The Gambia - The Gambia-Senegal Border et al.

Country: The Gambia
Book: The Gambia-Senegal Border: Issues in Regional Integration/ Politics in The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau
Author: Mariama Khan
Publication Year: 2019/2021
Genre: Sociology 

Country: The Gambia
Book: The African
Author: William Conton
Publication Year: 1961
Genre: Fiction

As countries go, there can be few that are quite so bizarre as The Gambia. The smallest country in Africa, The Gambia is almost entirely enclosed by Senegal. Its geography is entirely defined by the Gambia River (which makes up 11% of the country’s total area), with the capital, Banjul, situated on an island at the mouth of the river as it empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It is barely 30 miles wide at its widest point.

Moreover, one part of Senegal, Casamance, lies on the opposite side of Gambia, which, for all practical purposes, cuts it off from the rest of the country. In order to travel to Casamance, a Senegalese traveler must pass into The Gambia, cross the river, and exit once again. This obviously presents unique challenges in terms of border control and international relations.

The reason The Gambia exists at all comes down to this project’s favourite topic, colonialism. The Portuguese crown sold exclusive trading rights on the Gambia river to English merchants in 1588. This trade continued for the next two centuries until Great Britain occupied the area in 1758. It was at various times considered an enclave of Sierra Leone, also a British territory, until a separate country was created in 1888. It remained a British colony until gaining independence in 1965.

Senegal, meanwhile, was for three hundred years under the colonial control of France. Following independence for both countries, the colonial languages were retained as a lingua franca between different demographic groups with their own local languages. This presents further challenges in terms of managing the geographical border between the two countries.

Mariama Khan is a Gambian born academic working in the United States. Her two books under consideration, The Gambia-Senegal Border: Issues in Regional Integration, and Politics in The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, look at the challenges in policing and navigating the border between The Gambia and Senegal, as well as the history and cross border co-operation in West Africa in general.

The term used to describe Senegal and The Gambia as a whole is Senegambia. The Gambia-Senegal Border looks at how people living on opposite sides of the border negotiate customs check points, as well as the way transport and trade are coordinated.

The question that is bound to occur to anyone reading about Senegambia is, why don’t the two countries merge to become one and resolve many of these border problems, making Casamance contiguous with the rest of Senegal at the same time? 

Khan dedicates much time to this conversation and why it is impractical in the short (and probably long) term. Casamance becoming part of The Gambia has just as many issues with a lively and, at a times, violent movement in the region to become an independent state on its own.

Khan uses the local ideas dome-baaye (the father’s child)  and dome-ndeye (the mother’s child) as a comparison between the things in which The Gambia and Senegal are in opposition and the things in which they are in agreement. The former, in the language of the book, refers to areas where The Gambia and Senegal are in conflict. The latter refers to areas in which there is significant co-operation.

Politics in The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau draws parallels with the histories of these two West African counties under colonialism and since independence. Guinea-Bissau was a Portuguese country with many of its population shipped to the Cabo Verde islands (also a Portuguese African colony) as slaves to work in the cotton and indigo plantations.

Both countries were once part of the pre-colonial state of Kaabu, which existed for three hundred years from the 16^th to 19^th century, until the region was formally partitioned between the countries of Western Europe. Kaabu was essentially a province of Mali, made up of modern day Guinea-Bissau, The Gambia and parts of Casamance. The historic state gives Khan a way to metaphorically unite Guinea-Bissau and The Gambia and circumnavigate the barrier of Casamance that lies between them.

Mariama Khan

I chose these two books because it is nice to step away from the purely fictional for a time. There is so much of Africa to explore on which academia can shed a light. One cannot live on authors alone. Besides, with one of the strangest international borders in the world, it is worth exploring how it works in practice.

Moreover, given how much Western Europe carved up West Africa into such small chunks and slices, it is beneficial to get an idea of the larger picture when passing on to other countries in the region. Senegal is one of those places from which I had already read literature in the form of Fatou Diome. I would like to reread them and some of her other books, as well as a number of other Senegalese writers. To Guinea-Bissau we shall also turn soon enough with the author, Abdulai Silá.

William Conton might be considered somewhat of a cheat. He was of Sierra Leone parentage. However, he was born in Banjul (then called Bathurst) in 1925, forty years before The Gambia gained independence.

