All posts tagged Jackson

The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski (2009)

Warning: this review contains graphic descriptions of torture and mutilation.

Were you forced to kill any of your relatives or neighbours?
Were you forced to chop off people’s hands or feet with a machete?
Were you forced to gouge out people’s eyes?
Were you forced to rape women?
Were you forced to burn people alive?

(Part of the questionnaire given to freed child soldiers in north Uganda, quoted in The Night Wanderers, page 38)

Wojchiec Jagielski

Wojchiec Jagielski is a Polish journalist who specialises in reporting from the world’s worst conflicts. Hence, for example, ‘Towers of Stone’, his 2009 book about the gruesome brutal wars in Chechnya, along with books on Afghanistan and South Africa.

But it’s not not just reporting – Jagielski is interested in the psychology created by terrible conflicts and, beyond that, in the voodoo, spectral elements, the worlds beyond normal human experience which extreme situations create, the deprivation, degradation, demoralisation spread over long periods, which create new psychic zones.

For this reason – for Jagielski’s interest in moods and alternative states and his interest in depicting them in prose which is often more about poetry and fleeting perceptions than the journalist’s tradition fare of facts and dates – he has often been compared to the famous master of such writing and fellow Pole, Ryszard Kapuściński.

No surprise that snippets of praise from Kapuściński are found on the jackets of Jagielski’s books (”A stunning and beautiful book…Jagielski has scaled the heights of reportage’), or that Kapuściński wrote the introduction to one of his books, or that this very book was nominated for the Ryszard Kapuściński Prize.

Part 1 (Gulu and its night wanderers)

Ugandan elections 2006

The Night Wanderers is set in Uganda in 2006. Nominally Jagielski was in Uganda to cover the February 2006 general election and party politics are, accordingly, described in part 2. But the meat of the book is his descriptions of the appalling plight of the thousands of children abducted by the rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by the psychopath Joseph Kony. J.M. Barrie wrote about the Lost Boys but it was a fairy tale compared to this lost generation of Ugandan children.

The Acholi

The north of Uganda is inhabited by the Acholi people. Some 2 million of them have been driven out of their villages, forced to abandon their homes, their fields and crops, to leave behind the graveyards full of ancestral spirits, and instead herded into about 200 refugee camps where they have built huts and live, but which they can never regard as home.

Exemplary cruelty

The rebels terrify civilians by attacking villages, hacking people to death with machetes, chopping off their hands, slitting their throats, clubbing them to death, hacking them to pieces with axes, raping the women, herding people into huts and burning them alive. The cruelty is exemplary: it is punishment for not believing in the wonderfulness of Joseph Kony, and also to terrify entire regions into submission. Thus:

On the orders of their commanders, the guerrillas killed the villagers in extremely cruel ways. They butchered and burned them alive, forced the prisoners to commit cannibalism and infanticide. They raped and tortured, cut off people’s lips, gouged out their eyes, and chopped off their hands and feet. They left behind bloodied corpses and gutted houses. (p.138)

(Why does the LRA cut off people’s lips? As a warning to others not to report encounters with them to the authorities or to the Ugandan Army, p.296.)

Refugee village headman

Jagielski meets Abola Imbakasi, headman of one such refugee camp, Palenga. His meek son, Robert, was taken by the guerrillas for 3 months (p.18). On returning he had to be exorcised by a priest but is still not the same. His mind has been permanently damaged by what he saw and was forced to do.

The children’s treatment centre

Jagielski meets Nora who runs a rehabilitation centre (a ‘children’s treatment centre’) for children who’ve escaped or been rescued from the guerrillas. All of them have killed, multiple times. Jagielski watches one of the therapy methods which is to let them act out what they did as a kind of gruesome pantomime, some of them acting out their own roles, some of them playing the villagers who they hacked, burned, tortured, shot and burned. The terrible questionnaire (p.38).

The journalist’s responsibility

Jagielski explains that he’s never had problems interviewing the commanders and leaders who order massacres and atrocities. They’re always confident it was the only way to achieve justice or peace. They are always full of excuses, justifications and blame others (see Putin’s justifications for murdering civilians in Ukraine).

In his experience it is always much harder talking to the victims of atrocities. For many their story, their experience, is all they have left. Therefore sharing it with a journalist is like a precious trust. Part of which is they think that by sharing their story, it will bring about justice in the outside world, and will bring them peace and closure. It is far harder dealing with these poor people when neither of those things happen, when the world doesn’t suddenly galvanise itself to address their wrongs, when they are left feeling even worse than they did before they told their stories (p.33).

Rebel magic

The ferocity of the attackers, the way they chiefly emerged at night, the way they hid in the jungle and picked off anyone foolish enough to stray into the darker jungle, all this gave rise to folk stories and legends: that they could dematerialise at will, could appear anywhere like witches, had magical powers, that they change the children they kidnapped from humans into savage animals (p.39)

And indeed, villagers, adults, normal civilians who haven’t been inducted, regard returnees from the rebels as ‘spirits of the forest’, as bewitched, soulless, voodoo, jinxed, bad luck (p.49).

Initiation killing

Jagielski learns from Nora’s interviews with countless child soldiers how new initiates into the LRA were forced at gunpoint to murder their own fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, best friends, neighbours, in front of everyone, in front of plenty of witnesses, because then there was no going back, then they were forced to stay. This was the initiation ceremony into the Lord’s Army (p.45).

The boy Samuel

Jagielski is particularly interested in interviewing Samuel, who was abducted at age 9 and was soon afterwards forced to kill his first person, a boy from his village, and whose story Jagielski tries to piece together. Nora tells him the best age to create a child soldier is 9, old enough to be independent, young enough not to really know right and wrong. Mouldable (p.57).

Jackson the journalist

After trips to refugee camps or to interview the children, Jagielski returns to the bar at Franklin’s Inn where he regularly meets Jackson, now a radio journalist, himself inducted into the guerrillas many years earlier. Jackson plays the role of sardonic, satirical commentator on Jagielski’s efforts, claiming that no matter how many questions he asks, he’ll never understand what it’s like (p.46).

Atrocities

The narrative is regularly punctuated by descriptions of the most appalling atrocities, for example on pages 45, 50, 72, 138, 144, 146,

When they had finished their interrogation, the older guerrillas started killing the villagers. The commanders forbade them from shooting unnecessarily, to save bullets, and also because the noise of shots would alert the army. The peasants were tied up and made to lie on the ground, as the guerrillas unhurriedly murdered them one by one – men, women, old people, and also small children who weren’t fit to be prisoners. They killed them with machetes, axes, hoes and large knives usually used as agricultural tools. None of the villagers put up resistance or fought for their lives. Terror and a sense of doom had taken away their capacity for any kind of action. (p.137)

Or the story (repeated twice) of the LRA attack on a funeral procession when they forced the mourners to cook and eat the remains of the deceased, allegedly on the orders of Onen Kamdalu (p.241).

Gulu

Jagielski bases himself in Gulu, administrative capital of north central Uganda and each evening observes the same eerie ritual: every evening as the sun sets thousands of children (as many as 15,000) arrive having trekked from all the surrounding villages, for their own safety, to avoid the risk of being kidnapped and conscripted by the LRA. It is this silent army of forlorn children who arrive every evening and make beds in public spaces and on the sidewalks, who Nora calls ‘the Night Wanderers’ which give the book its title (p.58).

Jagielski describes the arrival of these tens of thousands of silent children in spooky spectral terms. The way the town of Gulu changed its atmosphere. the way adults departed abandoned the streets to the thousands of ghostly children. The peculiar way these children inspired irrational fear in the adult population, harbingers of evil (p.59).

Jagielski tells us he stayed at the Acholi Inn Hotel (p.91). This is a real place, still exists, and you can book a stay there, if you want.

