Everybody Bleeds

 

Few scenes from modern life carry as much pathetic dissonance as the tyrant laid low. Think of Saddam Hussein, bloody and disheveled after being pulled from his spider hole in Ad-Dawr. Or the corpse of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, sprawled on a dirty yellow mattress, besieged by phones taking snuff shots destined for the grinder of social media. These images underline the fallibility of rulers who wear the epaulets of power to appear invincible, and drive home the false us-versus-them dichotomy at work in the West’s idea of foreign dictators as inhuman monsters; in plain sight, their downfalls are all too human.

Citing "evil" as the stock answer to the question of how tyrants are made ignores the complex combination of factors that sets the stage for charismatic authoritarianism. Colonialism, natural resources, money, theatre, ego, narcissism, hedonism, patriarchy, forgetting to take your blood pressure pills, too much vodka and cocaine: all of these things may play a role in the days and reigns of autocratic despots. Even the worst tyrants are still people, and people are often ridiculous, shaped as much by historical circumstances as by their own thirst for power. (If anything, the threshold for ridiculousness in world leaders increases by the day.) The complex formula for tyranny is the engine of Dimitri Nasrallah’s new novel, The Bleeds. Nasrallah’s previous work includes the award-winning novels Blackbodying (2004) and Niko (2011), which won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2016 Canada Reads contest. Niko tells the story of a father and son fleeing Lebanon during the civil war. It is notable for its tender portrayal of a family damaged by violence and displacement. The Bleeds, in contrast, is a story about the kinds of people who cause civil wars. It focuses on a very different father-son duo: Mustafa and Vadim Bleed, authoritarian rulers of Mahbad, a small uranium-rich country founded by Mustafa’s dad, Blanco. In its turmoil and political design, Mahbad stands in for real Middle Eastern nations swept up in the Arab Spring movement, which in 2011 led to large scale public protests and toppled regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt. Mustafa is the patriarch. Vadim is the spoiled, reluctant heir to the Bleed dynasty. Both address the reader in their own voices. They narrate entwined paths to ruin as they’re manipulated by military generals, foreign politicians, and a powerful uranium conglomerate, who use them as pieces in a larger game of geopolitical chess. The primary losers are the country’s Lezer ethnic group, whom the Bleeds have subjected to a brutal purge. As will happen, father and son find themselves at odds, stuck on generational differences over how best to stifle public protest, suppress the Lezer uprising, and finesse the family brand to ease the transition of power from the elder Bleed to his successor. Relations degenerate quickly, but the roots of their resentment go deep: “We’re dead set against each other, we always have been,” says Vadim. “Our shared blood should have tempered our anger, but instead it’s amplified everything.” “Family is a problem that can’t be solved,” says Mustafa. “[W]hat’s a father to do when all his remaining options are bad?”

The Bleeds uses the refracting prism of media to complement, interrogate, and influence its own story, showing us how narratives of oppression and liberation are layered in the political echo machine.

This duelling central narrative is peppered with interrupting texts. These include articles from the government-controlled newspaper, written by an increasingly insubordinate reporter, and posts by a political blogger supporting the opposition and sharing news of the Bleeds’ abuses with the wider world. The multiplicity of voices squeezed into the book’s 195 pages can feel busy, but the dialogic layering of narratives and perspectives is central to the story. The marquee conceit of The Bleeds is that it’s a political thriller rooted in the experience of power—as the jacket copy puts it, the book “overturns the conventions of the political novel to focus on the corroded luxury and power structures framing the lives of those most affected by war and insurrection.” Typically, sociopolitical novels take the perspective of the oppressed, so this reversal in itself is notable, albeit not unprecedented. Nasrallah’s precursors in exploring the minds of tyrants through fiction include Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, and, more recently, Christopher Wilson’s The Zoo. More than just an about-face, though, The Bleeds uses the refracting prism of media to complement, interrogate, and influence its own story, showing us how narratives of oppression and liberation are layered in the political echo machine. This trick requires Nasrallah to adopt several different voices and styles, and it’s fair to say he’s a better novelist than blogger or reporter. There’s a sheen of fiction on these would-be journalistic artifacts, a product of the larger allegorical mode, which rubs up against their authenticity, not necessarily in a good way. The blogs, in particular, written (mostly) by the character Karina Faasol, can stumble into exposition, hijacking a voice that Nasrallah has tenuous control of to begin with. But adding these forums, in which the external narrative of the Bleed family unfolds on the page and on a million networked screens, is a bold and necessary move. Formally, Nasrallah’s novel looks at how the stories told by government, military, and media give subjective, divergent voice to the same circumstances. Each new facet adds a layer of the varnish that builds the yellowed skin of a political system: further iteration, more mythmaking and counter-mythmaking. This structure makes the novel a truly dialogic work, in the Bakhtinian sense: The Bleeds is a formal renunciation of the monolithic narrative—which, in an age when everyone experiences the world through their own customized news algorithms and social feeds, is constantly interpreted and interrogated by thousands of different voices.