I am unsure why Conton was born in The Gambia. His parents were descendents of Caribbean Creoles who settled in Sierra Leone when the country was established as a place for freed slaves. Nevertheless I have more than enough Sierra Leone writers to read to allow The Gambia to borrow someone who was actually born there.

Conton’s first novel (one of only two), The African, is a curiosity. It was one of the first dozen books to be published by the African Writers Series, along with the likes of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (see: Kenya) and Ayi Kwei Armah.

The African takes place in the fictional West African country of Songhai (based on the pre-colonial West African Songhai Empire), as well as locations in England, including Durham. Liverpool and the Lake District. It is partly autobiographical, partly a bildungsroman, depicting the development of the main character, Kamara, as he is educated in Songhai, travels to England to study at Durham University (as did Conton), suffers injury and tragedy as a result of his love affair with a white South African woman, before returning to his home country and becoming a politician and campaigner for independence.

It’s one of those books, like Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de Violence (see: Mali) that is a decent first novel. The main character is a little stiff and conservative. He marries his first wife for political reasons and takes a second wife (Songhai being a polygamous country like much of real life West Africa) for practical reasons. Unfortunately, Conton did not write another novel for twenty years. 1987’s The Flights is touted as a kind of sequel to The African. By all accounts, it’s not very good.

Still, The African is generic enough that it could be set in most West African countries in the years leading up to independence and its immediate aftermath. The ending, which turns into a tale of revenge and redemption, is a little superfluous. The ending is ambiguous and unsatisfying, especially for we simple souls who enjoy seeing the villain get their comeuppance. But then the novel doesn’t give us enough information to reach a solid conclusion as to the alleged perpetrator’s guilt. It’s partially successful as a novel. Perhaps that is why Conton took so long to write another.

I suspect as we return to West Africa many more times during this project we will find like the Caribbean and the Pacific Island Region that the borders between its nations will continue to blur. Borders, as we have seen countless times in these entries, are political and arbitrary.

The Gambia might be the smallest country in Africa, but that means its cross border relations are all the more important, especially with the larger country that encloses it. Behemoths like China, India, Russia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo remain unresolved due to their sheer size. Like the Louvre, their treasures are too big to absorb in one visit (or indeeed, many). Smaller nations might have less to offer but they have more to appreciate.

The bizarrity of The Gambia’s size and shape are what make it unique. One can only hope it retains its character through independence from Senegal, while reining the dome-ndeye of Senegambia. That way we can still say in a non-official language: Vive la Difference. Vive la Gambia.

William Conton

 

Croatia - How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed/Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism

Country: Croatia
Book: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed/Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism
Author: Slavenka Drakulić
Publication Year: 1991/2021
Genre: Journalism/Essay

Croatia is another of those countries that we know something about for all of the wrong reasons. The former country of Yugoslavia, which comprised the now independent states of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Kosovo and North Macedonia, suffered a series of devastating conflicts following the fall of the Berlin Wall and through much of the 1990s.

As Slavenka Drakulić notes in Café Europa Revisited, no other Eastern European communist country lived through a period of such prolonged bloodshed. Czechoslovakia splintered into the Czech Republic (now Czechia) and Slovakia. Latvia (see: Latvia), Estonia and Lithuania regained their independence after being absorbed by the Russian leviathan. Some, like Albania and Belarus, seemed to carry on much as before.

Drakulić observes that much of this has to do with the relative lack of restrictions (relative to the likes of Poland and Hungary), following the death of President Tito in 1980. Yugoslavian citizens had greater freedom to travel into the west than citizens of the Eastern Bloc.  Though, in other regards, censorship and shortages of pretty much everything were as harsh as anywhere else.

There was, Drakulić notes, not the level of political conflict one finds in Poland with Lech Wałęsa and the Solitarity movement of the 1980s. Nor the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, or the revolutions in Hungary in 1956 and 1989. As such, Yugoslavia was a smouldering pot of resentment that boiled over in the decade following the end of the Soviet era.

