a brief account of the destruction of the indies [bartolome de las casas]

Bartolome De Las Casas wrote this short, savage book in 1542. The urgency of the writing makes it feel as though it might have been written last week. With a disgusted brevity he moves around the continent of the Americas, from Florida to the River Plate, outlining the horrors that have followed in the wake of the white man’s wake relentless search for gold, the substance which, writes the author, is their true god.

Without going into the history, his account has retrospectively been questioned. He writes of the death of millions, the destruction of vast cities, whole regions being depopulated. This is the post-apocalypse made real, without the help of global warming, nuclear bombs or meteorites. No doubt there is some dramatic license in his depiction of events. Although he had extensive knowledge of the New World, much of what he writes about is second-hand, or hearsay. Yet his own experiences clearly established a benchmark, where the use of torture to extract information was normative, where subjugation was considered to be a violent imperative.

All of which makes one wonder what it must have been like, to have landed on these shores, as a man of god, sent from the civilised world to witness the savages, only to find the true savages are your own ‘civilised’ countrymen. De Las Casas talks of fifty cities in Mexico alone “more ample and more spacious than Seville”. Perhaps in his vituperative denunciation there is a hint of his own amazement, echoed in Garcilaso’s words, that these wonders could be so wantonly destroyed. It must have been impossible not to feel as though your system of values was inside out,  when confronted by the brute realities of history.

This bewilderment is captured in De La Casas’ outraged prose. A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies is as powerful a text as the Communist Manifesto. One of the first trumpets at the walls of Jericho, decrying the terrible truths that underpin the European invasion and its barbaric paradoxes. The book is still shocking and vital today, half a millennium later. 

the purple land [w h hudson]

On the face of it, as an Anglo who has spent more of his days in this country than anyone could have predicted 20 years ago, I should have read Hudson's tome long ago. 

It recounts the adventures of an Englishman in Uruguay during the mid c19. Richard, as the hero is called, leaves Montevideo in search of work on an estancia, gets caught up in a Blanco revolution, breaks the hearts of various Latin beauties, kills a man, works his way through a dozen horses and drinks a lot of rum. 

To be honest, I don't quite know what to make of the book. So many people have spoken to me about it that I expected it to encapsulate in its pages the ageless charms of a country which is not so very different now, in the "interior" at least, from what it was like 150 years ago. Perhaps it does, but the narrator keeps getting in the way. In this sense, the book is like travel literature the world over: impinged upon by the difficulties of the traveller in truly gaining a grip on the society he or she is describing.

Hudson, to be fair, seeks to make this point. His intention is to chart a gradual transformation on the part of the narrator as he comes to respect the unsophisticated ways of these noble, warlike young Americans. The penultimate chapter features a eulogy to the humble provincial Uruguayan: “may the blight of our superior civilisation never fall on your wild flowers, or the yoke of our progress be laid on your herdsman—careless, graceful, music-loving as the birds”. The contradictions inherent in the passage are obvious; on the one hand celebrating a prelapserian world, on the other redolent with a benign condescension.

When I first came back from Uruguay I was interviewed by a now eminent theatre director for a job as an assistant director. I was asked about Uruguay and I answered fulsomely, talking about culture and uses of time and such like. Somewhat sniffily he sought to puncture my enthusiasm with a remark about the country's impoverished economy. As though this was enough to consign the box marked Uruguay (and perhaps the one marked "Latin America" too) to the cupboard marked "Nice to visit but not that important". This attitude remains predominant in the UK, Spain, and much of Europe and the Anglophone world. For all his obvious affection for the country, this would also appear to be the attitude Hudson adopts. In the end, the narrator leaves, the world goes on, he will have other fish to fry.

This is the downside of the book. The upside is that it offers a colourful insight into a world of gauchos, revolutionaries and their molls. It's the stuff of a John Buchan novel, with larks aplenty and tall tales to be enjoyed. Most of the Uruguayans who have recommended the book have told me they came to know it as children, which makes sense. For an impression of what the c19th equivalent of backpacking might have been like, The Purple Land works a treat. For an insight into the growing pains of a young American nation, (the land is purple as a result of the blood spilt in the battles which rage on its soil), Hudson's novel leaves something to be desired. 

the incas (garcilaso de la vega)

Your mother was an Incan princess. Your father was a conquistador. You're bilingual. You grow up in the ruins of a civilisation that has been annihilated in the space of a generation. 

When you're 23 years old you leave your home country, never to return. You go to Spain and fight. For year after year. You're always going to be the black sheep. No matter what you achieve.

The more you fight in what the Spaniards call the old world, the more you value your own old world, which now has been subsumed by what the Spanish, of whom you are one, call the new world. 

