Vietnam - Monkey Bridge/The Lotus and the Storm

Country: Vietnam
Book: Monkey Bridge/The Lotus and the Storm
Author: Lan Cao
Publication Year: 1997/2014
Genre: Fiction

For many, if not most people in the world, Vietnam and the Vietnam War are inseparable. The plethora of films made about or set during the conflict, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Apocalypse Now, Born on the 4^th of July, Forest Gump, Good Morning Vietnam,  The Deer Hunter, etc., show the deep psychological scar the war left on the American consciousness. As discussed when we looked at South Korea (See: South Korea), even M*A*S*H, the one cultural artifact set during the Korean War, is really about Vietnam.

How many people died in the war remains widely debated with estimates ranging from 1.4 to 3.6 million people across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. What is known is that more tons of TNT were dropped on the countries of Indo-China than were dropped by all sides during World War Two, including both atomic bombs. The use of chemical weapons like Agent Orange cause birth defects in the Vietnamese population to this day.

What few, if any, American films and TV series do is present the Vietnam War as seen from the perspective of the Vietnamese. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s  2017 documentary series, The Vietnam War, frames the 20 year conflict through its various stages as seen from all sides. It is probably the most objective attempt to explain the how, what and why of Vietnam. Although some of its conclusions are perhaps less objective.

Lan Cao’s two novels, Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm, concern the war and how it affected those living in South Vietnam. They are in many ways mirror images of one another and, one imagines, largely autobiographical. In both books, a daughter escapes Vietnam with one of her parents (mother in Monkey Bridge, father in The Lotus and The Storm ) and settles in the United States. The ex-pats are haunted by the fate of those left behind in the aftermath of the war.

Cao’s perspective is one which we are perhaps not used to seeingly in western media. In the black and white grayscale through which everything must seeming be portrayed, Vietnam is a war between America and the Vietminh (the Vietcong in American parlance) of the Communist north. What about the Vietnamese who fought with and for the Americans?

 
In The Lotus and the Storm, Minh is a South Vietnamese officer who narrowly escapes execution for refusing to support the attempted military coup of 1965. From there, his story and that of his daughter, Mai, who shares the narrative with her father, becomes entangled with those of two Americans, James and Cliff, a GI and a military adviser respectively.

Monkey Bridge would seem to be the more autobiographical of the two novels. The narrator, also called Mai, takes up the bulk of her story with accounts written by her mother inserted at various points. These accounts parcel out the truth to Mai and to the reader like a slow releasing poison.

In common with both versions of Mai, Cao left Vietnam for the US in 1975 as the Vietminh were on the march to Saigon following the American withdrawal. Like the Monkey Bridge version of Mai, she initially lived with an American officer and his wife, who were personal friends of the family. She went on to become a professor of international law, trade and business.

It is a story we have seen depressingly frequently in this project. The author who is forced to flee their homeland thanks to internal conflict and outside agitation. Most recently, we saw Loung Ung escape the Killing Fields of Cambodia (see: Cambodia) for the United States via Vietnam and Thailand. There she worked for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

In Afghanistan (see: Afghanistan), all three of our authors became refugees thanks to one or more of the Soviet Union, Taliban and the United States (and then the Taliban again). Sulaiman Addonia (see: Eritrea) spent much of his life in refugee camps because of the Ethiopia-Eritrean War before settling in the United Kingdom. Samar Yazbek (see: Syria) had to leave Syria for the sake of her daughter’s and her own safety. There will be many others before we conclude this project. We shall certainly return to the issue when we turn to Zimbabwe.

When the subject of migration and immigration are such hot button topics, exploited by bad faith actors on the right, it is a timely reminder that if we want to quell the waves of migration, we could try interfering less in the internal affairs of other countries. Or be less surprised when people cross seas and deserts to escape economic and ecological wastelands for pastures new. It is, after all, what our ancestors did, Pilgrim and Anglo Saxon alike. Migration and immigrations are facts of life. It prevents societal stagnation. In the words of Bob Dylan: He not busy being born is busy dying

The obvious analogy is to the Monkey Bridge itself. A handmade bridge of wood or bamboo, they are built to cross the waterways of the Mekong Delta. Known as cầu khỉ in the local language, these precarious looking platforms embody the connections across a fragile divide found in Cao’s novels and in Diaspora Fiction in general. The people, often from the same families, who fought on both sides of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese who became refugees and those who remained behind. The émigrés who reconstructed their culture and community in the United States and how they push against the America for which they will always be in conflict, like any immigrant population.

The Vietnam War can never be erased from the minds of the Vietnamese, nor from the American consciousness. Yet Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm are about more than mere war. Historical events are rarely anything but a backdrop to any work of descriptive art. Like the landscape behind Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, they are mere details.

Circumstance does little more than to inform a narrative. Rather it is how characters respond to events. War and Peace is not a book about the Napoleonic Wars, but how its myriad characters, for better or for worse, respond to those conflicts. Family and friendships are at the heart of both of Cao’s novels. Survival and resilience. The power of individuals to lose everything and start again from scratch. Which, like a rickety bridge, is something that connects Vietnam to America and with a hundred other places besides.

Vietnam is one of those places about which the west knows more than it has any practical need or necessity to know. And yet, of course, we know very little. History is not always written by the victors. The Vietnam War is still framed as a disaster for the United States rather than the desolation of three impoverished South East Asian counties for dubious geopolitical reasons. The Vietminh won and yet few people ever really win at war. What level of victory Lan Cao or either version of her alter-ego achieved in emigrating to America is very much a matter of perspective. As with many of our featured writers, wouldn’t it have happened anyway? It is impossible to say.

