From “Egomaniacal Despots, Genocidal Dictators, Ruthless Tyrants: The Politics of Terror in Postcolonial Literature”
By Juan Carlos Pérez-Duthie
The Comedians exhibits several parallels with Greene’s famous novel The Quiet American, which came out several years earlier. This 1955 book also has a foreign locale as setting, plenty of intrigue and revelations about characters, all-too-human traits that don’t make everyone sympathetic, a prescient nature, criticism of U.S. policies, and a woman caught in the middle of a love triangle. The Comedians takes place in a land where a feeble, old man acts like a god and his evil actions threaten to consume everything in their path. In The Quiet American, though, there is no such figure of a tyrant in charge, because at the time the book was written, and in the time of the setting, the Indo-China political situation was still evolving into something increasingly complex, dangerous and vicious, with several factions vying for control of Vietnam and presenting themselves as saviors of the country, each in its own way.
Here too there are three main characters: a British journalist, Thomas Fowler; a young, American idealist, Alden Pyle, or the titular “quiet American” and who in typical Greene fashion is more than what he seems; and Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman, the center of affection, and rivalry, for both these men.
With the absence of a clearly defined strongman, and instead, many players pulling strings in all directions, the horrors are those more commonly unleashed by war rather than by one man’s brain and will, and still only scratch at the magnitude of what would evolve later on with the withdrawal of the French and the escalating American intervention. The same year that Greene’s book came out, South Vietnam gained its first president, Ngô Đình Diệm, after the French left, and many considered him a corrupt and authoritarian figure not too far removed from being a dictator. He was also a staunch American ally and anti-communist. His sister-in-law, Madame Ngô Đình Nhu, particularly reviled, was known as “the Dragon Lady of South Vietnam” (Evil can be an equal-opportunity employer. According to documentarian Tom Ambrose in his book The Nature of Despotism – From Caligula to Mugabe, the Making of Tyrants (New Holland Publishers, 2008), “The aggression, ruthlessness and single-mindedness needed to seize power and to dominate a country are traditionally seen as male characteristics. But in nature it is often the female that exhibits these traits”. P. 215).
Greene focuses on the atrocities that can be committed in the name of an ideal: precisely what Pyle does. The following is a sample of the misguided American interventionism in the conflict that would sadly become the norm as the U.S. entered more deeply into the quagmire:
I found myself for a moment envying them their sterilized world, so different from the world that I inhabited – which suddenly inexplicably broke in pieces. Two of the mirrors on the wall flew at me and collapsed half-way. The dowdy Frenchwoman was on her knees in a wreckage of chairs and tables. Her compact lay open and unhurt in my lap and oddly enough I sat exactly where I had sat before, although my table had joined the wreckage around the Frenchwoman. A curious garden-sound filled the café: the regular drip of a fountain, and looking at the bar I saw rows of smashed bottles which let out their contents in a multi-coloured stream – the red of porto, the orange of cointreau, the green of chartreuse, the cloudy yellow of pastis, across the floor of the café. The Frenchwoman sat up and calmly looked around for her compact. I gave it to her and she thanked me formally, sitting on the floor. I realized that I didn’t hear her very well. The explosion had been so close that my ear-drum had still to recover from the pressure. (P. 160).
The author, through Fowler, is almost poetic in the way he describes the explosion in the section above. And when he actually writes about the casualties, in just a few sentences he is equally powerful about the resulting carnage.
We were among a congregation of mourners. The police could prevent others entering the square; they were powerless to clear the square of the survivors and the first-comers. The doctors were too busy to attend to the dead, and so the dead were left to their owners, for one can own the dead as one owns a chair. A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat. She was still and silent, and what struck me most in the square was the silence… The legless torso at the edge of the garden still twitched, like a chicken which had lost its head. From the man’s shirt, he had probably been a trishaw driver. (Pp. 161-162).
Atrocities of a different kind – on a much larger scale – are referenced in the 2009 Canadian bestseller The Disappeared (Black Cat/Grove), by author Kim Echlin. The novel is a love affair set against a background that could hardly be grimmer: the Cambodian genocide under the mad rule of Pol Pot and the years after in which Cambodia struggled to return to some semblance of normalcy. And yet, it never suffocates the book because of the way Echlin conveys the tragedy.
Echlin had in Pol Pot, leader of the murderous Khmer Rouge, a fantastically egomaniacal dictator. However, she chose to go another route: intimating at the nightmares lived by one of the main characters, Serey, a Cambodian student and musician whose family fled the horrors of the communists and who met in Montreal a young girl, Anne Greves, narrator of the story. In the narrative, she addresses her paramour in the second person, as if writing him a letter. Minimalist in her approach, the author nevertheless makes use of that technique to her advantage, by charging every word chosen with resounding power:
Bombs were dropping the length of the Thai border as you grew up. Tons and tons of bombs. (P. 37).
