tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2698006743552625350.post4130410145138810072..comments2024-03-27T03:18:56.078-04:00Comments on THE VALLEY OF WORDS: CONTRADICTIONS AND DILEMMAS OF THE POST-COLONIAL WORLDDale Luis Menezeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06707366650904496827noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2698006743552625350.post-51538530838797577692012-03-16T12:38:38.026-04:002012-03-16T12:38:38.026-04:00FROM THE THIRD THURSDAY BOOK CLUB ONLINE FORUM:
De...FROM THE THIRD THURSDAY BOOK CLUB ONLINE FORUM:<br />Dear Dale,<br /><br />Thank you for your review essay with the beautiful cover of the Calcutta Writers Workshop flexiback edition of my novel The General is Up. I read it and printed it out.<br /><br />You have focused on some of the serious political issues in the novel.<br /><br />I need to read it again, but I would like to repond right away to some of your questions.<br /><br />You wondered why I used the fictitious (I prefer "fictional") name of Damibia intead of Uganda. I used the name "Damibia" first in my novel, "In a Brown Mantle." I was working in the Ministry of Finance of Uganda as Senior Finance Officer when I wrote the novel and did not want to take the risk of being put in prison for writing about the country (I had had to take an oath when working for the government). Second, by using "Damibia", I did not have to deal with every issue of Uganda. For example, I did not make any references to the three kings of Uganda, one being in the area I lived in. Thirdly, although some characters resembled prople from real life, they were in fact imagined, and some had no real life model--there was no such person as the narrator, Deo D'Souza. The Ugandan/Sudanese writer Taban lo Liyong said that everything has to go through the creative workshop of the writer. I liked the name "Damibia" because it was like Namibia--which was fighting for its freedom from Portugal at that time--and also was religious. And it was the place of the damned--the original title of the English translation of Frantz Fanon's book about decolonization and neocolonialism, "The Wretched of the Earth".<br /><br />I used the name again in "The General is Up" for an additional reason: I did not want to be killed (a remote possibility--it would take Amin time to try to figure out where Iowa was) and did not want friends of mine in Uganda (African friends) to be killed because such things did happen: people did get killed for what their friends wrote against the regime outside the country. Strange as it may seem, the name "Damibia" instead of "Uganda" was protection enough (and so was "The General" for "Idi Amin").<br /><br />I believe the peb us mightier than the sword--in the long run. In the short run the writer's primary duty is to stay alive. Too many people in Uganda have died for nothing.<br /><br />The Institute in the novel, as in real life, was in a civil service town: it was the centre of administration and everyone in the Institute talked about what happened in the government. There were many members of the Institute who were not Goan.<br /><br />Paragraph 3: the judgement about Canada being self-interested is what David says. The reader has to decide how much of it is true and how much biassed.<br /><br />Paragraph 4: the scapegoatism by the colonial rulers is in the thoughts of Al Kamena, a professor of history who may be a disinformation agent working for an intelligence agent in the West. However, since these are his thoughts, he most likely is right.<br /><br />The novel does not exactly end with the General getting assassinated by his rivals. He gets killed by himself. As you saw from the beginning, he was being haunted by an ally, Captain Oma, whom he had killed. He was suffering from nightmares of being hunted down and shot by Captain Oma. And the General's answer was to shoot, which means he shot at his nightmare, which means that eventually he would have to shoot at his own head since the nightmare was in his head. Could this happen in real life? Perhaps not, but it could happen in fiction, which was written by the author (who seems to be Ronald, as we see in the Epilogue). He had a fictional ending, stylized words as in a comic book, in which he fingered everyone who was guilty. This was a stylized, metaphorical ending.<br /><br />But thanks again for focusing on neocolonialism<br /><br />PeterDale Luis Menezeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06707366650904496827noreply@blogger.com