... its deeper concern is how structures and ideologies and personalities and relationships and morals and voices bleed—over decades, between nations, among families, and across technological and ethical lines.

Meanwhile, in the dual main story, the Bleeds wither into their own obsessions: Mustafa frets over his legacy, Vadim races cars and parties with lackeys in his private jet. This being, at its heart, a thriller, Nasrallah maintains a swift pace, occasionally sacrificing clarity for tension. The first person perspective keeps things fresh, but also provides a structural expression of the book’s themes. In a recent review published in The Walrus, André Forget (who is The Puritan's managing editor) argues that Nasrallah’s use of the first-person doesn’t work because there’s too much self-awareness in the direct address:

… given that one of the novel’s central preoccupations is how it feels to be on the inside of autocracy, the approach feels somewhat artificial, too folksy and guileless. Open, honest conversation sprinkled with level-headed analysis of the formative traumas that have shaped their lives and policies is the sort of thing dictators don’t usually engage in.

But, in part, Nasrallah’s point is that our idea of what a foreign despot should be is as much a construct, informed by media, context, and myth, as the structures of power these rulers uphold. Being a dictator (or, for that matter, a democratic leader) does not purge doubt from your emotional lexicon or make you flawless in internal performance; by portraying autocrats as devoid of human qualities, we only further shore up their exceptionalism. Although it is allegorical, Nasrallah’s text understands that Mustafa and Vadim Bleed are not divorced from reality; they are simply living in their own realities, which are different from each other’s and everyone else’s. The Bleeds are less humane for their callous narcissism, but no less human. The Bleeds deals with the shedding of blood, but as the beautiful cover design by David Drummond illustrates, its deeper concern is how structures and ideologies and personalities and relationships and morals and voices bleed—over decades, between nations, among families and across technological and ethical lines. Not all of the ideas come together over the novel’s brief length. But as we look at images of children kept en masse in cages in South Texas, watch Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un do their strongmen’s dance on the global stage, and continue to see the extreme results of authoritarian rule play out in the tragedy of Syria’s civil war, it is especially valuable to contemplate what drives the stupid cruelty of rulers. The steady stream of rank tweets from the Oval Office underlines that it is just as likely that those men we have always framed as evil blundered into power. They may very well be unstable, their daddy issues and fragile egos giving rise to the same sentiments expressed by Mustafa Bleed in the latter half of the book: “This has been an emotionally trying time … the world is beginning to tilt off-kilter.” Such men are subject to the currents of a dense global media culture. Their whims may have abominable consequences. And they raise the question Vadim poses, as he gets hauled away from an attempted escape to Slovakia: “Have you ever wondered, like I have, why the weakest piece on a chessboard is the king?” The Bleeds is a gripping work, taut and brief while containing multitudes, deeply political but tempered in its outrage, plumbing human depths but stylistically zesty as lemon tea. Told like a familiar tale, it mirrors events that continue to unfold daily in the global news. After all, no nation is immune to tyranny born of human arrogance. We need stories like this to remind those who would hoard power that when you fall into your spider hole, you will bleed like anyone else.