Book 218: Northern Marianas (English) – The Master Blaster (P.F. KLUGE)

Then they took us to the A-bomb strips, the main attraction. We sped down unexpected highways, left over from the war. The Americans noticed Tinian was shaped like Manhattan and the thoroughfares they built were named after similarly located Manhattan streets. So we were on Broadway, cutting through cattle fields, past Japanese buildings and temples, bullet pocked. Then we turned and we were bouncing along a dirt track, tunneling through thickets of brushy saplings that covered the sky and slapped at the windows; it smelled green but it was a hot green, like everything was being cooked as it grew. You were fried in the sun, poached in the shade. But at last we felt a hard final bump and we drove out onto North Field, which the guide told us had once been the largest air base in the world, four 8,500-foot runways. We were on one of them now, riding where B-29s had taxied and taken off. The place was deserted. It was like one of those end-of-the-world movies: planes and tents, Quonset huts and hangars and fuel tanks all gone, only the airstrips remained, like footprints of another time, another race even.

Let’s stay in Micronesia for a while and hop across to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. (The Southern Marianas are basically Guam, which is still under the US – as was the CNMI for a long time – but has had a very different history). Sadly, they are best known for their use by the US military, most notoriously when the bombers which dropped the first A-bombs on Japan took off from Tinian island. Although the islands became self-governing, even more than with the other Micronesian members of the former UN Trust Territory, their dependence on the US has not ceased.

This adventure story follows the experience of four outsiders who arrive together on the same plane. George Griffin is a cynical travel writer on a junket who was expecting to get in and away quickly. The academic Stephanie Warner has just separated from her husband. Mel Brodie is a repellent old entrepreneur – a loudmouth, entitled, fugitive financier, real estate shyster, on-the-run realtor. He has his eye out for the main chance here too. Khan comes from Bangladesh to escape poverty in ‘America’ where he suffers the abuse of foreign labour. The story is told in turn with the point of view of each (sadly not of any of the Micronesians).

The final character is the Master Blaster of the title – he is not the pilot of Enola Gay, but a blogger who revels in revealing the ugly side of local life and aims to keep those in power honest, though his identity is itself a mystery to everyone (it is revealed about 2/3 of the way through) and has naturally made a lot of enemies. He knows his truth-telling may be useless, but he feels compelled to do it anyway. As he says, offering his job to one of the newcomers, “At the end… I think what happens in this place is important. Hardly anyone cares, of course. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.” The local politicians and businessmen; the American government and visitors; the guest workers; even the ordinary locals, who understandably turn their favouritism into personal advantage – all are at the mercy of his keyboard. (And where in another one of those island countries where everyone is related and everyone knows each other). One by one those who arrived on same plane have to leave – except perhaps one of them.

The second-hand copy I bought was withdrawn from a US library where it had apparently only been read once. This novel deserves far better than that. It is funny and the dialogues are very good, and yet again I learned an enormous amount about this place and what makes it tick.

Kluge, P.F., The Master Blaster, NY, The Overlook Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1-59020-322-4

Book 217: Marshall Islands (English) – Melal (Robert BARCLAY)

Not long after Rujen Keju had clipped his Kwajalein Missile Range ID badge to the collar of his overalls, slung his boots over his shoulder, and left his home for the pier, his two sons, Jebro and Nuke, were up and headed in the same direction. Jebro carried a large gray duffel bag. Nuke had a small one-strap backpack. Each held a one-gallon jug of water. Around them, red morning light caught lingering smoke from the dump and the air seemed charmed with a magic pastel glow. Hinges squeaked. Water splashed. Bodies coughed and spat. Calico cats moved low and quick past helter-skelter cemeteries where snoozing mongrel dogs lay by concrete crosses that bore, in English, the names and dates of the dead.

Considering how hard it is to find any novel to read from the Marshalls (or just about anywhere in the Pacific), I was pleasantly surprised that this is such a great book.

It follows a Marshallese family, father and two sons, having a bad day. A really bad day. If you think you’ve had some bad ones…

As with our Hawai’ian novel, we’re exploring the devastating consequences of American colonialism, especially military and nuclear, on a small island country, which is still trying to deal with the consequences of the nuclear bomb and missile tests, nuclear (and consumer) waste, and permanently losing a large amount of their little land to the US military. (Maybe they should be re-named the Martial Islands?)

On this not very good Good Friday in 1981, the two boys, Jebro and Nuke (named after the bomb) decide to go to their ancestral island to visit their grandfather’s grave. A fairly banal exercise of a basic human right, you would think. But Tar-Woj has been taken by the Americans, and Marshallese are forbidden to visit, so the boys have to sneak in.

Of course, the Marshalls are famous as the site of the world’s first atom bomb test, on Bikini Atoll, and the little country has no doubt suffered more from the nuclear cycle than anywhere else on earth. Kwajalein is maybe the world’s largest coral atoll. What a perfect target to throw ICBMs at from California. One of its islets, Kwajalein proper, was cleared of locals for the airport and the missile base staff who live in affluent American suburbia. The Marshallese from all the other islets were concentrated into even more minuscule Ebeye (Meļaļ) islet, though many work menial jobs on Kwaj on day passes, and the greater opportunities there have attracted people from other parts of the Marshalls, so it is one of the most devastatingly overcrowded places on earth. Ebeye is ugly and impoverished, but for the Marshallese it is as close to ‘civilisation’ (American living) as they can get. In the ‘Slum of the Pacific’ they suffer from suicide, sickness, unemployment, boredom, bad imported food, lack of water, a shockingly contaminated lagoon, and a broken sewerage system – and apartheid. (Apparently not much has improved since the ’80s; one could add rising sea levels from global warming).