Cao’s novels give a perspective of the war as seen from a side rarely seen in mainstream retrospectives. Not only as someone Vietnamese or South Vietnamese, but as a woman, a survivor and an exile. We can never hope to reveal more than a fraction of the countries we read in this project. We can at least listen to voices that reveal something illuminating. Lan Cao is one such light.

Lan Cao

 

Uruguay - Las venas abiertas de América Latina et. al.

Country: Uruguay
Books: Las venas abiertas de América Latina/Vagamundo y otros relatos/ El fútbol a sol y sombra
Author: Eduardo Galeano
Publication Year: 1970/1987/1995
Genre: Politics/History/Sport/Short Story

Eduardo Galeano was one of the most important political voices to come out of Latin America during the 20^th century. A journalist, essayist, novelist, poet and football aficionado, Galeano’s socialist beliefs informed everything he wrote.

One of Galeano’s earliest works, 1970’s, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (The Open Veins of Latin America) gained a new lease of life in the 21^st century when Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, gave a copy to US President, Barak Obama in 2009. The book, which was out of print in English at the time, was soon issued in a new edition with a forward by Noam Chomsky.

Galeano had long since disowned the book, admitting he wrote it at far too young an age (he was 30 at the time), when he knew too little about business and economics. Despite that, the book holds up reasonably well. Any academic or non-fiction book soon ages, due to changing attitudes and new evidence becoming available, either by digging it out of the ground or rooting it out of the archives. While some of the facts and figures might be inaccurate, the historical details remain the same.

Those details relate to how first Western Europe and then the United States of America exploited Latin America’s natural resources from the time Columbus first landed in Hispaniola in 1492: Since Cortez conquered the Aztec Empire and relieved it of all its gold: Since Spain established its silver mines, most prominently the Polosi mine in Bolivia that enriched the Spanish Empire for more than a century, working thousands of indigenous people to death and bringing in the first Africans as slaves to replace them.

Las venas abiertas de América Latina gives a history from the Spanish Conquistadors up until General Pinochet's military coup in Chile in 1973, which took place 3 years after the book's original publication, but which is touched upon in a new afterword written in 1978. In between, we have all of the usual subjects when dealing with exploitation of the south’s resources by the north. Shell and Standard Oil. The United Fruit Company. Rio Tinto and the International Monetary Fund.

Not to mention the various military coups supported or directly assisted by the United States in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in the 1960s and 70s. Galeano was forced into exile in Spain when the book was quickly banned by the dictatorship ruling his native Uruguay. He wouldn’t return until 1985, when the dictatorship was overthrown. 

By that time, Galeano was already working on a new history of Latin America, the three volume Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire), the first part of which was released in 1982, 3 years before his return from exile. I haven’t read the trilogy, but it is on my reading list. It will be interesting to see how the two works compare, but it is safe to assume the later work is the superior.

Despite the flaws admitted by its author, Las venas abiertas de América Latina was a staple of classrooms and American colleges, north and south. for many years. When writer, Isabel Allende, was forced to flee Chile after her uncle, President Salvador Allende, was assassinated by General Pinochet’s forces, one of the few possessions she took with her was a copy of Galeano’s book. Books hold a currency far in excess of the price printed on their cover.

That Galeano brought his politics into everything is demonstrated by El fútbol a sol y sombra (Football in Sun and Shadow). Published in the mid 90s, it is nominally a history of South American football and the World Cup since the inaugural competition was contested in Uruguay in 1930. Uruaguay beat Argentina 4-2 in the final to lift the trophy.

Galeano weaves into the history of South American football the passions and politics of South American football.  Out of 22 tournaments contested since 1930, South American teams, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina, have won 10 of them. Brazil have won more World Cups (5) than any outer country: Italy and Germany having won 4 each.

It is a testament to the continent’s commitment and talent for turning out world class footballers from Pele to Messi that a relatively impoverished continent like South America has managed to compete with the richer nations of Western Europe for so long. Other than South America and Western Europe (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), no other region of the world has come close to winning the trophy, let alone dominating it. Even the Netherlands have never won the competition, despite the number of finals in which they have played (1974, 1978 and 2010).

The idea that football is matter of life and death for South Americans is perfectly demonstrated by the 1950 final contested between Uruguay and Brazil in Ro de Janeiro. It was the only year in which the final round took the form of a round robin rather than a knockout, with the four best placed teams playing each other with the winner being the one with the greatest points tally at the end. As the final match between Uruguay and Brazil kicked off, Brazil only needed a draw to lift the trophy.

Brazil took an early lead in the first half, but Uruguay equalised in the 68^th minute. In the 79^th minute, Brazilian goalkeeper, Moacir Barbosa, allowed Alcides Ghiggia to score the winning goal for Uruguay when he came out of his box, expecting a cross. Ghiggia instead dribbled past him.

1950 World Cup final

Barbosa became a pariah in Brazilian footballing circles for the rest of his life. Even in 1993,43 years later, and then in his 70s, the Brazilian Football Confederation would not let him commentate on Brazil’s international matches. Barbosa famously said, "The maximum punishment in Brazil is 30 years' imprisonment, but I have been paying for something I am not even responsible for, by now, for 50 years.” He died in 2000.

