Book 241: Svalbard (English) – Dark Matter: a ghost story (Michelle PAVER)

Hugo, the keen glaciologist, asked Mr Eriksson to head into the fjord to get nearer the glacier, and we craned our necks at fissured walls of ice and caverns of mysterious blue. From deep within came weird creaks and groans, as if a giant were hammering to get out. Then came a noise like a rifle shot, and a huge segment of ice crashed into the sea, sending up spouts of water, and a wave that rocked the ship. Shattered ice turned the sea a milky pale-green. The hammering went on. Now I know why people believe that Spitsbergen was haunted.

I have to admit that ghost stories are not what I normally read. Perhaps the closest I’ve gotten in Tirelessreader so far was my zombie story from Haiti. But I always intended this to get me reading outside my ‘comfort zone’…

Svalbard (also known as Spitzbergen) is part of the Kingdom of Norway, north of the Arctic Circle. It has the most northerly permanent population on Earth.

This is the story of a small 1937 scientific expedition to Svalbard. The main protagonist, 28-year-old Jack Miller, is poor and from a lower social class than his companions. This gives him somewhat of an inferiority complex. He hero-worships the expedition leader, Gus, and craves his approbation. In fact, class is a major theme of the book.

“I suppose what Gus was trying to say is that here in the Arctic, class doesn’t matter. I think he’s wrong about that, class always matters. But maybe up here it doesn’t matter so much.”

The young scientists are to base themselves at an isolated uninhabited site called Gruhuken but which had the remains of defunct whaling and mining activities. We come to learn that these had also left another unpleasant legacy. (Perhaps the name of the place should have given them some warning, since ‘gru’ means ‘horror’ in Norwegian – no doubt related to the ‘grue’ in ‘gruesome’).

While they stay there, the midnight sun turns into endless night. When he is left alone by his companions (Gus had become ill and needed to be evacuated), Jack’s mental state clearly deteriorates and the horror increases. Whether the one is linked to the other is up to us to judge – since nothing concrete happens to him to cause this, maybe it was just a case of cabin fever? Jack’s terror centres on a ‘bear post’ outside the leftover hut.

Dark matter seems to have become deeply entwined with Svalbard! Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (whose ‘dust’ is dark matter) also visits the islands. As Jack says,

In one of my periodicals, there’s a paper by someone who’s worked out that what we know of the universe is only a tiny percentage of what actually exists. He says what’s left can’t be seen or detected, but it’s there; he calls it ‘dark matter’. [This might be a reference to the Swiss Fritz Zwicky in 1933]. Of course, no one believes him; but I find the idea unsettling. Or rather, not the idea itself, that’s merely an odd notion about outer space. What I don’t like is the feeling I sometimes get that other things might exist around us, of which we know nothing.

Jack obviously believes in the supernatural…

Once or twice, I felt that there were anachronisms – for example I don’t think people in the 1930s knew the correct scientific explanation for the aurora borealis (northern lights), that’s only been confirmed fairly recently.

Each chapter ends with a lovely illustration – these weren’t attributed, so perhaps are from the author’s photos?

If I found the plot sometimes predictable, along with what I suspect might be common in horror writing (suggesting rather than saying that something is happening – for example, the Norwegian ship captain warns them off going to Gruhuken, but won’t say why), and as I said horror is not my preferred genre, this was still a good read, and it has received very good reviews.

Michelle Paver was born in Malawi (then Nyasaland) and now lives in Britain. She lived in Norway and visited Svalbard.

Paver, Michelle (1960 – ), Dark Matter, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Orion, 2011 (originally published 2010), ISBN 978-1-4091-2118-3

Book 200: Barbados (English) – In the Castle of My Skin (George LAMMING)

It would have been easier if I had gone to live in a more respectable district, but that was beyond my mother’s resources. She would have done so without hesitation, but she saw it was impossible and consoled herself with the thought that it didn’t matter where you lived. The mind was the man, she said, and if you had a mind you would be what you wanted to be and not what the world would have you. I heard the chorus every day and sometimes I tried repeating it to others. The mind was the man. I remained in the village living, it seemed, on the circumference of two worlds.