The result of this was what we witnessed on our TV screens for much of the 1990s. Tower blocks bombed to obliteration. Blood stained roads and pavements in the aftermath of mortar attacks and indiscriminate sniper fire. The unsettling knowledge that newspapers and news channels only cared because it was happening in Europe and to white people. Too many examples over the last thirty years give weight to that feeling.

It is interesting to compare Drakulić’s two books under consideration. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, published in 1991, but including some pieces written before the wall came down, gives a glimpse of Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Russian Communism. 2021’s Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, which, as the name suggests, is a follow up to another book, Café Europa, also written early in the post Communist period, shows how the optimism faded as quickly as the west’s promises of prosperity and reconstruction.

To illustrate the effects and after effects of communism, Drakulić describes the mundane details that people in the west take fro granted. The availability and quality of sanitary products. The nebulous quality of toilet paper as an indication of the country’s fortunes, like some second world version of the stock market. The versions of products western companies sell in the East, made with reduced or substandard ingredients, which they justify by saying people prefer that way.

Yugoslavia in many ways had its own socialist micro-climate, separate from the rest of Soviet controlled Eastern Europe. The countries that made up its borders were an Eastern Bloc in miniature. Religion wasn’t banned as it was elsewhere n the east (it was, however, rarely practiced openly for fear of persecution). Although Drakulić’s was subject to censorship (one chapter of How We Survived Communism describes a meeting with the official charged with censoring her work), she spent much of the Soviet era travelling across both sides of the Iron Curtain.

It is easy to forget that many people in the east thought about Russian communism in much the same way as those in the west. When you know you are being lied to, you learn to read between the lines. What isn’t said is just as important as what is. Journalists like Drakulić learned to write about the truth behind the propaganda without actually talking about it. Such acts of subversion could be heavily punished if not carefully disguised.

The opening chapter of How We Survived Communism concerns Drakulić’s friend, Tanja, a Slovenian journalist who took her own life in 1985. She wrote a seemingly innocuous article about pinball machines that led to her public ostracision. The piece included reference to private enterprise, which was then being introduced to booster the country’s flagging economy. The Communist party objected and the paper was forced to issue an apology. Tanja kept working for the paper, but none of her articles would ever be published again. She was shunned by her colleagues and friends refused to be seen with her in public.

Drakulić speculates on the reasons for her friend’s death, as people always do when a loved one takes their own life. She concludes that  ultimately Tanja thought her purgatory would never end. That communism would reign supreme in Yugoslavia forever. Yet jusr four years later, the wall came down. Two years after that and Yugoslavia ceased to exist. Drakulić asks how many others like Tanja died because they thought they would never escape. It is impossible to know.

It is a reminder that all empires end, even if they persist for a thousand years. The Soviet era is in many ways comparable to the fall of Rome (although Rome lasted ten times as long as the Soviet Union). A power vacuum was left behind. A lack of leadership led to chaos after everything had been controlled from Moscow for the previous forty five years.

There is an image that does the rounds on social media of the difference between West and East Berlin at night. You can clearly see where the Berlin Wall divided the city due to the difference in lightbulbs. To the west they are so bright as to be almost white. To the east they are a dull orange. More than thirty five years since the wall came down, the economic prosperity that has seen Germany become the powerhouse of Europe has barely trickled towrds the east of the country (you would think it would be a good place to build an observatory or two).

Berlin street lights photographed by Chris Hadfield aboard the ISS

This is the point of much of Café Europa Revisited, written 30 years after the Berlin Wall was demolished. The cafes, which are the talking shops of Croatia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, might have fancier lighting and furniture than before, but the hope and optimism Drakulić saw in people’s faces when writing her first Café Europa collection has faded.

It is part of the same exploitation and abandonment by the west that has seen so many risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean from Africa in recent years in search of a better life. Or the politicking in Great Britain that led to Brexit (to which the final chapter of Café Europa Revisited is dedicated).  

Drakulić holds up the post Communist era as a cautionary tale. The less wealthy are always abandoned by the rich. Although steps have been taken recently to redress the mistakes of Brexit, food prices have continued to increase and quality has gone down in the five years since the UK formally left the EU. Britain will never reach parity with Eastern Europe (the City of London is too important for that to happen), but like the end of the Soviet era, the ramifications of Brexit will be felt for decades to come.

