Home was no home to him
Francis King
CALAMITIES OF EXILE by Lawrence Weschler
Universtiy of Chicago Press, £19.95, pp. 192 No doubt on the principle that one might describe Flaubert's Trois Contes as fictional biographies, the publishers describe this triptych of biographical essays as non- fiction novellas. The thread that unites them is that the subject of each is a politi- cal exile who, in the words of the blurb, `tries to do the right thing with regard to the totalitarian regime holding sway over his homeland... only to end up thoroughly wracked and bollixed.'
The least wracked and bollixed of the three, since he has never suffered financial hardship, imprisonment or an inability to publish his work, is Kanan Makiya, son by an English mother of Saddam Hussein's favourite architect Mohamed Makiya. In 1989, by then resident in the States after a long sojourn in England as head of his father's London office, he published under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil a devastating account of the rule of violence and terror in Baathist Iraq. It was only with extreme difficulty that he had persuaded an American publisher to issue it, and subsequently it was little reviewed and sold in negligible numbers. Then came Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and from that moment the book took off, eventually to become a best-seller. At that, although aware of the risk of assassination, Makiya revealed his true identity.
Every political exile suffers a conflict of loyalties. He wishes to destroy a regime but he wishes to do so without simultaneously destroying the country which he loves. For Makiya this conflict of loyalty extended to his famous father, whose vision was often too lofty to take in ordinary suffering humanity. The son, a fervent secularist and, in his early years, Marxist, increasingly in opposition to the regime, and the father, a staunch believer in, as he put it, 'the Shiite spirit', if not in Shiism itself, loved and respected each other but nonetheless eventually found it necessary to break off all communication.
A vexed father-son relationship is also pivotal in the far stranger story of the Czech Jan Kavan. His father, Pavel, was a tough, ruthless Jewish communist, who suddenly found himself one of the accused, along with the former party general secretary Rudolf Slansky, in the Stalinist show trials of the 1950s. After his premature release from a 20-year prison sentence, he returned home, a broken man, who worked off his rage and frustration by constantly bullying both his English wife and the son whom he now saw as an ineffectual weakling, susceptible to repeated bouts of what were largely psychosomatic illnesses.
Pavel, having reached England as a student, then spent the next 20 years working for the Czech underground opposition. But when, in the immediate aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, he returned to Prague, his status as a hero was soon compromised by accusations that he had been a longtime collaborator of the communist secret police. Whether this was the case or not, is still in dispute. What is not in dispute is that many people who dealt with him during his English years found him erratic, devious, cantankerous and inefficient. The merit of Weschler's account is that he is always scrupulously fair, setting out the facts and leaving the reader to decide for himself the question of Kavan's probity.
The subject of the third of Weschler's essays, Breyten Breytenbach, is the most appealing of these men. A poet of extreme sophistication, he behaved with a ludicrous unworldliness in his role as radical conspirator against apartheid in his native South Africa. Having gone into exile in Paris with his Vietnamese wife (by South African law the marriage was illegal), he returned, as he hoped incognito, to his homeland on a revolutionary mission. Since he was then generally accepted as the foremost living poet in the Afrikaans language, his recognition and arrest were as certain as Solzhenitsyn's would have been on a similar mission to the Soviet Pnion. Under persistent but never violent interrogation, he soon cracked, making a humiliating confession and apology, during which he implicated some of his co- conspirators —all to no avail, since his sentence was an exceptionally cruel one of nine years. His moral collapse was far from heroic. But how many of us would have behaved any better? A fascinating aspect of Breytenbach's story is his relationship, when under arrest and awaiting trial in the maximum security section of Pretoria Central Prison, with his interrogator, a man named Kalfie Broodryk. Broodryk, who professed to admire Breyten- bach's poetry, was largely instrumental in getting a volume published while its author was still incarcerated. In gratitude, Breytenbach made him its dedicatee. From time to time Broodryk would show Breytenbach some exceptional kindness, even entertaining him in the family home.
When Breytenbach received his unex- pectedly savage sentence, Broodryk cried while escorting him back to his cell. Weschler sees something diabolic in Broodryk's behaviour, at one point calling him 'serpen- tine'. But gaoler and prisoner, like cat and mouse, often establish a strange symbiosis, feeling an attachment for each other stronger than conventional love or hatred.
Like Makiya's and Kavan's, Breytebach's whole life can be seen as a repudiation of family beliefs; but in his case those beliefs were embodied not in a father but in two brothers, one of whom half-heartedly and the other whole-heartedly supported the regime which he himself was so fanatically determined to destroy.
A New Yorker staff writer, Weschler tells these three tragic tales with an admirable combination of psychological penetration, intellectual thrust, concision and compassion. Each powerfully brings home to one the extent to which family conflicts, rivalries and allegiances can influence and even dictate public conduct.
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