CLANDESTINE IN CHILE by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

CLANDESTINE IN CHILE: The Adventures of Miguel Littin

By GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
New York Review Books, 2012, 116 pages, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

‘The most hated man in my life’, declared the casual-dressed, bearded, non-conformist Chilean film director, Miguel Littin, was the balding, near-sighted, clean-shaven, Uruguayan business tycoon who accompanied Littin’s every step on his secret return to the Chile of military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, in 1985. 

Littin’s true story, told to, and retold by, the Chilean novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, recounts how a false passport, voice coaching, weight loss, plucked eyebrows, new hair-do and ‘fake wife’ transformed Littin into ‘what I wanted least in the world to be: a smug bourgeois’, in order to disguise his re-entry to Chile to direct an underground documentary about the dictatorship.  Littin, a socialist who headed the pre-coup nationalised film industry, had only escaped execution during Pinochet’s coup through the help of a neutral military officer ‘who happened to be a film buff’.

Twelve years after the 1973 US-orchestrated coup, which assassinated the democratically-elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende, and installed Pinochet’s torture regime and a radical free market economic orthodoxy, Littin, one of five thousand permanently banned Chilean exiles, spent six risky weeks filming in Chile, protected by the Chilean underground, narrowly surviving exposure, his own carelessness with passwords, his impetuousness and being tailed by undercover police. 

Littin’s first impression on his return to Chile was one of ‘material splendour’ but the ‘ragged miners’, the poor of the slums, and the child beggars and unemployed peddlers in the shadows of the gay lights of Santiago revealed economic squalor.

So too, the apparent civilian calm – ‘armed policemen were more in evidence on the streets of Paris or New York’ – was deceptive.  Just out of visitors’ sights were the junta’s shock squads in the subway stations, water-cannon trucks on side streets and ‘secret’ police conspicuously present with their short-cropped hair.

This apparatus of repression, and a night curfew, kept many Chileans passive as individuals but collective protest and armed resistance were a daily occurrence.  From the general strike which preceded Littin’s arrival, to the protest hunger march he filmed.  From the poor woman who kept a photo of Allende hidden behind one of the Carmelite Virgin, to the Catholic nun who ran secret missions to and from Chile, including couriering the last reels of Littin’s film  to Europe.  From the young rebels who carried out innumerable ‘anonymous deeds’, to aristocratic Chileans in regime-fooling BMWs who saved Littin from sub-machine guns at roadblocks.

Littin found a supportive writer in Marquez, the novelist himself a friend of Allende, who had announced he would desist from writing as a protest against the coup until the Pinochet dictatorship had fallen.  This impractical gesture was rescinded in 1981 with Marquez’s novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which also marked a turn from the political to the personal in his writing, but, as Francisco Goldman notes in his introduction, Clandestine in Chile offered a chance for Marquez to stick one to the General.  Pinochet felt the blow and seized and burnt 15,000 copies of the book imported into the country.

The rest of Goldman’s introduction, however, is best avoided.  The professor of literature, a “post-revolutionary pessimist” embarrassed about his own radical political past of “idealism and naïve revolutionary dreams”, distorts the book as an illusory attempt by two ageing socialist has-beens to recapture the “political vigour, conviction and ardour” of their immature youth, an “absurdist” farce in which Littin and his film crews “never seem to be in any real danger” with Marquez pontificating as deluded propagandist for left-wing political “fanatics” such as Allende.  A different book entirely to the actual one about the genuine spirit of opposition to capitalist tyranny displayed by the quietly heroic Littin and Marquez.

RICHARD WRIGHT: The Life and Times by HAZEL ROWLEY

RICHARD WRIGHT: The Life and Times

By HAZEL ROWLEY
University of Chicago Press, 2012 (first published 2008), 626 pages, $38.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Despite being the first best-selling black writer in American literary history (with Native Son in 1940), Richard Wright found that ‘my being a rather well known writer did not help me any’ in lessening the prejudice he faced in the US.  His fame, in fact, so goaded some whites to put him more firmly in his racial place that he fled into voluntary exile to France from 1947.  Hazel Rowley’s masterful biography of Wright recreates the writer whose life and literature was marked by bigotry, violence and disillusion.

