“There’s something about truth that makes existence bearable.” – Camp Cope, “Stove Lighter”
What is a writer’s role when forced into exile, or when one’s language is held captive by authoritarianism? Can words remake a broken world? These questions and others emerge from two novels recently published in translation: The latest work of fiction by exiled Chinese author Ma Jian (b. 1953), which rages at the authoritarian rule of current president Xi Jinping, and a novel of political exiles and prisoners by the late Uruguayan journalist, poet, and playwright Mario Benedetti (1920-2009).
During this year’s PEN World Voices festival in New York City, Ma Jian spoke of the “fragile power” held by writers to speak the truth in response to craven tyrants. Fragile because of the certainty that they will be repressed, but also in China’s case because of the Communist Party’s hold on the people’s imagination. When listening to Ma speak, I thought, as I often do at PEN events, of the relative freedom writers have in the United States to express ideas and explore the boundaries of creativity. But after facing down a few more rounds of Trump’s divisive brand of authoritarianism, I remembered the death threats and pipe bombs targeting journalists. We live in a country where the president sets a tone of constant denial, which makes us run the risk of deluding ourselves as well. Our power is fragile too when facts are called fake, and it becomes more essential for us to remember what it feels like when we capture a sense of truth, and not to turn away.
China Dream opens with a foreword written in London in March 2018 that reverberates through the hollow space of Xi’s lies. Ma recounts the announcement of a “China Dream of national rejuvenation” made by Xi during a visit to the National Museum of China, a “vast Stalinist structure” on Tiananmen Square, full of artifacts representing the rise of communist rule but empty of its devastating effects, from the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the 1989 massacre. “I wrote China Dream out of rage against the false utopias that have enslaved and infantilized China since 1949, and to reclaim the most brutal period of its recent history … from a regime that continues to repress it,” Ma writes.
China Dream begins as bitter satire, chronicling the plans of fictitious China Dream Bureau director Ma Daode to carry out Xi’s vision of a single Chinese mind by developing a neural implant that would erase every person’s private dreams and memories. Ma Daode is vacuous and grotesque, cartoonish yet all too real. We first meet him as he wakes in his office from an afternoon snooze, “shoulders hunched over and his pot belly compressed into large rolls of fat,” a cell phone full of flirtatious texts with his young mistresses. But there is more going on under the surface. As much as he tries to suppress his own past and hold his mind in clear emptiness, dark memories gurgle up from under the surface. Ma Daode participated in the Cultural Revolution. He fought with a brigade of teenagers against his classmates, and even submitted his own parents to struggle sessions. He could never keep his job if the politburo discovers that he remembers things that never officially happened. As the book progresses, Ma Daode is overwhelmed by feverish dreams of the past. He can no longer see the cleansed Beijing he’d worked so hard to propagate because it is full of ghosts from the Cultural Revolution who won’t be quiet or disappear.
Ma Jian’s work is banned in China, where it is forbidden to speak or print his name, and for seven years he has been denied the right to return to his homeland. Mario Benedetti lived in exile from Uruguay in a period of dictatorship following the coup of 1973. His experience and its effect on him are glimpsed in autobiographical snapshots interspersed through the narrative of Springtime In A Broken Mirror, a spare but deeply felt book about the effect of imprisonment and exile on a family. The novel primarily follows a man held in jail in Uruguay while his family and friends are exiled in Buenos Aires. This narrative is broken up by italicized sections titled “Exiles” from the point of view of an Uruguayan journalist who, like Benedetti, was deported from Peru and settled with fellow exiles in Cuba. The Benedetti stand-in occasionally tells stories of other exiles who were unable to adjust to the rupture in their life and succumbed to isolation, including a man who’d suffered from a cerebral collapse due to beatings and torture but whose true cause of death, the narrator claims, was solitude. These interludes of empathy allow the reader to feel deeply for the fictional Santiago, the man at the center of the novel whose life is disintegrating unbeknownst to him while he writes hopeful letters home.
As time goes on with distance separating them, Santiago’s wife Graciela loses interest in him as a lover and considers new possibilities for the future. She begins an affair with their old friend Rolando, and Santiago’s father Don Rafael advises her to keep him in the dark until he is released from prison. The denouement of this plot is anticlimactic compared to the book’s more interesting thematic elements. In chapters narrated by Santiago’s father Don Rafael and his nine-year-old daughter Beatriz, they suggest hope for a future where creative expression can blossom.
While Don Rafael meditates on the military dictatorship’s ravages on the society—“The ruthless ones… have opened a long parenthesis in our society, a parenthesis that will surely be closed some day, although by then nobody will be able to pick up the thread of the original sentence. A new one will have to be woven, constructed with words that will no longer be the same”—Beatriz navigates the mysteries of her new home in Argentina through language. Her chapters are built around the new words she learns and definitions drawn from her observations and what she overhears. When Beatriz learns the word amnesty, she thinks it means to forget, but it also means her father’s imminent return from prison. Her vision of what will happen then is bittersweet and free. “When the amnesty comes we’re going to dance tangos. Tangos are sad music that you dance to when you’re happy so that you’ll feel sad again.” Perhaps this is the answer to Don Rafael’s prescription for how to repair their society, with new words for old truth.
At PEN World Voices, Ma said books restore a sense of dignity to a culture. Both of these books give testament to the irrepressible gravitation of human consciousness toward inner and shared truth, whether it’s something we want to see or not.
[Springtime In A Broken Mirror by Mario Benedetti, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor, published on April 30, 2019 by The New Press, 192 pages, $23.99 hardcover.
China Dream by Ma Jian, translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew, published on May 7, 2019 by Counterpoint, 176 pages, $23.00 hardcover]