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Jun. 19th, 2013 11:21 amIn the Country of Men was not officially part of my self-assigned Revolutionary Curriculum -- the only thing I actually knew about it was that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
schiarire has been telling me to read it for years -- but wow, this semester was a good time for me to read it.
In the Country of Men is set in Libya, 1979 -- two years after the Libyan Arab Republic was officially designated the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahirya, with Qaddafi as dictator.
The protagonist is Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy. At the beginning of the book, Suleiman's best friend's father has been arrested as a traitor; Suleiman's own father, an intellectual professor who was involved in previous democratic uprisings, is under suspicion and looks likely to be next.
This isn't an uplifting book. It's not a book about heroics. People do terrible things when they're afraid -- large terrible things and small ones; some people don't break under the strain, but most people do.
But even if Suleiman's father and his associates were revolutionary paragons who upheld their ideals and loyalty to each other against all odds, that wouldn't even be the point, because they're not the center of the of the book; the center of the book is the people who are affected when someone close to them decides to play the resistance game, and the prices that they end up paying. Suleiman is nine. He has no toolkit to handle the climate of suspicion and fear that has grown up around him, and it warps him in ways he can't undo. Suleiman's mother has no interest or investment in her husband's idealistic enterprises. Her liberal, intellectual brother betrayed her to her father when he saw her having coffee alone with a boy in a cafe, pulled her out of school and forced her into a marriage she didn't want; her husband's revolution isn't going to change any of that, so what good is it to her? Why should she care about a men's resistance that doesn't care about her?
And all of these things are important to remember. It's easy to romanticize resistance and revolution. But there's always a cost, and there's always people left behind, and In the Country of Men doesn't let you forget it.
schiarire has been telling me to read it for years -- but wow, this semester was a good time for me to read it.In the Country of Men is set in Libya, 1979 -- two years after the Libyan Arab Republic was officially designated the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahirya, with Qaddafi as dictator.
The protagonist is Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy. At the beginning of the book, Suleiman's best friend's father has been arrested as a traitor; Suleiman's own father, an intellectual professor who was involved in previous democratic uprisings, is under suspicion and looks likely to be next.
This isn't an uplifting book. It's not a book about heroics. People do terrible things when they're afraid -- large terrible things and small ones; some people don't break under the strain, but most people do.
But even if Suleiman's father and his associates were revolutionary paragons who upheld their ideals and loyalty to each other against all odds, that wouldn't even be the point, because they're not the center of the of the book; the center of the book is the people who are affected when someone close to them decides to play the resistance game, and the prices that they end up paying. Suleiman is nine. He has no toolkit to handle the climate of suspicion and fear that has grown up around him, and it warps him in ways he can't undo. Suleiman's mother has no interest or investment in her husband's idealistic enterprises. Her liberal, intellectual brother betrayed her to her father when he saw her having coffee alone with a boy in a cafe, pulled her out of school and forced her into a marriage she didn't want; her husband's revolution isn't going to change any of that, so what good is it to her? Why should she care about a men's resistance that doesn't care about her?
And all of these things are important to remember. It's easy to romanticize resistance and revolution. But there's always a cost, and there's always people left behind, and In the Country of Men doesn't let you forget it.
