradox. A Political Economy of Madagascar[END_REF] Chap. 1) 9 . This fear of distortion raises the following questions for humanitarian actors: Should we give in kind or in cash? What to give, or how much? If in kind, should we buy locally or not? Should we subsidize prices or set minimum prices?

Humanitarian actors carry out numerous surveys on undernutrition (anthropometric observations aimed at objectively measuring the degree of undernutrition -height, weight, brachial perimeter) and food insecurity.

In line with the profusion of international standards on this matter [START_REF] Glasman | Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs: Minimal Humanity[END_REF]Leroy et al., 2015), we find a wide range of methods and indicators. Some of these surveys track the price of the basket of goods over time, but the selection of products differs from that of the CPI and is primarily based on nutritional requirements in terms of energy (2100 kcal per person per day) and nutrients 10 . Faced with INSTAT's inability to provide indicators of rural price trends disaggregated by region, humanitarian actors collect prices themselves, both to monitor the cost of the basket of goods and to avoid (or limit) market "distortions".

Since 2014, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (Fewsnet), initially funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has been responsible for monitoring prices on a monthly basis, albeit with varying resources, rigor and frequency depending on funding opportunities from international donors 11 . In the absence of a permanent, stabilized monitoring system, what we have instead is a diversity of scattered initiatives, which it would be pointless to describe precisely and exhaustively, given their fluctuation over time. For the southern region, the World Food Programme (WFP) monthly price bulletin for 2022 includes six types of foodstuff (local rice, imported rice, cassava, corn, and imported oil). The program collects prices twice a month in 59 markets by telephone. The high variability of prices between markets confirm the value of micro-local price surveys. The WFP bulletin of December 2022, for instance, indicates that rice prices vary by 40% between markets. A one-off ACF/IRD/CIRAD survey [START_REF] Blanarova | Etude de faisabilité pour la mise en place de transferts monétaires pour la prévention de la malnutrition chronique à Madagascar[END_REF] indicates similar spatial variability. The SISAV (Food Security and Vulnerability Information System), promoted by the FAO, also includes regular local market surveys carried out every two weeks by local community representatives, supplemented monthly by surveys at district level by the Agricultural Service Centers and then at regional level by FAO agents. Among the 98 indicators collected, several relate to food prices, availability and accessibility (stock levels, quantities on the market, origin). However, the methods deployed prevent any comparison with the CPI: the teams do not have the means to purchase or weigh foodstuffs. Some teams specify in their method that they exclude from their list foods whose sales units are too heterogeneous, but this seems to be far from being the rule.

Some NGOs also carry out their own price surveys, devoting considerable human and financial resources to the task. An NGO like Catholic Relief Service (CRS), for example, for its actions in the South region, has a team of almost the same size as INSTAT's IPC team in 2023: a field team of 23 people dedicated entirely to crisscrossing markets to collect weekly price and availability data on essential foodstuffs, plus a team manager and data analysts. It is also interesting to note that the list of food products differs from that used by the WFP12 . Those data provide near-real-time information on price dynamics and foodstuff availability. The team regularly revises the list of goods according to field observations, which probably explains the difference with the WFP, which is stable over time to enable comparisons.

There are also occasional price surveys designed to measure the "performance" or "functionality" of markets, either qualitatively or by means of scores (e.g. the "Market Functionality Index"). Basic market "functionality" criteria include product diversity and availability, as well as price variability (seasonal variation and spatial diversity), to which other criteria, such as competition, quality of goods, etc. can be added.

The production of surveys -including price surveys -, data and indicators is both abundant and impressive in terms of the degree of technicality (even if far removed from the "best practices" usually used for the CPI) and dedicated resources. For the year 2017-2018, there are no less than three periodic bulletins tracing price trends, along with market analysis and sometimes market forecasts (Fewsnet Food Security Outlook, WFP Monthly Bulletins, SISAV Bi-monthly Bulletins). In addition, there are other bulletins focusing on food insecurity, again combining strategic analysis and forecasting, classifying territories and populations in terms of severity of food insecurity and urgency of action. In addition to first-hand data, modeling and prospecting include secondary data such as satellite tracking of rainfall and harvests, macro data on import/export trends, exchange rates and growth, etc.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine in detail the actual use of this set of price indicators. We shall emphasize their disparate, scattered and sometimes contradictory dimensions. The Rice Observatory, a governmental entity gathering stakeholders and dedicated to ensuring better regulation of the rice market, has for several years communicated its price reporting to the Fewsnet network for its monthly price bulletins. These efforts at coordination do not prevent ongoing controversies over numbers. "Everyone pushes for their own data", said a representative of the government's decentralized services, lamenting the profusion of data and the disdain for his own department's data. Although he was referring to a related issue, that of water, his testimony reflects a reality repeated many times over the course of participant observation carried out by one of us within a humanitarian NGO. Building and disseminating one's own data (even within the same organization and its various departments) is an integral part of the positioning strategies of humanitarian actors (we will come back to this in the conclusion). Furthermore, the volatility of funding prevents any longterm initiatives. The Rice Observatory, which had acquired legitimacy over time due to the quality of its price surveys, stopped its activities for lack of funding. We are unaware of the price sources now used by Fewsnet, yet their role is critical since the Fewsnet indices are used to negotiate the amounts of cash transfer programs. Populations, public authorities and humanitarian actors alike widely criticized the amounts set in the precovid period, reflecting an apparent lack of legitimacy of the numbers in use (Lallau and Gondard-Delcroix, 2020).