There is more to say, but I am conscious there are five other former Yugoslavian countries to cover in this project and we will return to the region many times before the end.

Drakulić is a writer for all of Eastern Europe. Her books takes us to Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, Albania and her native Croatia. In doing so, she lights upon generations of one family living in one small apartment and the vagaries of owning land in Yugoslavia. Of life under the Stasi in East Berlin and travelling to Sweden from Zagreb in the 1970s. Of the continuing threats to freedom and democracy that persist in much of the former Soviet sphere.

Fiction is my comfort zone, but fiction doesn’t always cut it if you want to make sense of the world. Which is why I always try to mix things up by reading journalism and biography and poetry and theatre. Drakulić’s writing is the perfect overview of life in Eastern Europe before and after the Soviet Union. We have talked about the wars in Yugoslavia, but said very little about them (or the importance of the Balkans in 20^th century history in general). Yet with five other countries to visit, I am sure there will be much to tell in the future.

Slavenka Drakulić

 

Sweden - Exterminate All the Brutes et al.

Country: Sweden
Book: "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (Utrota varenda jävel)
Author: Sven Lindqvist, Joan Tate (Translation)
Publication Year: 1992 (1997)
Genre: History/Travelogue

Country: Sweden
Book: Five Major Plays/The Red Room (Röda rummet)
Author: August Strindberg, Carl R. Mueller/ Peter Graves (Translators)
Publication Year: 2000/2010 (1879)
Genre: Drama/Fiction

Country: Sweden
Book: Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)
Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist, Ebba Segerberg (translator)
Publication Year: 2007 (2004)
Genre: Horror

Strap in. The first half of this one is going to be a trip. Not a scenic one either.

I first heard of Sven Lindqvist when Raoul Peck adapted his book, "Exterminate All the Brutes", into a four part documentary series, broadcast on HBO in 2021. Both book and TV series chart the route from Western European colonialism in the golden age of exploration all the way to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Lindqvist’s book is framed partly as a travelogue with heavy asides into the colonialism of the 19^th and early 20^th century. As Lindqvist expounds upon his thesis, he treks through countries that skirt the Sahara desert, travelling from Algeria in the north to Niger in sub-Saharan Africa. His digressions take us from the hot house of the Congolese rain forest to the furnaces of Auschwitz.

The book takes its name from a quote in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It is the conclusion drawn by Kurtz in his report to the company on how to deal with Africa. It is, Lindqvist argues, a recommendation Kurtz did not need to make because extermination was the standard policy of European colonialism in Afirca as elsewhere. Both Lindqvist and Peck note that much is left unsaid by Conrad, because most of his contemporary audience would have been well aware of European colonial atrocities.

Sven Lindqvist

An estimated 10 million people were murdered in the Belgian Congo in the early part of the 20^th century. Many were decapitated. Some had their heads mounted on wall displays for Europeans to pose in front of for photos. Even those who weren’t killed were often mutilated, their hands being cut off and collected in baskets if they didn’t gather rubber quickly enough for the colonialists’ liking.

Atrocities committed elsewhere were perhaps less voluminous, but no less brutal. The Germans held what was almost a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust in Namibia, building concentration camps and herding thousands into the Namib desert. None returned and little more than  bones were ever found.

The British and the French committed their own atrocities in their expansive empires. As we saw when we looked at Kenya (see: Kenya), after the war, after the Holocaust, Britain went right back to its old tricks, killing an estimated 50,000 Kenyans during the Mau-Mau Uprising and burning records and denying it for decades, until the surviving records were found in a warehouse and reality couldn’t be denied any longer.

Sven Lindqvist thesis is that Hitler and the Nazis were not some aberration of history. Their actions were the culmination of everything Hitler saw and admired about the British Empire. He couldn’t go west due to the Royal Navy’s domination of the seas and so he expanded east. The idea of Lebensraum, or living space, was fully inspired by what Britain and others had done in South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Not to mention the colonisation of the Americas, which killed tens of millions of people from slaughter and disease. Although Lindqvist constrains himself largely to Africa, Raoul Peck expands his thesis to include the Americas, and the United States in particular, with his small screen adaptation.