The Marshalls (along with the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau) signed a “Compact of Free Association” with the US when they became independent (or semi-independent). It will be interesting to see what continuing support and expectations the US will have after the Compact expires in 2023.

So to this great adventure story. We follow the brothers’ dangerous voyage to and from their ancestral island (coming back, American hoons sink their boat), and the shenanigans on Kwaj island, where the father works in the sewerage plant (the church embarrassment scene is masterful, and the incident of the poached dolphin provides a fascinating and thought-provoking insight into the opposing views of the islanders and the Americans, or the West generally).

There is a beautifully portrayed relationship between the brothers. The older Jebro is knowledgeable, intelligent, and mature compared with more impetuous Nuke.

Unusually, the ‘true’ story is interspersed with mythological sections – I don’t know how much of these are based on traditional stories.

Author Robert Barclay lived on Kwajalein for many years and obviously came to understand and sympathise with the Marshallese and their problems.

Another important, and very readable, book which deserves a much wider audience. It’s a great mix of adventure and sociology, a combination of the gritty realism of the American wasteland of nuclear contamination and addictive consumerism, and Marshallese mythology. Highly recommended.

Barclay, Robert, Meļaļ, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2002, ISBN 0-8248-2391-8

Book 46: Uzbekistan (English) – The Dead Lake (translation of: Вундеркинд Ержан = Wunderkind Yerzhan) (Hamid ISMAILOV)

Towards evening Uncle Shaken took the children to the Dead Lake. ‘Don’t drink the water and do not touch it,’ he told them. It was a beautiful lake that had formed after the explosion of an atomic bomb. A fairy-tale lake, right there in the middle of the flat, level steppe, a stretch of emerald-green water, reflecting the rare stray cloud. No movement, no waves, no ripples, no trembling – a bottle-green, glassy surface with only cautious reflections of the boys’ and girls’ faces as they peeped at its bottom by the shore. Could there possibly be some fairy-tale fish or monster of the deep to be found in this static, dense water?
The bus driver called Uncle Shaken to help him with a punctured tyre. Yerzhan was left in charge of the class. He saw his long shadow reflected on the water’s surface. Dean Reed in the boundless steppe, underneath the limitless sky, above the bottomless water. He briefly took Aisulu’s hand. Then he let go of it and pulled off his T-shirt and trousers and walked calmly into the forbidden water. For a moment he splashed about in it and then, to the admiration and terrified twittering of Aisulu and the others, he walked out of the water, shook himself off as if nothing had happened and dressed again in his canvas trousers and Chinese T-shirt.
Nobody snitched on him. And for a long time afterwards everyone recalled with respectful admiration Wunda’s dramatic escapade.

I’ve long felt a special connection with Uzbekistan, both because of a long fascination with Central Asia and because I was privileged to visit in the year it became independent from the USSR.
The author Ismailov was born in Kyrgyzstan, lived in Uzbekistan (whence he was forced to flee in 1994) and now lives in Britain, and this book is set in Kazakhstan. Does he qualify for my Uzbek writer? Well, it seems everyone doing a similar project to this one thinks so, and has chosen him. (Fair enough; after all, Uzbekistan lies at the very heart of the Silk Road, so you should expect a bazaar of influences, cultures and ethnicities, especially with the crazy, artificial borders left in Central Asia by the collapse of the USSR.) However, while they seem to have all gone for his The Railway, I’ve chosen The Dead Lake.
With a title like that coming from an Uzbek writer, you might (like me) expect the Dead Lake to be the what’s left of the Aral Sea (which perhaps should now be re-named the Arid Sea). But it refers to another Soviet ecological catastrophe, in another country altogether.
The scene is the Polygon, the poisoned zone in Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union carried out its atmospheric and underground nuclear tests, seemingly without any consideration for the people who lived on the supposedly empty steppe (which can’t help reminding this Australian of the British tests here).
The narrator meets “Wunderkind” Yerzhan on a train across the Kazakh steppe, where he is playing the violin. He angers Yerzhan, who has been permanently stunted by the incident of rash childish bravado I quoted above, by mistaking him for a 12-year-old boy (he is in fact 27). As the train rattles over the endless plain, he learns Yerzhan’s tragic story (and fills in some of the gaps himself).
After he realises at 12 that he has stopped growing, Yerzhan makes pathetic attempts to stretch himself.
The railway seems to be a symbol of progress, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish a nuclear test from a rumbling train. So often in this world you wonder whether ‘progress’, even on balance, is worth it, most especially for the people unfortunate enough to live where there are resources (minerals, forests, agricultural land, or just space) that others covet.
I’ll never forget Ismailov’s exquisite potted legend of that other Wunderkind, Mozart.
What a tragedy that this incandescent, angry and compassionate book, along with Ismailov’s other works, is banned in Uzbekistan.

 

ISMAILOV, Hamid (1954 – ), The Dead Lake, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield, Peirene, London, 2014, ISBN 978-1-908670-14-4