When art collides with politics
Author Abroad S2:E7
Greetings! This month’s edition of Author Abroad looks at the menace of authoritarianism, the relationship between politics and the arts, and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s award-winning novel, Brotherless Night.
Reflections from Abroad
July 22nd, 2024 marked the 30th anniversary of the military coup d'état in the West African nation of The Gambia. I can never forget this date because I was headed to The Gambia that very same day for my first overseas assignment. Upon arrival at London Heathrow, an airline representative informed me that the airport in the capital city of Banjul was closed and my connecting flight postponed—indefinitely. I spent the next few days stranded in the UK as I waited for the airport to reopen and my employer to decide whether it was safe for me to proceed. After much deliberation, made more complicated by the fact that we didn’t have internet back then, I was on my way a few days later.
The coup was staged by a group of junior soldiers, led by a 29-year-old lieutenant named Yahya Jammeh. The soldiers’ purported justification for overthrowing the government was growing corruption, ineffectiveness, and autocratic tendencies on the part of President Dawda Jawara, who’d been in power for 32 years. In an attempt to consolidate support, the coup leaders banned opposition parties, suspended the Constitution, and established a provisional ruling council with Jammeh as its head. Yahya Jammeh continued to rule the country for 23 years, his tenure marked by increased authoritarianism, censorship, and human rights abuses.
In my former home of Myanmar, the military continues to cling to power three years after their 2021 coup d’état, despite promising to hold elections by the end of the year. Since then, tens of thousands of civilians have been arrested and killed in the military regime’s draconian attempts to suppress resistance. The much-loved democracy icon, Aung San Suu Kyi, remains under house arrest. (Some would argue that she has her own autocratic tendencies, having failed to groom anyone to succeed her. She has certainly engendered a sizable personality cult, whether intentional or not.)
Meanwhile, the last couple of weeks have seen a bloody government crackdown in Bangladesh, where I lived until a few months ago. In response to peaceful student protests over unfair job quotas, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly totalitarian government unleashed deadly security forces, implemented a nationwide curfew, and shut down the internet for over a week. As the NYT reports, “Over the past 15 years, Ms. Hasina has deeply entrenched her authority and divided this nation of 170 million people. Those who kissed the ring were rewarded with patronage, power and impunity. Dissenters were met with crackdowns, endless legal entanglement and imprisonment.” With the return of internet access the day before yesterday, reports of thousands killed or “disappeared” and rumors of mass graves suggest that she has reached a new level of brutality.
In my own country, former President Trump exhibits clear authoritarian traits. In addition to choreographing his own personality cult, he spent considerable effort while president trying to dismantle the American system of checks and balances designed to prevent one branch of government from overpowering another. And when he lost the presidency through a free and fair democratic election, he rallied his supporters to overthrow the government on January 6th, 2021.
What all these situations have in common are leaders who refuse to give up their power, placing their own ambition ahead of the good of the country. They become so desperate to retain power that they refuse to tolerate dissent. This leads to censorship, human rights abuses, and violent suppression of any type of protest. They claim to love their country, but their actions suggest otherwise.
The inclination of certain leaders to cling onto power doesn’t surprise me. What puzzles me is the mass devotion that tends to surround these despots. Why did Gambian voters continue to elect one dictator for seven consecutive terms, and then proceed to elect another dictator for five consecutive terms? Why do Sheikh Hasina’s supporters join the riot police in attacking students rather than just staying out of it? In some instances, people have no choice but to support their government out of fear of retribution against them or their families. In other cases, they may have been brainwashed by propaganda.
What continues to confound me is why, in a “free” country such as the United States, people continue not only to vote for Trump, but treat him like a demigod. What is it about human nature that makes us want to turn flawed human beings into superheroes? Why do we idolize others, even after they fail to live up to their promises? The only explanation I can think of is that the world is so confusing and overwhelming that we’d rather pin our hopes on someone who claims to have all the answers than face ambiguity. What are your thoughts?