One may wonder how far the making of numbers related to the cost of living includes people's voice. Humanitarian initiatives include "participatory" approaches designed to gather perceptions of the local population. These methods often highlight the social and cultural dimensions of food. However, when it comes to taking action or producing data, these are more often than not set aside because of emergency constraints and the difficulty of translating such dimensions into numbers. Local populations most often express themselves indirectly, by transgressing humanitarian policies and interventions according to their own standards of justice (Olivier de Sardan, 2021). In southern Madagascar, positions of power related to lineage, ethnicity, social class or gender commonly undermine the population coverage targets and eligibility thresholds humanitarian experts design through meticulous work on numbers [START_REF] Gondard | Comprendre les systèmes locaux de protection sociale. Éléments d'analyse dans trois Fokontany du Grand Sud Malgache[END_REF].

Transgressive strategies also include challenging the units of analysis used for targeting, like the Fokontany (administrative subdivision on a village scale). For example, at an internal NGO seminar, an NGO representative mentioned that the number of Fokontany in their intervention zone multiplied by more than three in three years...13 According to NGO's staff, the feeling of exclusion from assistance programs would be the main explanatory factor, along with famine-related migrations and internal conflicts. People want their own administrative entity and, in a way, their own numbers.

Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to trace the various forms of expertise that contribute to the production of cost of living numbers. Each of these forms of expertise has its own raison d'être. Their promoters are rarely fooled by the weaknesses and limitations of their numbers, but they have a mission to accomplish and objectives to reach. They measure what they want to measure and what they can measure. As with any type of number, the numbers they produce serve as much to explain reality as to make it legible and to shape politics (Iversen et al., 2023;Naudet, 2000).

The socio-history of statistical indicators shows the extent to which they are co-constitutive of states, including post-colonial ones, while at the same time giving rise to various forms of appropriation and transgression. This includes, for example, tactics of cunning, concealment and negotiation, as in the Mauritanian case [START_REF] Samuel | Calcul macroéconomique et modes de gouvernement: les cas de la Mauritanie et du Burkina Faso[END_REF]. This includes using and distorting official statistics to stage an idealized display of the actual situation, as in the case of the so-called "Tunisian miracle" (Hibou, 2011). In the case of Madagascar, characterized by the collapse of public bodies, including INSTAT, and repeated famines, the profusion of indicators, surveys and analyses is both shaped by and constitutive of a fragmented mode of government (Lavigne Delville, 2017). The State, fragmented between several uncoordinated and sometimes conflicting departments and ministries, cohabits with various research teams and a myriad of humanitarian actors [START_REF] Berrou | Qui pilote si personne ne gouverne? La politique publique de protection sociale à Madagascar au prisme de l'analyse des réseaux sociaux[END_REF].

In an analysis carried out in Niger following the 2005 famine, historian and political scientist Vincent Bonnecase already highlighted the diversity of surveys and indicators (then limited to nutritional surveys) and their often contradictory results [START_REF] Bonnecase | À quoi servent les indicateurs nutritionnels ?[END_REF]. He argued that there was nothing surprising about the uncertain, unstable and contradictory nature of the data: it simply reflected a specific use of data, less as a guide for action and decision-making than as a tool for negotiation between the multiple players involved in food and poverty eradication policies. His analysis is certainly valid for the Malagasy context. Nearly twenty years later, evidence-based policy has become a watchword [START_REF] Bédécarrats | Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development: A Critical Perspective[END_REF]Naudet, 2006) while austerity policies have stripped the National Statistical Institutes, and the Malagasy case is a sad example of this. Not surprisingly, humanitarian actors devote a substantial proportion of their human and financial resources to data production and dissemination. The lack of legitimacy of INSTAT data, which reflects and crystallizes the weak legitimacy of the Malagasy State, authorizes and encourages aid agencies to produce their own data and, even more so, to set up complex data collection systems, some of which rival INSTAT's price surveys, at least in terms of resources, while responding to radically different objectives and methods.

The resources injected into these systems, which evolve according to projects and funding, must be weighed against the crying lack of resources allocated to INSTAT, which is itself dependent on international funding.

Crudely affected by the structural adjustment plans of the 1990s and the associated budget cuts, INSTAT reflects a broader African reality, where unreliable international databases are tending to replace National Statistical Institutes, many of which are now languishing in the doldrums (Jerven, 2013;Naudet, 2000).

Figures are lacking, but many qualified statisticians are leaving the Malagasy civil service for an international career. Lack of funding, legitimacy and attractiveness reinforce each other in a vicious circle that seems difficult to break. Following the anthropologist David Mosse (Mosse, 2004), one might wonder whether the production of data by NGOs and international organizations (sometimes with the support of researchers), although potentially useful in the short term to improve the distribution of aid, serves above all in the long term to "cultivate" the humanitarian and development world: following a self-poietic dynamic, the data produced justifies both the urgency to act and the indispensability of humanitarian and development actors.

The profusion of indicators and analyses also reflects the economic and social fragmentation of the country. The CPI is supposedly 'national', but represents only a narrow fraction of the population and the economy (urban and market-based). There is not one economy but a plurality of separate and sometimes incommensurable economies. We have seen the efforts made by research teams and humanitarian actors, sometimes in isolation, sometimes in collaboration, to gain a better understanding of this plurality. However, these efforts hardly account for the specificities of the cost of living in a context where the informal economy, self-consumption, social and symbolic expenditure, hunting and gathering represent a significant part of livelihoods and of a life worth living.