Barbados is traditionally the most anglophile of the West Indian countries, so it was a bit of a surprise when the country replaced Queen Elizabeth as its head of state last year, on the road to becoming a republic. Here we are at an earlier stage of its history (the 1930s) as it transitions towards independence (1966) from the UK.

This is an autobiographical novel of Lamming’s young life (as ‘G.’) from 9 to 19. (He was not much older when he wrote this classic).

It was rather slow and not particularly easy to read. The dialogues were sometimes rather impenetrable. But there is a great deal of beauty in the writing. There is a lot of repetition, short sentences and lyrical description (especially of crabs…), which creates tension as you wait for something to happen.

The village and plantation where he grows up is effectively owned by the ‘white’ landlord Mr. Creighton, who later sells it from under the people’s feet (even though they were saving up to buy their houses, they couldn’t own the land). Despite his paternalism he had a strong feeling of noblesse oblige and they were mutually dependent. The villagers end up having to move. There are in fact multiple betrayals in the story, but as a great writer Lamming enables us to see different sides of the issues and to some extent to empathise with everyone. Multiple viewpoints in narrating the story also complicate the reading.

No one is totally bad here – not Creighton, nor the investors who want to build their own houses without necessarily wanting to oust anyone else.

In all, it was not an easy or thrilling read but very worth persevering with for its insights into betrayal, racism, class struggle, colonialism and adapting to changing times.

Lamming, George (1927 – ), In the Castle of My Skin, UK, Penguin Modern Classics, 2016, ISBN 978-0-241-29606-6 (First published 1953)

Book 199: Guadeloupe (French) – Victoire, les saveurs et les mots = Victoire, the flavours and the words (Maryse CONDÉ)

How different were the circumstances of this departure from the one from Marie-Galante, sixteen years earlier when the mother had tried to protect the daughter. This time, it’s the daughter fleeing from the mother. She goes in front, dressed in the elegant uniform of Scottish cloth, pleated dress flapping at her heels, blouse buttoned up to her neck, half-heel patent leather pumps, and wearing the coquettish white panama as demanded by her sisters.

[my translation]

Maryse Condé won the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize (the official one wasn’t originally awarded to anyone that year). From this historical novel I’m not sure why – not that there was anything wrong with it, just that it didn’t seem anything special to me. But she has written many other works which are apparently better – this is the only one I’ve read.  

So here we are in Guadeloupe (with brief excursions to Martinique, France and the US). As an aside, I have a complaint. Guadeloupe is shaped like a butterfly. The smaller part is called Grande-Terre (Big Land), the bigger and higher part is called Basse-Terre (Low Land). Someone’s idea of a joke, or just perversity?

The story concentrates on the life of Victoire, Maryse Condé’s grandmother, whose one great skill is her cooking although she never really gets the benefit she deserves from it. Both she and her daughter Jeanne have hard lives. Her mother (Caldonia) adores her but is not good at raising her – Victoire always remains illiterate. It is uncertain as to who was her father (presumably some white soldier). Her skin is surprisingly white. She suffers humiliation and detestation from her youth.

As his servant Victoire has ambiguous relations with Boniface Walberg, but they certainly involved sex – something a master could still expect from his servants as a hangover from the time of slavery. Nevertheless, she is at least fond of him. Similarly ambiguous is her relationship with his wife Anne-Marie, who becomes a great friend.

Her relationship with her prickly daughter Jeanne is always difficult, and they are total opposites (Jeanne would struggle to boil an egg). In the racist local terminology Jeanne is born “mal sortie”, in other words blacker than her parents. Because of this her social class rejects her and she has a hard life. She disapproves of her mother, especially of her relationships. Victoire had however made sure she got an excellent education.

Unfortunately, the novel had no glossary, and although it is written in standard French, the Creole words and phrases are not clarified. Some were obvious but most were obscure to me.

The character of Victoire is based on Condé’s real grandmother. In all I found the story unexciting but pleasant enough.