You can admire the passion, but you also have to wonder whether a psychiatrist doesn’t need to sit Brazil down as a nation and tell them it’s probably time to let it go. Because Barbosa was right. There are few crimes for which half a century castigation is a fit punishment and none of them involve sport. If he’d been English, he would have been doing self-depreciating adverts for Pizza Hut and all would have been forgotten (hell, they'd probably have made him manageer at some point). In English football there is always a fresh humiliation just around the corner.

El fútbol a sol y sombra is perhaps the best place to start when reading Galeano. It is a perfect encapsulation of all his interweaving talents and interests, incorporating journalism, politics and Latin American life and leisure. It’s not his most serious book to be sure, but it is at least an appetizer before one tackles Memoria del fuego or any of Galeano’s novels, into which I have yet to dive.

That said, finally we turn to Vagamundo y otros relatos, which doesn’t seem to have an English translation. I guess it translates as Wandering and Other Stories. All of these books I read in Spanish, taking my first foray into Spanish language literature for this project. My Spanish is still middling and this book in particular seems to contain a lot of Uruguayan slang, which the dictionary on the palm reader on which I read it could not always translate. Still, I think I understood most of it.

The stories contained in this volume are for the most part quite short and at times more like sketches of Galeano’s early life than they are out and out short stories. Perhaps I have too much of the Joycean in me, but the scenes feel as much like the childhood stories at the beginning of Joyce’s Dubliners, which are certainly heavily autobiographical. They are enjoyable for the most part.

Despite dealing with Vagamundo y otros relatos at the end of this piece, I in fact read it first of the three books under consideration. It very much prepared me for Las venas abiertas de América Latina. Certainly if you are learning Spanish and want quick two or three page pieces with which to practice comprehension, Vagamundo y otros relatos is a good bet.

I have been meaning to read Galeano’s books for years and this is an excellent triptych with which to start. It is also an excellent place to begin reading Latin American writers in Spanish, before moving on to Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gioconda Belli and the many other Spanish speaking writers of Central and South America. Onwards and downwards into the Southern Hemisphere. 

Eduardo Galeano

Mali - Le Devoir de Violence

Country: Mali
Book: Le Devoir de Violence
Author: Yambo Ouologuem
Publication Year: 1968
Genre: Fiction

The controversy surrounding Le Devoir de Violence, Yambo Ouologuem’s only novel, is almost as interesting as the novel itself. It’s also a sadly familiar story of the unequal interplay between western colonial nations and their former colonies.

Le Devoir de Violence (Bound to Violence in the English translation) recounts the history of Nakem, a fictional African country . Although the book has a timeframe covering several centuries, much of this history is dispensed with in a sentence or two. Large chunks of the narrative are then dedicated to more recent history (if we can count the dawn of the 20^th century as recent).

The book was published in 1968, when Ouologuem was just 27. It was initially declared a triumph and a revealation by the French press, especially Le Monde: Albeit it with a patronising veneer towards Ouologuem as an African writer. Translations into English were soon completed and published. Then the furore started.

Ouologuem was accused of plagarising several other writers, particularly English writer, Graham Greene. Greene was apparently annoyed that several passages of his 1934 novel, It’s a Battlefield, had been repurposed, but accepted an assurance that he would be credited in subsequent editions of the novel. However, Harcourt, the publisher of the US edition, demanded $10,000 in damages from the French publishers, Le Seuil.

Passages borrowed from other works were identified, but the whole affair seemed, prima facie, to be something about nothing. Amongst other supposedly plagarised material was the Bible, the Quran and a short story by Guy de Maupassant, none of which would have been copyrighted material in 1968. Ouologuem claimed all of these passages were enclosed in quotation marks in his original manuscript, but Le Seuil removed them from the published text.

The publishers appear to have left Ouologuem to take sole blame for the version of the book as it appeared in print. The backlash in France was so strong that the book was banned. It was removed from sale in America and elsewhere. Existing copies were pulped. Ouologuem returned to Mali from Paris, where he had been living at the time, and became a virtual recluse. He refused to speak about the book or his time as a writer, raising a family and becoming a devout Muslim. He died in 2017.

It is easy to see in all of this a tale of racism and double standards as old as colonialism iteself. Writers borrowing from other writers is nothing new. There are entire sections of Moby Dick, for instance, that Herman Melville copied verbatim from the various scientific textbooks on whaling and oceanography that he had in his possession. One of the writers Ouologuem was accused of plagarising, André Schwarz-Bart, was himself accused of plagiarism without being banned or having his books pulped. As we have seen in previous entries in this project (see: Saudi Arabia et. al.), it is very much a case of one law for ‘us’ and another law for ‘them’.

Another criticism leveled at Le Devoir de Violence came from Africa, with some denouncing the novel as a satire on West African society. And perhaps in this we can see the real reason for the backlash against Ouologuem in France and in the rest of the west. That certain commentators were happy to embrace the novel when they saw it as a black African lampooning his own culture. Yet once they noticed the borrowing from white western writers, a new layer of satire was revealed to them, sending up not only African traditions, but colonialism and the ‘civilising’ mission of which western countries still bafflingly seem proud. The irony is that the white colonial period actually occupies very little of the narrative.

Rather than the ‘Black Rimbaud’ as some labeled Ouologuem (inaccurately, as on the evidence of this one novel he was much more of a modernist writer), instead he was  reclassified as an uppity African, criticising his betters. Especially in Francophone Africa, where France seems to operate somethng akin to a protection racket towards its former colonies. Ouologuem actions could not be allowed to stand and he was effectively ‘disappeared’ from the literary world.