With the rise of nature conservation policies, these issues can no longer be ignored. In Madagascar, the proportion of the national territory dedicated to protected areas was 3% in 2003, 15% in 2017 and the target is 30% in 2030. This increase directly curtails the traditional means of self-sustenance for residents. A considerable segment of the population has historically depended on these lands for agricultural activities, hunting, and the use of pivotal resources such as wood, water, and medicinal plants [START_REF] Amelot | Des justiciers de la biodiversité aux injustices spatiales. L'exemple de l'extension du réseau d'aires protégées à Madagascar[END_REF]. However, extant mechanisms to compensate villagers for the access restrictions are often found to be inadequate [START_REF] Bertrand | Madagascar, politique forestière: Bilan 1990-2013 et propositions[END_REF][START_REF] Rivière | Les (dé)connexions du développement : ethno-géographie systémique de l'aide au développement et à la conservation forestière à Amindrabe, Madagascar. phdthesis[END_REF]. Most statistical surveys struggle to apprehend selfconsumption (including those mentioned earlier in the paper). They often restrict their focus on farming, neglecting substantial contributions from hunting and gathering. Specific surveys estimate that in certain conservation areas, the economic value derived from hunting equates to up to 57% of a household's monetary income [START_REF] Golden | Economic valuation of subsistence harvest of wildlife in Madagascar[END_REF]. Consequently, as conservation initiatives expand, numerous households confront escalating living costs due to reduced access to these vital resources. This underscores the necessity to refine cost of living estimation methodologies to more accurately incorporate the humanenvironment relationship and account for non-market consumption behaviors, ensuring a more comprehensive representation of the economic realities faced by rural communities. This would also imply exploring incommensurable aspects such as the loss of a territory to which one belongs and is attached, the loss of interdependent bonds that forge livelihoods, but also identities and ways of inhabiting the world and the resulting feelings of dispossession and acculturation.

CPI experts may argue that adequately assessing the cost of living is too complicated and costly... which will encourage researchers, NGOs and international organizations to collect new data to account for the loss of well-being resulting from conservation policies. The cost of an indicator that adequately measures diversity and fluctuations in the cost of living is a recurring (and legitimate) argument (Council, 2002;[START_REF] Deaton | Getting prices right: what should be done?[END_REF].

But the overall cost of fragmented and dispersed alternative initiatives needs to be considered. Above all, one wonders who ultimately pays the price of approximate and biased price indices. Clearly, it is the poorest people who lack the appropriate numbers to make their situation acknowledged and their voices heard.

In the

2000s, foreign aid accounted for 40% of government expenditure and two-thirds of revenue. World Bank data cited by(Razafindrakoto et al., 2020: 92).

Afristat is an international institution created in 1996, bringing together 22 sub-Saharan African countries, including Madagascar. Its aim is to contribute to the development of economic, social and environmental statistics in its member states, and to strengthen their skills in this field.

A deflator is a value used to adjust economic indicators to account for changes in price levels.

Data corresponding to the standard of living quintile estimated by working people in the DHS 2021 survey, on page https://www.statcompiler.com/fr/?cc=MD&ucc=&ic=HC_WIXQ_P_LOW,HC_WIXQ_P_2ND,HC_WIXQ_P_MID,HC_W IXQ_P_4TH,HC_WIXQ_P_HGH consulted on 25/06/2023.

Madagascar, World Health Organization Global Health Expenditure database, available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.OOPC.CH.ZS?locations=MG, consulted on 14/06/2023.

European training center for economic statisticians from developing countries.

Commodities monitored by CRS include Dolique, Maize, Niebe, imported rice, local rice, sorghum, cattle, goat, kid, chicken, water jerrican, manioc, sweet potato and oil. Commodities monitored by WFP: local rice, imported rice, maize, cassava, cowpea and imported oil. Commodities monitored by Fewsnet include local rice, imported rice, maize and cassava.

It rose from 311 in 2017 (feasibility study), to 542 in 2018 (project launch) and to 1054 in 2020.

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Vanessa Guignery

The Precarious Balance of Refugees: Rupture and Connectivity in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017) and Helon Habila's Travelers (2019)

Keywords: refugee, precariousness, vulnerability, fragmentation, connections, Habila (Helon), Hamid (Mohsin), postcolonial literature réfugié, précarité, vulnérabilité, fragmentation, connections, Habila (Helon), Hamid

Contemporary novels about refugees often question the appropriateness of traditional narrative forms to relate stories of forced migration which involve a fragmentation of the self and of one's sense of reality. Writers opt instead for forms which are as disjointed as the experience of refugees themselves. This paper explores the precarious balance between a poetics of rupture and an aesthetics of connectivity in two novels about refugees: Exit West (2017) by Mohsin Hamid and Travelers (2019) by Helon Habila. It first examines the strategies developed by both authors to destabilize form in order to reflect the refugees' shattering ordeals during and after their forced displacements. The multiplicity of stories as well as the shifts in focalization and narrative modes testify to the impossibility of inscribing refugees' experiences within a single coherent and homogeneous pattern. However, Hamid and Habila also draw from the potentialities of the novelistic genre to devise formal ways of connecting apparently disparate story lines and thereby suggest possibilities for cross-cultural solidarity between refugees who share a common condition of vulnerability.