CONDÉ, Maryse (1937 – ), Victoire, les saveurs et les mots, Folio, Mercure de France, 2006, ISBN 9782070355259

Book 154: Lithuania (English): Between Shades of Gray (Ruta SEPETYS)

My stomach burned with hunger and my head throbbed. I missed drawing on real paper and longed for light to sketch properly. I was sick of being so close to people. I felt their sour breath all over me, elbows and knees constantly in my back. Sometimes I had the urge to start pushing people away from me, but it was no use. We were like matchsticks in a small box.

I feel a special link with Lithuania since I was lucky to visit straight after its birth (or rather rebirth) in 1992. The visa stamp I’m most proud of is from Lithuania, numbered no. 75. (I suppose visa stamps aren’t much longer for this world – nor, maybe, physical passports, although that won’t allow us to travel as freely as Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta…) Personally I’ll miss them, and the relieving thunk of the bureaucrat’s stamp into your little book (before which I always feel slightly nervous, as if I must have done something wrong…) Like my other most prized stamp, Liechtenstein, it couldn’t have been easier to escape from Vilnius station into newly minted Lithuania after the long train trip from Moscow (ultimately Tashkent), but finding the downtown office where I could get the sought-after stamp was not so easy. The country’s independence from the USSR (gained along with Latvia and Estonia in the amazing Singing Revolution) was still very tentative (the parliament building was ringed with defences against Soviet tanks which fortunately never arrived) and I was still shaking my head that they’d gotten away with it. And I felt myself privileged to have ‘discovered’ the lovely Baroque city of Vilnius and to be able to wander it with not a single other tourist.

Lithuania’s independence has always seemed precarious. In the Middle Ages in union with Poland it was one of the most powerful and advanced states in Europe. For most of its existence it has been swallowed by one or other of its neighbours. The Baltic States managed a fragile freedom between the World Wars, until betrayed and swallowed up by Stalin and Hitler. The USSR invaded, which is where this novel begins in 1941, and deported large segments of the population, especially the intelligentsia. The Vilkas family are put into freight cars and shipped to Siberia. The father has already been separated from them at the outset. The horrible journey is harrowingly described by 15-year-old budding artist Lina.

No matter what random cruelties are done to them (and Lina comes to realise that random cruelty is all of Stalin’s plan, hard as that is to grasp for humans who can’t help looking for patterns and reasons), the family and most of the Lithuanians maintain their dignity and morality. The NKVD (Stalin’s secret police, predecessor to the KGB and Putin’s FSB) is inexplicably and unnecessarily cruel to them, just as history has been to Lithuania. Not only must they survive against the vicious Russian guards, whose only vocabulary is “Davai!” (”Come on!” though it literally means, appropriately enough for Communists, “Give!”)

The exiles spend months at a labour camp in the Altai Mountains, then end up at an unbelievably bleak camp at the mouth of the Lena River on the Laptev Sea, north of the Arctic Circle. They are given nothing – not even food on days when they can’t work because of storms – and have to build everything themselves. The environment is so harsh that whether your door opens inwards or outwards becomes a matter of life and death. They have to struggle to stay positive in the face of not only the environment and the Russians but also one of their own (the ‘bald man’) who is unfailingly morbid and pessimistic.

Between Shades of Gray is an enthralling story, despite its simple writing. Few names are given, not only of the Russians but also of the Lithuanians, who instead are described (’the man who wound his watch’). It makes it easier to remember the characters, anyway. There are some beautiful images too, like the comparison of a dead person’s spirit to a kite disappearing into the sky. Despite the traumatising theme, I loved this book.

SEPETYS, Ruta (1967 – ), Between Shades of Gray, London, Penguin, 2011, ISBN 978-0-14-133588-9

Book 151: Mongolia (English) – The Blue Sky (Galsan TSCHINAG)

I felt as if the joy that had filled me when I saw Grandma for the first time had stayed inside me like some wave or like a breeze of light burning so intensely and radiantly that it blazed a bright trail through the time since I had last seen her. By now the river had become impassable since the cool of the night could no longer weld together for even a few hours the shards of ice that were breaking apart. The icy mass was like softened clay that sank beneath a horse’s hoof.