Yet despite the actions of some, the world does get incrementally better and Ouologuem’s only novel has been rediscovered and reappraised in recent years. A new English translation was published last year (2023) by Penguin Books. I read the book in the original with my imperfect knowledge of the French language. 

The question then remains: what is this infamous novel actually like?

The truth is, Le Devoir de Violence is a very good first novel from a first time novelist in his 20s. Like other first novels we have examined on this journey, such as A Grain of Wheat (see: Kenya) or Near to the Wild Heart (see: Brazil), it gives a tantalising glimpse of the novels Ouologuem’s readers could have expected to come. If only.

In fact, Ouologuem did write a number of other works, fiction and non-fiction, some of which were published under an nom-de-plume, Utto Rudolf, with many other manuscripts unread and in the possession of his family. There is a hope that some of these works might see the light of day at some point in the not too distant future.

Ouologuem style is reminiscent of the modernists. How much he knew of Joyce, Woof or TS Eliot is anyone’s guess. Yet French literature is hardly unfamiliar with modernism (Joyce finished writing Ulysses in Paris after all). Satre’s novels are quasi-Modernist. Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series is proto-Modernism.  The school of Modernism has many alumni, advocates and practitioners.

Nakem is a fictional African country, but as with Jacob Ross’s fictional island of Camaho (see: Grenada), the parallels with Ouologuem’s native country of Mali are thinly disguised. Mali, after all, was once the richest and most influential country in Africa. The city of Timbuktu is one of those places that has deeply embedded itself in the western consciousness. When I was growing up it was still used euphemistically to describe somewhere at the opposite ends of the Earth. Its name carried with it the same mystical frisson as Shangri-La, El Dorado or Middle Earth: An unreal place that one would ever actually visit.

I will admit to getting slightly lost in places, mainly as a result of that imperfect French of mine. I suppose the saving grace in there being only one published Yambo Ouologuem novel is the chance to revisit it and read it more than once: get lost in the historical eddies that ripple though the book until they settle upon Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, whose narrative occupies much of the second half of the book. 

Maybe after a few more turns around the history of Nakem, further chapters from Yambo Ouologuem’s curtailed literary career might start to emerge. After fifty years, it is more than time.

Yambo Ouologuem

 

Latvia - Soviet Milk/Life Stories

Country: Latvia
Book: Soviet Milk (Mātes piens)/Life Stories (Dzīves stāsti)
Author: Nora Ikstena (Translator: Margita Gailitis)
Publication Year: 2015(2018)/2004(2013)
Genre: Fiction/Short Fiction

To Latvia. Middle of the triptych of Baltic states with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. Latvia was invaded and annexed by Russia in 1940 and remained under its iron fist until declaring independence in 1991, following the dissolution of Soviet Union.

Soviet Milk takes place during those years. It is told in alternating narratives, switching  between an unnamed mother and her daughter. The mother is sent to Leningrad (St Petersburg) as part of her medical training, but an incident there leaves her medical career in ruins. She is sent into exile to run a clinic in the Latvian countryside. Her daughter remains with her grandmother in Riga, visiting her mother at weekends and during the holidays.

The title refers to the daily milk all children were given in Soviet run schools (although the original Latvian title, Mātes piens, translates as Mother’s Milk). The mother disappears for five days after giving birth. When she returns, her milk has dried out. The daughter develops an aversion to milk as a child. The metaphor is there for all to see. The daughter rejecting the symbol of her mother as her mother has rejected the daughter. The mother in turn has rejected her own mother after her father was taken away and died in a Soviet prison. Daughter and grandmother form a bond, skipping the middle generation in a familiar trope of fiction and real life.

 As the daughter studies hard at school, enduring the propaganda she is forced to learn and memorise, her mother’s mental state slowly unravels as her exile continues without end. The daughter is almost a metaphor for Latvia itself as she secretly becomes more militant towards the communists. Her schooling progresses through the 80s and into university as  the end of Russian communism on the horizon for all who know how this era of history ends.

Ikstena, like the daughter, was born in 1969 and in fact much of Soviet Milk is autobiographical. Which make the denouement all the more affecting, reflected as it is by real life events. The book ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall. All of us who were alive that night in 1989 can never forget it. Like the fall of the Soviet Union itself, it all seemed to happen so remarkably quickly. For some, though, it came too late.

Life Stories is an earlier collection of Ikstena’s short stories, but many of the same themes from Soviet Milk, especially the autobiographical elements, are present throughout the eight tales. Tales of the city and tales of the countryside. Tales of Latvia and tales of Latvian immigrants living in the United States. Tales of life and tales of death.

Nora Ikstena has written more than 20 books, novels, short stories, essays and biographies, and although much of this work is not as yet available in English translation, she is another writer to whom I will return long after I have finished this reading project. Soviet Milk is considered the final part of a trilogy of novels that began with 1998’s Celebration of Life and continued with 2012’s Besa. So there’s two more books, if translations can be found.

Latvia is one of the countries for which this sort of literary journey is made to discover. It is perhaps a little reductive to resort to a book which focuses on the Soviet era, but with so many former Soviet states, the Russian occupation is a large part of recent European history, in the same way it is impossible to consider many African nations without recourse to the impact of English, French and German colonialism. Or turning to Latin America without thinking about the Spanish and Portuguese impact on those countries (in many of those countries I am literally reading those books in Spanish).