L'équilibre précaire des réfugiés : rupture et connectivité dans Exit West (2017) de Mohsin Hamid et Travelers de Helon Habila (2019) Résumé : Les romans contemporains sur les réfugiés remettent souvent en question la pertinence des formes narratives traditionnelles pour raconter des histoires de migration forcée qui impliquent une fragmentation du soi et du sens de la réalité. Les écrivains optent plutôt pour des formes qui sont aussi disjointes que l'expérience des réfugiés eux-mêmes. Cet article explore l'équilibre précaire entre une poétique de la rupture et une esthétique de la connectivité dans deux romans sur les réfugiés : Exit West (2017) de Mohsin Hamid et Travelers (2019) de Helon Habila. Il examine tout d'abord les stratégies développées par les deux auteurs pour déstabiliser la forme afin de refléter les épreuves bouleversantes traversées par des réfugiés pendant et après leurs déplacements forcés. La multiplicité des récits ainsi que les changements de focalisation et de modes narratifs témoignent de l'impossibilité d'inscrire les expériences des réfugiés dans un seul schéma cohérent et homogène. Néanmoins, Hamid et Habila exploitent également les potentialités du genre romanesque pour imaginer des moyens formels de relier des histoires apparemment disparates et suggèrent ainsi des possibilités de solidarité interculturelle entre des réfugiés qui partagent une condition commune de vulnérabilité.

My aim in this paper is to examine the mechanics of form as a means of lending expression to experiences of forced displacement in two contemporary novels: Exit West (2017) by British-Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid and Travelers (2019) by Nigerian novelist Helon Habila. I will show how the vulnerability and precariousness of refugees -or "travelers" to use Habila's term -is communicated through vulnerable and unsettling narrative forms which, in turn, may disrupt the reading experience. I will also argue that while reflecting the shattering trajectories of displaced persons, refugee narratives often simultaneously suggest means of connection, interdependence and solidarity, both in the diegesis and through formal devices. While Exit West and Travelers record the fragmentation of lives caused by forced migration, they are not outright defamiliarizing or experimental narratives as they retain a narrative unity and continuity, and partly rely on conventional narrative devices. I will therefore explore the precarious balance between a poetics of rupture and an aesthetics of connectivity in these two novels. After briefly exploring the instability of the term and category of "refugee" itself, I will examine the strategies used by Habila and Hamid to destabilize form in order to reflect the discontinuous experience of refugees. I will then illustrate their reliance on the relative stability and unity of the novelistic genre, which may be a reflection of the stability displaced persons hope to secure in the host country but which can only be achieved narratively through the secret connections between their seemingly disparate stories.

The instability of denomination

The precarious and vulnerable condition of the refugee who, for Simon Gikandi, is "the Other of the cosmopolitan" (Gikandi 2010, 26), is reflected in the instability of the term itself. Claire Gallien addresses the taxonomic debate by referring to a 2016 piece entitled "Qui dit quoi?" ("Who Says What?"), penned by the Coordination Sans Papiers 75/Paris, which underlines that "behind each word lies an ambush and that the choice of designation between migrant, refugee, asylum-seeker, exiled person, sans-papier, foreigner, immigrant, dismissed plaintiffs, and illegal immigrant is always politically and ideologically charged" (Gallien 2018, 738). According to the Geneva Convention of 1951, refugees are people who no longer live in the country of their nationality "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion" ("Convention"), and for the United Nations Refugee Agency, a refugee is "someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence" (UNHCR). In recent years, there have been calls for a revision of the term to include the economic and ecological factors forcing people into displacement. According to David Farrier, refugees are the "new subalterns" (Farrier 2011, 5), and for Claire Gallien, "the term 'refugee' is an occidental construction used to refer negatively to a person who has lost the protection of his/her own country and been forced into bordercrossing" (Gallien 2018, 739).

In La Fin de l'hospitalité, Fabienne Brugère and Guillaume Le Blanc suggest using the term "refuge seeker" as the people who are called refugees are often people waiting to become refugees, asking to be granted the status, name and identity of a refugee (Brugère and Le Blanc 2017, 62-63). Bridget Haas calls them "citizens-in-waiting" or "deportees-in-waiting" (Haas 2017, 75) and argues that this experience of protracted waiting is best captured as a "rupture" (interrupting mobility) rather than a "transition" (Haas 2017, 81). A refuge seeker or "refugeeto-be" (Asaad 2019, 68) is thus placed in an in-between or liminal position, waiting in an airport, in a camp, at the border, limit or threshold between two worlds, no longer belonging to the place they left, not yet belonging to the place they currently inhabit. It could be tempting to envisage this unstable position through the prism of Homi Bhabha's concepts of the "inbetween" or the "third space" which the theoretician employs to refer to the cultural space occupied by "borderline existences" (Bhabha 1994, 312). However, Gallien rightly argues that this framework is inadequate in the context of refugees, as for them, the border does not entail "resistance and creative agency" (even if it may) as much as "danger and death" (Gallien 2018, 741). The position of the refuge seeker is therefore often more fragile and unstable than that of the migrant.

In Travelers, as noted by Eleni Coundoriotis, "travel" is Habila's "preferred term to convey a multiplicity of highly individuated scenarios of migration against the backdrop of Europe's inhospitality to Africans during the 2010s" (Coundoriotis 2022, 193) 3 while in Exit West, the term "refugees" is used as early as the first sentence to refer to "a city swollen with refugees" (Hamid 2017, 1). In both novels, the travelers' and refugees' precariousness of location and status is mirrored in the form of the books as will be seen from an analysis of the two books' opening sentences, their structure and handling of narrative voice.

