Unveiling a literary triptych: A discussion on Hola El Che
By Jesse Poe
The greatest chef I have ever personally known once told me that the
best meal need only three ingredients and that the mastery of making
those three ingredients into the great experience of a meal is the
balance and connection between themselves. Hola El Che!, a book in three
parts by Dilshan Boange, connected by the improbable and sleight-of-hand
that allows certain writers the ability to weave between the real and
the magically real without upsetting the theatre of the mind upon which
stage they have been given permission to speak, is comfortable at that
dinner table, comfortable to nod knowingly at that mastery and its
history, and to tell a story of its own (or three) to add to the
proverbial p(L)ot.
The first ingredient: the title story
The first of these three ingredients/stories is the title story 'Hola
El Che!'. A story in which Che Guevara finds his way to Stratford Avenue
in Colombo 6 (a detail that does nothing to ruin the story by my
revealing here). Improbable, perhaps, one would think, however I find
the most improbable and therefore commendable thing about this story to
be not that Che could have faked his death, continued to live and one
day showed up in a Sri Lankan cafe, that is a believable as an
conspiracy plot or even most of things we read in the news on a daily
basis, instead it is how naturally Boange gives voice to an aging Che
living in the world we call today. What I find so delightful about the
reality of this voice is that, as a voice would, it speaks in its own
time saying what it would feel inside of the moment it is sharing with
you, not a resuscitated Che from the voice of his Diaries or such, but
the real voice of the moment, a Che of today, one who had lived
continuously stacking the days one on top of the other as we all do. An
aging man of now and what that Red Starred Black Beret would mean today,
wrinkles and all.
The Galle Face Literary Eve
The book moves along and introduces us to the Galle Face Literary
Eve, which as you know, or will come to know, is a collegiate night of
literary discussion. Dear reader, you should know that as a writer you
have to be careful what you write about because not only do you have to
tell a compelling story to you the reader, that story has to share its
own truths in the unique voice of the context that you set up to tell
those truths. Never an easy task, but definitely some voices are harder
than others.
In this second story, I was reminded of Philip K. Dick's personal
inspiration and hero, writer Thomas M. Disch and the incredible feat
that set before himself in Camp Concentration to write a story of war
prisoners given a super drug that accelerated their minds to the point
of genius and beyond to insanity. The thoughts, actions, intentions and
banter had to be that of an upward and hyper-accelerated drive towards
wisdom that reflected itself in the reality of the words he laid one
after the other in front of the reader. Not easy at all. Every bit as
difficult is that of the overtly enamored yet been-there-done-that, back
and forth of graduate students, let alone students of literature and
mixed gender students at that! And Boange, like Disch, pulls it off with
an ease that makes it seem as if it is journalistic reporting instead of
the creation of the mind of an author (to me always one of the great
signs of good writing).
Like the literature obsession of Peter Kien in Cannetti's Nobel Prize
winning Auto-de-fé, who took great care to choose which books he would
take with him on his daily walks so that they might have their own
roundtable discussion inside his satchel, Boange takes this similar
magic to another level and has characters walk right out of their own
books as if conjured by the very literary discussions of their
papayri-prisons and the rubbing of their hardback boundaries like Geni.
The craft at work
The very clever undercurrent to this story that shows not only the
craft under which Boange works, but also his history of study and
understanding of the greats of that craft is that these characters from
One Hundred Years of Solitude do not step out of their own open books on
the tabled discussion, but have struggled out of their own type-set
trappings to be part and parcel of a discussion which tries to be
inclusively broad, from Bushnell's unbridled spectrum of NYC's single 30
something strugglings of Sex and the City to Bronte's corset-constrained
romanticism to Harry Potter adult escapism to the magic of childhood to
the book mentioned that would have been best left unmentioned in an
enjoyable evening, Camus' The Outsider.
But yet it is that very medium of French existentialism that conjured
these fictional beings.
It's existential investigation and bleak look at the need for meaning
(or absence thereof) was the very spell that opened the thin veil
between our the physical world of toil and triumph and that of the
literary world, Lewis' Looking Glass in action, the portal between
realism and magic realism, to discuss over dinner the theme of: is there
really only one idea of what can be called 'real'?
The discussion begins to go beyond that of academia to an aerial view
of the question of what is real and what is reality between the three
representing nations that of Camus' bleak depression era pre-war France,
Marquez's light-hearted but brutality-tinged Colombia, and that of Sri
Lankan present day Post and Undergrad Literary students, a three-way
World Cup, with all three teams on the field at the same time. Quite a
sport.
Football
I myself have never been a fan of spectator sports, I enjoy playing
them on rare occasion, but not watching them, even five years living in
Italy didn't make me a fan of watching football, however World Cup is
another story altogether as that it is so much more than watching a
sport, it is watching countries performing on a grassy field in the very
same way they do in populace, politics and popular culture.
It is its own cultural looking-glass blender where you can see those
peoples mixed together and reflected in a new cultural kaleidoscope, yet
somehow each part still wholly their own. In the same way, the
discussion begins to open the way to this discussion that is as
interesting to an outsider as it must be to a member of the "home team"
reading Boange's play-by-play narration of the debate.
The final story of the trio
Cannibals in the corner room, the third and final story of this
literary triptych excels in revealing a window into the slow unraveling
of a person's psyche towards madness, (no easy task at all) to come to
believe that there in the back room of a friend's flat there is a room
inhabited by a tribe of hollowed-eyed cannibals who pace the open-doored
room without ever disturbing the threshold, creating a deeply scary and
disconcerting image in the mind of the reader. Although it takes a bit
of time for the reader to be drawn into the story it is partly that slow
stirring of the waters into the tempest of this really fantastic and
unique idea that allows Boange to create such a truly horrific and
unforgettable image and impression of fear as this.
As with all literature, even that of contemporary (which soon becomes
that of a historical period as time goes by), time and place of a story
are often interchanged with the time and place in history in which they
are published, and this story lends itself in our current and constant
debate of commercial cannibalism taking place in our increasingly
capitalistic world to be that other room down the hall, the corner
office, where the tabloid popularised CEOs eat without hunger or
realisation of flavour or taste devouring only for the sake of devouring
like the ancient story of the snake and the turtle whom the snake bites
while on the turtle's back who is giving him passage half way across the
river, why? Because he was a snake. It was his nature.
Sri Lanka should be proud of their son Dilshan Boange for Hola El
Che!, a book in three parts, as he should be of himself for showing his
true nature, that of a writer.
The reviewer Jesse Poe is a singer, songwriter and musician based in
New York -USA who can be contacted via his official website.
http://www.jessepoe.is/
|