So many smaller, or less powerful nations are impacted by the incursion of larger powers and these ‘interactions’ (to use a decidedly Orwellian phrase) influence how a country develops in its language, its culture, its self-image and its self-belief. Much of Latvian culture and folk tradition was suppressed under the Soviet regime. The reemergence of those traditions served as a symbol and a bellwether for the end of Russian dominance in the region. In the case of Soviet Milk, reflected by the real life events that inspired the novel, the familial is a microcosm of the global. The passing of one era. The emergence of another.

Besides, Russia’s invasion and bombardment of the Ukraine reminds us that former satellite states like Latvia are not out of the woods yet. If Ukraine falls, who will be next on Vladimir Putin’s radar? The era of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev is not ancient history. It is as much part of living memory as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like the man said, those who forget the lessons of history are doomed forever to repeat them. Soviet Milk is part of the canon that informs that remembrance.

Nora Ikstena

 

Cambodia - First They Killed My Father

Country: Cambodia           
Book: First They Killed My Father
Author: Loung Ung
Publication Year: 2000
Genre: Memoir/History

Often on this literary trip around the world, I find it hard not to conclude that the human race is a collection of despicable specimens. From the current desolation of Syria (see: Syria) of the previous entry, we turn to Cambodia and the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge.

Loung Ung was 5 when Pol Pot’s forces entered Phnom Penh in 1975. Her father was a policeman and the family were relatively comfortable compared to many other Cambodians living in the city at the time. With the arrival of the Khmer Rouge, the family were forced to flee the capital, first by car and then on foot. In a journey vaguely reminiscent of the Joads in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, they stumble from one disaster to the next.

Eventually they arrive at a camp and what is advertised as a safe haven. Yet like every work of fiction ever written, the dream soon turns to nightmare. The family are forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day growing and harvesting food. Little of this produce is shared with the workers and their rations are quckly reduced to little or nothing

Loung describes the single rice dish that becomes less like rice and more like a thin broth. How she’d drink the liquid first to reveal three tea spoons worth of rice at the bottom of the dish. Savouring every last grain, even if they fell in the dirt. It was the only food they would receive each day, although they were able to buy extra supplies with gold and jewels sewed into their clothing before the exodus from Phnom Penh.

Yet there can be no doubt what will happen in this story. The title tells all and hangs over Loung’s memoir like the shadow of the Grim Reaper. As a government official and de facto supporter of the previous regime, the family live in constant fear that Pa will be identified and liquidated. As we hear in tales told of every cowardly regime throughout time, no formal sentence of death is pronounced. Two soldiers arrive to ask Loung’s father to help them free a vehicle from a ditch. He is never seen again.

Life limps on. Eventually Loung’s mother tells her and two of her siblings to escape and find a family willing to take them in. Instead Loung and her sister, Chou, end up in a children’s camp, where Loung is recruited into the army as 7 a year old child solder to fight the Vietnamese. Loung manages to get a pass to visit relatives and returns to the camp to see her mother one last time. After a premonition, she next leaves without permission and finds the family tent empty. Like her father, her mother is never seen again.

The Vietnamese army took control of Phnom Penh in 1979 and pushed westward. Loung’s camp is hit with mortar fire and many of the children are maimed and killed. She is reunited with two of her surviving siblings and they once again find themselves walking. They are taken in by a number of families, some kind, some cruel, but with the Khmer Rouge mostly in retreat, they are able travel back towards the capital, now reunited with two more of their brothers.

Through a series of adventures, Loung travels with her brother to Vietnam to stay with his wife’s new family. The three of them are then smuggled into Thailand to a refugee camp and are then sponsored to travel to the United States, where they settle in Vermont. Loung went to school, graduated from college and became a campaigner and activist for veterans of the Vietnam War and the abolition of landmines. In 1997, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, for which Loung worked, won the Nobel Peace Prize.

First They Killed My Father has been criticised by many in the Cambodian community. There are a number of alleged inaccuracies in the book and the main objection raised is how a 5 year old child could have remembered these incidents so clearly. This kind of misses the point. The book is deliberately framed through the eyes of a child and what seem like relatively minor errors feed into the rose tinted view we all have of our childhoods. Memory is a fickle thing. Whether Cambodians put mint in their noodle soup or whether the family really did visit Angkor Wat in 1973 or Wat Phnom in Phnom Penh is neither here or there.

It does seems like there is a certain amount or racism and classism in these accusations. Loung’s mother was Chinese and ethnically she is half Cambodian. The sad irony is that this is exactly the kind of eugencism that were central to the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Loung describes using dirt to darken her pale skin for fear she would be identified as half Chinese and killed. Apparently the same level of xenophobia survives in certain corners of the Khmer population.

The classist jibes are equally reductive. The accusation that, well your family were well off before the Khmer Rouge, so how can you claim to represent the Cambodian community is a ridiculous as saying, well you were a professor in Warsaw before the Germans invaded, so how can you speak for the Polish Jews who survived Auschwitz?As we saw with Saudi Arabia (see: Saudi Arabia), no one voice is more worthy or representitive than any other. Life is not a single data point but a scatter chart of many such points.

No one person represents the whole. In order to get a balanced view of any historical event, we must read from a wide variety of sources, even those that do not conform to our ideological view of the world. No one account can give a definitive assessment of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or the concentration camps of the Nazis. First They Killed My Father is no less an objective view of the time and place than Roland Joffé’s 1984 film, The Killing Fields. Yet the latter seems to receive less of a backlash. Sadly in reviewing a female author, we always have to suspect that sexism and basic misogyny play a part in these criticisms.

