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Dream of revolution gone awry
Milandos de um Sonho: A euforia dos sonhadores (Misadventures of a Dream: Euphoria of the dreamers)
2001
Bahassan Adamodjy
Quetzal Editores, Lisbon, Portugal
560 pages
Reviewed by Richard Bartlett
When revolution came to Mozambique, it did not really infringe on life in the cities until after the collapse of the Portuguese regime in 1974. Or to put it in more historically accurate terms, armed struggle against the Salazar regime did not directly affect life in the cities of the colony, even though revolution was soon to sweep away the apparatus of empire.
It is this interface of revolutionary guerrilla with people living on the periphery of the city, beyond the core of revolution, that Bahassan Adamodjy recreates in Milandos de um Sonho. Adamodjy is an artist and journalist who was born in Beira, Mozambique and now lives in Maputo.
Before explaining any further how Adamodjy turns this interregnum between colonialism and independence, between revolutionary and citizen, into a comment on the post-colonial African state of the 21st century, it is necessary to at least attempt a translation of the title. Even were this review to have been written in Portuguese, like the novel, the title would still require some translation, for ‘milandos’ is not Portuguese but Shona, and Adamodjy uses much more than a mere smattering of indigenous words through the book; the glossary is 50 pages at the end of a 500 page novel.
Milandos de um Sonho, roughly translated would be ‘Dream that lost its way’ or ‘Misadventures of a Dream’. But ‘milando’ is not easily translated and is used frequently in colloquial dialogue to refer to almost anything negative – mistake, misunderstanding, cause trouble, conflict, mis-anything. The dream cannot be anything but revolution.
It is tempting to draw parallels with the Angolan novel Mayombe, set in the jungles of the Cabinda enclave in the north of that country. Mayombe deals with the armed struggle, with the difficulties, physical, emotional and ideological, that the guerrillas face. Pepetela wrote Mayombe at the height of the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Milandos de um Sonho picks up where Mayombe left off. The armed struggle has been victorious, but what now? How do the contradictions of guerrilla movement turned political party manifest themselves? How do warriors discard their weapons and continue the struggle in civil society?
But one must be wary of parallels. Angola is not Mozambique, and sharing a common national language and history of Portuguese imperialism does not mean the lessons of one can be duplicated in the other. And more importantly, Adamodjy is not writing from the midst of revolution, but with hindsight as his companion. This novel, while unmistakably Mozambican, is a comment on the ironies of the post-colonial state, and it manages this without resort to being didactic. Adamodjy manages this because this work was created with the benefit of hindsight. It was not written while the new society was being built, but was created as comment on why that new society has now turned into little more than a lesson in the history books.
"It is about how revolution swept throught the lives of ordinary people and left them somewhat changed, slightly shaken but still coping with the same quotidian dilemmas"
The events in the novel take place over the period between the Carnation revolution in Portugal of April 1974 and the end of 1975, the first year of Mozambique as an independent country. It opens with the arrival of a guerrilla in the township of Mussequite, a shanty town on the edge of the city of Beira, in central Mozambique.
Adamodjy takes the back roads in telling his tale. It is not about the corridors of power, it is not about leaders with grand vision, but it is about how revolution swept through the lives of ordinary people and left them somewhat changed, slightly shaken but still coping with the same quotidian dilemmas, with the same mechanisms of coping and adapting. What makes the tale much more than a realist portrayal of a small part of Africa a quarter of a century ago, is that Adamodjy takes the back roads in every sense. This is no simple narrative told between two dates. It is of disparate events that comprise a community, it is told by an omniscient narrator who frequently forgets the story being told and indulges in a questioning of us, the reader, as the narrative turns oral and we, as observers, must remove ourselves from the past and join the narrator in the present. And it takes the untrodden paths of language.
Yes it is written in Portuguese, and Adamodjy’s command of the language allows him to recreate it, mix it with indigenous languages and present it in the way it has been adapted by the people. Reading the dialogue is a slow process initially, as one has to hear what has being written because he writes as the people speak; no concessions are made to the niceties of grammar. Therein lies its beauty. He is not telling a historical tale, he is questioning the nature of nation – after all, Portuguese was adopted as the sole national language in Mozambique in 1975.
He plays with language and uses it to amuse, to entertain and to raise issues of identity. Again a comparison with an Angolan novel is convenient. Xuanhenga Xitu produced the caricature Mestre Tamoda. Mestre (master or teacher) has a command of Portuguese such that he does his best to show off, to use excessively flowery language when a word or two would suffice. So it is with the character of Nhantumbo, the tailor, in Milandos de um Sonho. He is known as the educated one, although his use of Portuguese leaves much to be desired, few others in the township know that. His prize possession is his dictionary, which he caresses in having to write official notices and letters, choosing impenetrability where simplicity would do. But he too is seeking identity, and evolves into the central character in the second half of the novel as he finds his place in the revolution.
But this is all too serious. Revolution is serious business, and Nhantumbo is a serious character who only wants to be taken seriously, but Adamodjy manages to make fun of their situation, he creates moments of such mirth that we can’t help laughing with the characters as they stumble towards freedom.