Disconnected stories / fractured voices in Helon Habila's Travelers

The first sentence of Travelers is deceptively marked by a great syntactical stability and lexical simplicity: "We came to Berlin in the fall of 2012, and at first everything was fine" (Habila 2019, 3). Place and time are clearly identified, and we later learn that the characters are a middle-class couple, an African-American artist and her husband, the narrator in Book 1, a Nigerian PhD student and teacher, who have moved from the United States to Berlin for a year. The "fine" stability of the opening sentence is however disrupted by the expression "at first" which proleptically announces that this balance will not last, the trip to Berlin being "[a] break from [their] breaking-apart life" (13). While the wife goes to Berlin to paint portraits of migrants for an art project called Travelers (but keeps resolutely and unethically distant from the sitters), the Nigerian narrator, who will remain unnamed throughout the novel, accompanies her reluctantly as for him, "every departure is a death" (12). The alliteration in the plosive [d] in this statement and the polyptoton of "break"/"breaking" in the previous fragment reflect the violent rift provoked by dis-location and re-location. The narrator contrasts this deadly departure with his "immigrant's temperament, hoping for home and permanence in this new world" (11), in other words, striving for stability. In Berlin and elsewhere, this man who is "[p]resented to us at first potentially as an Afropolitan" (Coundoriotis 2022, 194), i.e. a cosmopolitan, urbane African with transnational ties and a fluid identity, becomes acquainted with refugees, immigrants and exiles who tell him, in various forms and more or less reluctantly, their painful story of forced departure from their home country and separation from their family.

The fragmentariness of the lives of the people whose stories are told is reflected in the structure of Travelers, what Outlwile Tsipane calls its "nomadic turn", as it moves from one life-story to another [START_REF] Tsipane | A Powerful Commentary on Displacement, and a Stark Condemnation of the Powers That Be' -Outlwile Tsipane Reviews Helon Habila's New Novel, Travellers[END_REF]. Despite the indication "a novel" on the front cover of the hardback edition, Travelers proposes the successive and seemingly disconnected stories of migrants or refugees: each is told in a separate "Book", without any obvious transition from one to another, making the volume resemble a collection of interlinked short stories. The genre of the short story may seem to be particularly well-suited to narratives about refugees because of its affinities with the fragment, the margin and the "lonely voice" to echo the title of Frank O'Connor's seminal study of the genre (O 'Connor 1962). Several writers have chosen this literary genre to write about the fragmenting experience of refugees, including Viet Thuan Nguyen in The Refugees (2017), or Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes in breach (2016), set in the "Jungle" in Calais. David Herd and Anna Pincus, the editors of the four volumes of Refugee Tales (2016-21), have opted for the looser form of the "tale" (inspired by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), to initiate a collaboration between British writers and refugees, asylum seekers or detainees. For Janet Wilson, such narratives encourage "multi-directional readings and multiple perceptions of the refugee character" (Wilson 2021, 266).

In Travelers, the sense of reading apparently disconnected stories is reinforced by the fact that each "Book" adopts a different narrative mode and shifting internal focalizations: while some stories are mediated by the narrator, others are told by the refugees themselves, either chronologically or in fits and starts, in direct speech or in letters. Thus, the first-person narration by the unnamed narrator in Books 1, 4 and 6, gives way, in Book 2, to a third-person narration with an internal focalization on a refugee named Manu, from which the narrator of the previous section is absent. Book 3 proposes a third-person narration with a focalization on a woman from Zambia called Portia who finds herself in Switzerland with a mysterious man, only identified as "he" (Habila 2019, 111), whom we eventually recognize as the narrator from Book 1 whom the young woman had met a few days before in Berlin. Portia is therefore now the person observing the Nigerian protagonist who has become a minor character about whom she knows less than the reader. A long portion of Book 4 is told in direct speech by a refugee from Somalia who tells the narrator his story linearly while they are travelling on the same train. Within Book 5, set on the unnamed Italian island where the Nigerian protagonist is stranded after a series of mishaps,4 the narration is unstable, constantly shifting from one mode to another, one story invariably interrupting another: it comprises a third-person narration focalized on a local inhabitant, Matteo, who rescued a woman and her child on the beach; a first-person narration by the unnamed narrator turned undocumented migrant as he tries to get his bearing on the island; and a third-person narration transcribed in italics when Matteo tells the story of the rescued woman. The sixth and last Book is set several years later in London where the narrator meets Portia again, and they help Juma, a Nigerian asylum seeker on hunger strike, who tells them the story of his ordeal both in direct speech and later in a letter transcribed in italics. As the novel progresses, the voices of the refugees become more audible and occupy more space, testifying to the narrator/character's growing attentiveness to their stories.

Such variations in modes of narration and in voices, which account for the fragmentation of the text, testify not only to the multiplicity and singularity of stories of refugees, which cannot be contained within a single coherent and homogeneous pattern, but also to the multiplicity of ways of articulating and perceiving these stories. The non-linear and elliptical dimension of the book sometimes unsettles the reader when some crucial information of place, time or characters is omitted, placing the reader in a vulnerable hermeneutic position, a minor form of the type of precariousness refugees face in their new and often hostile environment. A similar hesitation and unbalance are also to be found in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West.

Sudden rifts in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West

While Travelers starts with a deceptively stable opening, in Exit West, the first sentences encapsulate a tension between near-collapse and attempted connection, an oscillation which persists throughout the novel: "In a city swollen with refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. For many days" (Hamid 2017, 1). These opening sentences seem to be stumbling, moving forward and retracting, as reflected formally in the punctuation marks that interrupt the flow, the conjunctions "but", "or", "and", and the negations that belie what immediately precedes. The narration oscillates between the tentative offering of information as is expected in the incipit of a novel and its withdrawal or mitigation marked by the epanorthosis or selfcorrection: the city is "still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war". The city is therefore positioned in a precarious balance, an in-between place between peace and war, between "still" and "not yet", or, as mentioned further down on the same page, "teetering at the edge of the abyss" (ibid.).

