A Need to Rebel
Galligan, Richard
A Need to Rebel Under the Colors, by Milovan Djilas. Translated by Lovett F. Edwards. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 557 pp. $9.75. Reviewed by Richard Galligan llyJiLOVAN Djilas should be given a...
...ANTHEA LAHR is a free lance critic...
...He is the head man of a small Montenegrin village who is brought to prison by the Turkish authorities and put through the most bone-crushing tortures his interrogator can devise—all because he is a Serbian, a leader of a clan whose history stretches back 500 years, and a sympathizer of what the Turks know is a growing revolt among the peasants, Serbs, and serfs of Montenegro...
...They will win...
...Anto Radak is the first man we meet in the rugged landscape of Under the Colors...
...It is a clash of two worlds...
...It was fanaticism and cruelty...
...This is not to say that we should ignore his past as a vice president of Yugoslavia, as an author of important critical works on Marxism, or as a prisoner of conscience in Tito's jails...
...We see people trying to work out their own individual destinies, while at the same time trying to find their common goals in the intimate heritage of their clans and the emerging consciousness of freedom...
...And we are never sure whether Djilas is simply flavoring a history, or actually creating a myth...
...Djilas himself is from Montenegro, and he goes on for more than 500 pages about the region's struggle for independence during the late Nineteenth Century...
...We hear Anto's son shout, "I cannot and will not be a serf...
...It was a drama of the spirit and a butchery of the body...
...He lets us see the anguish of older people when they reluctantly decide to split up their clans, probably forever, so they can move more freely in battle...
...In his effort to catch the early events of a people's growing struggle against their rulers, Djilas has produced a novel that is too often clumsy and static when it tries to be moving and eternal...
...There are times when Djilas makes us squirm as we read of the brutalities of prison torture...
...They will annihilate us," says one of the Turkish landowners...
...We see the humble villagers scrape together their few jewels and trinkets, and even sell their animals, so that they can raise enough bribery money to get their leader out of jail and bring his broken body back home...
...Her reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Times and Village Voice...
...Young and old Serbs, men and women, members of different clans, struggle within themselves to understand their need to revolt and their willingness to share the horror that will go with it...
...There were the "frontiers of a Turkish empire in dissolution" and "the comradeship of soldiers devoted to pain and death...
...It is this philosophy that characterizes the brutal rule of the Turks over these tough mountain people...
...He wrote "Uncertain Resurrection: the Poor People's Washington Campaign...
...He is co-editor of "Social and Political Philosophy" and of a forthcoming book, "Philosophy and the Black Revolution/' CHARLES E. FAGER is a student at the Harvard Divinity School who has been active in the civil rights movement...
...But until that happens we will make mincemeat of plenty of them...
...THE REVIEWERS MILTON MAYER, The Progressive's Roving Editor, has lived and studied in Czechoslovakia in a span of twelve trips there...
...Reviewed by Richard Galligan llyJiLOVAN Djilas should be given a chance to show what he can do as a novelist...
...The world has changed for me since I decided on revolt, and I can no longer live in it as it is, but only in that world which is to come...
...RONALD E. SANTONI, professor of philosophy at Denison University, grew up in Quebec and returns frequently...
...The peasants speak mostly heroic cliches...
...He sections off his huge novel in four parts, each one dealing with a special crisis, but all of the parts coming together to express the larger historical struggle...
...Yet, not all of Under the Colors succeeds...
...He leads us from father to son, grandfather to grandson...
...There are moments when he manages to catch the flavor of young people enjoying spontaneous physical pleasures...
...We watch as the people store up guns in preparation for the inevitable clash with the Turkish authorities...
...RICHARD GALLIGAN is a free lance writer and critic, located in New Haven, who also teaches part-time...
...The dialogue is stiff...
...Banners flew high, while heads were cut off and stuck on poles along the roads...
...But if Djilas chooses to set before us an historical novel about the Montenegrin people's struggle against their Turkish rulers, we ought to be willing to accept the book on its own terms and see how well it succeeds at doing what it is trying to do...
...When it cannot do it by fair means, then it does it by foul...
...DONALD KEY is art editor of The Milwaukee Journal...
...He writes as a man who feels pride in the stock he came from, and a tremendous masculine admiration for the physical endurance and passion of his ancestral freedom fighters...
...Then Djilas switches the scene for us again, and shows us the Turks talking among themselves...
...Every authority and every rule has a right to defend itself against rebels," says Anto's interrogator...
...And each defends itself, finally, as best it knows and can...
Vol. 35 • July 1971 • No. 7