The memories are stuck in your brain. Perhaps you have some of the details wrong but they're there. You're sitting in a tent in a dusty plain. About to fight the infidel yet again. And you realise what you have to do with the rest of your life. The only thing you can do. You have to write it all down.

swimming home [deborah levy]

There's a corner of a foreign field that will be forever England. According to Levy, this corner is constructed out of petty deceit, matrimonial disquiet and suicidal urges. Whilst there are echoes of McEwan's Atonement in the conceit, the work of art this most resembles is Joanna Hogg's Unrelated. The British idyll abroad upset by the appearance of a rogue element, in this case the unpredictable and clearly unhinged Kitty Finch, who is swimming in the pool of the French holiday villa hired by two bourgeois London families. Kitty Finch spells trouble and sure enough she brings it to the party, unhinging one and all.

Whilst this is a potent cocktail of a premise, the truth is that the book skates over the dramatic depths. Like an iced-over pool, we gain glimpses of things the novel might have explored but chose not to. Instead the writer favours a poeticised imagistic approach, full of metaphor and simile, one which lathers the cold, cruel eye of the poet over the novel's crust. If you get my drift. Cruel, the book certainly is: with the exception of a 14 year old girl, Nina (more shades of Atonement) all the various characters are people you'd rather not hang out with. It does feel slightly pretensious of the author to give them such portentous jobs, (a holocaust-escapee poet; a TV war correspondent; etc), the significance of which are never really investigated. Instead the book hinges on Kitty, the bastard daughter of Fitzgerald's Nicole, waiting for the nuthouse to claim her.

The book has been a success and has earned an introduction from Tom McCarthy, no small praise. In some ways it also reminiscent of Lerner's Atocha Station, but it lacks the humour of Lerner's anti-heroic text, forever taking itself as seriously as it possibly can, overloading its 150 pages with an implication of a depth it never gets round to revealing.

russia in 1919 [arthur ransome]

Arthur Ransome became famous for his books about kids larking about on boats, books which I read as a child, as did generations of British children. The vividness of the childhood adventures these book captured are what made them work and perhaps it comes as no surprise to learn that Ransome’s own life was not short of an adventure or two.

This book recounts a visit to Moscow in the early Spring of 1919, following on from another visit he’d made in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. The book, which the author describes in his own introduction as “quite dull”, paints an insiders portrait of the way in which the Bolsheviks consolidated power as Moscow itself gradually got back to its feet. Russia is still hamstrung by the aggression of the allies. Somewhat frustratingly, Ransome manages to arrange a meeting with some British POWs, but never writes it up. Instead he goes into detail about the political scene at the time. In pre-Stalinist days, there was still considerable scope for independent political parties, albeit from the left. Before the purges all kinds of groups sought to shape the revolution in their own image, even if Ransome makes it clear that the Bolsheviks are likely to remain the dominant force. His accounts of his conversations with Lenin, a ‘happy’ revolutionary leader, are fascinating and insightful, revealing Lenin as a gnomic figure well aware of his position in history.

Elsewhere there are insights into life in that brave new dawn. One figure comments on the shortage of spoons as evidence that things are not getting any better. But the theatres of Moscow are full and Ransome creates a portrait of an impoverished but vibrant city, full of restless political activity, even though it is distressingly cold. He talks to people who have accepted their change in status with a surprising degree of equanimity, as people’s homes are co-opted and redistributed. The world has changed and people change with it.

Ransomse does all he can to remain even-handed. His scepticism regarding Lenin’s belief that the British revolution is imminent will prove astute. However, there appears to be a quiet admiration for the scale of the revolutionary project. As though the writer is conscious of his luck in being able to witness one of the most remarkable experiments in human political history.

when father was away on business (d emir kusturica, w abdulah sidran)

Kusturica's second film is not well known in the UK, although most people I've met here seem to have seen it. I'd never heard of it. The director's reputation might be on the wane, but there was a point at the end of the 20th century when he felt like the freshest, most important new voice in cinema. A trio of films, Black Cat, White Cat; Time of the Gypsies and Underground were feted for their irreverence and flair. When Father Was Away on Business was his second film, using many of the same actors who appear in the later films and is a bravura piece of work which stands up beside the director's more celebrated offerings.

The film belongs to a strong Eastern European satirical tradition (going back to Schweyk, Brecht etc). Tito's Communist rule is pervasive and one misplaced remark can lead to exile. This is what happens to Malik's father Mehmet after his lover denounces him to his brother-in-law. Mehmet "goes away on business" and later the family will follow him. The satire is gentle but affecting, most of all because it presents events through the eyes of the child, for whom football and girls are just as important as politics. 