This is not to downplay or delegitimise what took place in Germany and Eastern Europe in the 30s and 40s. These are obviously unique events in history. The problem comes when we try to ring fence the events of the Second World War and attempt to see them as isolated incidents. Yet they are not isolated. They are the natural consequence of colonialism, as well as the apotheosis of two and half thousand years of Eurasian anti-Semitism. The Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. It is the sharp end of myriad expulsions and pogroms committed against the Jewish people since the time of the Babylonian exile.

The mantra of the post-Holocaust world is 'Never again' and yet we have allowed it to happen time and again in Cambodia (see: Cambodia) and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The United States killed millions in each of Korea (see: South Korea), Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (see: Vietnam) and Iraq, as well as facilitating genocides in other countries, most notably East Timor, where Indonesia killed a third of the population (200,000 people), all funded and armed by the US.

We see the same death and wanton destruction in Gaza and Lebanon, seemingly without anybody being about to stop it, despite being the ones supplying the bombs and the bullets. We say never again because it seems so much more civilised than admitting the reality that our post-war economies are largely built on and underpinned by the arms industry. Yes. “Never again” sounds less psychotic than, “Please sir, can I have some more?”

Colonialism never really ended, it was just placed under new ownership. The European colonial empires faded after the Second World War, largely thanks to bankrupting themselves fighting the Nazis. The USA enriched itself by converting much of its defunct industry into weapons manufacture and saw no reason to stop just because there was no longer a war. Hence the Cold War. Hence the War on Terror. These are not nothing, of course, but they are vastly overstated to justify spending more than half of the federal budget subsidising the US arms industry.

There is a growing trend in right wing western politics of crying ‘they’re erasing our history’ while simultaneously denying the facts of colonial history. Or skipping over many of the salient facts of the Nazi rise to power, inspired by European colonialism and American eugencism against its black population. There are many excellent corollaries against this historic myopia.  Sven Lindqvist and Roland Peck are just two voices amongst the cacophony of writers and film makers seeking to correct the mainstream narrative. They are also an excellent point of entry into these issues. We have already met others in this project. We will meet many more.

By comparison, the work of August Strindberg is somewhat sedate. Indeed, having read one of his novels, The Red Room, as well as several of his plays, I am struggling to find much to say about him. It is the downfall of attempting to write about an author several months after reading them. Yet there is truthfully little to tell.

Compared to his Nordic counterpart, Nowegian, Henrik Ibsen, there is no comparison. Ibsen’s plays are trailblazing and full of controversy (by the standards of their day). They inspired the likes of James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw. Strindberg did inspire Tennessee Williams, John Osborne and Ingmar Bergman amongst others, but whatever impact he may once have had seems to have been diluted by the passage of time and the more liberal sensibilities of the modern day. I don’t think the same will ever be said about Ibsen, any more than they are said about Shakespeare.

Which isn’t to start some kind of international incident between Sweden and Norway (I should have that power). There is plenty that Sweden does better than pretty much anyone else (all its heavy metal for instance). Ibsen is simply a better playwright than Strindberg. That is objectively true.

The Red Room is an interesting novel and the one for which Strindberg made his name. In many ways, it is in the same vein as many of the novels we have encountered in this project: The cavalcade of characters and incidents that coalesce into the novel’s climactic scenes. It’s a satire on Stockholm society at the end of the nineteenth century that bears comparison to any number of European satirists from Swift to Graham Greene. It is often referred to as Sweden’s first modern novel.

This is where you can see the influence of Strindberg on the likes of Ingmar Bergman. Although they are in very different genres, The Seventh Seal (and, by extension, films like Wings of Desire) surely contains DNA from The Red Room. As do many of Berman’s films, of which I have seen maybe half a dozen.

You don’t have to be head over heels in love with an artist to appreciate their place in the pantheon of art. Elvis and Jane Austin, for instance, have always left me somewhat cold. And yet I can appreciate them as links in a chain to music and literature that I do like.

The same is true of Strindberg. He is not quite Dickens, but then Stockholm is not quite London. Which is no sleight. The quality of life in Sweden and its Nordic neighbours is better than Great Britain or much of the Western world.

The Red Room is based on Strindberg’s impoverished years as he tried to become a writer. Yet you feel that his avatar, Arvid Falk, is never so destitute as Oliver Twist or Little Nell or any number of Dickens’s characters. Which, again, is no sleight.