Jagielski tells the history of how Uganda was created as a nation by the British, yoking together completely different peoples and tribes, the Buganda – agriculturalists – in the south, the Acholi, Lango and other peoples who lived by grazing and cattle, in the north.

Milton Obote and Yoweri Museveni

At independence in 1962 the British tried to reconcile these different peoples, making Milton Obote from the Lango tribe prime minister and the king of the Buganda, Frederick Mutesa II, president. But in 1966 Obote overthrew Mutesa and declared himself president. In 1971 Obote was overthrown by his own army chief of staff, Idi Amin from the Kwakwa people. In 1979 Ami invaded Tanzania but was swiftly repulsed and overthrown by the Tanzanian army (for a vivid description of Amin’s horrifying rule and the Tanzanian invasion, see Giles Foden’s powerful novel The Last King of Scotland).

Obote returned to power and swiftly commenced violent repression even worse than Amin’s triggering the Ugandan Bush War against him, led by members of Obote’s army plus tribal opponents. They crystallised into the National Resistance Army (NRA) and attracted support from the many Rwandan Tutsi exiles and refugees living in southern Uganda (who were to go on to form the Rwandan Patriotic Front and invade Rwanda in 1990).

In 1986 Obote was overthrown for the second time and the leader of the NRA, Yoweri Museveni, came to power. Museveni began a campaign of intimidation against the powerful Acholi people in the north and it was this which inspired Acholi resistance.

Alice Auma

Jagielski gives a pen portrait of Alice Auma, a withdrawn young woman who had failed to get pregnant by two husbands and been returned to her father in shame, before she began having visions and claimed to have visitations from spirits and announced she was a prophet of the Lord. She named the chief spirit visitor Lakwena (p.74).

Alice became known as Alice of the Holy Spirit. She set up a temple where she could heal the sick and the mentally disturbed. Then announced she was establishing an army which would not just defend the Acholi from the Ugandan Army’s depredations, but conquer all of Uganda and establish religious rule. She gathered followers from conventional guerrilla forces who were losing encounters against the army. She promised if they sprinkled holy water on their guns every bullet would find its billet, and if they smeared holy oil on their bodies they would be invulnerable.

Although this didn’t actually happen, the intensity of their belief led them to surprising victories over the conventional army and word spread. Conventional troops fled in panic when they heard the psalm-singing Alice army approaching. The army grew to several thousand and fought its way south to within 100 miles of the capital. But then her spirits abandoned her. Her troops said it happened when she crossed the White Nile and went beyond the borders of Acholi land. The central army also recruited powerful witches and magicians and defeated Alice’s army in November 1987.

Alice fled to Kenya where, ten years later (1997), Jagielski interviewed her. She didn’t say much. She claimed to have found a spirit cure for AIDS. She died in 2007.

Joseph Kony

Her father tried to take up her baton for a while but lacked the charisma. Then a new prophet arose in Acholiland, Joseph Kony. He claimed to be visited by Lakwena who had instructed him to create a new army, the Lord’s Army, and liberate Acholiland. One by one other rebel groups folded and ceasefired with the Ugandan army. Only the most fanatical opponents or those who had committed the most barbaric crimes held out and gravitated towards Kony’s army which, by a process of selection, became full of psychopaths, ‘vile, bloodthirsty, accursed creatures’ (p.81). (Jackson explains more about Lakwena, pages 198 to 200).

But they lacked manpower and the villages were no longer as keen to hand over their sons as they had been for Alice’s Army. So Kony took to kidnapping children on an industrial scale. Jagielski thinks the force Kony renamed the Lord’s Resistance Army might be the only child army in history.

Interview with Kony

Jagielski gives extended quotes from what I initially took to be a newspaper interview Kony gave, in which he disclaimed all responsibility for kidnapping children, claiming the mutilations were carried out by the Uganda army not him, swearing that his cause is just etc (pages 201 to 203). In fact the material comes from this video interview carried out by Sam Farmer, who must, as the saying goes, have balls of steel to doggedly track down a known mass murderer to his lair.

Warning: this video contains graphic and upsetting images of mutilation.

Sister Rachele Fassere

The story of Sister Rachele Fassere who tried heroically to rescue the 139 girls abducted by the LRA from the most eminent school in the region, St Mary’s convent school in Aboke.

Britain’s imperial behaviour and legacy: pages 71, 104, 154,

The stock African accusation against imperialists, the British, against all outsiders:

‘And that’s where the problem lies – in the names,’ said Jackson…’You give your own names to whatever you find in your country, and you’re convinced that once you’ve named it all, you’re also going to understand it all. But we have our own names too, but we look at things in our own way.’ (p.114)

Part 2 (Kampala)

In part 2 Jagielski leaves Gulu, travelling south by bus (with Jackson) to the capital of Uganda, Kampala. Thus we get a pen portrait of Kampala’s history – one of the few cities in all Africa that existed before the Europeans arrived i.e. that Europeans didn’t found. Winston Churchill was delighted with it and called it the pearl of Africa (p.154)

Jagielski checks into the Speke Hotel where all the foreign correspondents say, meet and swap knowledge (p.122). How western journalists co-op or rip off the hard-earned knowledge of local African journalists (pages 123 to 126).

Spirits

Alice Auma, and Joseph Kony after her, both triumphed because of the nearly universal belief in spirits. The book adverts again and again to spirit belief. For example, the passage about the area around Luwero where so many villagers were slaughtered that there was no-one to give them burial rites and so the spirits of the dead were trapped in this world and entered the bodies of the living (p.146).

Extended passage naming some of the spirits who take Kony, how he behaves when possessed etc, chief among them Lakwena (pages 166 to 169).

Jackson’s family believed that when his father came home from the war he was possessed by a spirit which eventually drove him to hang himself. The entire family and village were too scared to cut the rope he’d hanged himself by under the belief that anyone who did so would themselves be possessed and die, and had to bribe an old, old lady, known to be an ajwaka or healer, to do it.

Part 2 has more history and politics in it than part 1, which was more about individuals like Nora, Samuel et al. Jagielski is quite a repetitive writer. Some ideas are repeated in nearly the same phrasing. The dispossessed refugee men of Penga often raped women:

as if only by inflicting rape could they come alive and shake off their inertia (p.18)

Two hundred pages later, Nora complains that Acholi men are ‘useless’. They steal the money their womenfolk earn, simply abandon them, or rape them:

as if only through violence, by inflicting pain and harm, could they restrain something beyond their control which was causing their former world and old way of life to slip away before their very eyes. (p.237)

In a bigger example of repetition, the sequence of events whereby the British left Obote as Prime Minister and the king of Buganda as president, then Obote overthrew the king to become a dictator (1966), was himself overthrown by Amin (1971), who was overthrown by the Tanzania War (1979), which brought Obote back to power (Obote II), how Obote was even more bloodthirsty than Amin (maybe as many as 500,000 Ugandans died under his second regime), how this triggered the Ugandan Bush War (1980 to 1986), which eventually overthrew Obote and replaced him with Museveni – this narrative is repeated at least twice, some parts of it 3 or 4 times.

Part 2 goes into more detail about the biographies of all three players, Obote, Amin, Museveni, plus the restored king of Buganda, King Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi or ‘King Ronnie’ (p.140).

Pages about Amin and the mutual loathing between him and Julius Nyerere (pages 142 to 144); ‘the personification of horror (pages 155 to 166, including some of the scenes described in ‘The Last King of Africa’).

