Two Approaches to Suffering
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing TWO APPROACHES TO SUFFERING By Brooke Allen It no longer seems remarkable that the events of the closing century have, for violence and sheer grotesqueness, outstripped...
...It contains all the genre's standard props and supporting characters: twins (symbols of unity, or duality), circus performers (symbols, as are homosexuals, of human and political freedom), supernaturally sagacious animals, and many others...
...Speak, Rwanda is written with extreme simplicity...
...All these ingredients will be old hat to anyone familiar with magic realism...
...Still, hacks have greedily seized the artistic freedom the form would seem to allow, imitating favorites like Gabriel Garcia Marquez until magic realism—a source of numerous possibilities if properly handled—has quickly become as standardized and formulaic as the chivalric legend or tale of courtly love...
...The Hutu powers-that-be pretend to believe Habyarimana was assassinated by Tutsi extremists, and use this doubtful hypothesis as an excuse to begin a general massacre of the tribe they hate...
...Mestre has cheapened a serious and important subject with his rhetorical grandstanding and an overweening artistic vanity...
...The vengeful farmer Mingo, whose guava milk has a secret ingredient—Mingo's own urine—turns the town of Guantanamo's women into raving bacchantes...
...One character, for instance, a pathetic Hutu thug with a small horizon and small dreams, uses the word "yeah" from time to time...
...The Holocaust clearly defies novelists' inventive powers...
...This is why most fiction is not magical, and why the great writers of magical tales—E...
...Speak, Rwanda, in marked contrast to the self-indulgent Lazarus Rumba, gives its subject both dignity and dimension...
...Hector and his twin brother Juanito are as beautiful as angels...
...Hector's murderer ejaculates over his soon-to-be-dead victim...
...In other words, when a writer simply lets loose and ignores the novel's debt to, and roots in, the realistic, his work usually goes badly astray...
...How should a writer like Don DeLillo, to take just one example, continue to outrage and titillate when the whole world has turned into a Don DeLillo novel...
...Mestre displays all the excess and dependence on empty hyperbole that typifies so much of the work of Garcia Marquez' apostles...
...But magic—impossible happenings, ghoulish returns—dismantles belief, forcing on us apparitions which, because they are beyond belief, we cannot choose to believe...
...No one could call Speak, Rwanda a great novel, but there is real dignity to the way the author has chosen to tell his tale...
...In a fictional world where anything and everything can happen, what significance is to be attached to any individual event...
...Her husband, Julio Cesar Cruz, was a hero of the revolution and a close friend of Fidel Castro...
...The story is told by several interrelated characters...
...Its theme—racial and tribal hatred—is universal and yet, somehow, inexplicable...
...The Lazarus Rumba's subject—the Cuban revolution and, more particularly, the subsequent political repression undertaken by the Castro government—would in better hands be a fascinating one...
...In one scene el Rubio, stroking his paunch like a B-movie actor, force feeds a young man offal and confesses that he has cast a spell on him by swallowing corn kernels whole, picking them out of his feces, and making his guest eat them...
...There is Immaculée, a Tutsi woman slain in a grisly massacre, and her 12-year-old son Innocent, who survives by posing as a Hutu and becoming a servant boy in the Hutu military...
...Mestre, a 35-year-old native of Cuba who has lived in the United States since childhood, has resorted to a popular gimmick, magic realism...
...Hector comes to his end in a concentration camp for sexual deviants, but not before fathering a child by Alicia...
...Idi Amin, Larry Flynt and Tammy Faye Bakker, among many others, are characters that not even Charles Dickens' perfervid imagination could possibly have conceived...
...The plainness sometimes goes a little too far: Pierce's style is sternly neutral...
...Most movingly there is Pauline, the Hutu wife of a vicious genocidaire who during her terrible months at the Goma camp takes in orphaned and starving children, eventually bringing the survivors home with her...
...How, then, to even write fiction in an absurd age...
...It artfully compels us to re-examine loosely thought-out ideas about the role of aid societies, the United Nations, and the larger world in local wars...
...But when the Fidelistas, once in power, begin to rely on terror and torture, the idealistic Cruz becomes an embarrassment...
...It is, however, a dangerous solution...
...Where Mestre distinguishes himself is in his almost religious devotion to the repulsive, his tireless efforts to really and truly gross out the reader...
...Juanito eventually disappears, except for his glass eye, which Hector inserts into a hole he has dug under his left nipple...
...For the conventions of magic realism tend to give the author more license than is good for him, and it is effective only in the most delicate and skillful hands...
