Writing is freedom

“Writing is freedom and to hell with everything else” - Martin Amis.

So if writing, really good writing, serious writing is about freedom, it follows that anyone who cares about that kind of writing would be interested in the things that threaten it.  And what threatens it, more than anything is tyranny, the tyranny of humans or the biological tyranny of dementia, that robbed Amis of his father  and is robbing me of my mother, while the physical part of her has already been stolen by our own family’s human tyrant.

There isn’t much we can do about human tyranny, not alone, at any rate.  But it is at least worth recognising it. Or is it?  I was sent today a recent parody of a conspiracy theorist:

One of the attributes is “knows what tyranny looks like”.  But considering how smug and knowing, such types are, one could also add: “Ne s'accord jamais, cherche à saper, se croit toujours le plus malin...  “[Translation].  I have met enough of them to know. In the end, isn’t the conspiracy theorist just another kind of tyrant-in-waiting.  “Four legs good two legs bad …four legs good, two legs better.”

In ‘The Feast of the Goat’, the story of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic (1930-61) Mario Vargas LLosa explores the threat to human freedom.  It is not easy bedtime reading.  The early pages were challenging in that many names and backstories are introduced pertaining to the men involved in Trujillo’s assassination. The novel switches between before and after the assassination, changes viewpoints within that period  and also reaches forwards (and back again) to the 1990s and the story of one of the survivors.

But the main reason it is difficult is the catalogue of horrors it describes. As well as the [true] well-known murder of the three Mirabel sisters who opposed the regime, we hear about the manipulation, murders and torture that led the Trujillo assassins to that deed.  We hear how, less for sexual satisfaction and more to test the loyalty of his closest men he would have obligatory sex with their wives. 

"Llegaba a jactarse de <las hembras que se había tirado>, algo que también celebraban los cortesanos. cortesanos, aun cuando ello los hiciera potenciales enemigos de Doña María Martínez, la prestante dama, y aun cuando aquellas hembras fueran sus esposas, hermanas, madres, o hijas."

“He even boasted of ‘the cunts he had fucked’, something his courtiers also celebrated, even when that could make them potential enemies of Doña María Martínez, the bountiful first lady, and even when those cunts were their wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters.”

His manipulation of the men closest to them is described, keeping them in his favour then pushing them out so they all craved his approbation.  There is a fictionalised but plausible account of the the choice of one of these, who had fallen out of favour, to sacrifice, for his own security and restoration to favour, his fourteen-year-old daughter to the sexual appetites of the seventy year old with prostate cancer. Men did, apparently, offer up their daughters to the generalissimo, and not just from self-interest but for the sheer honour.  

Almost as excruciating is book’s cataloguing, in graphic detail, of the capture, four month torture and assassination by Trujillo’s son, of his fathers executioners.

I found it in the local Oxfam recently and bought it because of the theme and because I had recently met some Dominicans at a Latin party in Edinburgh.  They were described to me as a people of “mucha labia” by a sober Peruvian professional.  He warned me to beware of people from that area - all talk. A line from the novel says: “The gringos are beautifully frank, they don’t have our delicacy, they don’t know how to sugarcoat the pill.”

 In my brief acquaintance with them then and later, I found the Dominicans fun-loving, friendly, respectful, with, like many Latin Americans I have met great affection for their folk traditions.  I also had a sense of why I had been given that warning.  But to find that such seemingly happy people had endured a dictatorship was surprising, later, that they had suffered such barbarity was a shock. 

So many Latin Americans blame the United States for every conceivable ill, even their own dirty politicians. The Venezuelan, Carlos Rangel, wrote a controversial book about the topic in 1976: ‘Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario’ (From the noble savage to the noble revolutionary). They excuse their dictators as being puppets of the US.  Milei is made in Trump's image so the catastrophe of Argentina’s economy is down to the gringos. 

There is no doubt that the United States has much to answer for in their destabilisation of & intervention in many regimes for their own interests. It is hypocritical about democracy, claiming to defend human rights while propping up regimes with no record of the same.  Meanwhile, that country is profoundly unequal, materialistic and torn apart by gun violence. The US has claimed its interventions are down to the politically destabilising threat of communism, or immigration, or drug crime, depending on the era.  It claims to seek to establish stability - and how well that worked out in Iraq. Sometimes it just wants to throw its weight around to prove it can compete with the other heavy hitters. 

These justifications it has given might legitimately worry a state, but have the interventions of the most powerful country in the world worked? Not objectively, not, at least, if the measure is, indeed, the justifications cited.  There are and have been many socialist states in Latin America, not least for decades including Cuba, on the US doorstep. Human rights abuses continue, war continues - it’s good big business, at least if you are on the supply side.  Immigration continues, drug crime continues.  The one thing that the US has got from intervention is business, deals and resources. It is no surprise.  That is what we would expect from the cradle of capitalism and consumerism.

So I appreciate Vargas Llosa’s recognition that Trujillo was regularly frustrated by the United States, their sanctions via the OSA, the threat of another invasion and occupation by them as they had done 1916-1924.  He did not fail to  emphasise that Trujillo grew up with US marine training, which evidently shaped him, but he did not blame the US for Trujillo or overblow their complicity in his overthrow.

Vargas Llosa’s own politics have changed.  He began supporting the Cuban revolution but gradually moved right more recently endorsing Brazil’s right wing presidential candidate, Jair Bolsanaro over Lula da Silva (who won), all while  supporting gay rights and drug decriminalisation.

“It is remarkable that the author of Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat, two of his greatest novels, which examine the moral corrosion of Latin American societies caused by the dictatorships of military men, would prefer a thuggish ex-army captain [Bolsanaro] openly calling on his supporters to arm themselves ahead of October’s election over a flawed but genuine democrat [Lula da Silva].” - Tom Hennigan in the Irish Times.