Book review: 'Goat Days'

Book: Goat Days
Benyamin
Penguin
255 pages
Rs250

Book: The Dream Of The Celt
Mario Vargas Llosa
Faber and Faber
404 pages
Rs499

In 1978, a young Taiwan-born artist named Teching Hsieh built a prison-like cage, fitted with a cot, a sink and some basic accessories. Then he locked himself inside it and for a year, he remained in self-enforced solitary confinement. He would not speak, read, write, listen to the radio or watch television. For Hsieh, who went on to become a cult legend, the isolation offered was liberating because he said he was able to think without being interrupted or distracted. It was a radically different perspective on a prison cell, which predictably symbolises confinement for most people. Hsieh, on the other hand, subtly pointed out that the pace and tedium of everyday life actually constrains us through his decidedly extreme performance art project.

While Hsieh’s imprisonment was unreal, the prison experiences of Roger Casement and Najeeb Muhammad, the heroes of The Dream Of The Celt and Goat Days respectively, are factual. However, Roger and Najeeb’s stories have something in common with Hsieh’s: enforced isolation gives the two men the freedom to think, and these thoughts make up the two novels.

From the eloquent epilogue to The Dream, it becomes clear that Nobel prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s interest in Roger Casement arose from the novelist’s conviction that his extraordinary story needs to be remembered, rather than reduced to a footnote in historical research. Barely-remembered today, Roger was one of the greatest humanitarians of the early twentieth century. His work in the Congo and Amazonia forced Europe to acknowledge the human rights abuses in these areas.

In 1911, Roger was knighted for his humanitarian work. Five years later, he would be stripped of his honours and executed for treason. Although it would seem that his espousal of Irish nationalism in his last years led to Roger being arrested, his politics are not the reason he was the subject of scandal and bundled out of public memory. Roger’s trial became one of the most infamous of his time because after he was arrested, the police raided his lodgings and produced a diary that recorded numerous, casual homosexual encounters. He had lost the support of influential friends like the novelist Joseph Conrad for his anti-Britain politics but the nail in Roger’s coffin was his little black book.

Najeeb Muhammad, on the other hand, is a thoroughly humble man. A diver in Kerala, he scrapes together the money to get a passport and visa to work as a labourer in Saudi Arabia, leaving his mother and a pregnant wife behind. It’s a common story in Kerala, but Najeeb’s experiences are literally off the beaten track.

An Arab man picks him up from Riyadh airport and takes him out to the middle of the desert. All Najeeb has around him are a few tents, goats, camels, sand and a fellow worker whose appearance is so unkempt and filthy that Najeeb is initially terrified of him. Since Najeeb only knows Malayalam, nothing anyone says makes any sense to him.

The Arab employer, known as arbab which (ironically) translates to “saviour”, is a vicious man who subjects his workers to horrific living conditions. He’s unmoved by the fact that he treats human beings, one of them a Muslim like him, worse than he treats his animals. Najeeb lives in a crude tent, eats bread and water, and tends to the goats. Basic amenities like bathwater and clean clothes are considered unnecessary. For years, he survives these conditions and regular beatings. Then, with the help of two workers from a neighbouring farm, Najeeb escapes. The journey through the desert almost kills him, but he makes it to Riyadh, where he lands himself in prison with the hope that he will be repatriated.

Benyamin’s original Malayalam telling of Najeeb’s story won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award and is a bestseller. The clumsy translation lets both Benyamin and Najeeb down. Translator Joseph Koyippally’s awkward English emphasises the novel was written in another language, unlike Edith Grossman’s characteristically assured translation of Llosa’s Spanish. However, there’s no diluting the terrible misery of Najeeb’s experiences in Saudi Arabia, which make a grotesque mockery of the Gulf prosperity and the modernism we assume when we see shiny urbanity.

Goat Days opens with Najeeb exulting in the freedom he enjoys in prison. His experiences as a goatherd are told in flashback, bracketed by Najeeb praying he will be selected for repatriation. If his arbab comes to the prison and reclaims him before he’s selected, he’ll have to go back to the farm.

The Dream has a more complex hero and structure, but when it begins, Roger’s condition is similar to Najeeb’s as a goatherd. No news from the outside world reaches him. He is alone, filthy and unkempt in Pentonville Prison, which is not a refuge for Roger but like Najeeb in prison, he too is hoping the government will consider him kindly.

Shuttling between present and past, the novel pieces together Roger’s life, his achievements and the ideas and events that moulded him. Llosa does for his reader what Roger’s unseen lawyer has to do in court — provide a testimonial that will convincingly portray Roger’s heroism and his naïveté. By the time we reach his Irish phase, The Dream is weighed down by textbook-like detail and the pace slackens as though Llosa is trying to avoid the final sentence, but for the most part, Roger’s extraordinarily well-travelled life is gripping.

Considered together, The Dream and Goat Days present the awful truth that the power dynamics between the powerful and the underprivileged remain as oppressive as ever. The dismantling of colonial mechanisms has been succeeded by the economic structure of neo-colonialism and it is as brutal as its predecessor.

The Dream presents colonialism from the unique perspective of someone who belonged to the camps of both oppressor and oppressed. Goat Days is comparatively uni-dimensional but it’s interesting to note that in the fictional “I” of Goat Days, the author whose voice is prized and the voiceless are fused into one.
Najeeb’s experiences underscore the importance as well as futility of Roger’s humanitarian work. The deceit that turns people into slaves remains unnervingly similar. Najeeb is as easily bedazzled as the tribes of the Congo were by glass beads and promise of wealth. People like Roger may have taken a hammer to the old empires, but new and equally oppressive systems have replaced them with smooth efficiency.