Take this brief example of a discussion on food types:
– Durante da guerra – revelou o Camarada –, os guerrilheiros alimentava terra com tronco de mandioquera. Mandioca num é tipo de arroz que quando deita na terra demora tipo continuador na barriga de mãe dela. Demora muinto, até uma pessoa quando está cercado com fome, até ser atacado com ela própria, morre de esperar...Problema de arroz é num ajudar os camaradas quando tinha situação.
– Como assim? Os camaradas combatia com arroz ao lado?
– Não é isso camarada. Estamos falar arroz demora demais no necimento. Quando nós trocava base, no dia de confusão de situação de ataque, dava confusão de apanhar cada tronco magrinho de arroz. Mas mandioquera, basta arrancar um tronco, mandioca vem cheio tipo cacho de banana. Encher saco de mandioca, num castiga mesma coisa tipo encher saco de arroz.
– A razão explica a fundação da diferença. A mandioca, tem a diferença com arroz devido que a mandioca é uma tuberculose Camarada Luta Continua. Enquanto arroz cerealement falando, num é persistência e num dá resposta rapidamente às ansiosidade da campesenaria.
(–During the war – the Comrade revealed –, the guerrillas feeded the earth from trunks of cassava bushes. Cassava isn't like type of rice which when you leave it in the earth delays in the earth like child in the belly of its mother. Delays too much, until a person is surrounded by hunger, until being even attacked by it, dies of waiting...The problem of rice is that it doesn't help comrades when they have a situation.
– How's that? The comrades fighted with rice at their side?
– It's not that comrade. We are speaking of rice delaying too long in birth. When we changed base, on the day of confusion in a situation of attack, it would be too much confusion to collect each thin little trunk of rice. But cassavas, it's enough to grab one trunk, cassava comes full like bunch of banana. Filling a sack with cassava, doesn't waste the same thing like filling a sack of rice.
– The reason explains the foundation of the difference. Cassava has a difference with rice due to the fact that cassava is a tuberculosis Comrade Struggle Continues. While rice, cereally speaking, is not a persistance and doesn't give a rapid response to the anxiety of the peasantryness.)
This mirth is as much thanks to the character of Luta Continua as it is to the absurdities of a people grappling with the change from colonialism to independence. Luta Continua is the central character in the novel, even when he all but disappears in Book Two. His name means Struggle Continues, in Portuguese, and was the slogan used as a rallying cry for the revolution. But this novel, its central theme, is about subversion of revolution, about that constant interregnum between idealist and opportunist, between revolutionary and reactionary in the wardrobe of revolutionary.
The book begins with the strangeness of hope brought to life by the arrival of Struggle Continues, of how he changes the lives of the people and opens their eyes to the possibilities of change. By the end of 500 pages and 18 months in the life of the people of Mussequite we are left a revolution supposedly hijacked by opportunism and Struggle Continues betrayed. But the idea behind this book is not that the revolution was hijacked from the very start – that would be an easy assumption considering the path to capitalism that Mozambique has taken since ditching its Marxist constitution in 1990 and dropping the ‘People’s’ part from its official name, so now it is simply a republic.
Revolution is about identity, about collective identity from the myriad people that embrace it and were enveloped by it and in Milandos, Adamodjy takes a linear journey from one date to another, along which he shows that revolution is not about the leading lights, it is about the rank and file, about their needs, loves, jealousies betrayals, desires, beliefs and if the revolution forgets the individual it is destined to fail. Yet this book is not about a desire to glorify the role of the individual in the morass of revolution; quite the opposite. It is about how individuals adapt to the exigencies of changing identities.
It is also about the irony of idealism. Struggle Continues as the revolutionary idealist could be compared to the country’s first president, Samora Machel, whose idealism made him a national hero, and whose idealism led him into an increasingly isolated position as those below began to question the application of his ideals. Thus the revolution does not die, but its idealism is re-routed for other ends.
But Milandos is not about the conflict between the idealist and the opportunist, it is about an entire society being swept and bullied along by the fervour of revolution. There is the Greek expatriate who lives a life of isolation with his books, the two Mozambicans who return from the United States have studied economics and gynaecology (much as first Frelimo pressident Eduardo Mondlane did), the Portuguese bar owner, the cobbler whose name is Faz Tudo (Do It All), the prostitute who manages to defend her lifestyle and the Jehovah’s Witness who is unmasked and sent to a re-education camp.
All of these characters are given a voice, they are not merely paraphernalia on the edges of the novel. This, among other things, makes Milandos a book that does not permit laziness on the part of the reader. Not that it is a trial, or that it is tedious. Rather that because this is not just a historical novel, we are constantly jerked back into the present into virtual dialogue with Adamodjy who flays us with questions and forces us to listen, not just read, before plunging us back into the sad-hilarious and inspiring imperfections that created modern-day Mozambique.
And that, essentially is where this novel must be situated. Yes, there are the people, the recipients and creators of revolution and then there is the narrator, the individual, continually questioning us, forcing us to consider what revolution is really about, bringing it back to the level of me, of us, not just of the people. The revolution might have been hijacked, but the idealism did survive, somewhere, and in trying to explain why this novel makes such an important contribution to Mozambique almost 30 years after the revolution was victorious one must go beyond heroes, beyond idealists and opportunists. Corruption has survived, but so has hope, so have the ideals. The people have not forgotten, they are merely getting on with living.
Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books