Of course, I am equally to blame here in choosing one writer and one book to represent the whole of Cambodia. I do not claim Loung Ung to be the be all and end all of Cambodia literature, any more than I claim Clarice Lispector to represent (see: Brazil) or Waris Dirie to encompass all of Somalia (see: Somalia). Sometimes though, I have to be ruthless. There are 197 countries to cover in this project, as well as their various dependencies.

Some places hold my interest longer than others, usually because of their unfamiliarity to me. As someone who has thought and read about Cambodia, on and off, for a very long time, I am reasonably well acquainted with the events of the time. I am, for instance, less knowledgeable about Laos, which is a gap I will certainly plug at some point. There are only so many hours in the day.

Later, when this project is completed, there is no telling to which countries' literature I will return. For now, First They Killed My Father will have to do. Time to hoist anchor and raise the sails. Time to be moving on.

Loung Ung

 

Syria - Woman in the Crossfire/ Planet of Clay

Country: Syria         
Book: A Woman in the Crossfire/ Planet of Clay
Author: Samar Yazbek
Publication Year: 2012/2021
Genre: Journalism/Fiction

Before the start of the Syrian Revolution in 2011, Samar Yazbek was already something of a household name in her country. As well as a novelist and journalist, she had appeared on several programmes on Syrian State TV and presented her own series, Library Story.

Yazbek was also something of a controversial figure for being a woman living in a conservative Islamic country. She left home at 16, very much out of kilter with traditional values. She was also raising her daughter alone, without living with the father.

All of this might have given someone else pause when the series of demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011 Being a face known to many, not to mention a woman, was bound to put her in harm’s way. But Yazbek is not anyone. Throughout the first 100 days of the demonstrations and retaliations by the security forces, she recorded her experiences, as well as firsthand accounts of those witness to massacres and of the victims of the beatings and torture.

A Woman in the Crossfire is the result of those recordings. If we want to get highbrow and overly effete about it, we can compare A Woman in the Crossfire to Goya’s Disasters of War, the series of sketches Goya made depicting the atrocities carried out by Napoleon’s forces following their invasion of Spain in 1808. Yet the two have a lot in common. Quick, vital sketches that describe the daily indignities committed by the aggressors on the general population. 

A scene from Goya's Disasters of War

From the start, Yazbek was recognised by the police and military officers. She received countless death threats and not just from the authorities. As an Alawite, a minority Shīʿite Muslim sect, of which Bashar al-Assad and his family are members, Yazbek was considered a traitor by many of her own people.

Bravery comes in many forms. Yazbek does not portray herself as some stoic, impassive observer. She took Xanax to be able to sleep at night. She often had crying fits and worried most for her daughter, who, as teenager, was most in danger from the kinds of sexual violence committed in all wars and conflicts. As the demonstrations begin, she witnessed her first dead body. It was far from the last.

But bravery is not about action without fear. It is about action in spite of that fear. Yazbek was threatened and intimidated but kept writing regardless. The authorities frequently appeared at her door and, hood over her head, took her to be shown the mutilated bodies hanging in the cells of the Syrian torturer chambers. They made her strip to the waist at one point, but a combination of defiance and a fainting fit prevented (perhaps) the sexual assault that was to follow.

A Woman in the Crossfire is a reminder how important female voices are in such moments of revolution and conflict. It is a snapshot of what was happening in Damascus and elsewhere in the country at the moment when the revolution began. At the end of July 2011, Yazbek left the country, more for the protection of her daughter than any regard for her own safety. 

It was perhaps a fortuitous escape. From July and into August 2011, members of the Syrian military started to rebel (Yazbek records instances of whole units being massacred for refusing to serve or fire on civilians). New factions formed, hostile to Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian Revolution was over. The Syrian Civil War had begun. It has been in progress ever since.

More than 600,000 are estimated to have been killed in Syria in the last 13 years, including 55,000 tortured to death in the same cells to which Yazbek was taken. It is a war in which all the usual global political suspects interfere and make political capital. From the UK, USA, France, Russia, Iran and Israel. no one comes out of it well. Only this week as I write, 5 SAS soldiers are being investigated for potential war crimes committed while on active service in Syria.

War, as Smedley Butler once said, is a racket (see: War is a Racket). It is also a business. Since the end of the Second World War, many of the world’s major economies have been dependent on their arms manufacturers. Syria is just the latest country allowed to go to rack and ruin to feed the cannibalistic war machine.

Bashar al-Assad is culpable for much of this of course, but the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the unleashing of Isis and other Islamist forces is as significant to what has happened to Syria in the last decade. And like the 8 year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, in which both sides were kept well armed by the same global cannibals, Syria lies in ruins as much from external interference as internal strife.

Samar Yazbek has returned to the Syrian conflict in her writing multiple times since leaving the country. I have not read all of the works, so I can't comment on which is the most impactful. Yet her 2021 novel, Planet of Clay, must be near the pinnacle of what she has written in that time.

Planet of Clay is told through the eyes of Rima, a girl unable to speak. In reading A Woman in the Crossfire, one can’t help but think of Rima as an analogue of Yazbek’s own daughter at the time of the initial Syrian uprising. Although from Yazbek’s descriptions of her daughter, she was far from silent at the time. The landscape in which Rima travels is also not the largely intact Syria at the beginning of the crisis. No time is specified, but the wholesale destruction suggests we are closer to 2021 than 2011.