Maybe you just have to be Swedish to truly appreciate his work. And maybe it’s the Joycean in me that gravitates towards Ibsen and his pronounced influence on all of Joyce’s work. We like what we like and no one should have to make excuses for that (almost no one). So let’s leave Strindberg undisturbed where he is and move on to another Swedish author called Lindqvist.

August Strindberg

John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 novel, Let the Right One In, is our first foray into horror. Ostensibly a vampire novel, it traces a series of murders in Strindberg’s Stockholm a century after The Red Room in the grime of the 1980s. Yet Let the Right One In is also about school bullying, social ostracism and the loss of the nuclear family. Indeed, the elements of vampirism are relegated to the background for much of the novel. I have yet to watch the film adaptation, but one would imagine the horror is brought more to the fore when trying to distillate a five hundred page novel into a two hour film (cf. any adaptation of Dracula).

I don’t know how much influence the book had on the Duffer Brothers, but you can certainly find the same elements in Stranger Things as Let the Right One In. The 1980s setting. The young female outcast with supernatural powers (compare Stranger Things’ El with Let the Right One In’s Eli). Despite taking place in Stockholm, Lindqvist’s novel has the same small town ambience as the fictional Hawkins, Indiana. The same is true of Dark, which is essentially Germany’s answer to Stanger Things and, by extension, Germany’s answer to Let the Right One In.

Having read (and watched) a lot of vampire fiction lately for a different project. I always enjoy how new writers add to the lore. Octavia Butler’s vampire alien species that came to Earth millennia ago in Fledgling. Vampires as feral creatures in the Mexican borderlands of the 1840s in Isabel Cañas’s Vampires of El Norte. The revenants of Neil Jordan’s 2012 film Byzantium with their long thumbnails instead of fanged teeth. Each mix and match bits of vampire myth: leaning into some; discarding others.

Let the Right One In has its own take on these tropes. Are vampires made or are they born? Is Eli even really a vampire? The elements of trans identity that one doesn’t often find in vampire literature (though I am sure that has changed in the 20 years since Let the Right One In was published).

Though to circle back to Sven Lindqvist and Exterminate All the Brutes, we should never forget the origins of vampire literature are based on anti-Semitic propaganda around the blood libel and other hideous conspiracies. When we think of the trope of the vampire repelled by the crucifix, it is a barely concealed commentary on Judaism’s perceived rejection of Jesus Christ as the one true Messiah. It is possible to reclaim these cultural items from their racist origins. However, like our colonial past, we must never lose sight of their dark origins, especially when bad faith actors seek to cloak them in long shadows.

Sweden sits up there in the near Arctic doing its thing. Like Finland (see: Finland), it doesn’t need to proclaim itself a great global power to regard itself a successful nation. Like all of Scandinavia, it has a much higher quality of life than anywhere else on Earth. People pay a much higher rate of taxation of course, but that’s what it takes to build a society built on something other than platitudes and demonstrably false soundbites. Other countries should take note, but of course they never will. Which is why we find ourselves where we currently find ourselves.

It seems like half the bands I listen to, like Opeth, Ghost, Goat and The Hives (amongst others), hail from Sweden. I have a tongue in cheek theory that like Douglas Adams’s Shoe Event Horizon, there will come a Swedish Rock Horizon, when it will become physically impossible for any rock band to come from anywhere other than Sweden. It has some great authors too of national and international importance. We are not done with Sweden. Not by a long shot. But as always, there are other places to visit. 

John Ajvide Lindqvist

Uzbekistan - The Railway et al.

Country: Uzbekistan
Book: The Railway (Железная дорога)/The Underground (Мбобо)/ The Dead Lake (Вундеркинд Ержан)
Author: Hamid Ismailov
Publication Year: 2006 (1997)/2015(2009)/2014(2011)
Genre: Fiction/Historical fiction

Uzbekistan is somewhat of a curiosity. It is one of only two double landlocked countries in the world (i.e. you have to travel through two other countries to reach a body of water that opens out into one of the world’s oceans). However, the other country with this dubious distinction is Liechtenstein (see: Liechtenstein), which is a tiny country in the Alps. It’s like comparing Kansas City with Colorado.