This is the story of a Mongolian shepherd boy (who shares the author’s name, Dschurukuwaa, along with much of the story) of the Tuvan nationality at the cusp of a changing world – in fact a very similar world to that of Abai, my Kazakh novel; both the traditional nomadic lifestyles and the creeping appearance of Communism are very similar. Most people don’t realise that Mongolia was the second country to become Communist (apart from the short-lived Béla Kun regime in Huntary); Marx and Engels surely never planned for Communism to be imposed on nomads, and collectivising and imposing quotas on those in thrall to the vagaries of the weather is crazy.

The Blue Sky is written through the eyes of a child, but unlike most stories like that, where the child’s adult self remembers more than is believable or has too much adult understanding in retrospect, this one worked for me.

Although his becoming a shaman (like the author) comes after this first volume, his feeling of closeness with nature is obvious here.

His relationship with his grandmother is lovely. During her tragic life, her wicked sister had stolen almost all her property. She finds consolation and happiness in looking after Dschurukuwaa.

As we follow him growing up, little Dschurukuwaa has a frightening accident, falling into simmering kettle of milk. The close relationship with his dog Arsylang, who can communicate with him, is lovely.

The most touching moment was the time of Dschut (violent weather), with its heartbreaking deaths of the animals.

The author is of the Tuvan ethnicity, a minority in Mongolia (though they have their own Tyva Republic in the Russian

Federation – it was briefly independent to 1921 to 1944 and some its unusual stamps are among my most treasured!)

This novel was first published in Germany in German, as were the two subsequent volumes, and the English translation uses German spellings which I think really should have been changed for the English translation; a less misleading English transliteration for dshele (rope tether in Tuvan) might be jele; for the Turkic title baj, we would use bai (or bay), and jolka (ёлка, Russian for Christmas tree) would be yolka.

In all, this is a beautiful little story of a boy growing up in a world which is also changing, even though not a great deal happens. The description of traditional life in the legendary Altai Mountains is wonderful.

Galsan Tschinag (in Tuvan: Irgit Schynykbajoglu Dshhurukuwaa) (early 1940s – ), The Blue Sky: a novel, translated from German by Katharina Rout, Minneapolis, Milkweed, 2006, ISBN 978-1-57131-064-4

(first published in German, 1994)

Book 134: Costa Rica (Spanish) – Mamita Yunai (Carlos Luis FALLAS)

 

Illusions of all those who enter the Banana Zone looking for a fortune and who depart, leaving rags in United’s plantations. The old workers no longer dream of any future, they no longer think about anything. They sweat and swallow quinine. And they get drunk on the rough rum which burns their throats and destroys their organism. You have to numb yourself so as to forget the horror in which you’re living and in which you’ll have to die!

‘Yunai’ sounds like one of those exotic Amerindian words, doesn’t it? Actually it’s our old friend (or enemy), the United Fruit Company, who keeps appearing in our Central American books because its power was all-pervasive. Costa Rica was no exception, but it has been exceptional in other ways – it has largely managed to keep out of the cycles of wars and military coups that have beset its neighbours, and it has been protected from the latter by having brilliantly abolished its military in 1940 and the country has been democratic, with few lapses, since the 1860s. Which is not to say that that democracy has been flawless – like elsewhere – and that is just what we are dealing with here.

Costa Rica is holding an election. José Francisco, Sibajita, is sent to a remote area to ensure it is conducted fairly, but the local authorities are interfering, manipulating the locals (including plural voting). The area is inhabited mostly by Indians, who are poor, powerless, drunken, in a generally sorry state, treated unfairly by the fruit company (United/Yunai; Mamita = Little Mother) and the local police, and are slowly losing everything. As in many democracies around the world (India? Papua New Guinea?) they are apparently only needed when their votes are needed. Sibajita does what he can to ameliorate this impossible situation.

Then we move to the banana plantations run by the hated company to experience the oppression and injustice of life there.