The plot is Kafkaesque in its outlook. Rima is dragged from one basement and safe house to another by a series of relatives and other actors. First her mother ‘disappears’ (an Orwellian tern for ‘shot’). She ends up in a hospital filled with torture victims. Her brother rescues her and drags her from pillar to post, until he also ‘disappears’. It is then the turn of her brother’s friend to bring her to safety.

Anyone who’s ever read Kafka or Orwell knows how this ends. Yet as we have said before during this project, fairytale endings are a myth. There is no restoration of the status quo for Syria. A tentative ceasefire has been in place for the last couple of years, but not much of Syria remains standing. The west and its media have long since moved on to other conflicts, because in a world financed by arms sales there are always new flames to fan with bombs and bullets. It doesn’t seem like we will ever learn.

Samar Yazbek

 

Iceland - Butterflies in November et. al.

Country: Iceland               
Book: Butterflies in November (Rigning í nóvember)
Author: Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Brian FitzGibbon (Translator)
Publication Year: 2004 (2014)
Genre: Fiction

Country: Iceland               
Book: Icelandic Folk Tales
Author: Hjörleifur Helgi Stefánsson
Publication Year: 2020
Genre: Folklore

Country: Iceland               
Book: The Prose Edda
Author: Snorri Sturluson, Jesse Byock (Translator)
Publication Year: 1220 (2005)
Genre: Norse Mythology

Country: Iceland
Book: Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland
Author: Jeff Janoda
Publication Year: 2005
Genre: Historical Fiction

Iceland is a country which fascinates me. Straddling the Atlantic ridge between the Eurasian and America tectonic plates, it is a land famous for its volcanoes and lava fields. Indeed, over the last few years there have been a number of prominent volcanic eruptions on the island, the live streams for which I have often played in the background while reading.

Even before then, my awareness of Iceland as a place of wonder begins with the 1959 film adaptation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, staring James Mason, and later the book, which began my love of Jules Verne (see: Le Rayon Vert for more).

In Journey to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre), German Professor, Otto Lidenbrock finds a note written in runic script in an old book of Icelandic saga. When decoded, the note gives the reader coded instructions on how to gain entrance to the centre of the Earth.

Lidenbrock, accompanied by his nephew, Axel, travels to Iceland, to the stratovolcano of Snæfellsjökull in the west of the island. On certain days at the end of June the sun casts shadows that point the way towards a tunnel which leads into the bowels of the planet. Many have seen in this, and other plot points, as an influence for JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. They initially take the wrong tunnel and have to double back. Once on the right track, the adventures never return to Iceland, finally emerging during a volcanic eruption on the Italian island of Stromboli.

Iceland beguiles with its apparent smallness. Although only 500km at its widest point, the coastline runs for more than 6,500km. Which provides more than enough space for the roadtrip featured in the first Icelandic book proper under consideration, Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.

The unnamed narrator, a translator of more than 11 languages, has been left by her husband for his pregnant mistress. She has ambitions of travelling abroad, but when a friend is hospitalised for several months, she find herself the temporary guardian of their 4 year old, hearing impaired son. And so the two set out on a journey around the 1300km long Ring Road that encircles Iceland.

The novel has certain similarities to Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare (see: Finland). Just as Paasilinna’s book begins with the winging of the titular hare, so Butterflies in November begins with the narrator hitting and killing a goose in her car. The lives of the protagonists of both books alter or unravel in the immediate aftermath of these incidents, resulting in them journeying through the wilderness of their respective countries.

It’s a decent enough novel in its way and I will return to Ólafsdóttir’s books at a later date. However, as others have pointed out, it does contain some problematic language. Like "a child with a Senegalese father" being identified as being disabled because of their dual heritage. The narrator’s husband is a misogynist and bully of the highest order, with his pronouncements and personal attacks on her going unchallenged. There is even a brief reconciliation between the two at one point. The book is one of those that just kind of ends without any resolution being achieved. I want to read more as I’m interested to see if this is emblematic of Ólafsdóttir’s oeuvre or of Icelandic literature in general.

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

For now, let’s move on to Icelandic Folk Tales by Hjörleifur Helgi Stefánsson. The image of traditional Icelandic literature is one of the great sagas and Edda (see below). In turning to Iceland, I knew I wanted to read some Icelandic folklore and found a number of examples. Stefánsson’s short collection of folk stories is a more modern rendering of a number of folklore tropes, but all the familiar characters are here. Demons. Witches. Elves. Sooo many trolls. If ever we needed reminding just how much influence Icelandic folklore had on the shaping of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, we can find it in these pages.

I say this is a modern retelling as Stefánsson’s framing is of oral tales passed down by his parents and grandparents. It is also very much a national collection, with each area of Iceland featuring at least once. Yet the well worn, clichéd language of the fairytale is also present, with all of the usual, ‘There once was a’ and suchlike that we find in Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. The stories are new and old at the same time, reminding the reader just how old a country Iceland really is.

For a sense of how old Iceland is, we turn to the 13^th century Prose Edda. This is the one. The book that inspired Tolkien’s entire mythology, from Middle Earth, the name he took for his mythical world, to names of several of the dwarfs that set out with Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, to the name of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings series, who is here a character called, Frodi.