When Anne travels to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, to meet with Serey after he has felt the calling of returning back home, in simply a two-page chapter Echlin revisits the evil that Pol Pot spawned.
Imagine a street; imagine waking up one morning and teenaged voices outside shouting, Comrades, it is Year Zero. (P. 69).
… Year Zero. The country has a new name. Everyone works on farms. Seed. Plant. Harvest with knives. Pound. Winnow. Bag for the soldiers.
Music is forbidden. Talk is forbidden.
The soldiers make bonfires of libraries and paper money. Everyone is hungry.
Banks. Gone.
Mail. Gone.
Telephones. Gone.
Radio. Gone.
Teenagers serve Angka, the Organization. The leader is Brother Number One. No one knows yet his name is Pol Pot. No one knows he used to be a schoolteacher called Saloth Sar. How did this happen? People fell asleep and when they woke up nothing was the same. Would a person risk helping a neighbor if a nervous, shouting teenager were pointing a gun?
In Year Zero there is no past. (P. 70).
That’s it. The author does not go further into developing Pol Pot but, because the consequences of what he did still haunt, and will haunt Cambodia for generations to come, everything that takes place in the novel unfolds because of what this man did in the 1970s.
Much less brutal and sanguinary, but still ruthless and imperious, was another Asian strongman, Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia after the country gained its independence from the Netherlands.
Sukarno, who today can be considered a “benevolent dictator” if compared to others of his kind, had been the leader of his country’s struggle for independence, and was hailed by many at first. But as it usually happens with power, it corrupts men, or brings out the worst in them.
A 1978 novel, The Year of Living Dangerously (Penguin), by Australian author and journalist Christopher J. Koch, exposed what it meant to live under the fist of Sukarno like no other book till then. And of course, with the 1982 movie version based on the book, and starring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hunt, this story got to be known even better.
I tracked down the book after having seen the movie a long time ago, and then again recently. Never having heard of the author, I did not know what to expect from his writing. To my surprise, it presented a portrayal of life in 1965 Indonesia that seemed much more realistic than a pseudo-memoir published that same year titled Sukarno: An Autobiography – As told to Cindy Adams (The Bobbs-Merril Company, Inc.), which was nothing more than a hagiography ghostwritten by an American gossip columnist.
Adams’ book, which purports to be non-fiction, nevertheless seems much more enveloped in half-truths than a fictionalized account like Koch’s Dangerously. This is how Sukarno, in his first chapter, The Reason for Writing this Book, explains why he felt the need to give an account of his life, which he does as a first person narrator, but mentioning himself in the third person:
And so the time has come. If I am ever to set my story down, I must do it now. I may not have the opportunity later. I know people are curious as to whether or not Sukarno was a Japanese collaborator during the Second World War. I suppose only Sukarno can explain that period of his life and so it seems right he should. For years people have asked: Is Sukarno a dictator? Is he a Communist? Why doesn’t he allow freedom of the press? How many wives does he have? Why does he build new department stores when his citizens are in rags…?
Only Sukarno himself can answer. (P. 16).
This is how Koch views Sukarno in his novel, as presented by the unnamed first-person narrator of The Year of Living Dangerously. The account is much more in tune with what journalists and critics wrote at the time about the Indonesian leader. In this instance, Koch’s narrator – he is an observer, and not the novel’s central character, that would be Hamilton (Gibson in the movie) – describes what Sukarno has done to get the Indonesian population riled up and behind him. He confronts the world, and pits Indonesia in a perpetual state of us vs. them, a policy of confrontation known as Konfrontasi, which masks the regime’s shortcomings and failures:
The whole Western world and India as well were confronted, while the Bung warmed his ego at the blaze, striking dictatorial attitudes from Europe’s nineteen thirties, his black pitji tilted in defiance: a baffling mixture of menace and playboy appeal. The people sometimes called him Bapak – father – but he was really the Bung, the daring elder brother, who carried out every outrageous scheme they had ever longed for, and shouted every imagined insult at the world’s Establishment – and at shady colonial masters who might try to come back. (P. 8).
Sukarno is not only a towering presence in this novel, like Trujillo in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but a character too, as in The Feast of the Goat. Something else that author Koch is adroit at in his narrative, is the way he makes the capital city of Jakarta come alive, and links it to everything that Sukarno has done and does. The city is the most blatant example of Sukarno using his country as a laboratory and playpen.