In all we get a picture of a Costa Rica that is nowhere near as impeccably democratic, just and monoracial as it may appear from the outside. Nowhere is perfect…

Fallas, Carlos Luis (1909 – 1966), Mamita Yunai, San José, Editorial Costa Rica, 2000, ISBN 9977-23-290-3 (first published 1941)

Book 117: Bulgaria (English) – Under the Yoke (Ivan VAZOV)

Kableshkov spoke with enthusiasm. He was a very clever man and must have had a clear picture of the situation, which he now presented in a false light. But he was carried away by the force of his cause, and all means seemed permissible to him for its realization. Only this lofty faith in the sacredness of the cause he was serving could explain the assertions, tendentious or sincere, of this honest soul. And indeed they were so convincing in their eloquence as to provoke no remonstrances. Everyone was already convinced of what Kableshkov was trying to convince them of. It was obvious that everything would happen in just that way.

As promised by the label, this is a searing indictment of the harshness of life under the rule of Ottoman Turkey (the Bulgarians are mostly portrayed as heroic and the Turks as villainous) shortly before its liberation. While life may appear relatively tranquil on the surface, the April Uprising of 1876 is brewing (although unsuccessful, its harsh suppression by the Turks would ultimately lead to Bulgarian independence). It follows Boycho Ognyanov from his escape out of imprisonment in Diyarbakir, his preparations and final struggle against the Turks. It is an intensely nationalistic novel, written in exile.
The chorbadjis (wealthy Bulgarian city-dwellers) are labelled as a whole class as collaborators and traitors, yet they are not beyond redemption, like Marko Ivanov who gets swept along with the patriotic enthusiasm. Sadly, the Turks are also portrayed as unexceptionably evil. For our days it seems uncomfortably biased. But we should of course judge a work by its time, its context and its purpose.
It is a vivid, enthusiastic, if sometimes naive portrayal of the Bulgarian revolution’s false dawn. Perhaps its main value is as an historical document, but it was still very interesting to read this, the foremost classic of Bulgarian literature.

VAZOV, Ivan (1850 – 1921), Under the Yoke: a novel about the life of the Bulgarian people on the eve of the Liberation, 1876, translated from Bulgarian by Marguirite Alexieva and Theodora Atanassova?; Sofia, Borina, 2004 (originally published 1889-90), ISBN 954-500-127-5

Book 83: Rhodesia (English) – The Grass is Singing (Doris LESSING)

She realized, suddenly, standing there, that all those years she had lived in that house, with the acres of bush all around her, and she had never penetrated into the trees, had never gone off the paths. And for all those years she had listened wearily, through the hot dry months, with her nerves prickling, to that terrible shrilling, and had never seen the beetles who made it. Lifting her eyes she saw she was standing in the full sun, that seemed so low she could reach up a hand and pluck it out of the sky: a big red sun, sullen with smoke, like a shining plow disc or a polished plate, ready for plucking. She reached up her hand; it brushed against a cluster of leaves, and something whirred away. With a little moan of horror she ran through the bushes and the grass, away back to the clearing. There she stood still, clutching at her throat.

 

Nobel laureate (2007). Doris Lessing is an amazing writer. The breadth of her writing genres is breathtaking. She was born in Persia (now Iran), grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which qualifies her to represent that defunct country, whose racisim would have been anathema to her, and later lived in Britain. Apart from needing to give Rhodesia some representation, as one of the countries that has existed during my lifetime, Lessing is simply too important to ignore, although modern Zimbabwe is so different that I wanted to choose a ‘Black’ writer to represent it (hence, ‘Bones’ by Chenjerai Hove).
This, her first novel, is a murder mystery which begins and ends with the crime, while all the rest of the book fleshes out what caused the killing. The victim, Mary, is a city girl who should never have left her satisfactory urban life but (due to the needling of her contemporaries) marries an eternally struggling farmer, Dick Turner, who seems congenitally immune to success, and she buries herself on his isolated farm. So isolated are they that she does not even know about the war. The (distant) neighbours despise these ‘poor whites’, who in turn hold themselves aloof from them. Dick treats his land a bit better than the other rapacious ‘Whites’, likewise his ‘Black’ labour force (although partly because of the difficulty of acquiring and holding onto them). But Mary becomes an ever more virulent racist – yet we can understand (although not sympathise) because we have seen how she has come to be this way. Despite this, she is drawn into a highly charged relationship with her final male servant (having driven off a string of predecessors), Moses, who she had once abused.
Mary’s mental disintegration stands as a symbol for the inevitable breakdown of the racist Rhodesian regime. Lessing masterfully describes her boring life, yet I couldn’t keep from eagerly turning the pages. I would definitely say this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read.

