Say Nothing – An Immersive Account of Lives Caught in the Web of Violence and Political Skulduggery

“When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as ‘whataboutery’ took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about.”

Investigative writer and staff writer at the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe’s narrative non-fiction, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (published February 2019) chronicles the complex and messy history of the bloody warfare in Northern Ireland with a great deal of clarity. Troubles is the descriptor of the brutal sectarian violence that haunted Northern Ireland in the late 20^th century. More than 3,500 people were killed during the Troubles and at least half of them were civilians. The Irish republicans/nationalists, predominantly Catholics (minorities), fought for a United Ireland (for the Northern Ireland to leave UK) whereas the Protestant loyalists were determined to keep Northern Ireland under British rule. The British government brought in the troops to serve as peacekeepers  although they ended up running their own campaign of terror by infiltrating IRA (the republican paramilitary organization that sough to end British rule in Ireland) and adopting other ruthless ways to curb the rebellion.

Patrick Radden Keefe looks at this most discussed conflict in modern history through the unresolved case of one victim. On one cold December night in 1972, 38-year-old Belfast resident, Jean McConville, a recently widowed mother of ten children living in the sprawling public housing complex, Divis Flats (described as the ‘slum in the sky’) was abducted by a gang of masked intruders. The neighbors in this overcrowded projects not only watched Jean's abduction with a air of indifference, but as one of her son says some of their neighbors were among the gang. Before leaving the house and getting into a van, Jean McConville put on her coat and said to one of her older kids, “Watch the children until I come back.” The missing mother’s bones were found on a beach in 2003. The human interest story of what happened to Jean McConville serves as  a entry point to this mesmerizing as well as devastating historical account of Troubles.

Patrick acknowledges that the key information related to McConville’s disapperance and murder emerged due to Boston College’s The Belfast Project, a controversial and aborted project which endeavored to curate an oral history of the Troubles, supposed to be accessed by students of future generations. For the covert project, the members of Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries were extensively interviewed with a promise that the tapes would not be released until after all the participant’s death. But when the existence of such a project was leaked, British government engaged in a lengthy legal dispute, demanding the Boston College to turn over the tapes since it might provide answers to unsolved crimes. But of course the Police Service of Northern Ireland and UK government’s generous commitment to see that the justice is served reeked of double standards and political intrigue.

The impact of Jean’s disapperance on the McConville children is explored alongside the complex lives of IRA members Dolours Price, Marian Price (the Price Sisters), Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams (people allegedly responsible for Jean’s murder), who were the chief architects of IRA’s violent resistance in the 1970s. Gerry Adams eventually transformed himself into a politician and became the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of IRA. After the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which ended the bloodshed (alongside the republican dreams of United Ireland), Adams was hailed in some quarters as the ‘Irish Nelon Mandela’. But he is also a most hated figure in some other quarters, christened as a traitor who betrayed the true republican cause. Adams is the most divisive and compelling personality in the history of Ireland, and Patrick offers a three-dimensional portrait of the well-known public figure, dispensing with the black-and-white narrative and retaining the many shades in between. It’s not just Adams, but Patrick’s portrayal of the Price Sisters, Brendan Hughes, IRA are neither positive nor negative.

Say Nothing is as multifaceted as a historical account can be. We may not condone the philosophical discourse offered by Dolours Price in choosing a particular form of violent resistance against the British imperialism (by planting four car-bombs near London’s government buildings which injured 250 people but, fortunately, caused no deaths).  But when you read the passages where the British government decides to force-feed her to break her hunger strike inside the prison (demanding to be moved to a Northern Ireland prison) you can’t stop yourself from getting enraged by such civil rights violations (despite the force-feeding, the strike lasted for 203 days and Dolours was eventually moved to Northern Ireland prison). Patrick transports us to the foul-smelling corridors of Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh prison (in 1981), chronicling how the moral dilemma of Brendan Hughes partly led to the wider campaign of hunger strike, spearheaded by Bobby Sands. Later, Dolours Price also reminisces on the martyrdom of Bobby Sands (after 66 days of hunger strike) and wonders if she has indirectly caused his death. The author presents each of these well-documented historical events from a unique perspective which befittingly complicates the moral dimensions. Say Nothing may offer some sort of emotional catharsis for the McConville family but post-confict reconciliation still remains a distant dream.