In apathy it sprawled, on its flat, swampy plain where the heat was a changeless oven; and it barely seemed a city. This century’s girds of glass and steel were rarities; it was still in spirit a Dutch-colonial town, a stretched-out frieze of squat commercial buildings in parchment-coloured stucco… It had a curious, staid charm, this rejected colonial frieze, but now the mechanisms of the departed masters were ceasing to function. Public transport had almost stopped as fuel and spare parts ran out; the canals had become sewers; the roads were so pot-holed they pounded a car to pieces. (Pp. 25-26).
And while the city crumbles, this is what Sukarno, in his megalomania, does:
Meanwhile, huge loans were spent on armaments and new buildings, and the President had made his decree: Jakarta must be an instant world capital. Monuments rose, topped by ecstatically gesturing figures like ghosts from the Third Reich, or Stalin’s Russia… Engineer Sukarno flew over it all in his special white helicopter, supervising operations; and we in the Wayang Club watched as eagerly for the chopper’s comings and goings as those villagers to whom the President would descend, as Billy Kwan had put it, like Vishnu in his magic car. (P. 26).
These fragments portray so well many of the qualities that are typical of dictators: the delusional sense of grandeur, the belief that they are the father and savior of the nation, the exploitation of nationalism against colonialism as a rallying force, etc.
Within Sukarno’s Indonesia, a smaller story, a human-scale story, takes place, and that is what draws us into the dangerously political time that Asian country is experiencing in Koch’s pages. All the authors analyzed here so far do the same: they present a context where there may be repression or war, typically at the hands of one man, and place the characters and their predicaments in the larger sphere of those men who succeed mostly at disrupting and destroying, even though they believe they are organizing and creating.
In terms of destruction, it would be unfair to compare, say, Sukarno and Trujillo to Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot or Stalin. For the evil of those tyrants was of such magnitude, that they defy any logic. Trujillo would massacre Haitians, for example, but he would contend that he was defending his country; Sukarno lived as a god-king while his people died in misery, and yet he argued he did everything for them. To grasp Hitler as a human being, or have him presented as a full-fledged character in a fictionalized account, is utterly difficult because his crimes are so mind-numbingly unbelievable.
Someone like Dr. Duvalier, well, yes, he was a monster to many, but as time has gone by, memory becomes short, and today, with Haiti still in dire straits, suddenly the Duvaliers are being remembered fondly by some (Witness the euphoric reception that many Haitians gave to “Baby Doc” Duvalier when he recently returned to Haiti). Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio addresses this issue of “dictator rehabilitation”, but never repentance, in his 2004 book of interviews Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators (Walker & Company):
At that moment, a brutal tyrant can begin to contemplate his rehabilitation and the devil to relax and to look from a distance at the growing disenchantment with the new regime, accompanied by a longing for the old one (P. 243; translated from the Spanish-version of the book, printed in Mexico in 2007).
There is probably no wickedness of heart that can be ascribed to these fans of the younger Duvalier; for many, it is that they think things in the days of the father were simply not as terrible as they are today in Haiti. With those who choose to follow the tenets of Hitler and Stalin, however, those neo-Nazis and die-hard communists, there is a true evil present in them as there was in those two men, coupled with anger and hate, which seems to encompass all that they do and profess.
As long as some benefit from the largesse and favoritism bestowed by the conditions set in place by a dictator, such dictator will have fans. Ergo, Castro remains in power, or plenty of African despots, like the octogenarian Robert Mugabe, who refuses to step down and has been dragging Zimbabwe into hell with him (In 2009, Chielo Zona Eze’s debut novel The Trial of Robert Mugabe depicted what this madman has wrought in his country), still have defenders.
In his 2006 memoir of Africa, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown & Company), Zimbabwean journalist Peter Godwin recalls the story of how he was asked by a British TV station to make a documentary on why his native country became a basketcase. For his own curiosity, he wanted to answer questions that had been perplexing to him, and that resonate in dictatorship literature:
Do Africa’s problems reside principally in the continent’s underlying environment, or with imposed colonial distortions, or with the travesty of Africa’s postcolonial leadership? (P. 156).
Probably no other African “leader” raises more questions, provokes more fascination, and creates more revulsion, than Idi Amin Dada, ruler of Uganda. Mugabe may be despicable, but Amin was abominable. Because, how many of these men would eat their enemies? Not many. Amin allegedly did (add to that fortunately short list of cannibal autocrats, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, self-proclaimed emperor of the Central African Republic).
Next Week:
Mad Men
The Last King of Scotland (Vintage) is the 1998 debut novel of British author and journalist Giles Foden. Like many other people, I too discovered it and became enthralled with it after seeing its 2006 cinematic version with Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin. Of all these books with a common theme that I have been examining, Foden’s is perhaps the one where the figure of the dictator best takes center stage and becomes a fully developed character, an antagonist to the narrator/protagonist, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan.
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