Tag: Diverse December

Author, Book review, Fiction, Gallic Books, Libya, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Yasmina Khadra

‘The Dictator’s Last Night’ by Yasmina Khadra

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Fiction – paperback; Gallic Books; 190 pages; 2015. Translated from the French by Julian Evans. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

The Dictator’s Last Night by Yasmina Khadra puts us in the shoes of Colonel Gaddafi at the height of the Libyan civil war in 2011 shortly before his capture and execution by the NATO-backed rebel forces of the time. It’s a fictionalised account, of course, but it has a ring of authenticity about it. Unsurprisingly, it’s quite a dark and sombre novella, seeing as it provides a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of one of modern history’s most controversial and divisive figures, yet there’s a certain delicacy of touch, which makes it a fast and compelling read.

Secret hideout

When it opens, Gaddafi is holed up in a disused school — his troops’ secret headquarters — waiting for his son to join him so that they can move on to another, safer, location. It is the night of 19 October 2011 and the city of Sirte is raging all around him, as NATO attacks from the air and rebel forces attack from the ground.

Over the course of the next 24 hours, Gaddafi recalls his life story —  a Bedouin who grew up believing he was the Ghous clan’s “chosen one” yet forever remembering the childhood curses and slights against him even as he rose to become one of the Middle East’s most powerful and influential men, albeit one with a  messiah complex — while confronting his own fears for the future. He is largely resolute in defeat, knowing that his time has come, but he’s also angry and bitter at what he perceives to be the ingratitude of the Libyan people and he has short shrift for those in his immediate employ who he treats with disdain and cruelty.

But despite his circumstances, trapped in a situation with seemingly no safe way out, he still wears his megalomania on his sleeve:

I am Muammar Gaddafi, mythology made flesh. And if there are fewer stars in the sky over Sirte this evening, and my moon looks no fatter than a nail clipping, it is so that I should remain the one constellation that matters. They can fire all the missiles they have at me, I shall see only fireworks celebrating me.

Portrait of a complex man

Of course, we know how the book ends, but as Gaddafi moves towards his final hour the author expertly charts the fallen dictator’s ever-shifting moods — from acceptance to anger, from fear to fury.

It’s not a sympathetic portrait by any stretch of the imagination — Gaddafi is delusional, sociopathic, unrelenting in his inability to forgive, or trust, anyone — but neither is it a caricature of the embittered “kooky” tyrant the Western media often portrayed him as. Indeed, the book’s greatest achievement is in the way it gives voice to a proud man who set out to liberate his people but got corrupted by the taste of power along the way:

Pride is invaluable to reason. When you have ruled over peoples, you sit on your cloud and forget reality. But what exactly have you ruled over? To what purpose? In the final analysis, power is a misunderstanding: you think you know, then you realise you have made a thumping mistake. Instead of going back and redoing it properly, you dig in your heels and see things the way you would like them to be. You deal with the unthinkable as best you can and cling to your fancies, convinced that if you were to let go all hell would break loose. And now, paradoxically, all hell has broken loose because I did not let go.

Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an award-winning author from Algeria, and  this is his latest novel to be translated into English.

I read this as part of #DiverseDecember.

5 books, Book lists

5 books to read for Diverse December

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5-books-200pixThanks to the power of social media and the efforts of two bloggers — Dan, who blogs at From Inside the Dog, and Naomi, who blogs at The Writes of Woman — this month has been designated #DiverseDecember. This encourages everyone to promote and read books by BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) writers in order to redress the balance, which tends to favour writers from white backgrounds (and usually from the US or UK).

Having read more about the initiative in this brilliant blog post by Naomi, I began to wonder whether I had an inherent bias against BAME writers, too. Though this blog tries to focus on Australian and Irish authors, I was surprised to see I do, actually, read writers from non-white backgrounds, too, though perhaps not as many as I should.

I thought I would highlight five of my favourites since I began book blogging in 2004. The books have been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s name — click the title to see my full review:

Song-for-night ‘Song For Night’ by Chris Abani (2007)

This powerful novella is set in an unspecified African nation. The story is told from the perspective of a child soldier, who is taught to detect unexploded land mines with his bare feet and then disable them with a knife. His vocal chords have been cut, “so that we wouldn’t scare each other with our death screams” whenever a fellow solider is blown up by a mine. Song for Night is not a pleasant read, but amid the terror and the brutality, there is a deep, underlying humanity here, about what it is like to have your childhood stolen from you, a world in which life is cheap and hate comes easily.

Yacobian-building ‘The Yacoubian Building’ by Alaa As Aswan (2004)

Set in downtown Cairo at the time of the 1990 Gulf War, this intriguing novel shows Egyptian life in the late 20th century through the eyes of a diverse range of characters, all of whom live in a single apartment block. It charts the struggles of a wide cross-section of society, from the underclass that live in cramped conditions in converted storage rooms on the roof of the building, to the wealthy residents who inhabit the building’s apartments. This allows the author to show the apparent contradictions in Egyptian society where people with different religious, political and moral viewpoints live side by side, not always in harmony.

Half-blood-blues ‘Half Blood Blues’ by Esi Edugyan (2011)

This novel about jazz musicians living in Berlin during the Second World War won the Giller Prize in 2011. It is narrated by Sidney Griffiths, a black bass player from Baltimore who spent his formative years in Berlin during the 1930s and 40s, looking back on his life half a century later. The narrative swings back and forth across time — from Berlin and Paris during the war, and Berlin and Poland 50 years later. It’s a fascinating account of one man’s experiences — his love affairs, his musical rivalries and fierce jealousies, his guilt and much-too-late atonement for one cruel act that he can never take back. It’s a thrilling, adventure-filled read.

The-attack ‘The Attack’ by Yasmina Khadra (2007)

The Attack, set in Israel, is about a suicide bomber. It opens with Dr Amin Jaafie, a surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital, dealing with the bombed and bloodied victims of a terrorist attack in a downtown pizza restaurant that has killed 19 people. As a naturalised Israeli Arab, Dr Jaafie has worked hard to be respected, admired and accepted by the Jewish culture in which he could so easily be cast as an outsider. A dedicated doctor, married to the woman of his dreams, he socialises in fashionable circles, but now his whole life has been turned on its head. What was it about his wife that made her carry out this despicable act, and what clues did he miss? The book follows his quest to find answers to these questions…

Benang ‘Benang: From the Heart’ by Kim Scott (1999)

This story about Australia’s history of white subjugation of indigenous people was joint winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1999. It is narrated by Harvey, who comes to slowly understand his place in his family line — “the product of a long and considered process” to create a white man from a long line of people with aboriginal blood. This process has been overseen by his grandfather as part of a disturbing scientific experiment in which he has been trying to “breed out” the aboriginal blood in successive generations. His efforts mirror those of the settlements and missions in the early part of the 20th century in which Australia operated a crude system of apartheid designed to separate whites from blacks. This incredibly moving, often challenging, book left me with a giant lump in my throat…

For more inspiration, please do check out my BAME writers tag.

Have you read any of these books? Or can you recommend others by BAME writers? Are you taking part in #DiverseDecember?