As well as well Tolkien, The Prose Edda was used by Richard Wagner for much of his Ring Cycle, the Black Sabbath album, Tyr, as well as all of those Marvel movies. Indeed, whenever anyone makes reference to the Valkyries, Berserkers. Valhalla, Ragnarok, Yggdrasill, Thor, Odin or Loki, they are ultimately referring back to the Prose Edda.

The book is in one  sense a teaching aid on how to write epic poetry, using references to earlier Norse poems that are mostly now lost (although a second volume, known as The Poetic Edda, does gather many of these verses together.) Here we get the sense of the age of Iceland, in that these stories were already old when they were gathered together and set down by Sturluson in the early 13^th century. It is telling that the Prose Edda is also known as the Younger Edda.

The Prose Edda is also an interesting document in that it straddles the periods of pagan and Christian Scandinavia. The book starts with reference to Adam and Eve and Jesus Christ, but soon spins off into reference to classical mythology. Thor is made a refugee from the Fall of Troy in the same way as Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid. He is made commensurate with Hector, although in most renderings of the story, including the Iliad, Hector was killed by Achilles.

This classical framing was perhaps an attempt to preserve Norse mythology in the face of Christian persecution by making it seem less grandiose and more in the vein of Roman mythology. Thor, in other renderings of the mythos, is commensurate with Zeus or Jupiter, all of them gods of thunder. Yet this would place Thor in direction competition with Jehovah. Thor’s powers are therefore dialed down and transferred to a mythical realm that remained acceptable to the Roman Catholic church because of its Latin associations.

In a similar vein, Loki, chief antagonist for Thor, becomes analogue with Odysseus (or Ulysses, to emphasise the Roman version). Which makes sense. Both are tricksters. The Trojan Horse is said to have been Odysseus’s idea, not to mention his many deceptions on the journey home to Ithaca. Though Hector and Odysseus are never really placed in direct conflict with one another in either Homer or Virgil.

Many of our modern English words come down to us from these tales. Earth (as in Planet Earth). Hell (Hel in the original). Not to mention most of our days of the week, which are all named after Norse gods, in the same way that all Latin derived, romance languages use names derived from pagan Roman gods.

Of all the books we have looked at, or will look at on this journey, we are unlikely to find one that has had more influence on western thought than the Prose Edda.

For a modern retelling of other Icelandic sagas, we turn, finally, to Saga: A Novel of Medieval Iceland by Jeff Janoda. This historic novel takes it queue from the Eyrbyggja saga, written by an anonymous writer sometime in the 13^th century. It describes the feud between two Norse clans that settled Iceland, led by the chieftains, Snorri Goði and Arnkel Goði.

Janoda’s retelling (one imagines, without having read the source material) gives the characters more of an inner life than would have been the convention in medieval literature. Like the Prose Edda, there is a blending of Christian and Norse mythology. Odin and Thor never appear directly, but their influence and patronage or disapproval are keenly felt by all. The supernatural elements of the original do feature, but are open to interpretation. Are visions of the dead real or figments of the imagination? It is for the reader to decide.

Like the best historical fiction, Janoda roots the action in the real world. The Eyrbyggja saga was considered semi-historical to begin with and Janoda’s book would seem to iron out some of the wrinkles to make it closer to the historical reality of 13^th century Iceland while playing fast and loose with the narrative elements of the original story. But isn’t his what happens in all mythology? Building on previous versions of a tale to add to the mythos. We see this with Greek and Elizabethan playwrights, Marvel comics, as well as every adaptation of A Christmas Carol or The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Indeed, as this project likes to draw parallels with the countries and authors it has previously explored, we cannot fail to observe that a certain Robert Louis Stevenson, last seen in Samoa (see: Samoa), wrote 'The Waif Woman: A Cue, from a Saga', a story based on certain elements of the same saga. A cursory reading of the story suggests it was largely based on a minor subplot. It was published posthumously in 1916, more than 20 years after Stevenson’s death in 1894.

We, I, have spent more time and covered more Icelandic authors than any country on this journey thus far. However Iceland perches on the edge of a liminal space between many different worlds. The mythological and the historical; the Norse and the Christian; the European and the American. It bestrides the narrow world like a colossus (to borrow from Shakespeare's Cassius).

One figure absent from Jeff Janoda’s version of the Eyrbyggja saga is Eric the Red, the Viking explorer who ‘discovered’ Greenland and established the first settlements on the island. The Icelandic Edda and Sagas tell us so much about the Vikings who influenced European society far beyond the height of their powers, from trading across Europe and into Asia, to founding the city of Dublin, amongst others, to  ruling the Danelaw across North East and Eastern England for more than two centuries.

Yet while Iceland exists in that liminal space, it is a country in the here and now. Since beginning to read these books, the latest volcanic eruption has begun on the island and has already been going on for more than a week, with no sign of ending just yet. Iceland has given us Björk and Sigur Rós (amongst others), for which I am personally very grateful. It is one of those places that seems to punch above its weight, but also has the same kind of successful social democracy as other Scandinavian countries. A reminder that you don’t need to be the richest nation in the world to provide a high standard of living for your citizens. Indeed, the two things might be mutually exclusive.

As such, you will excuse me writing two thousand words on such a small country, when a behemoth like Argentina or Congo might receive half that word count (*might*: I cannot say what rabbit holes I will stumble into during this project). Iceland exists in that liminal space between the mythical and the real. Its tropes and archetypes flow into western literature into a dozen other places besides. Other than Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, there is nowhere else that has influenced us more.

Jeff Janoda