“They say officials love to serve the people, so why do they treat the common folk as enemies? Heavy taxes and under-the-table levies, like ravenous beasts, force the farmers to head for the hills. The common folk have a bellyful of grievances, but they dare not let them out. For the moment they open their mouths, electric prods close them fast.”
The brilliant and controversial Chinese novelist Mo Yan’s
1988 novel The Garlic Ballads (translated to English by Howard Goldblatt in
1995) details inhumanity and injustices that offers a disconcerting reading
experience. Having previously read a novel and short stories of Mo Yan (Red
Sorghum & Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh) and forewarned of the
brutal violence in The Garlic Ballads, I was somewhat prepared for it. Yet the
novel deeply agitated me with its relentlessly grim portrait of patriarchy and
bureaucracy. Set in 1987 rural China, the novel chronicles the ruined lives of
‘Paradise County’ peasants, who are ordered by the government to plant only
garlic in their fields. When garlic glut
renders the commodity worthless the officials who gave the order now refuse to
even buy their produce, while the angry peasants revolt and ransack the local
government office. The establishment reacts in the only way it knows when the
masses question its power: through state-sanctioned violence.
The Garlic Ballads may sound like a diatribe against the
corrupt and vicious communists of Deng Xiaoping era (1978-1989). In fact, the
book was banned in the wake of Tienanmen Square protests. But Mo Yan, the
masterful raconteur and storyteller delivers more than a polemic as he
effortlessly conveys the concerns and ubiquitous struggles in farmers’ lives. The
powerlessness and frustration of the peasants is narrated through three
characters: Gao Ma, a garlic farmer and war veteran whose love affair with his
neighbor girl Jinju leads to bitter conflict with the girl’s family; Gao Yang,
also a poor garlic farmer who has faced humiliation throughout his life for
having landlord parents; and Fourth Aunt, Jinju’s ill-treated mother. All three are
arrested by uncaring officials for their alleged participation on the revolt and
trashing of the government co-op.
While Mo Yan symbolizes the atmosphere of fury and depravity
by evoking the imagery of garlic rotting in the fields, he also meticulously
details the trickle of bodily fluids. There are vivid descriptions of these
people bleeding, urinating, sweating, etc (“something warm and wet [which]
slithered into his nasal cavities then continues down his face. He tried, but
couldn't hold it back; whatever it was spurted out of his nostrils and entered
his mouth.”) Such intimate (and discomfiting) observations of the bodily
functions somehow illustrate the people’s distressed psychological state. Moreover, when
the three alleged rioters are picked up by the police (several days after the
revolt), Mo Yan cleverly uses disjointed flashbacks to gain our empathy for the
characters. And most often, the author counterbalances his visceral depictions
of pain and torture with lyrical evocation of natural landscapes (“Stars shone brightly in the deep, dark, downy-soft canopy of
heaven, beneath which cornstalks, straining to grow tall, stretched and rustled.”)
The Garlic Ballads not only lays bare the inhumanity rampant
in the ruling quarters, it also closely focuses on the brutality, carried out
in the name of preserving tradition & culture. The marriage arranged for
Jinju is pretty much a business negotiation, and when Gao Ma decides to thwart
Jinju’s family’s plans the violence he is subjected to us is as dreadful as the
state-sanctioned violence. On one hand, the corrupt officials use the shell of
socialism to propagate fascist policies; on other hand, Mo Yan indicts deplorable
cultural practices and rigid moral codes, pushing the agrarian community to be
in conflict with one another. The writer depicts how this debasement enveloping
the Chinese society (within family and state) sternly restricts individual
freedom. The title refers to ballads sung by a blind minstrel named Zhang
Kou, whose songs is considered to be driving force
behind the farmers' rebellion. Each chapter of the novel opens with Zhang’s ballads
who eventually gets arrested by a policeman, cursing “You blind bastard, you’re
the prime suspect in the Paradise County garlic case!” The minstrel's mouth is
gagged although it takes much more than to wholly silence him.
P.S.: when Mo Yan received Nobel Prize in
2012, Peter Englund, the Nobel permanent secretary selected The Garlic Ballads
as ‘Mo Yan’s gateway book’ (first of the author’s novel to be translated into
English).
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