The two books this time: a historical fiction that imagines what happened in the 11th-12th century in Omar Khayyam’s world and a shocking book about Patrice Lumumba that exposes how things happen in our world. Not entirely different. Here’s my updated reading list and the previous update. Now for the 13-point review.
1. The Lumumba Plot by Stuart Reid is the stomach-churning account of the 1961 murder of Congo’s Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. This is recent history, there is no surprise ending. Still, the narration is tightly wound and the reader is left mortified, rooting in vain for the embattled leader, waiting inexplicably for a miracle that will save him. Of course, as always with a lot of non-fiction, it is possible that there are other versions of the events that transpired, but this is Reid’s story.
2. Reid profiles Lumumba who even as a young man, sometimes “flew too close to the sun”. Growing up in colonized Congo, he plays by the discriminatory rules to become one of the “poster children of colonialism’s ‘civilizing mission’.” But Lumumba is not perfect, spending 14 months in prison for embezzlement before landing in Leopoldville as a beer salesman right as “the Congo experienced its first nationalist stirrings”. His dazzling political rise drew from his oratory skills, the “fluid mixing of rational argumentation and emotional appeal.”
The shores of the great river, full of promises,
Henceforth belong to you.
This earth and all its riches
Henceforth belong to you.
And the fiery sun, high in a colorless sky,
Will burn away your pain
Its searing rays will forever dry
The tears your forefathers shed – Lumumba, Sep 1959
Bouncing back from another political imprisonment to lead the independence roundtable and become Prime Minister, he is trapped in the double whammy of a nation left unprepared for freedom and its new leaders equally unequipped for governance and international manoeuvring. It was after the breakaway South Kasai province descended into ethnic conflict that a British journalist wrote, “There was a feeling late in August 1960 that Patrice Lumumba must die. It was in the grass and in the wind.”
3. Reid explains in great detail the powers around Lumumba. First, the Belgians, who offered independence but were reluctant to let go: tinkering with new government formation, sparking a mutiny amongst the soldiers that grew into widespread riots (Congo became “a country which is a body without a head.”), supporting the secession of the resource-rich Katanga province (“In a sense, Belgium was at war with its former colony”), sending troops into Congo and stroking one coup after another.
4. Then, the Americans, in their cold war framework (even though Lumumba maintained that “independent Congo should reject the East-West schism and seek “economic and scientific cooperation with any friendly country.”) worried about the Soviet presence and their “cornering the global market on cobalt”. CIA officer Devlin was playing up the communist threat while from the US, orders for Lumumba’s removal supposedly came down from the highest levels. The US supported the failed coup by President Kasavubu and then the successful one by Commander Mobutu (still wishing Lumumba “would fall into a river full of crocodiles.”). Reid suggests they also schemed to eliminate Lumumba with botulinum toxin or a sniper rifle, got him put under house arrest, deployed “massive and organized application of threats and pressures—along with inducements—” to ensure pro-Lumumba factions didn’t get UN representation.
5. There was the UN, led by Dag Hammarskjold and his representatives in Congo, Bunche and later Dayal, at first unable to force out Belgian troops or interference, then bypassing Lumumba to negotiate directly with secessionist leader of Katanga, Moise Tshombe. In the end, the UN could not prevent Lumumba’s capture, torture or transfer to Katanga.
6. And there was Joseph Mobutu. (“The main fault line in the Congo was becoming clear. On one side were Mobutu and Kasavubu, backed by the Americans and the Belgians. On the other was Lumumba, supported by other African leaders but locked in his house. Awkwardly straddling the divide was the UN.”) Mobutu sealed the deal with another coup and then transferred the captured Lumumba to Moise Tshombe, his nemesis, where Lumumba was supposedly tortured, murdered, his body dissolved with acid, and a Belgian perpetrator was able to take home a tooth and at least one of the Prime Minister’s fingers.
7. “If I die, too bad, the Congo needs martyrs.” – Patrice Lumumba. (The reader, on the other hand, is left wondering if everything in the book could possibly have happened, horrified, needing answers.)
8. Samarkand by Amin Maalouf is essentially two stories, one the extraordinary reimagination of the life of Omar Khayyam in the late 11th to early 12th century, placing the poet and the creation of his poetry in the centre of history as it unfolded in Persia and Transoxania (that included modern day Uzbekistan). It is also the story of the three friends, Nizam al-Mulk, Hassan Sabbah and Omar Khayyam. “They were radically different men, each of whom represented an eternal aspect of the Persian soul.”
9. Maalouf traces the Seljuk invasion of Samarkand and the rise of its celebrated minister, Abu Ali Hasan, the Nizam-ul-Mulk under kings Alp Arslan and Malik Shah. He also presents the trajectory of Hassan Sabbah, from a court officer to the head of the feared Order of the Assassins (“How can precautions be taken against a man intent on dying?”). And the beautiful but ambitious court poetess Jahan, Khayyam’s lover. (“Next to your beloved, Khayyam, how alone you are! / Now that she is gone, you can take refuge in her”). “Together, and different. Lovers for nine years, married for four years and their dreams still did not live under the same roof. Jahan devoured time, Omar sipped it.”
10. The second story takes place some 700 years later in the early 20th century when an American, Benjamin Omar Lesage, travels to Persia in search of Khayyam’s original manuscript (hand written in a book “made of Chinese kaghez, the best paper ever produced by the workshops of Samarkand”) that has surfaced after centuries. He lands in a Persia caught in a state of political turmoil with the Russians and British vying for control over the monarchy and Persian factions pushing for a constitutional democracy. Here, Lesage falls in love with Princess Shireen who finds herself in possession of the manuscript. The rest of the story takes the reader onboard the Titanic and to its eventual resting place at the bottom of the ocean.
11. As historical fiction goes, this one holds the reader’s interest, with its absorbing description of the time and events, some albeit a bit jarring, but going deftly through the politics of both periods, in pursuit of the true Khayyam.
12. “It never negates what has come before it and is never negated by what follows. Poetry lives in complete calm through the centuries. That is why I wrote my Rubaiyaat”.- Khayyam, on Poetry.
13. ‘You ask what is this life so frail, so vain.
’Tis long to tell, yet will I make it plain;
’Tis but a breath blown from the vasty deeps,
And then blown back to those same deeps again – Omar Khayyam.
THOUGHT PURGE 