Patrick Keefe unremittingly captures all the complexities surrounding a historical account of armed insurrection, martyrdom, state-sanctioned terrorism, and societal repression. The lingering bitterness and agony in the aftermath of armed struggle, the fine art of political backstabbing, the atmosphere of silence and denial aren’t just relevant in the context of Troubles, but could be detected in any ethnic, sectarian conflicts happened/happening across the globe [Patrick rightly quotes Claude Levi-Strauss: “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic.”] Hence I recommend this narrative fraught with violence, betrayals and loss to anyone interested in history and politics.  

The Sound of Things Falling – A Reflective Novel on Remembering and Memory

“And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.”

Like the Chilean novelist and short story writer Roberto Bolano – often regarded as the most influential Latin American author of his generation – Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez contemplates the troublesome history of his nation’s past, its culture of violence, and the political dysfunction through delicate, dream-like tableau. Mr. Vasquez’ third novel, The Sound of Things Falling (published 2011 and translated to English by Anne McLean) is falsely described as a tale exploring the Colombian drug trade. Although the readers can easily equate the word ‘Colombia’ with drug war (the popular history of Medellin Cartel and its notorious leader Pablo Escobar has had profound effect on people around the world) The Sound of Things Falling is primarily concerned with the trauma of living in a disorderly society where the past is a black-hole and memories are faulty. Vasquez strongly evokes the sense of a particular place and its history while universalizing certain aspects of his deeply introspective characters’ emotions.

In The Sound of Things Falling, Vasquez as usual offers dual narratives; one detailing the existential anxieties of the narrator, whereas the other intricate tale of an elusive past begins to gradually invade the emotional landscape of his narrator/protagonist. The novel opens with the news item of a shooting, not between drug cartel and paramilitary, but the shooting of a hippopotamus which has escaped from the broken-down private zoo of cocaine baron Pablo Escobar. The dead hippo and its connection to Escobar unveil the interior life of the story’s narrator, Antonio Yammara, a law professor in Bogota approaching 40 years of age.  Antonio remembers the time he visited (when he was 12-years-old) Escobar’s zoo against the order of his parents. But Antonio is not haunted by his childhood. He tells us that his life was changed in the mid- 1990s when he befriended a lonely, middle-aged man named Ricardo Laverde.

Antonio comes across the short and timid Laverde in the billiards club in central Bogota, since both of the lonely men are regulars there. Drug-related kidnappings and killings were the order of the day in the 1990s as Vasquez writes, “The violence that’s been ravaging Colombia is not just savagery of cheap stabbings and stray bullets, the settling of accounts between low-grade dealers, but rather violence committed by actors whose names are written with capital letters: the State, the Cartel, the Army, the Front.” By the time Antonio and Laverde get acquainted with each other, the worst of the nation’s violence (bombing commercial airlines, assassinating presidential candidate on live TV) has already become a memory.

Antonio Yammara, the handsome and smart professor belonging to Colombian intelligentsia, occasionally has an affair with his students. Nevertheless, he later starts to live with his ex-student Aura who becomes pregnant with his baby daughter, Leticia. Antonio is mildly fascinated by his billiards club friend whom he learns had made his living as a pilot. One day, Antonio sees Ricardo Laverde listening to a mysterious, unmarked cassette. Few minutes later, Laverde is killed in a shooting with Antonio receiving one bullet in his gut.

Antonio is saved physically, but mentally he doesn’t recover (suffers from PTSD), and gradually becomes obsessed with the life of his dead friend. Vasquez hints that the post-traumatic stress is a generalized condition of all Colombia’s citizens as they are still suffering and striving to recover from the nation’s bloody past. Ricardo Laverde has piloted small aircraft, carrying cocaine into US soil, for which he has spent more than a decade in jail. When Antonio receives an invitation from Laverde’s 28-year-old beekeeping daughter, Maya to visit her at a remote location, he immediately accepts it. In the trip, Antonio gets to know about Laverde’s life with his American wife Elaine Fritts, who first arrived at Bogota as a US Peace Corps worker (in the early 1970s). As Antonio delves deep into the memories of young Laverde’s life, his present life with his patient wife and lovely little daughter begins to founder.   

