They’re the ones who are bad news in my book.It was reportedly back on November 5, 2010, when Nicholas tied the knot for the first time with a local Pawtucket, Rhode Island native at the age of 23, just for it to soon go up in ruinous flames. It should be mandatory reading for all diplomats who sit in capital cities, swapping gossip on the cocktail circuit, so sheltered from the horror under their noses that they almost end up doing the PR of their hosts. This is not travel writing it’s a portrait of a post-genocide society, a study of repression and mass denial. Like his debut book Stringer, this is beautiful prose, acutely observing the landscape and characters but in Bad News Sundaram has found something very important to say. Sundaram stumbles on a landscape of devastation where people have mutilated their own homes. ‘I felt the hut was bad,’ says a man whose family is left exposed to the elements as a result of his obedience. Villagers proudly destroy the grass roofs of their own huts because they are told by the government that they’re too primitive. The era of pensee unique, or a single way of thinking, begins to set in once again-the same mindset that fuelled the genocide in Rwanda.Įventually the regime’s lies become so internalised that the victims of repression don’t even realise they’re victims. The government’s giant lies become the truth and it’s a struggle to challenge it. Not efficiency but systematic fear transforms reality every village has its network of informers, which means there’s nowhere for dissidents to hide. The government orders all villagers to wear slippers overnight and it happens plastic bags are eradicated once the order is issued. The book begins with a grenade explosion but all the physical evidence is tidied away so fast that the author begins to doubt his own memory of the sound of the blast. His Rwandan colleague explains, ‘The truth in our country is hidden and you need to look not for what is there but for what they hide’. The population prefers to walk home from work in the dark. He gazes at Kigali’s impressive lines of street lamps dotting the empty new roads then hears a shuffling of feet and murmur of voices on the adjacent perilous road. In a metaphor for the book, one night Sundaram is shown what was obvious but he had failed to observe. To reinforce the point, a grim appendix lists the many Rwandan journalists who faced problems after criticising their government. That’s after he’s sent a text message saying, ‘I think I may die tonight’. From expressing himself in hundreds of words of elegant copy, one trainee is reduced to beeping Sundaram at night on his mobile phone simply to indicate he’s still alive. The journalism training briefly gives rise to the dream of a new magazine, which is slowly strangled by red tape and outright intimidation. Sundaram describes the betrayal as a kind of negative freedom that earns you more space, more liberty. After a while, the journalism students turn on each other. ‘A big photo pays for your sins,’ explains a man outside a seminar on political reform put on to impress the diplomats. Worse still, several join the ranks of the flatterers who extol the virtues of President Paul Kagame, whose larger- than-life photos dot the town. Who better to be the foot soldiers of freedom than Rwandan journalists who pass through Sundaram’s training programme in the capital Kigali? It’s not long before the characters who exude hope and talent are forced to flee or go into hiding, their newspapers closed down. It gradually becomes apparent that the surreal veneer of normality is a giant deception that convinces only the foreign diplomats and donors, who pride themselves on their influence with the dictatorship and on its efficiency. The contagious mistrust slowly rises through the book like the author, you too wonder whom to trust. The fear that eats at the mind until author Anjan Sundaram convinces himself the birds on his bedroom roof are crack commandos ready to drop through the ceiling and abduct him. This superb book brilliantly captures the eerie calm, the constant gnawing anxiety of life under extreme political repression.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |