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