Vasques is skillful at tapping into larger themes of national identity, fatherhood, fear, love, and memory simply through one individual’s curiosity. The Sound of Things Falling, similar to his other stories, is an investigation of sorts. Yet the central mystery doesn’t provide an answer to a earth-shattering secret, but subtly introduces us to the Colombian national character. The author profoundly focuses on the social and psychological impact of Colombia’s violent past. There are no detailed portraits of drug trade or the nation’s debilitated political institutions (courtesy of giant neighbor -- US). Vasquez rather intimately showcases the psychological effect of violence in ordinary Colombian citizens’ life. And there’s undeniable beauty in the way Vasquez describes how these simple individuals are linked through history by the violence, fear and uncertainty, passed from fathers to daughters and so on. 

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant – An Artfully Written Story of a Family’s Will to Survive Malevolent Forces of History

“Since it’s my birthday, I’m going to cook a meal for each of you with my mouth, and you can eat it with your ears. You won’t be able to eat it with your mouth because there’s nothing to eat, but prick up your ears, because I’m going to start cooking any moment now…”

In the 1980s, Yu Hua wrote short stories that were known for its ‘incisive lyricism’ and established himself as a key figure in Chinese avant-garde literature. Born in 1960, Yu Hua was working as a dentist when he started publishing stories. In 1990s, there was a major shift in the author’s style as he wrote two best-selling novels, which depicted the extraordinary struggles of the ordinary Chinese men and women. To Live, Yu Hua’s first novel (published in 1993), was adapted into a critically acclaimed movie by Zhang Yimou. His second novel, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (published in 1995 and translated to English by Andrew Jones in 2004) follows a small-town factory worker, from his youth to old age in the second half of the 20^th century – a period that marks the early days of Chinese socialism (1950s), the ambitious yet brutally forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward (in 1958) and the famine that ensued as a result, the bloody Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and the relatively better (economically) post-Mao era.

Like To Live’s central character, the no-good-gambler Fugui, Xu Sanguan of Chronicle of Blood Merchant is a unheroic figure, molded by the regressive sociocultural practices and restricted by financial instability. He earns meager wages, working as a cart-pusher in a silk factory, situated in his small rural town. Xu Sanguan hears from his favorite fourth uncle that people in their village sell blood to hospital and earn money, the amount even if they toil six months in the field can't dream to earn. Selling blood was traditionally a taboo subject in China, but in the 1980s Chinese authorities and commercial companies set up a network of blood plasma collection stations in public hospitals especially to tempt the impoverished peasants. When Yu Hua wrote this novel the malpractices and corruption surrounding the system didn’t come to light (the unhygienic blood-buying practices led to HIV infection, afflicting at least half a million peasants in Henan province). Yet, Yu Hua’s portrayal of Xu Sanguan giving blood till he is too weak to even stand presents an alarming picture.

Earlier in the novel, the writer treats us to painful description of things-to-do before donating blood. Xu Sanguan meets two peasants on the road who asks him to drink lots of water to dilute their blood so that there’s more to sell (“drink until our stomachs are so swollen that it hurts and the roots of our teeth start to ache”). Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, however, isn’t a story steeped in misery and melodrama. Yu Hua details Xu Sanguan’s crisis-ridden life in the provincial village with a caustic wit. He is definitely not a likable character in the early chapters. Learning that the first of his three sons, Yile, is actually the child of his rival, He Xiaoyong, he abuses his wife Xu Yulan and bullies the boy. At one point, Xu Sanguan calls up his sons, Erle and Sanle, to promise him that they would rape He Xiaoyong’s daughters when they have grown up.

Xu Sanguan also often offers his twisted logic on why he can’t treat Yile as his son (ladened with casual misogyny). He leaves Yile at home during the famine and takes the rest of the family to eat noodles at a local restaurant. The image of hungry Yile stumbling through the streets, searching for his family, enrages us. Quite a few readers may get offended by Xu Sanguan’s absurd logic and callous deeds (strengthened by regressive social and cultural thinking). Even the other characters’ behaviors and motives may baffle our politically correct bourgeois sensibilities. But gradually Xu Sanguan takes the path of redemption that largely avoids blatant sentimentality. And as the state deprives the family of private existence, the political and social turmoil of the nation also invades their domestic space in myriad ways.    

Despite a clear-sighted portrayal of a vicious totalitarian world, what distinguishes Yu Hua’s novel is the humane portraits of the unenlightened people, who gradually learn to set aside their prejudices and false sense of pride. With this novel, the author has deftly mixed his humanistic notions with his early stylistic innovations (credit also belongs to the translation work of Andrew Jones). The result is a vivid story of flawed people who emerge from the period of intense fear, finding joy in small things and solace in family unit.