Another thing Jagielski repeats is the claim that Uganda became a place of war, horror and death. Because he repeats this kind of phrasing, stretched out to paragraphs, many times, and because the narrative is non-chronological but hops about in time, it becomes hard to figure out which leader it happened under and why it happened. Many passages like this:

Presidents changed but the nightmare continued and Uganda never stopped flowing with blood, as if it had been sacrificed to the god of war and evil. (p.145)

Wracked by lawlessness and violence, Uganda continued to be a bloodbath, doomed to horrific destruction, curse with an apocalypse. (p.164)

After almost two decades of the tyrannical regimes of Obote and Amin, civil wars, massacres, lawlessness and bankruptcy, plague and famine, and one and a half million corpses, it had come to be known as a doomed country… (p.170)

The bravery of British journalist William Pike, who edited the newspaper New Vision without fear or favour, and his lead journalist, Allio Ewaku Emmy (pages 126 to 129).

What triggers the more political flavour of part 2 is that Museveni had prided himself on not being like the old dictators, not hanging on forever…and yet, at the time Jagielski is writing, Museveni was trying to alter the constitution in order to allow him to run for president more than two times (as most constitutions require). That happened in November 2005, which dates the writing of these sections to that moment, rolling on to the subsequent elections of February 2006.

(In fact as I write, at the start of 2024, Museveni is still president of Uganda, having held the post since 1986, 38 years and counting.)

Museveni

Pen portraits of Museveni on pages 129 to 133, 139 to 140, 144 to 145, 170 to 177. Museveni surprised everyone by changing quickly, on taking power, from a firebrand socialist revolutionary guerrilla to a pragmatic head of state prepared to work with western banks and let capitalism thrive.

Museveni on slavery

Museveni discomfited other African rulers with a few home truths:

‘We like to complain about the whites, but have we ever wondered why only Africans let themselves be enslaved? Why didn’t we put up resistance? It was our own greed and quarrelsome nature that ruined us. That’s why we were defeated and conquered. We ourselves are to blame. It was our chiefs, waging fratricidal wars, who took people prisoner to sell them to slave traders from Europe. It was those black traitors who bear the blame for slavery.’ (quoted on page 171)

1. The kind of thing a white person could never say or think.

2. I think he’s wrong though, in two ways. Firstly, the reason Africa was so prey to depredation was because it was the most economically, socially and technologically backward of the continents (with the exception of Australia) due to the reasons laid out at length in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

But there’s a second thing going on here which is that Museveni, like most modern commentators, is thinking within the framework of black and white that has been firmly established over the past 100 years, which has created a false homogeneity among black people. I’m continually impressed, on a pretty much daily basis – reading the papers, listening to the radio, going to exhibitions – how black activists think there is some kind of inherent unity among black people, that all black people share the same interests and concerns. This seems to me wrong, wrong about any community or group of people.

What I’ve read in the books by Jeal or Hochschild or Segal give the impression that the Africans we’re talking about, in the 1700s and 1800s, didn’t have this simplistic modern binary between Black and White, nor share the modern idea that all black people share a common identity, common goals, need to be united etc. This all seems, as far as I can tell, to have sprung up among black people in the West, whether civil rights movements or black power or Nation of Islam or Black Lives Matters – all these groups define themselves by contrast with whites (and mostly derive from America).

My reading of the sources is that back in the 1700s and 1800s this kind of ‘black consciousness’ simply didn’t exist. Instead Africans identified themselves with tribes, maybe religions, with regions and languages, and regarded all Africans outside their tribal or religious group as others, others who could be quite legitimately enslaved or waged war on or whatever. They had no need to feel guilty as they were smiting the enemy and then selling them into slavery, thus boosting their own prowess, preserving their tribe, making their family wealthy, and that’s what mattered to them.

In a nutshell, Museveni is projecting back onto his ancestors a kind of black consciousness which is a twentieth century (and mostly American) creation and (like America) simply didn’t exist so no-one was aware of it and no-one acted on it, in the period he’s projecting it back onto.

African unity

3. Finally, yet again the strong impression given is that the whole concept of black unity in Africa is a joke. Here’s Michela Wrong describing the moribund Organisation of African Unity:

The summit of the Organisation of African Unity, that yearly get-together where insincere handshakes were exchanged, 29-year-old coup leaders got their first chance to play the international statesman, and the patriarchs of African politics politely glossed over the rigged elections, financial scandals and bloody atrocities perpetrated by their peers across the table.

(‘I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation’ by Michela Wrong, p.357)

Biafra. The Rwanda genocide. The wars in Congo. The civil war in South Sudan. Just the history of Uganda alone makes clear how difficult Africans find it to live in peace with other Africans. One and a half million Ugandans dead in 20 years of civil wars and insurgencies is proof of something.

Look at how the insurgency of the Lord’s Resistance Army got mixed up with ongoing enmity between all the regional nations: at various points the governments of both Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo gave the LRA aid and support, while Sudan backed Kony in retaliation for Uganda’s longstanding support of the secessionist movement in South Sudan.

Where is the ‘African unity’ in any of this? In fact Jagielski’s description of the poisonous backstabbing rivalry between African states is bleakly hilarious (pages 195 to 196).

The Ugandan opposition

Jagielski visits the HQ of the opposition party, the Forum for Democratic Change.

Portrait of Nasser Sebaggala, opponent of Museveni and mayor of Kampala from 2006 to 2011.

Portrait of Museveni’s slighted mistress Winnie Byanyima, who has blossomed into an international figure (pages 178 to 180). Winnie married Museveni’s one-time physician, Dr Kizza Besigye, and encouraged him to become a leading political opponent, to stand in the presidential election against Museveni (180 to 181).

As usual with the African elections I’ve read about, nobody talks about policies, instead the campaigns rotate solely around personality and character i.e. Museveni is the ‘great leader’ who has saved Uganda or Museveni has hung on too long and must go. Playground level.

Bounty hunters

A page on freelance bounty hunters around the world. The international community put a bounty of $1.5 million on Kony’s head, which attracted freelancers (p.193). In that case surely the question is, how come nobody tracked him down and killed him? Simply because he’s surrounded by trigger-happy bodyguards?

Bishop Joseph Kibwetere

Auma and Kony aren’t the only ones possessed by spirits. The story of Bishop Joseph Kibwetere who gathered a large following when he predicted the end of the world for 31 December 1999. He and his followers all burned to death in a church fire in March 2000. Or did he escape? Prophets and visionaries appear whenever there’s a natural disaster, droughts, floods, epidemics (p.209). (It doesn’t so much sound like, as actually is the European Middle Ages.) The ebola epidemic of the early 2000s which was, of course, seen as another attack of bad spirits and, like so many evil things, came from the Congo (pages 210 to 212).

Jagielski’s unhelpful way of describing disease

Jagielski writes about disease in a melodramatic, anthropomorphised way which undermines your trust in his descriptions of other things. Here he is describing the action of AIDS:

But the invisible virus was alive inside her, lying in wait, and when it launched its lightning attack, giving no chance for defence, it was too late to save her. (p.214)

This isn’t a very useful way of talking about or thinking about infectious diseases. Anthropomorphising disease like this is not far short of the local belief in spirits, except that Jagielski doesn’t have the excuse of no education. He’s dumbing down from dramatic effect.

In fact it has two deleterious effects. 1) Talk to any health professional and they’ll tell you we need to remove moralising and stigma from infectious disease. This kind of dumbed-down anthropomorphising encourages scientific illiteracy and folk attitudes. Most western nations are facing health crises, specifically over measles, caused by the decline in MMR vaccinations, triggered by rumour and false information. Many people thought the COVID vaccines were some kind of state-run conspiracy. For this reason discourse about illness should be kept scientific, factual and precise.

2) The second bad effect is that anthropomorphising illness like this, using this kind of emotionalising, unscientific way of describing disease, opens the door to moralising which quickly leads to judging victims, for example the way AIDS was initially stigmatised as a ‘gay plague’ or more recent slurs about monkeypox. Medieval worldview. Burn witches etc. People need to be encouraged to think about disease in the correct scientific, objective fashion.

A journalist’s complaint

Another thing I didn’t like was his self-centred hand-wringing about the moral challenges and compromises involved in being a journalist.

Messy, abandoned friendships, business started and interrupted, then forgotten, littered the routes of all my journeys. (p.216)

Well, I reflected, as I read the fifth or sixth such passage, if you don’t like it, get a job in an office. A lot of journalists seem to imagine that when I buy a book on a particular subject I’ll really appreciate lots of stuff thrown in about how hard their job is and how they have to continually make work-life compromises and let people down and oh it’s so difficult. Well, I don’t. Boring.

In a way the journalist’s profession has betrayal encoded into it. It demands gaining people’s trust and extracting confidences from them, purely in order to publicise and reveal them, all for a sense of a job well done, for satisfaction, applause and prizes. (p.216)

Like going to see your doctor with troubling symptoms and just wanting a diagnosis and treatment but instead having to listen to a long lecture about how badly paid doctors are and there’s never enough time to see patients and all their other gripes. No. Just diagnose and treat me. Same with journalists: don’t tell me all about your sensitive scruples and heroic regrets. Just tell me the bloody story.

Part 3 (back to Gulu)

To his own surprise, Jagielski didn’t hang around in Kampala to wait for the results of the election. He had unexpectedly bumped into Jackson and decides to return to Gulu. On the way Jackson tells him something extraordinary: most of the guests at the Acholi Inn Hotel where he’s staying are former guerrillas, people who have carried out the most appalling atrocities.

He describes the standard military corruption: all Ugandan soldiers are all corrupt. Their officers keep all their pay for themselves so the ordinary soldiers are forced to steal from the locals, hold them up at temporary roadblocks, even sell their arms and ammunition to the guerrillas.

Not only that, but many of the shops in Gulu sell goods stolen from country villages which the guerrillas  have looted and then send on here. And that the guerrillas, who kidnap other people’s children, send their own children to good public schools here in Gulu. This isn’t a dysfunctional society so much as dysfunctional people. When so many people dysfunction what hope is there for ‘normal’ society?

‘Where two elephants fight, the greatest victim is the grass.’ (Acholi proverb, p.229)

Rehabilitating child brides

Jagielski returns to the child treatment centre. It’s pretty obvious he fancies Nora and she’s quite happy to flirt with him. He admires her tight-fitting jeans. The other care worker, Christine, is careful to knock on Nora’s door, even when it’s open, so she doesn’t walk in on them kissing or worse. I found these scenes a bit icky (for example, page 249).

Lunch. Watching the children at crafts. The eldest girl is 16. All of them who were capable of it, were taken as child brides by guerrilla leaders and have borne children. On returning to the world they are shunned by their families. So the centre teaches them to sew, makes crafts, open market stalls. This is the route to financial independence and, once they’ve earned some money, to interesting some man into marrying them.

Refugees

Refugees are people who may not have lost their lives to war, but their existence has been robbed of its meaning. War has taken away all their faith, hope, dreams and energy. (p.234)

Former guerrilla leaders

Jagielski talks to the former LRA leaders now living quietly at the Acholi Inn:

Jagielski carries out an extended interview with Banya (pages 240 to 248), a characteristic figure in that he had been a senior figure in the formal Ugandan army but quit when Museveni came to power, disgusted that Museveni overthrew the interim rulers (who succeeded Amin) through violence, and also worried Museveni would start persecuting the Acholi (as he did). One day envoys from Kony arrived at his home and told him to come now or they would kill his entire family. So he went with them and was never allowed back.

Christine returning the lost boys

At the centre Nora works alongside Christine. They dislike and avoid each other. Nora thinks Christine obeises herself to a husband who’s moved to Kampala and is rumoured to have taken a second wife. Christine denies all this and thinks Nora is disreputable for not having married and settled down.

A long passage seeing things through Christine’s eyes, the arrival of the first liberated child soldiers at the centre, Christine’s opinion that they need love and support and, above all, to be told it’s not their fault. All of them were forced to kill or mutilate under threat of it happening to themselves.

The best medicine for these damaged children turned out to be routine: wake-up same time, breakfast, chores etc (p.259).

Jagielski accompanies Christine as she takes some of the last boys in the camp back to their various villages, observing their receptions (pages 259 to 269). Life in the dirt poor refugee camps, with absolutely no purpose, is hard for the reclaimed boy soldiers. Many of them run back into the bush, where there’s at least a purpose, and food. Or are so shunned by former neighbours and even their own family that they become embittered, violent. Some of them spontaneously kill.

Mato oput

Jagielski witnesses a ceremony of mato oput meaning reconciliation for a crime, and learns the complex traditional methods for a wrong-doer to admit their guilt, the compensation to be paid by his family, the road to acceptance and reconciliation (pages 266 to 269, 273 to 282).

A detailed description of Acholi beliefs about dead people’s spirits, specially how they persecute the living if they’re not happy (pages 269 to 273). Worth mentioning that a Catholic priest, Father Remigio, accompanied Christine and Jagielski on this trip, and was by his side explaining all aspects of the mato oput ceremony, their provenance and meaning.

The Acholi king

The Achioli king is named David Onen Acana II. His shabby court looks like a provincial post office. Some facts about the Acholi who migrated into north Uganda from Sudan where they were nomadic shepherds, hunters and fishermen.

When he arrives the king is discussing the future of Kony with one of his advisers, Chief Lugai. They’d been invited to meet Kony in the bush but when they got there he didn’t show up. The king and Chief Lugai say Museveni needs to pardon Kony and the International Tribunal at the Hague drop its charges. Only then will Kony come in, and he must be handled with traditional Aconi rites i.e. Mato oput (p.288).

The king then laments at length how the old tribal ways are being destroyed not only by the war, the enforced relocation of 2 million people, but criticism from Christian missionaries and Muslim imams and the new young generation in cities who turn to the West (pages 289 to 291). In other words, the inevitable process of ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’.

Father Cosmas

An interview with the Catholic priest Father Cosmas who is quite clear that Alice was possessed by satanic spirits but that Kony is Satan himself (p.294). Stories he has heard from children who have been rehabilitated and made their confessions to him.

Severino Lukoya

Jagielski says goodbye to Nora, with the uneasy feeling that he has wormed his way into her and Samuel’s affections merely to exploit them for his book then dump them. And that’s what she accuses him of.

The last thing he does in Gulu is go to visit Severino Lukoya. He was the father of Alice Auma who, after Alice’s forces were defeated, claimed that the spirits had entered him and that he was now the spokesman for Lakwena et al. In the event the forces he led were defeated by the Ugandan Army even more heavily than Alice’s, he fled to Kenya, and the mantle passed to Joseph Kony who lied that he was Alice’s cousin. So it’s a family romance, of sorts.

Anyway, Severino quietly returned to Gulu, built a church for his own denomination, and has been living quietly, left in peace by the authorities. Jagielski discovers he is now a very old, weak old man. Severino is assisted by Martin the chaplain who seats him on a chair and hands him one of the holy bottles. Then Jagielski witnesses the old man being possessed by Lakwena.

Severino speaks in Acholi, Martin translates, and it’s basically a recap of Severino’s career i.e. being chosen by God, trying to preach the word of God, going off to bush to live by himself, choosing water to purify and stones to act as weapons and incite his men to fight for the Last Judgement…

Then it’s over and the old man shrinks in his chair, exhausted.

Thoughts

1. This is a very, very good book which doesn’t so much explain as immerse you in the bloody, complex history of modern Uganda and especially the horrifying reality of the LRA’s campaigns and their terrible aftermaths for all concerned.

2. It’s a fount of information not only about the LRA and about Uganda’s troubled history, but many aspects of the folklore and traditional beliefs of the Acholi people, above all their profound belief in the role of spirits in all aspects of human life.

3. It also gathers together a range of valuable eye-witness accounts: from children directly involved, from some of Kony’s henchmen, from Nora and Christine, plus Jagielski’s witnessing of the mato oput ceremony, the knowledge of Father Remigio, the opinion of Father Cosmas, Jackson’s conveying of the voodoo mysticism of the Acholi people which no outsider can really understand.

4. It’s a real shame the book doesn’t have an index as I found myself wanting to reread certain passages or flip through the explanations of particular topics which are scattered in fragments through the text and so hard to re-find unless you’ve made a record or turned down the page. Part of my motivation in making such detailed notes and providing precise page references in this blog is to create such indexes, as best I can, for my own use and as, hopefully, a help to other readers.

5. Jagielski is in the same ballpark as Kapuściński but not in the same class. Kapuściński can be, by turns, genuinely philosophical, reaching deep into human nature, or lyrical, or quirky and drily humorous (as throughout his book about Haile Selassie). Jagielski attempts the same kinds of thing and they’re interesting enough, such as his fairly frequent personification of abstract entities:

The day fixed for the elections overslept and got up late, looking grey. For ages it couldn’t gain full consciousness and get itself going. (p.187)

This kind of thing is entertaining enough, but without the real depth or lyricism of his mentor.

6. Obviously most of the subject matter of The Night Wanderers is beyond appalling but, if you’ve read 20 or 30 books about contemporary Africa, as I have, you get used to Africans massacring each other, generally in the most brutal, sadistic ways possible.

What it makes me wonder is … you know how anti-colonial critics, post-colonial writers and anti-colonial historians often criticise the Europeans for, among countless other crimes, imposing their notion of the nation state onto cultures which were more flexible and fluid, based around tribes and traditional rulers … well, in descriptions of the collapse of whole regions of supposed ‘states’ (such as Rwanda or Congo or Uganda or Sudan) into violent anarchy, I wonder if it’s simply a matter of older traditional African culture reasserting itself, of societies rearranging themselves around their core attachment to tribes…and that the endless guerrilla wars are just the modern name given to the age old tradition of warlords gathering supporters and fighting the ruling king…

They’re called warlords and guerrillas these days but, from my reading of Gerald Segal’s book about Islamic slavery, I learned a lot about the continually shifting, rising and falling kingdoms and empires of west Africa, rising as new warrior chiefs achieved ascendancy, falling as other states seized land and towns under violent new leaders…

So isn’t the violent chaos in many African countries simply a continuation of the old traditions, but now with Kalashnikovs? That’s the strong impression you get from Jagielski’s extended description of the tangled web of insurgencies, civil wars, militias and guerrillas, which completely ignores state borders and sprawls across a huge area of north Africa taking in Somalia, Sudan north and south, Uganda, Congo, Darfur, Chad, Central African Republic, as far west as Niger, large parts of which are under no state control (pages 195 to 197).

And stepping right back – isn’t this patchwork quilt of petty kingdoms based around local chieftains in fact the way most humans have lived through most of history? Wasn’t this the same continually warring tribal world the Romans encountered everywhere they advanced, for example the complex tribal networks of Gaul and Britain endlessly at war with each other as described in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars? Or, hundreds of years later, the equally complex, warlord-based societies of Dark Age Britain and, indeed, right across post-Roman Europe? Isn’t it, in fact, the natural way most humans have lived in most of history – and the huge, secular, technocratic and democratic states we in the West take for granted, aren’t these the oddities and exceptions to the rule?

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

A word on the translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It reads very well indeed. The word order and use of subordinate clauses do not feel as if converted from another language, as often happens with translations from French or German. It reads like English and very well written English at that. There are a few odd turns of phrase, which I enjoyed:

  • When Museveni announced new presidential elections that he intended to win again and extend his reign, Dr Besigye cast him a challenge and stood for election too. (p.180)
  • Museveni had the victory in his grasp. (p.184)
  • Emmy cast him a look but didn’t say anything. (p.194)

The only blemish on her style is her very frequent use of the word ‘whom’ which regular readers of this blog will know I have developed an irrational dislike of. I dislike it’s prissy formality. Nobody says it in actual speech. It is becoming a literary fossil.

There he had met Nora, the first person to whom he had told everything he had seen and endured. (p.187)

‘What about those who don’t even know whom they have killed?’ (p.283)

Despite being British, Lloyd-Jones uses the word ‘pants’ for trousers (p.248) and ‘line’ for queue (p.172). Maybe the sub-editors at the New York publishers insisted. But these are microscopic quibbles. It’s a highly readable, fluid translation.

Credit

The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski was published in the Polish original in 2009. The 2012 English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones was published by Old Street Publishing (OSP). References are to the OSP paperback edition.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 31, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, Translation, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 31, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/31/the-night-wanderers-wojchiec-jagielski/

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett (1951)

I wonder why I speak of all this. Ah yes, to relieve the tedium. (Malone Dies p.179)

Malone Dies is the second in a trilogy of novels Beckett wrote after the war, which started with Molloy and ends with The Unnamable, all three quickly coming to be referred to as The Beckett Trilogy. That’s the title of the old Picador paperback edition I bought in the late 1970s and which I read it in.

Beckett wrote Malone Dies in French and it was first published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951. The English translation, published in 1956, was made by Beckett and introductions and online synopses emphasise that the English version is different from the French version in a number of details.

Introduction

I found Molloy very hard to read:

1. Because it is so verbally boring – Beckett’s style is for long stretches dead and deadening (I asked several friends to try reading some and all gave up after 1 or 2 pages)

2. Because the subject matter is so unrelentingly depressing. Not morbid, as such, it’s just the pointless meanderings of two senile old characters going mad or, more accurately, it’s a hyper-literary playing with the notion of characters going mad or breaking down. It would have a certain documentary interest if it really were the diary of someone going senile, but in fact it’s nothing like that. It is a highly crafted, highly artful, carefully concocted text, stuffed with all kinds of references – literary, philosophical, astrological – along with parodies and pastiches, and the development of stylistic devices to convey the ‘problematics’ of writing itself, the permanently collapsing nature of language, especially when used by a collapsing personality.

What’s depressing is that so much ingenuity has gone into devising texts which are wilfully nonsensical, nonsensical at epic length, and that I am wasting days I will never get back, reading and writing about them.

All went well at first, they all came to me, pleased that someone should want to play with them. If I said, Now I need a hunchback, immediately one came running, proud as punch of his fine hunch that was going to perform. It did not occur to him that I might have to ask him to undress. But it was not long before I found myself alone, in the dark. That is why I gave up trying to play and took to myself for ever shapelessness and speechlessness, incurious wondering, darkness, long stumbling with outstretched arms, hiding. Such is the earnestness from which, for nearly a century now, I have never been able to depart. From now on it will be different. I shall never do anything any more from now on but play.

Things always decline, decay and go downhill in Beckett, with mind-numbing predictability. Thus, whereas the characters in Molloy at least lived and moved about a bit (rode bicycles, hopped about on crutches) the first-person narrator of Malone Dies, the ‘impotent old man’ Malone, is considerably further decayed, is bed-bound and is, well, dying, the key fact stated right at the start:

I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month… I could die to-day, if I wished, merely by making a little effort. But it is just as well to let myself die, quietly, without rushing things.

But he doesn’t die. He spends a long time spinning stories, making up characters, interspersed with returns to the narrator in bed, bored, speculating about death, fussing about his belongings, visited towards the end by some mysterious visitors.

As to the prose, we are back in the land of ‘I don’t know’ and ‘perhaps’, the two lynchpins of Beckett’s prose style. The easiest way to parody Beckett would be to write a series of trivial rhetorical questions and just put ‘I don’t know’ after them:

  • There it is then divided into five, the time that remains. Into five what? I don’t know.
  • I do not see any fields or hills. And yet they are near. But are they near? I don’t know.
  • No, it is not a question of understanding. Of what then? I don’t know.
  • From now on I shall write on both sides of the page. Where does it come from? I don’t know.
  • That’s the style, as if I still had time to kill. And so I have, deep down I know it well. Then why play at being in a hurry? I don’t know.
  • But what if her purpose, in sorting the lentils, were not to rid them of all that was not lentil, but only of the greater part, what then? I don’t know.
  • But l tell myself so many things, what truth is there in all this babble? I don’t know.

Dementia, senility, atrophy, aphasia, I don’t know, perhaps, all that fall, decline, will it ever end, I’ll go on no i can’t go on i will go on, and on and on and on blah blah blah. Here are some of the hundreds of instances of ‘perhaps’:

  • But perhaps I shall not succeed any better than hitherto. Perhaps as hitherto I shall find myself abandoned, in the dark…
  • Perhaps I shall put the man and the woman in the same story, there is so little difference between a man and a woman, between mine I mean. Perhaps I shall not have time to finish. On the other hand perhaps I shall finish too soon…
  • But perhaps I was stunned with a blow, on the head, in a forest perhaps, yes now that I speak of a forest I vaguely remember a forest…
  • Perhaps she is dead, having pre-deceased – me, perhaps now it is another’s hand that lays and clears my little table. I don’t know how long I have been here, I must have said so. All I know is that I was very old already before I
    found myself here. I call myself an octogenarian, but I cannot prove it. Perhaps I am only a quinquagenarian, or a quadragenarian.
  • Perhaps they think I am dead. Or perhaps they are dead themselves. I say they, though perhaps I should not.

Perhaps he should. Perhaps he shouldn’t. What do you think? I don’t l know.

(Interestingly, Beckett indicates that he is perfectly well aware of his penchant for adding ‘perhaps’ to every other sentence – he has the narrator of The Unnamable say: ‘No more perhapses either, that old trick is worn to a thread’ (p.286) — although he promptly continues to use ‘perhaps’. It really is a lynchpin of his prose style.)

Plot summary

  • while he’s dying Malone decides he will tell himself stories; after some discussion, this settles down into five elements: the present state, three stories and an inventory (p.167)
  • he’s in a room, not he thinks an asylum or a hospital but an institution, for he hears the voices of others and is provided with food – he thinks he got there in an ambulance, which instantly aligns him with Molloy who also doesn’t know how he got there, probably in an ambulance (p.168)
  • he lies in a bed, next to a window, he can see buildings, at night he can see the stars (p.169)
  • every day a hand half opens the door and places food on a table which he then pulls over to the bed using a stick with a hook, the table being on castors, a woman used to do it, come in and fuss around, but now he only sees a withered hand [everything declines and falls] (p.170)
  • he was old when he got there, maybe in his eighties, though he doesn’t know maybe he’s only in his 50s or 60s, who knows (p.171)
  • suddenly we are launched into a story about a man named Saposcat and his son, nicknamed Sapo, the son is good at maths and listens to his parents (his father is a salesman in a shop) discussing ways to earn more money, they want Sapo to become a doctor or surgeon and support them (p.172-3)
  • Malone interrupts his story to comment on his inability to tell this story or any other story (p.174) in fact he keeps interrupting  his own narrative to say ‘this is awful’ – presumably his telling of it, and to explain that bits he gets wrong, facts he’s not sure about, are like fragments of darkness which threaten to swell up and overwhelm him
  • Malone tells us the light has gone out in the building across the way, he imagines a man going for walks with a dog till the dog gets too weak and ill to go, at which point the man realises it’s time to have him put down [everything declines and falls] (p.176)
  • all the time commenting on his own inability to tell the story, Malone carries on painting a portrait of young Sapo as a dreamy, sensitive boy who fails his exams and is hurt overhearing his parents making their plans for him. Long, long passages are gibberish:

Here truly is the air I needed, a lively tenuous air, far from the nourishing murk that is killing me. I shall never go back into this carcass except to find out its time. I want to be there a little before the plunge, close for the last time the old hatch on top of me, say goodbye to the holds where I have lived, go down with my refuge. I was always sentimental. But between now and then I have time to frolic, ashore, in the brave company I have always longed for, always searched for, and which would never have me. Yes, now my mind is easy, I know the game is won, I lost them all till now, but it’s the last that counts. A very fine achievement I must say, or rather would, if I did not fear to contradict myself. Fear to contradict myself! If this continues it is myself I shall lose and the thousand ways that lead there. And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty. (p.178)

  • he has a delirious vision of himself playing with what he insists on calling his playthings, turning, dizzy, falling
  • he tries to struggle on and convey some of Sapo’s ideas, but fails, keeps relapsing into the present and fussing about his current plight, for example the way not all his belongings are in the room as he at first thought, for example the missing boot and a zinc ring (p.181)
  • just like the lush description of Moran getting into bed, Malone describes the weight of his body on the bed, the sheets, the dirty windowpane (p.182)
  • abruptly we are introduce to the Lambert family and the father, Big Lambert, who is a butcher, who loves butchering pigs, who comes back after a hard day at the slaughterhouse to regale his family with descriptions of the slaughter (p.184)
  • and suddenly we discover that young Sapo visits the farm, tells his parents he’s off to the countryside to study, but in fact hides his books and steals off to sit in the Lamberts’ farmhouse kitchen and watch the womenfolk work – the repetition of the silence and the darkness and the dust and the fresh goats milk on the table reminds me of D.H. Lawrence – maybe it’s meant to be a parody of D.H. Lawrence (p.186)
  • sometimes a grey hen comes scumbling into the kitchen – this reminds me of Moran’s concern for his grey hen (p.187)
  • after these encounters Sapo would sneak off leaving a shy present for the Lambert family on their farmhouse table
  • a stream of consciousness description of how he writes, little finger poised to indicate the edge of the page, he didn’t want to write but here he is writing etc (p.190)
  • he becomes aware that it’s a week since he wrote the first words of the book, it’s an exercise book, the pages ruled into square, mathematical symbols at the front, his pencil has five sides and is sharpened at both ends, it has fallen off and rolled under his bed, it takes him a long time to find it and then spear it with the stick with a hook on the end although, phew, it is not too damaged (p.192)
  • Mr and Mrs Saposcat give their son a brand new fountain pen as a good luck present for his exams (p.193)
  • Sapo goes to visit the Lamberts and discovers father and son, Louis and Edward, burying a dead mule and we are given the full story of how Big Lambert bargained it off a farmer at the very gates of the Knackers Yard (p.194)
  • Malone tells us that rabbits sometimes die of fright before you break their necks, whereas chickens have no imagination and carrying on scurrying around even after their head’s been cut off (p.197)
  • after the big family meal, Edward (the son) goes up to his room to masturbate in peace, reminding us of that other masturbator, Moran – incest is in the air since both father and son have considered sleeping with the sister/daughter, Lizzie (p.198)
  • Malone is bored of talking about the bloody Lamberts. What’s the point? He had planned to tell another story about a stone, shall he skip forward to that?

What tedium. If I went on to the stone? No, it would be the same thing. The Lamberts, the Lamberts, does it matter about the Lamberts? No, not particularly…I shall try and go on all the same, a little longer, my thoughts elsewhere, I can’t stay here. I shall hear myself talking, afar off, from my far mind, talking of the Lamberts, talking of myself, my mind wandering, far from here, among its ruins.

  • Cut to memories of talking to a Jew named Jackson who kept a parrot (which reminds me of the parrot in Molloy and of the parrot in Mercier and Camier – I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t written a paper about parrots in Beckett) (p.200)
  • reverting to thoughts about whereabouts in the building he is and on which floor, it crosses Malone’s mind that he might be dead already and not noticed the difference (p.201)
  • he considers the quality of light in his room, and the darkness, and this disintegrates into a Nausea-style hyper-awareness of his own body of his perceptions processed within his skull
  • he lost his pencil for two days – he is only called Malone now i.e. might have been called something else once (p.204) in fact refers to ‘the other’ (p.206)
  • a hallucinatory passage where he remembers becoming soft and liquid as mud or hard and contracted as thread – then fantasises that he not yet born, that he will be born into a charnel house, at other times it seems he has had a long life, wandered in town and country and spent time on a beach, washed by surf (echoing the experiences of Molloy) (p.207)

But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.

  • then there seems to be a sequence where the narrator slips down into the body of someone else, of ‘he’, sitting on a bench by the river wearing a greatcoat buttoned up to his throat – he’s going to call him Sapo but that’s no long appropriate so renames him ‘Macmann’, not much better, but we’re in a hurry (p.210)
  • Macmann sits with his back to the river watching the tide of humanity in the city, many of them hastening to rendezvous with lovers, and a page long description of the horse of cabs, sad amid the frames, then trotting briskly to their destinations (p.212)
  • turns into a delirious fantasia about age, about the days passing compared to the liquidation of old age, to having to pull yourself along the ground to allotments where grow brambles, rather acid, and frightening off birds and small mammals – the prose becomes visionary:

All strains towards the nearest deeps, and notably my feet, which even in the ordinary way are so much further from me than all the rest, from my head I mean, for that is where I am fled, my feet are leagues away. And to call them in, to be cleaned for example, would I think take me over a month, exclusive of the time required to locate them. Strange, I don’t feel my feet any more, my feet feel nothing any more, and a mercy it is. And yet I feel they are beyond the range of the most powerful telescope. Is that what is known as having a foot in the grave? And similarly for the rest. For a mere local phenomenon is something I would not have noticed, having been nothing but a series or rather a succession of local phenomena all my life, without any result. But my fingers too write in other latitudes and the air that breathes through my pages and turns them without my knowing, when I doze off, so that the subject falls far from the verb and the object lands somewhere in the void, is not the air of this second-last abode, and a mercy it is.

  • they banged his head on the doorframe taking him out on a stretcher, where was he, oh yes passing the 3 or 4 days til he hope he dies, he remembers murdering four, no five men, notably the butler (p.217)
  • he hallucinates light and shade outside the window are those really stars or are they painted not they’re twinkling lights come on he can see people silhouetted
  • back to Macmann, it starts to rain so he lies on the ground to keep his front dry, then clutches at tufts of grass to move, just as Molloy and Moran did (p.219)
  • suddenly he is in a plain far from town or woods, in ‘a wild and practically illimitable part of the country’, exposed to the elements, but thanking his stars his semen never harmed anyone i.e. he’s never had progeny (p.221)
  • a detailed description of the postures Macmann adopts in the rain on the earth, where the mud mixes with his long hair while the author reflects on his strong constitution (p.225)
  • and thrusting himself about in a restless frenzy he takes to rolling, like a cylinder, an indefinite distance (p.226)
  • back in the present, in bed, Malone reviews his possessions, starting with his two pencils and his exercise book and going on to fondly remember the bowl of a pipe he picked up somewhere and the other worn-smooth objects he’s always like holding in his hand as he falls asleep
  • he weighs various systems of defining what are, and are not, his possessions, and whether he possesses them
  • an old photograph of a donkey on a beach wearing a hat, leads into thoughts about decomposition and the fact his poo pot and his urine pot are filling up and no-one’s changed them (p.231)
  • he has lost his stick! overnight! now he is bereft – does he have any possessions left? (p.233)
  • while he considers whether ‘they’ are trying to poison him among other conundrums, he resumes the story of Macmann, namely he wakes up to find himself in an asylum, the House of St John, and is instructed in its regulations (p.235) reminding us of the asylums where both Murphy and Watt end up
  • he is put in the charge of Moll, an old crazy lady who feeds him, washes him, tells him what is and isn’t allowed (p.236)
  • though both old and impotent, Macmann and Moll have a go at sex, he folding up his penis into a package and trying to insert into her dry vagina like stuffing in a sock (p.238)
  • an example of one of Moll’s comically bizarre love letters to Macmann; it genuinely is funny (p.239)
  • Moll wears earring with a small crucifix of Jesus Christ, then shows Macmann more or less the only tooth on her crone’s mouth is an enormous canine craved with the image of Christ on the cross (p.243)
  • they have a passionate physical affair of two old crones, until Moll falls away, starts rubbing her tummy, her hair falls out, and one day a man – Lemuel – comes to tell Macmann Moll is dead (p.244) this man Lemuel often has fits where he dances, screams and hits himself on the head with a hammer
  • cut to Malone having a memory, he is with his mother at a racecourse watching one of the first airplanes loop the loop
  • suddenly someone is there by his bedside, and hits him on the head (p.247)
  • the man in black attends Malone all the time, he has an umbrella which he leans his weight on, he uses it to poke through Malone’s belongings scattered all over the floor, lift up his bedclothes, the man has muddy boots – I begin to wonder if it is Jacques Moran (p.248)
  • when the man in black leaves, softly closing the door and walking away down the corridor whistling, Malone speculates if a whole series of visitors will come over the following days, and fantasises about ‘a little girl’, who he can teach to strip for him, fondle him, fetch him soup, empty his slop buckets and finally close his eyes, put a bung up his arse when he dies, and follow the hearse to the cemetery: ‘Easy, Malone, take it easy you old whore’ (p.251)
  • Malone finds it harder to breathe or hear anything – he cuts away to the Macmann narrative: since Moll’s death Macmann has been leaving the asylum grounds; sometimes he brings back brambles or an entire hyacinth he had pulled up by the root and then Lemuel hands it to Pat who whips Macmann with it (p.53)
  • a poetic description of the location and grounds of the St John asylum behind its walls topped with broken glass, the big lodges by the gates full of deserving families and their swarming brats (p.255)
  • Macmann carried round a photograph Moll gave him of herself as a 14-year-old girl – one day a group outing is announced led by a Lady Pedal – Lemuel goes to the kitchen and orders six portions of excursion soup which is like normal soup but with chunks of bacon in it – then he visits six cells, each with a florid lunatic in it (p.258)
  • Malone feels the end coming but goes back to the Macmann story – Lemuel assembles the five inmates on the terrace ready for Lady Pedal’s outing – they clamber into a wagonette which sets off down the hill and through the lodge gates at a dangerous pace, being overloaded (p.261)
  • the asylum patients, Lemuel, Lady Pedal and two ‘colossi’ dressed in sailor suits and named Ernest and Maurice alight from the wagonette at a quay and take a ferry to an island for a picnic
  • this ends horribly when Lemuel briskly murders the two sailors who brought them there with his hatchet, Lady Pedal on returning faints and breaks her hip, the narrative collapses on the last page, sentences starting in mid word, paragraphs breaking, Lemuel gets Macmann and the other prisoners into the ferry and they set off somewhere, he raises his hatchet but not to kill nobody, nevermore, no, not no-one

And the narrative breaks off like that into a last few lines of prose poetry or maybe fragments.

Maybe this abrupt ending is meant to represent Malone finally bloody dying, although it would be funnier if, à la Tristram Shandy, the last page had had a jagged ink line running down and off the page as of someone dying and their pen sliding across the page.

Arcana

The prose itself is rarely difficult to understand. It’s just the sentences the words are organised into are so often stupefyingly dull. It kept me going through the arid wasteland of his dessicated prose to look for out-of-the-way and rarefied vocabulary, but there are notably few juicy words. Beckett has come a long way since the show-off, arcana-packed diction of the 1930s novel, Murphy.

  • Perhaps I shall not have time to finish. On the other hand perhaps I shall finish too soon. There I am back at my old aporetics.
  • I shall not finish this inventory either, a little bird tells me so, the paraclete perhaps, psittaceously named.
  • Then with clasped hands and tears in my eyes I would have begged it of him as a favour. This humiliation has been denied to me thanks to my aphony.