Likewise, the reader is placed in an in-between situation of knowledge and ignorance, and will be kept in that position of undecidability through a great part of the novel. The first sentence is saturated with indefinite articles, which is not unusual for the first sentence of a novel, but while the man and woman are identified in the next sentence as Saeed and Nadia, throughout the book, the city itself remains unnamed (just like the narrator in Travelers) and the group of refugees who "swell" the city are kept unidentified, unheard and unseen, merely existing as an indistinct mass, whose origins and reasons for being in the unnamed city are never explicitly revealed. While the anonymity of the refugees contributes to their enforced invisibility and what Judith Butler calls "the violence of derealization" (Butler 2004, 33), the lack of precise national landmarks in the novel has been interpreted by several critics as a sign of the universality of "contemporary experiences of space and time in the globalized world", one "that extends beyond national borders" (Jeanniard du Dot 2019).

In the first sentence of Exit West, the two characters also seemingly follow an arc of opening and then withdrawal as they meet but do not speak, foretelling a future of silence and restraint when they later become refugees in the West and prove unable to communicate their feelings to each other. Instability also affects syntax through the second elliptical nominal sentence ("For many days"), which could have concluded the first sentence, but is instead isolated between two full stops, bringing in yet another correction but also fracturing the rhythm, as though the text itself was tripping over a first difficulty. This faltering opening to Hamid's novel may be seen as a way of communicating from the start the fragility and precariousness of life which can dramatically topple over in an instant. This "sense of the fragility of things" (Hamid 2017, 223) is suggested at the bottom of the opening page: "one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying" (1-2).

The combination of continuity or habit and sudden abruptness or irruption of the event, the shock, the change, the break, is what the novel repeatedly conveys both through what it narrates and how it narrates it. For instance, the death of Saeed's mother in the now-at-war unnamed city is told in such a violent way, appearing in the middle of a 21-line sentence which starts by explaining why Nadia resisted the idea of moving in with Saeed's family and then includes the following: "she might have waited much longer had Saeed's mother not been killed, a stray heavy-calibre round passing through the windscreen of her family's car and taking with it a quarter of Saeed's mother's head" (72). The sentence does not stop at this shocking information which takes the reader by surprise, but continues for another nine lines, explaining first that when she was shot, Saeed's mother was only checking inside the car for a misplaced earring -a banal gesture in her everyday life -and then that after that death, Nadia decided to stay with Saeed and his father. The narration here seemingly drowns the most arresting and shattering information in a continuous flow of words, as if attempting to conceal or attenuate the shock of the event, to maintain the pretence of continuity. However, the linearity of everyday life and of the narration has been brutally fractured by the sudden shot and graphic image, destabilizing the reading experience and reflecting the violent eruption of war within the quieter rhythms of the characters' lives. In Exit West, Hamid frequently resorts to such overlong sentences which "deliberately denaturaliz[e] English syntax almost to breaking point" (Chambers 2019, 228), the "careening syntax" and "breathless syncopation, reflecting the relentlessly desperate condition" of the refugees-to-be (Chambers 2019, 231).

A similar sense of an abrupt rift, rupture or fracture in the thread of the characters' lives and in the narration itself is exemplified by the way refuge seekers leave their home country and enter a new one. In Exit West, unlike in Travelers, refugees do not make long and excruciating journeys, but, as in children's books or in science fiction, merely step through mysterious "black doors", cracks or fissures in space and time, and find themselves in another country in the blink of an eye, as if by magic. While realistic novels may transcribe in a linear way the painful and lengthy experience of displacement of refugees (which is how some refugees tell their excruciating stories in Travelers), in Exit West, the fantastical shift from one place to another is abrupt and sudden. This suddenness reflects the shock of the rift but also elides, in a way that can be ethically problematic, the harshness and dangers of transit even if the exhausting teleportation through doors is likened to both "dying and […] being born" (Hamid 2017, 98). 5 Paul Veyret justifies this non-mimetic allegorical mode by arguing that such a mode "contains its own precariousness and hermeneutic vulnerability" (Veyret 2020, 129) and might therefore be more liable to reflect the precariousness of the refugees' experiences.

The sudden displacements in Exit West are also related to what virtual reality offers in our globalized world, as phones are like doors to faraway countries, collapsing the borders of 5 The stepping through the door, though rapid, is experienced as a struggle (the first refuge seeker described in the book "wriggle[s] with great effort", "gripping either side of the doorway as though pulling himself up against gravity, or against the rush of a monstrous tide", 6-7) and a form of birth: "With a final push he was through, trembling and sliding to the floor like a newborn foal" (7). The suggestion might be that the refugees forcefully start a new life with a new identity in the new country, but their first reaction at their point of arrival is one of utter disorientation and the refuge seekers soon find out that they are not welcome in the host countries which have been "building walls and fences and strengthening their borders" (71), thereby imposing rigid lines of articulation to strictly separate the natives from the migrants. nation-states, and connecting distant places and people. The phones' antennas "sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be" (Hamid 2017, 35). Liliana Naydan and Claire Chambers have analysed the significance of digital technologies in Exit West as being both a means of connection (beyond national borders) and disconnection ("dividing users' attention", Naydan 2019, 434) as Saeed and Nadia "live as simultaneously connected to and yet disconnected from one another, their homes, and the nations to which they migrate" (Naydan 2019, 434). As noted by Chambers, their phones "help them keep their distance while at the same time connecting them" (Chambers 2019, 220). In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai had already drawn attention to the types of instability similarly engendered by migratory movements and the development of digital processes: "when [the story of mass migrations (voluntary and forced)] is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of massmediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities." (Appadurai 1996, 4) The surreal modality of transport in Exit West is introduced early in the novel but before the reader has been told about it, so that the first scenes showing people stepping through doors can only be understood retrospectively, defamiliarizing the immediate act of reading. The instantaneous and destabilizing shift from one place to another -both literally through the dark doors and virtually through social media -is also reflected narratively through the juxtaposition of the main plot and mysterious parallel narrative lines. The former involves Saeed and Nadia in the unnamed city and then as they step through portals to leave their city at war, first to go to the island of Mykonos, then to London and finally to Marin near San Francisco. The secondary narratives concern unidentified characters in faraway countries, who only make brief appearances and then disappear altogether from the diegesis. Such micro-stories usually appear after a blank on the page -a visual fracture -but are presented as simultaneous with the main narrative line.