If the wider world has heard of anywhere in Uzbekistan then it will undoubtedly be Samarkand. Samarkand was an important settlement along the Silk Road that connected Europe to China. It has been a centre of Islamic scholarship for centuries. As we noted when we looked at Turkey (see: Turkey), the Persian poet, Rumi, moved to Samarkand with his family when he was about 5.

Samarkand, along with much of modern day Uzbekistan, was once part of the Persian Empire and part of Iran until Russia expanded its borders into Central Asia during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The city and country at large remained a part of Russia right through the Soviet era. The three books we will consider in this piece all take place (for the most part) during that era.

Hamid Ismailov was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1954, but moved to Uzbekistan as a young man. He lived there throughout the Soviet regime, but was forced into exile in 1992 following the election of Islam Karimov as the first President of the newly independent country.

Karimov remained President for 25 years until his death in 2016. His reign was marked by corruption, censorship and torture and extrajudicial killing. Election results regularly exceeded 90% in Karimov’s favour. In 2002, his security forces were said to have executed two prisoners by boiling them alive. Despite this, the US occupied an air force base in the country for four years from 2001-2005 during their operations in Afghanistan.

 
Hamid Ismailov left Uzbekistan after he was accused of seeking to overthrow the government (“Unacceptable democratic tendencies” was the phrase they used). He settled in the UK, where he worked for the BBC World Service, becoming a Writer in Residence in 2010. He speaks and has written in numerous languages, including Uzbek, Russian, Turkish, French and German. For the most part his books are written in Uzbek and Russian and have been translated into English by other writers.

All of three books under consideration here have elements in common with one another. The central character in each is a child. All of them feature railways of one kind or another. However, each is set in a different country of the USSR. The Underground takes place exclusively in Moscow. The Dead Lake is principally set in Kazakhstan. Only The Railway features Uzbekistan, mostly the fictitious Silk Road town of Gilas. However, even here the book crosses oceans as part of its sprawling narrative.

Ismailov wrote The Railway when he still lived in Uzbekistan. It was published in Russian in 1997 with the English translation coming out in 2006. Despite having written an Uzbek version, Ismailov’s novel, like all of his novels, remains banned in Uzbekistan. He often publishes his books via Facebook in order that Uzbek readers have access to them.

The Railway is one of those novels, like A Grain of Wheat (see: Kenya) or The Forty Rules of Love (see: Turkey), that uses multiple narrators and Point of View characters to create a composite picture of the people and community featured. Central to the story is the unnamed boy, whose italicised narrative runs through the book between its tragicomic set pieces.

The literal railway is also central to the novel as the first line connecting Central Asia to Russia is being constructed. It pulls like a magnet with many of the stories culminating and concluding in the vicinity of the iron tracks.

Gilas is a multicultural town of Uzbeks, Russians, Tartars, Armenians, Chechens, Persians, Germans and Ukrainians. There is a large Jewish population. Also a sizable Korean community, due to the very real fact that when thousands of Koreans fled to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula during World War Two to escape the Japanese, Stalin had them sent to Uzbekistan because he was as paranoid of them as he was of everyone else.

As translator, Robert Chandler, says in his Preface to the novel, “Gilas is a Noah’s Ark of humanity – and a microcosm of the Soviet Union.” Like a Soviet Leviathan or Moby Dick. Or, an overlong Bob Dylan song with a cavalcade of characters, the roll call of whose names goes on for pages before the book even begins.

The Railway can also be seen, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (see: Dominican Republic) as a history of Uzbekistan and Russia during the first half of the 20^th century as told through it characters. Like Diaz’s book, the novel revolves and recirculates through time, picking up threads as it goes. Like The Great Reclamation (see: Singapore), there is a point in the past beyond which it will not go. For Heng’s novel, that is 1965. For Ismailov it is the end of the Stalinist era and, presumably,. the birth of Ismailov himself (Ismailov was born the year after Stalin died).

Chandler notes in his Preface that the Uzbek capital of Tashkent was regarded as a cosmopolitan city in the years immediately following the Second World War. Gilas  is said to be located  not far from the capital. Characters in the novel travel to the UK and the USA and make the Hajj to Mecca. For all that we think of the Soviet Union as inward facing and inaccessible, life at the margins of the regime are portrayed as broadly tolerable.

Communism is a constant presence of course, but the communists are lampooned like everyone else. As Jean-Jacque Rousseau understood, the larger an empire grows, the harder it is to control and disseminate the message of any central authority. Technology makes this easier to achieve, as we see with China’s mass surveillance systems, but in the Uzbekistan of the first half of the 20^th century, communism had to compete with Islam, Christianity, Judaism and centuries of Central Asian tradition and folklore. It’s strict enforcement was then somewhat diluted.

The Underground is a different beast entirely; set as it is in Moscow, the belly of the Russian bear. The novel is told in the first person by Kirill, or Mbobo, the son of Siberian mother and an African father, who was conceived during the 1980 Moscow Olympics. As we learn in the opening passages, Kirill’s mother died when he was 8 and he died 4 years later. His ghost or soul tells his story more than a decade after his death.

As the railway is a metaphor in The Railway, here the Moscow Metro is a metaphor in The Underground. Each passage of text is sub-titled with the name of one of the stations that make up the Moscow underground system. Though as the narrative rattles past the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, the stations start to be renamed, foreshadowing Kirill’s fate. He refers to his mother as Moscow, which is another obvious metaphor for the decline of the state in the dying years of the Soviet Union.

As a child of an African father, Kirill’s dark skin marks him out in the capital of Russia. He is subjected to frequent racist abuse and even uses racist terminology to refer to himself. As his mother is Siberian in origin, he is doubly prejudiced against. His mother drinks and flits between two different lovers.

The tragedy of Kirill is despite the disadvantages and prejudices he faces, he is academically gifted and reads books far beyond his years. One of his ‘uncles’ calls him Pushkin. in reference to the Russian novelist, Alexander Pushkin. Like the unnamed mother and daughter of Soviet Milk (see: Latvia), the collapse of the Soviet regime comes too late to offer salvation. If salvation was ever even possible in the heart of Russia. Unlike Latvia and other countries that gained their independence, the bulk of the former Communist republic lurched from the collapse of the Soviet regime, to economic collapse and financial looting by its oligarchs to the coming of Putin and the return of political oppression.

In The Dead Lake, we travel to Kazakhstan and the shadow of the Russian nuclear weapons programme. The narrator meets a young violin player while travelling through the country by train. Although he appears to be a child, he is in fact 27. As they travel on though the country, Yerzhan tells his story.

As the atomic tests produced great pools of contaminated water, the locals were forbidden from approaching them. One night Yerzhan dives into one to impress the girl next door with whom he is in love. His curse in to never age, even as she grows into a woman and drifts from his grasp. The narrator doubts the veracity of the boy’s tale, but when he meets two relatives at the end of the line, neither of whom he has seen in many years, the story seems to be verified.

It’s a Central Asian fable, like those we found in Bhutan (see: Bhutan) and Iceland (see: Iceland) and found through the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson. The Tales of the Arabian Nights and many other besides.

Indeed, all of the Ismailov’s books feature folk and fairy tales told to children. The Dead Lake becomes the snake eating its own tail as the story of Yerzhan takes the form of a story told to Yerzhan. But then Ismailov’s books often seem like stories told to his own young self. Yerzhan, Kirill and the unnamed boy of The Railway feel like facets of the author himself.

Hamid Ismailov’s own story is one we have encountered too many times on this journey so far. The writer forced into exile by invasion, civil war or the sheer paranoia of the ruling autocracy. Unlike the rest, Ismailov has been unable to return to Uzbekistan since he left more than 30 years ago. Even the writers we encountered in Afghanistan (see: Afghanistan), have been able to return to their homeland at various stages. Though that now seems impossible for the foreseeable future. The freedom to create and express oneself remains a distant dream for many in the world. Which makes voices like Ismailov’s all the more important.

Uzbekistan seems a curiosity, but it’s repressive government is sadly more the rule than the exception. It might be one of only two double landlocked countries in the world, but there are many more doubly landlocked from truth and freedom of expression. If this project has any one aim, it is to shine a torch on the dark, oppressive corners of our world. Hamid Ismailov and his contemporaries are the motes of light without which thiat task would be impossible.

Hamid Ismailov