However, above and beyond its politics, this is a great film in so far as it captures a complete social environment. As well as being a satire, it's also like a work of 19th C realism. Here is Communist Sarajevo captured with all of its energy, beauty and flaws. The film runs at 2 hours and 15 minutes, with an array of storylines and twists in the plot, but it never feels over-elaborated or rambling. The director's hand is firmly on the tiller, guiding the screenplay through its various episodes, whilst revelling in this world which has gone and will never return. The frequent use of significant football matches, usually against the Russians, provides a framework based in history, a history which must seem all the more distant now in Bosnia, when the nation participating in the football matches no longer exists. In addition, the affectionate relations shared across the religious divide seem remarkable given the imminence of what was to come at the time this small masterpiece was made. 

warriors of tibet: the story of aten and the khampas' fight for the freedom of their country [jamyang norbu]

What happens when exiled, bereaved, your family killed, your home purloined, your life is brought to a premature conclusion?

Jamyan Norbu’s account of the life of Aten, a native of Tibet displaced by the Chinese in the early sixties, does not provide us with the answer to that question, because it is at exactly that point that the book ends. Aten finally crosses the Himalayas, arriving in Dharamsala in India, his life as he knew it now no more than a memory. It is these memories that the book vividly conveys. Life on the high Tibetan plain. The day to day domestic problems. The importance of religion and pilgrimage. As well as the presence of the Chinese, whose occupation is cruel yet benign until Mao finally turns to the task of subjugating the ancient culture, beginning a process of destruction which continues to this day.

The book brings to mind Pinter’s Mountain Language. The Chinese are even attempting to destroy the words the Tibetans employ. At first Aten tries to work with the Chinese, his journey mirroring that of the Dalai Lama, spending a year in China being trained to become a figure they will use to govern the country. Here are fascinating insights into the way in which China’s seemingly sudden emergence as an economic superpower is actually part of a process and a way of thinking that has been in development for far longer than anyone realised. The subjugation of Tibet and other indigenous peoples within and on the edges of its borders marked the start of a process which continues apace. Aten notes the way in which the occupation became more and more savage, until it reaches the point where he has no option but to join the catastrophic resistance campaign, with devastating personal results.

This is a book written in memory about a lost world. The miracle is that the narrator, as conveyed by the author, seems to have retained through his affection for what he has lost, his sense of humour and humanity. Where one might expect fierce anger, the reader encounters equanimity. For anyone with an interest in the fate of Tibet, or displaced peoples anywhere in the world, this book represents a compelling read.  

marx in soho (w. howard zinn, d. juan tocchi)

Zinn's text is a curio. He wasn't primarily a playwright. He was a political historian. As such, what the audience watches when they see his play is the work of someone whose ambition is less to create drama than to convey to his audience a didactic understanding of a historical subject. In this case, Karl Marx. The result is a play which is part biography, part philosophical/ historical treatise and part, because the premise of the play is that Marx is far from dead, commentary on our contemporary existence.

It's perhaps this last aspect which is the most powerful. When the bearded Troncoso talks to the Verdi's audience of how, in spite of capitalism's gizmos, there are still people sleeping on the streets, the inference is crystal clear. Society might be a changing, but too many things remain the same. And, according to the writer's interpretation of Marx, shall continue to do so, so long as we inhabit a capitalist universe. There's so much Zizek in Zinn's Marx that it's almost as though he was conceived by this play, originally written in 1999. For a Londoner abroad, the text also offered a convincing description of that city in its mid nineteenth century guise, when notions of third world and first had yet to be developed.

The play is also an intriguing examination of the dramatic medium. Zinn's Marx tells us that his wife, Jenny, criticised him for not writing in a language the workers could necessarily understand. This past week I've discovered the cinema of the Bolivian filmmaker Sanjines. Who might describe himself as a Marxist, something which Marx in Soho has the philosopher reject as a concept. Sanjines' film, The Courage of The People employs a pared down narrative style, which some might accuse of being overly simplistic. However, he adopted this structure in order to ensure that the people about whom he was making cinema, (the miners and indigenous people of the Bolivian altiplano), felt included as spectators. Interestingly, his 1989 film, La Nacion Clandestina, made largely in Aymarac, employs a narrative structure which is so rooted in the Aymarac philosophy that it overlaps with the outer reaches of innovative modern narrative theory (time becomes non-linear; the past and the present co-exist). The screenplay might have been written by Nolan. At the same time the film still has a highly 'accessible' feel, as it takes the viewer into indigenous Bolivian culture in a way no other film I've seen even begins to.