The first interruption starts thus: "As Saeed's email was being downloaded from a server and read by his client, far away in Australia a pale-skinned woman was sleeping alone in the Sydney neighbourhood of Surry Hills" (5). Once the brief scene in Australia has been told, the return to the main plot takes place after a blank and likewise emphasizes the contemporaneity of events: "While this incident was occurring in Australia, Saeed was picking up fresh bread for dinner and heading home" (8). The narration thus combines continuity and discontinuity, first by highlighting simultaneity between the two moments in distant places (introduced by "As" and "While"), then through the sharp narrative and visual shift from one scene, one continent and one character to another: the narrative is "simultaneously interrupted and also fluid or connected because of Hamid's transition" (Naydan 2019, 443). In the not-yet-at-war unnamed city, Saeed is performing banal, innocent, ordinary activities, whereas in the named place in Australia, the "incident" concerns the emergence of a mysterious dark man from the darkness of the sleeping woman's closet. The reader understands only much later in the novel that the man in the closet was not there to harm the woman but had just travelled through one of the magical black doors and is a refuge seeker.

Several similar disjointed vignettes regularly interrupt and unsettle the main narrative line, whisking the reader to intriguing scenes in Tokyo, San Diego, Vienna or Amsterdam. They often appear unfinished or ambiguous, their incomplete state reflecting the uncertainty that affects both readers and characters. As noted by Naydan however, they are a "disruption [that] leads to connection" (Naydan 2019, 443), as the readers are encouraged to draw connections between the various scenes, both in the main narrative and in the secondary plots. This simultaneous pull towards disruption and connection is a common feature of Exit, West and Travelers which draw from the potentialities of the novelistic genre to suggest ways of relating seemingly disparate events and situations, and of creating bonds across communities.

Fracturing and connecting

In Trauma Fiction, Anne Whitehead writes that "if trauma is at all susceptible to narrative formulation, then it requires a literary form which departs from conventional linear sequence" (Whitehead 2004, 6). Our previous analysis has shown that a departure from linearity is precisely what Exit West and Travelers perform, the former taking the narration in various directions at once and condensing time, the latter juxtaposing story lines. The rifts in the narrative as well as the rifts in the space-time continuum in Exit West constitute a powerful means of reflecting the "unhealable rift" (Said 2000, 173) of being forced to leave one's country, one's home, one's family. As Saeed and Nadia keep moving from one place to another, from one refugee or worker camp to another, Saeed reflects on everything he has lost and which has left him "unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing" (Hamid 2017, 188). 6 The form of Exit West and Travelers is likewise adrift, slipping away, moving from one narrative line to another, one country and one character to another.

And yet, this narrative precariousness is always countered by a simultaneous drive towards some form of stability and unity within the novelistic genre. In Exit West, just as the world is "full of fracturing" and everyone is "coming together" and yet "also moving apart" (155), just as nations are "like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some on disintegration" (155), the narrative itself is both fracturing into disparate fragments and trying to resist the fracture by maintaining the main narrative line of Saeed and Nadia, even if the young people are irremediably drifting apart and eventually "part into separate lives" (225).

In Travelers, the fragile link or "weak glue" (Coundoriotis 2022, 197) between the juxtaposed stories is provided by the Nigerian protagonist as a more or less attentive recipient, bringing to mind Judith Butler's question of "whether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place" (Butler 2015, 99). Habila's narrator/character listens to the refugees' stories first with detachment and distance, and then with more "compassionate understanding" (Ramsey-Kurz 2020, 172), which explains why the first story resembles "an incomplete collage of fragments" while the narratives that follow are "more and more densely knit and carefully deliberated" (Ramsey-Kurz 2020, 172). This evolution in the protagonist's attitude is epitomized by the move from his tentative "I wondered what his story was" (Habila 2019, 8), when meeting Mark (an out-of-status film student from Malawi turned "nomad", 67) in Berlin in Book 1, to the more resolute "What mattered was to hear what happened next. I wanted to know" (177) in Book 4, when listening to Karim (a refugee from Somalia). This shift in attentiveness and in modes of storytelling testifies to a changed ethical response on the part of the protagonist, who increasingly acquires the ability to "listen carefully" (208). His attentive ear rescues the refugees and their stories from indifference, erasure or oblivion, and makes the lives of those who perish (like Mark in Book 1 or Juma in Book 6) "grievable", providing "the narrative means by which 'the human' in its grievability is established" (Butler 2004, 38). To quote Amitav Ghosh in the author's notes to The Glass Palace, "every life leaves behind an echo that is audible to those who take the trouble to listen" (Ghosh 2000, 552). It is by paying close attention to the stories of a multiplicity of refugees and migrants that the protagonist of Travelers is able to "link legacies of loss" and create connections between diverse traumatic experiences: "listening to the trauma of another can contribute to cross-cultural solidarity and to the creation of new forms of community" (Craps 2012, 156).