Writing
Another recent NYT article about The Poet Who Commands a Rebel Army in Myanmar got me thinking about the relationship between politics and the arts. Aside from the very famous, artists in the US tend to exist on the fringes of society. The arts are not generally viewed as a serious, professional career path, and American artists often struggle to make ends meet. Yet in other countries where I’ve lived, artists are both revered and feared.
Myanmar is one such country. As the article states, “Myanmar is a country entranced by poetry. Poets are celebrities, accorded the kind of adulation that, in other places, might be showered on actors or athletes.” The same is true of all artists in Myanmar, whether painters, novelists, or puppeteers. In my novel, The Golden Land, the narrator recalls the magic of Burmese marionettes, who in centuries past were the only ones capable of delivering difficult messages to the King. Where a human messenger could be killed, a marionette could not; even if it were destroyed, its soul would live on.
Artists are seekers of truth, uncovering and dissecting what is true in life, and articulating that truth indirectly through a combination of symbolism, metaphor, and allusion. What makes symbols and metaphors so powerful is their ability to spark recognition at the gut-level, shedding new light on concepts too complex or tedious to grasp with the rational part of our brains.
This is why autocratic governments such as Myanmar’s feel threatened by artists, and why nearly a dozen poets were elected to parliament in the 2015 elections that ushered Aung San Suu Kyi’s (more) democratic government into power. In the words of Maung Saungkha, the poet in the article’s title, “Revolution is the job of poets and artists.” Maung Saungkha was imprisoned by the previous military regime for a poem that compared the leader at the time to male genitalia.
If authoritarianism is on the rise, as it seems to be, we must continue to nurture the arts, empowering and uplifting our artists to keep seeking the truth and finding new ways to help us see that truth.
Reading
Brotherless Night: A Novel by V.V. Ganeshananthan (Random House, 2023)
Recommended to me by a family member (because the description reminded her of The Golden Land!), this award-winning novel tackles many of the same themes discussed in today’s newsletter. Sashi, our narrator, is a young medical student trying to reconcile the love she feels for family and friends with the corrosive politics of war. As Sri Lanka descends into civil war, and two of her brothers join the Tamil Tiger rebel movement, she must figure out where she stands politically—not easy when both sides are responsible for unspeakable atrocities.
Brotherless Night reminds us that there is no such thing as a good side in any war—that we might support the motives of one side over another, but the reality of warfare is that innocent people will be killed, raped, tortured, and displaced in the name of political ideology. In the novel, the revolutionary leaders of the Tigers get so caught up in their own rhetoric that they forget the very ideals they are fighting to preserve. They joined the movement to fight for freedom and justice on behalf of the Tamil people, but they soon become so paranoid and intolerant that they execute anyone who dares question their actions.
Brotherless Night also explores the role of doctors in a conflict. Should Sashi provide the same level of care to the perpetrators of violence as she does to their victims? Does the act of healing others enable more violence by lessening its impact? (One might ask the same question about humanitarian aid.) In one scene, as Sashi is treating a rape victim, she reflects on the woman’s refusal of pain medicine: “I held the pieces of her earlobe together and tried to make the stitches small. She was right. Doctors resolve to relieve pain, but pain is information, and to lose it can mean losing something valuable. Pain draws a map.” Pain helps us remember what happened so that we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Another powerful theme introduced by Ganeshananthan is the role of feminism in the context of war and revolution. Josie, one of Sashi’s classmates, insists that she supports feminism as defined by the Tigers, to which their teacher, Anjali Acca, replies, “What kind of struggle asks women to support a cause but does not address our concerns?” And a few pages later: “What is the role of dissent for feminism? Can an organisation that does not allow dissent be a feminist organisation?”
Above all, Brotherless Night reminds us of the importance of dialogue, of keeping open the channels of communication and taking the time to listen to others, advice that we all need to remember in these divisive times. As Anjali Acca tells Sashi,
“[the Tigers] are unhappy with me because now I criticize them. They don’t like that I changed my mind. They don’t want debates or arguments. But we have to continue to debate and argue. We can only get through these ideas by talking about them openly. To move forward we have to question ourselves.”
An important and evocative novel.
That’s all for this month. Thanks for reading!
💕 Liz