...it is a phenomenon we must learn to comprehend if we are not all to perish...
...But Pierce has made a noble effort, and his brief, lucid, unpretentious novel is of great value in helping us understand a bitter conflict that has received too little international attention, and that mostly of the wrong kind...
...So is her cousin Hector, Alicia's sometime lover and the protagonist of a painfully drawn-out parallel plot...
...Magic corrupts our ability to judge fiction, which is a measured unreality...
...In his recent book, The Broken Estate, critic James Wood offers a plausible explanation for why magic realist fiction is so often unsatisfactory: "Fiction demands belief...
...There is Agnès, a strong, principled young Hutu nurse, whom Silas wishes to marry, and her brother Augustin, a doltish fellow who becomes a genocidaire as a way of rising in the world, in spite of his initially squeamish feelings...
...no one voice is distinguishable from any other, except in cases where a few artificial speech markers are thrown in...
...it is a sort of fictionalized oral history in which a number of characters, both Hutu and Tutsi, tell their stories as though into a tape recorder...
...No one, perhaps, has ever really succeeded in getting inside the heads of those who commit what have come to be known as crimes against humanity...
...All of the characters come from the Land of a Thousand Hills, as they call Rwanda, a lushly gorgeous agricultural region where Hutus and Tutsis had enjoyed a state of nervous truce from the time the country achieved independence in 1962...
...so, for that matter, does Disney World...
...the only difference between them is that Juanito has one blue eye and one brown, while Hector's are almond colored...
...As a child, Juanito loses the blue eye in an accident and it is replaced by a glass one of a similar color...
...Later he joins some wandering teenage bandits, and finally ends up scavenging for a living in the teeming, hellish refugee camp of Goma...
...Julian R. Pierce seems to have paid attention to this lesson in his recreation of another shocking event of our recent history, the genocide in Rwanda...
...In The Lazarus Rumba (Picador, 487 pp., $27.50) by Ernesto Mestre, and Speak, Rwanda (Picador, 292 pp., $23.00) by Julian R. Pierce, two first-time authors provide divergent answers to such questions...
...Pierce does a fine job of clarifying, in the words of his characters, the ancient rivalry between the two peoples: the minority Tutsi (the Watusi of romantic legend, a tall, elegant warrior tribe), who had been in the ascendant during the colonial period, and the agricultural Hutus, who at 85 per cent of the population inevitably came to power after independence...
...Writers & Writing TWO APPROACHES TO SUFFERING By Brooke Allen It no longer seems remarkable that the events of the closing century have, for violence and sheer grotesqueness, outstripped anything a writer could possibly make up...
...T. A. Hoffmann, Gogol, Kafka—are so densely realistic...
...This death sets off a tragic chain of events...
...As these few examples clearly indicate, Mestre tries too hard, too often: So many nasty details merely bore and irritate rather than shock...
...The boys are spotted by an acrobat with pederastie tendencies who teaches them to be circus performers...
...The novel's action begins in early 1994 with the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu who had kept a precarious peace with the Tutsis...
...The Tutsi military elite, exiled in neighboring Uganda for over 30 years, cross the border and begin to counterattack...
...There is Silas, a venal and opportunistic Hutu who is one of the instigators of the genocide...
...There is a captain in the exiled Tutsi military who, as a leader of the triumphant invading forces, is appointed to the nearly impossible but symbolically rich task of acting as Minister for Rehabilitation in the new government...
...Thereafter Alicia is continually harassed, spied on and sent periodically to prison camps for "rehabilitation...
...they become famous for a trapeze act, "The Lazarus Rumba," that makes their incestuous love—or their divine unity, if you go along with the author—visually manifest...
...The central figure is a young widow, Alicia (note the bow to Lewis Carroll) Lucientes, who emerges during the course of the story as one of Cuba's most famous dissidents...
...He should have remembered that the most powerful of the many works of literature to come out of the Holocaust was not a florid, portentous novel but a straightforward firsthand account, the diary of Anne Frank...
...He is stripped of his rank and eventually murdered by the revolutionary authorities, led by "el Rubio," the sinister head of the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, an archetypal bad guy and j ust about as subtle as Cruella DeVil...
...He establishes a story line, only to undermine our interest in it from the very beginning with intolerably lengthy digressions and shaggy dog tales told by ancillary characters...
...He preeningly models his novel on two of the sacred texts of magic realism and of postmodernism in general, Alice in Wonderland and The Arabian Nights...
...Pierce, in foregoing the easy payoff of stylistic bravado, subordinates his artistic ego to a very much more important cause...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 10