In addition, unexpected links are revealed between characters of the different Books in Travelers, and between the experiences of refugees from all over the world in Exit West. In Habila's novel, Manu, the refugee from Libya whose story is told in Book 2, was one of the sitters of the narrator's wife, and was briefly mentioned in Book 1. In Book 5, when the woman who was found on the beach and had lost her memory suddenly remembers who she is, it turns out that she is Manu's wife and that they had been separated when, fleeing Libya, their boat sank. When the Nigerian refugee in London writes the story of his journey in Book 6, the reader realizes that he had been on the same boat as Manu and his wife. These thin narrative threads or echoes, though improbable from a realistic perspective, form a fragile continuity between seemingly disconnected stories and between individuals whose ties to their home, country and family had been severed.

In Exit West, the main narrative and the secondary plots are juxtaposed without ever crossing (no character from a secondary plot ever meets a character from the main narrative), and yet they all participate in a similar process of migration and are therefore secretly connected. They form a narrative continuity and echo the solidarity Saeed and Nadia maintain despite the decline of their love, or the one Nadia develops towards refugees from other countries. While the rift with one's country is painful to most characters, the passage is "unexpectedly pleasant" to others (Hamid 2017, 172), who step through doors not as political refugees but in order to connect with other individuals or for economic reasons. This is the case of the unnamed elderly man in Amsterdam and the wrinkled man in Rio de Janeiro, who constantly travel back and forth between their two cities, and eventually become lovers, or of the unnamed mother and daughter who regularly meet on either side of doors. However, as Maëlle Jeanniard du Dot rightly points out, "the narrative avoids the pitfall of depicting an idealized community of migrants who leave their differences aside" (Jeanniard du Dot 2019). Saeed, for instance, finds it more difficult than Nadia to step beyond his own community.

The connections that Nadia and the protagonist of Travelers develop, together with the narrative echoes between various stories across different countries may evoke what Michael Rothberg has called "rhizomatic networks", which operate "beyond the framework of the imagined community of the nation-state" and "exceed attempts at territorialization (whether at the local or national level) and identitarian reduction" (Rothberg 2010, 7). It is this community of experience across several countries which can create what Rothberg calls "intersecting solidarities" (2016, 366), since "history, like trauma, is never simply one's own, […] history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas" (Caruth 1996, 24). This sense of implication is what encourages the attentive listener and reader of Exit West and Travelers to make connections between seemingly dissimilar journeys and display their "capacity to recognize one's face in the face of the foreigner and to valorize the traces of the far-off in the nearby" (Mbembe 2021, 215). Recognition may arise from the awareness that the "history of movement and migration touches everyone, including those who have not migrated themselves" (Lagji 2019, 228), like the elderly woman in California in Exit West who has lived in the same house all her life, and yet declares: "We are all migrants through time" (Hamid 2017, 209). Her observation of her rapidly changing city and of the multiplicity of migratory movements leads her to make this powerful statement which points towards a common humanity, and suggests "how the desire for a different existence or a new chapter in one's life makes us all, in some sense, migrants" (Chambers 2019, 237).7

Conclusion

By juxtaposing stories in Travelers and elliptical micro-narratives in Exit West, Helon Habila and Mohsin Hamid offer a kaleidoscope of fragments which "makes for the creation of a vulnerable form", by which Jean-Michel Ganteau means "a form in which the apparent autonomy of each [narrative] is flaunted the better to be negated" (Ganteau 2019, 80). The vulnerability of the fractured form thus not only mirrors the fragility which affects refugees in their displacements and lives, but also paradoxically unites distant lives and stories, as each juxtaposed narrative is not autonomous but secretly related to the others. Refugees connect narratively, beyond the visual divisions on the page marked by blanks, sections or asterisks, and despite the hostile anti-migrant policies to which they are subjected in the host countries. In spite of their differences in backgrounds, nationalities, religions or genders, they share a common condition of vulnerability which can be viewed through the prism of interdependence and may therefore constitute a dynamic force based on the possibility for an empathic opening to the other's vulnerability which is a mirror of one's own vulnerability, what Jean-Michel Ganteau calls "a loop of vulnerability" (Ganteau 2015, 11).

This loop is exemplified by the support Saeed and Nadia give and receive in the various camps they inhabit in Exit West, or by the empathic listening to individual stories by the protagonist in Travelers. In both novels, the mosaic of people on the move, forever adrift and unmoored, acutely suffer from loss, but also sometimes find strength and solidarity in the shared experience of loss and what Liliana Naydan calls an "aesthetics of connectivity" (Naydan 2019, 447). In Exit West, Saeed laments the loss of his parents, of his country and of his love for Nadia, and yet he feels -some might say too naïvely or sentimentally -that "this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry" (Hamid 2017, 202). The form of Exit West and Travelers seems to register this double pull: towards loss, fragmentation and discontinuity on the one hand, and towards connection and interdependence on the other. This unresolved and permanent tension may be considered ethical in that it does not erase or homogenize the suffering and vulnerability consecutive to forced displacement but suggests possible ways of

In African Titanics (written in Arabic in 2008 and translated into English in 2014) by Eritrean writer Abu Bakr Khaal, the boat people fleeing North and East Africa for Europe see themselves as "travellers" and not refugees.

After he loses his passport and boards the wrong train, the protagonist becomes an undocumented migrant in a refugee camp in an Italian island where he suffers a mental breakdown, his life toppling over abruptly. According to Eleni Coundoriotis who comments on this unexpected narrative turn, "the plot's improbability destabilizes the novel's realism"(Coundoriotis 2022, 197).

The narrative voice notes that "the whole planet was on the move" (167) and "All over the world, people were slipping away from where they had been" (211).

Chambers rightly points to the problematic nature of this "well-intentioned phrase" and of the use of the pronoun "we" which, while asserting a solidarity with displaced people, tends to downplay "the specificity of their trauma"(Chambers 2019, 238).