 

LESSING, Doris (1919 -2013 ), The Grass is Singing, New York, HarperCollins, 2008, ISBN 9780061673740

Book 79: Senegal (French) – Les Bouts de bois de Dieu = God’s Bits of Wood (Sembene OUSMANE)

In this way the strike established itself in Thiès. An endless strike which was, for many, along the whole length of the line, a time of suffering, but, also for many, a time of reflection. When the smoke finished floating over the savanna, they came to understand that the time had finished, the time of which the old people had spoken to them, the time when Africa was a kitchen garden. It was the machine which now reigned over their country. In stopping its motion over more than fifteen hundred kilometres, they became aware of their power, but also aware of their dependence. In truth, the machine was in the process of making new men of them. It did not belong to them, it was they who belonged to it. In halting it, it taught them this lesson.

[my translation]

 

This novel is set in three towns along the French-built railway from Dakar (Senegal) to Bamako (Mali). As the interminable 1947 railway strike drags on, the railwaymen and their families suffer intolerably from hunger and thirst and injustices by the colonial authorities, and eventually their destitute women also become more militant. The action takes place in three cities: Dakar and the railway town Thiès (Senegal), and Bamako (Mali).
The workers’ struggle represents the larger struggle for the people to overturn the power relationship with the French colonial administration. In the end, solidarity triumphs. This is not without a terrible cost, to themselves as well. Even their own social order is challenged. Different people have different ways of attempting to deal with the situation and the colonial régime. When a relative becomes a strike-breaker he is put on trial by them, despite being an elder and so traditionally worthy of more respect. Payments for polygamous families also cause conflict. As so often in revolutions and wars, it is the women who become prominent in keeping day-to-day life functioning and in forwarding the struggle (and, it has to be said, are sadly often suppressed back into their former roles afterwards). The high point is their protest march from Thiès to Dakar.
There is the cruel irony that, although there is no water to drink, the authorities use a but water cannon to disperse the protesters (who call themselves ‘God’s Bits of Wood’).

A great study of the price people have had to pay to achieve freedom, and still have to pay to get adequate working conditions.

 

OUSMANE, Sembene (1923 – 2007), Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, Paris?, Pocket, 2013 (originally published 1960?), ISBN 978-2-266-24581-4

Translated into English as: God’s Bits of Wood (Harlow, Heinemann, 2008, ISBN 9780435909598)

Book 78: Cambodia (English) – In the Shadow of the Banyan (Vaddey RATNER)

Once again I saw the face of the Khmer Rouge soldier who’d aimed her gun at the old man’s head. It occurred to me that the look on her face, as she shot the old man, as she watched him fall to the ground, had no name. It was neither anger nor hate nor fear. It was absent of rage or anything recognizable, and I remembered thinking that she had looked neither like a child nor an adult, but a kind of creature all to herself, not altogether real, in the same way a nightmare monster is not unreal.

 