Zinn's mission was to de-Marxify Marx, to shed him of the historical baggage which Marxism has appended to his work and his name. Whether Marx in Soho entirely succeeds in doing this depends to a large extent on how the play transcends its own origins in order to engage with the audience which Jenny championed, for example. With this in mind, it's a play which seems to come up against the buffers which insulate Western culture. Within the division between high and low culture which helps to consolidate the (capitalist) status quo, Marx in Soho quite clearly pertains to the high end of the spectrum. Quite how the dramatic artist/ writer breaks out of this straightjacket is hard to say, but perhaps the work of Sanjines offers some clues.

ashes of the amazon [milton hatoum]

Hatoum’s novel falls between two stools. On the one hand it would appear to aspire towards the epic. The narrative is set primarily in Manaus, and the book charts the gradual transformation of the town through the latter part of the twentieth century from sleepy backwater towards tawdry metropolis. The more colourful waterfront barrios are torn down and replaced with anodyne housing estates. At the same time, the book’s anti-hero, Mundo, leaves Manaus, venturing first to Rio and then onto Berlin and finally, Brixton, in London.

However, alongside this overarching perspective, the writer seeks to create an intimate, off-key portrait of an artist. Mundo’s story is narrated by his friend, Lavo, to whom he might or might not be related. Born into wealth, Mundo is an innate rebel, who turns against his conservative father as he seeks to become an artist. (Intriguing the way in which the dissonant artist features so regularly as a figure in contemporary Latin American writing, Mundo taking his place alongside Alan Pauls’ maverick, amongst others.) Hatoum’s portrayal locates the roots of Mundo’s artistic urge in the desire to confront and reclaim something of the Amazon. His mother, Alicia, apparently emerged from the jungle alongside her mad sister, fully formed. His father has made his money from exploiting jute. Mundo aspires towards a connection with that which is being wiped out by modernity. His final demise occurs after he executes a piece of performance art in Rio, dressed as an Indian, carrying a canoe oar he’s kept hold of after being given it by an Indian boatman in the jungle, years before.

Mundo’s portrayal is intriguing, all the more so for being presented through the eyes of his poor friend who himself is gradually working his way up the social system by becoming a lawyer, a journey that will be the inverse of Mundo’s. However, the book’s intent to fulfil this duel role means that it sometimes feels that it’s neither fish nor foul. Mundo’s wanderings in Europe, for instance, are dealt with in a somewhat cursory fashion. In a way his story might be the obverse of Flyte’s in Brideshead. The wealthy heir who ends up slumming it in the first world, rather than the third. Perhaps because I might have known people like this, falling through the cracks in Europe, I hoped for more, but in spite of the book’s geographical detail (Atlantic Road/ Brixton Road etc), these passages feel skittish. Likewise the final post-dictatorship stages in the re-development of Manaus feel as though they are alluded to rather than fully conveyed. The book is much stronger at describing the world which has been lost, when Manaus still represented the hinge between the jungle and the immigrant.

Although this is perhaps ultimately a frustrating book, shining a light on a city which remains one of the great frontiers of modern man, as urbanity confronts the immemorial swathe of the Amazon, it still offers a fascinating insight into what Manaus used to be and what it has since become.

velada metafísica de fernando gonzález (d. cristóbal peláez)

The Sala Verdi brings a season of Latin America theatre to Montevideo. First up is Teatro Matacandelas, from Medellin in Colombia. Theirs is a defiantly Brechtian theatre with a Victorian Gothic twinge. I can’t follow all of it. The story deals with a presumably fictional philosopher, Fernando Gonzalez. He stands for mayor and is rejected. He lives on the finca that will later belong to Pablo Escobar. He has a curious affair with a Frenchwoman when he spends time in Marseilles as a counsel.

Above and beyond the quixotic narrative, there’s a makeshift theatre practice at work. In much the same way as last night’s Henry 4/5 in the Solis, a chorus appears at the start urging the audience to use their imagination to convert the empty space into the valleys of Antioquia or a Mediterranean port. Harsh lights isolate spaces on the stage for the performers to inhabit. The acting has a heightened, declaratory hue. The philosopher barks out his thoughts, as do many of those he meets along the way. Scenes shift rapidly. Music starts to punctuate proceedings. About an hour in, things become more and more gothic. A version of the devil appears, bathed in red light, emanating a powdery glow. Later the whole of the Catholic church takes over. The theatre is bathed in incense and smoke. There’s so much smoke that the alarm goes off. But the philosopher’s oratory style drowns it out. There’s a deliberate sense of ramshackle chaos on stage. Jesus makes an appearance and you’ve got no idea what’s going to happen next. 

Teatro Matacandelas create a rough theatre out of nothing which appears to be influenced by Brecht, would be admired by Brook and yet also emanates out of the rhythms and customs of Medellin. It’s vibrant, non-naturalistic and full of the unexpected, even if to the non-native speaker there are moments which are plain baffling. The final words of Fernando González are read out by the whole cast in a hyped up final scene, books being ripped to pieces, like something out of a lost work by Blaise Cendras.