Rudery

A surprising but regular component of Beckett’s style is his frequent descent into blunt anglo-saxon vulgarity.

  • Lambert was feared and in a position to do as he pleased. And even his young wife had abandoned all hope of bringing him to heel, by means of her cunt, that trump card of young wives. For she knew what he would do to her if she did not open it to him. (p.184)
  • For my arse for example, which can hardly be accused of being the end of anything, if my arse suddenly started to shit at the present moment, which God forbid, I firmly believe the lumps would fall out in Australia.
  • They think they can confuse me and make me lose sight of my programmes. Proper cunts whoever they are. (p.246)
  • Those are men and women, you know, people, without being able to specify further. A stream at long intervals bestrid — but to hell with all this fucking scenery. (p.354)
  • All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. (p.260)

Some critics speak high-mindedly about Beckett’s quest to probe the limits of the text or writing. They tend to gloss over the consistent, chest-poking use of cunt and fuck.

Poetic prose

But the point of the novels isn’t their characters, it isn’t even the characters’ quests or journeys or intentions which can be made into metaphors of ‘man’s struggle to find meaning in a meaningless universe’. It’s Beckett’s way with prose.

Weary with my weariness, white last moon, sole regret, not even. To be dead, before her, on her, with her, and turn, dead on dead, about poor mankind, and never have to die any more, from among the living. Not even, not even that. My moon was here below, far below, the little I was able to desire. And one day, soon, soon, one earthlit night, beneath the earth, a dying being will say, like me, in the earthlight, Not even, not even that, and die, without having been able to find a regret.

And he has lots of ways, uses lots of techniques, creates new ways of combining words and sentences, overlays meanings. Thus all the mini-narratives in Malone Dies – about Sapo and Macmann and Moll and Lemuel – exist in counterpoint with the passages where we revert to Malone’s first-person narrative, or the stream of his obsessions.

But absolutely all discussion of Beckett’s work makes it sound too sane and approachable, whereas the whole point is its rebarbatively unapproachable attitude.

And I must say that to me at least and for as long as I can remember the sensation is familiar of a blind and tired hand delving feebly in my particles and letting them trickle between its fingers. And sometimes, when all is quiet, I feel it plunged in me up to the elbow, but gentle, and as though sleeping. But soon it stirs, wakes, fondles, clutches,
ransacks, ravages, avenging its failure to scatter me with one sweep. (p.206)

All the way from this kind of weird poetry to ‘Proper cunts whoever they are.’ It feels like the multiple layers or registers of the book could be taken to pieces like blocks of coloured Lego and you could identify different strands and building blocks. Once you start, I bet you’d find hundreds.

Pontificating

To pontificate is to ‘express one’s opinions in a pompous and dogmatic way’.

Wikipedia tells me this text contains the famous line, ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’. Is that line famous? Is it worth remembering? Does it mean anything? To quote Beckett – I don’t know. Perhaps.

But once it was pointed out, I realised a key component of Beckett’s style is a taste for delivering resonant and grand-sounding generalisations, not about life and a variety of subjects, that would be too interesting: about Beckett’s one subject – the decay and collapse of the mind and the inability of the mind, the narrator or language to convey it, the thing, the collapse of language, of writing… but the determination to keep on writing…

  • The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.

It is a style designed to create acolytes and followers, and these are indeed what Beckett created, from his breakthrough in the 1950s, through the 60s, 70s and 80s, in larger and larger numbers.

Humour

Some passages, taken in isolation, as standalone passages, and read aloud, have power and coherence and are bizarrely funny, a prize example being the love affair of Macmann and Moll. This points forward to the plays where the simple fact of dialogue breaks up the novels’ walls of prose into much more quotable snippets.

But taken as huge, 100-page walls of solid prose, the novels are very difficult to read or process. Selections, snippets, little passages or episodes – it makes sense that this was how they were broken up in the earliest BBC radio or TV adaptations, into something more like speeches. Vastly more accessible.

Thus a reading of selected passages from Malone Dies was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 18 June 1958. Beckett selected the passages, which were read by the actor Patrick Magee, and incidental music was composed by Samuel’s cousin John S. Beckett.

Trouble is, you can’t read the entire book like that. Or maybe you need to read the entire thing, marking up shorter passages, and then go back to review and reread just those. To consider these long texts as sort of anthologies of shorter, self-contained passages, more than novels. Perhaps. I don’t know.

Self referentiality and creating a fictional universe

In all three novels the narrators refer, at some point, to protagonists of other Beckett texts:

  • Oh the stories I could tell you if I were easy. What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds. Murphy, Watt, Yerk, Mercier and all the others.
  • But let us leave these morbid matters and get on with that of my demise, in two or three days if I remember rightly. Then it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave.
  • They fell and I saw them no more. I naturally thought of the pseudocouple Mercier-Camier.
  • I am neither, I needn’t say, Murphy, nor Watt, nor Mercier, nor — no, I can’t even bring myself to name them, nor any of the others whose very names I forget,
  • they taught him thinking, it’s always he who speaks, Mercier never spoke, Moran never spoke, I never spoke
  • All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing,
  • Am I clothed? I have often asked
    myself this question, then suddenly started talking about Malone’s
    hat, or Molloy’s greatcoat, or Murphy’s suit.

Presumably references in each novel of the trilogy to protagonists from the other novels helps ‘bind’ them together and also brings out the theme of shifting and very unstable identities.

But there is also a mythologising aspect to it, which reminds me of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes? Yes, quite early in the Holmes stories, Dr Watson starts referring to numerous other cases, giving them florid titles, promising to tell us more about them sometime, before he settles on the one he’s going to describe this time. It creates a sense of spaciousness, it makes it feel like the Holmes texts aren’t just a handful of stories, but ramify out in all directions to create the sense of an entire imaginative universe.

Same here.

The Spanish Civil War

In 1937 Nancy Cunard sent out a questionnaire to famous artists and writers asking them to state their position on the Spanish Civil War. 148 writers sent in their replies which were published in a pamphlet which was sold to raise funds for refugees. Beckett sent back the shortest contribution – ¡UPTHEREPUBLIC! – which continues to divide critics, undecided whether to interpret it as passionate or ironic.

Half way through Malone Dies Malone writes:

Yes, that’s what I like about me, at least one of the things, that I can say Up the Republic! for example, or Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder if I should not rather have cut my tongue out, or said
something else. (p.216)

So the book contains sneaky references to Beckett’s life as well as works. I wonder how many. I bet hundreds of scholars have spotted thousands of such references.

‘What tedium’

The bottom line is that Malone isn’t dying or anything as grandiose. In my experience, people who know they are going to die are shit scared, whereas Malone is just bored. His phrase ‘what tedium’ clangs throughout the text like that of a bored aristocrat. He confesses to being ‘bored to howls’ (p.206). The text is a way for him to impose his insufferable boredom on the reader. It is an extraordinarily complex labyrinth of language and lexical and literary experimentation. But God, reading it was like having my teeth pulled out. In small selected chunks, yes, a page or so can be attractive, particularly if read aloud. But the full-on hundred pages are a challenge.

But still.. once you’ve made it through… scattered, isolated passages stay in the mind, and many passages repay rereading to relive the peculiar, mind-bending place the book takes you to.

M

Commentators have pointed out that Beckett was attached to the letter M. His protagonists include Murphy, Mercier, Molloy and Malone and one commentator pointed out that Watt’s name begins with an M upside down. In the same jokey, tricksy spirit, Malone can be simply read a ‘M alone’.

Credit

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1951. The English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1956. Page references are to the 1979 Picador paperback edition of The Beckett Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.

Related links

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 13, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Irish literature, Literature, Novel
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 13, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/13/malone-dies-samuel-beckett/