This great novel is set during the takeover of Cambodia by the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975, and the immediate horrific, unbelievable aftermath. I was an idealistic teenager at the time and I first heard about what was happening there in a Readers Digest Condensed Book of Cambodia Year Zero. It seemed that no one outside knew (or cared?) what was happening there at the time, indeed it seems as if most of the world didn’t become aware until years afterwards, perhaps from Christopher Koch’s book The Killing Fields and the subsequent movie. I felt like screaming to the world, “Why don’t you care? Why don’t you DO something?!” Of course there was nothing I could do, maybe nothing anyone could do, until the horror was finished by a Vietnamese invasion – for which they received no thanks, since everyone (not least the Cambodians themselves) suspected them of a colonisation exercise, and perhaps that is what it might have become. But even if they were only swapping one Communist regime for another (and a foreign one at that), surely it was better than the KR which murdered perhaps a third of the total population, totally emptied the cities, and tried to drag the country responsible for the glories of Angkor back to some barbaric agricultural pre-civilisation.
In this novel, the background and experiences of the heroine are very similar to those of the author. She is deprived of her privileged childhood, with one exception: the love of story-telling that she receives from her father. One constant theme in the book is this importance of telling stories. This is one reason why, despite the horrific historical setting, the story is not not 100% negative; there is still beauty to be found as well. The natural world is important, and its symbolism pervades the story.
I realised, or was reminded (as I should know) that life is a lottery. Of those sent from the city, some are lucky with the country folk they are sent to live with and with their new life, others meet tragic ends.
Like Cambodia itself, the heroine Raami survives impossible odds to survive. It turns out that survival depends on what is inside yourself.
Sadly, there is not much true idealism left in the world. It was given a bad name by fanatics such as the KR in Cambodia, the Red Guards of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Nazis and so many others in relatively recent times. Mostly, what is left is cynicism. What the world needs is renewed idealism ALONG WITH humanity and tolerance.

 

RATTNER, Vaddey (1970 – ), In the Shadow of the Banyan, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2013, ISBN 978-1-4516-5771-5

Book 75: Ecuador (Spanish) – Huasipungo = The Villagers (Jorge ICAZA)

‘The Indians cling with blind and morbid love to this scrap of land which is lent to them in exchange for the work which they give to the hacienda. What’s more: in their ignorance they believe that it is their own property. You know. There they put up their thatched huts, farm their little smallholdings, raise their animals.’
‘Sentimentalities! We must overcome all difficulties no matter how hard they may be. The Indians… What? What do the Indians matter to us? To put it better… They must… They must be important TO US… Of course… They can form a very important factor in the business. The arms… The work…’
[my translation]

 

In 1930s Ecuador, building a road through the jungle should have brought prosperity and modernity to the local Indians, but landowner Don Alfonso only thinks of using it to increase his personal wealth. He robs them first of their labour then of their huasipungos (small plots of land allocated to tenant farmers by the hacienda/large estate owner in exchange for work), causing them to revolt and be massacred. (A more accurate spelling in English orthography would be ‘wasipungo’).
Icaza was maybe the greatest Ecuadorian author of the 1900s. ‘Huasipungo’ needs to be seen in the context of the indigenista movement (which was influential across the arts spectrum), which highlighted the oppression and struggles of the indigenous people. Its themes are exploitation by big landowners and gringos, racism (including the racism of the mixed-race mestizos against those with more Indian blood than themselves), class struggle, and the venal, collaborationist church which functions as part of the power structure and has been bribed into using the faith as a weapon against the indigenous.
The casually inhuman treatment of the natives as if they are not people is quite shocking. For example, in one incident, cattle invade the corn fields during the night. Don Alfonso thinks he’s a hero just because he had to get up in the middle of the night to do something about it! To reward himself, he rapes a powerless indigenous girl. They are basically treated like property, even the indentured labourers. These have been subjected to forced labour under the very real threat of losing their land.
Fuelled by chicha, a fermented corn drink (which is doled out to them like medicine), they are forced to drive the road through a marsh, against the engineer’s advice, leading to a horrific death.
The Ecuadorian Spanish spoken by the indigenous people is not too hard to follow, but is obviously influenced by their native Quechua which only has the vowels a, i, u, so that their Spanish loses its e and o vowels. The Indians tend to speak as a chorus almost like in a Greek tragedy. They are an integral part of the country, while the whites seem out of place and slightly ridiculous.
This important and engaging novel shows in black and white the long shadow that colonialism cast over Ecuador.

 

ICAZA, Jorge (1906-79), Huasipungo, Madrid, Cátedra, 2013 (originally published 1934), ISBN 978-84-376-1251-5

In English:
Icaza, Jorge: The Villagers