Born in 1908 in a wooden shack in Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper and grandson of slaves, Wright had a stormy childhood, trapped by a puritanical Seventh Day Adventist religion, menial jobs working for ‘nigger’-taunting bosses, and the threat of violence.

Books and writing were his intellectual escape, and Chicago his geographical route out of “semi-feudal conditions in the rural south to the steel and stone grind of modern industrial capitalism” with its own special discrimination, magnified by the Great Depression.

Marxism became Wright’s university, through the Communist party-organised John Reed Club of proletarian artists and writers.  Wary at first, Wright found that communists were the only white people who showed sincere interest in black rights.  A member from 1932 to 1944, the Communist party was central to his life, though never an entirely smooth fit.  Although Wright loyally survived numerous twists and turns of Moscow-dominated political and literary policy, he was seen by hard-liners as an untrustworthy “wayward individualist”.

As Harlem correspondent in New York for the party’s Daily Worker,  he resented having to write propaganda and preferred to put his creativity into his novels.  Until now, he said, black writing had been  ‘the voice of the educated Negro pleading with white America for justice’, an approach he set out to exorcise through “urban toughness”, “graphic realism” and “emotional power”.  Native Son featured Bigger Thomas, a tough, bullying hoodlum, a rapist and murderer, the “angriest, most violent anti-hero ever to have appeared in black American literature”, says Rowley. 

Not all liberals, black or white, appreciated, or understood, where Bigger Thomas was coming from.  They lamented the novel’s lack of positive characters and absence of sympathetic white people.  Some of Wright’s party comrades were also ill-at-ease with his portrayal of Communists in the novel and they attacked the book with the Stalinist vitriol of the literary ideologue.  Wright lapsed from active membership in response.

His next book, American Hunger, took a bitter biographical tour of racism in the south and north, and also included a scathing attack on the Communist Party for its reaction to Native Son, for its slavish obedience to Moscow and for its hostility to ‘independent-minded individuals’.  There was some justice in his anti-communist broadside but also much unfairness - as Rowley notes, Wright’s “picture of the Communist Party was not balanced.  He wrote with the righteous anger of a betrayed lover”.

Whilst  Moscow was unsubtle about Wright’s defection (calling him a ‘renegade’ whose works display ‘ever-growing signs of the putrefaction common to American decadent literature’), the FBI salivated at the prospect of a Communist apostate who might prove useful for Cold War propaganda and as an informer.  However, given that another major factor for Wright’s break with the party was its downgrading of  the civil rights struggle in favour of the war effort during World War 11, the FBI rapidly cooled towards someone whose disagreement with the Communist Party was that it was ‘not revolutionary enough’, as an agent put it, ‘with respect to the advancement of the negro’.

Wright was never fully assimilated into the rest of the fold of prominent ex-communist intellectuals who contributed to the 1949 Cold War bible, The God That Failed, by British Labour MP, Richard Grossman.  Wright remained concerned about how anti-communism was being used to clamp down on civil liberties and free expression by radicals of any stripe or colour and he declined Grossman’s invitation to contribute to an updated book.

When State Department officials threatened their troublesome new anti-communist ally with a career-damaging show trial before Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, Wright vowed never to testify, and when he found out in 1960 that it was the CIA that was behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had co-opted Wright by funding and publishing him, he was pained that for years “he had in fact been a propaganda tool for the CIA”.

Wright died in mysterious circumstances in 1960, aged just 52.  Although speculation that the FBI or CIA were involved remains just that, the sudden absence of a talented writer who was a fervent critic of racism in the US was happily to the benefit of the capitalist secret police and their political masters.

Wright’s narrative power as a writer is well served by Rowley’s story-telling rhythm whilst her political assessment of Wright is judicious with only infrequent lapses when Wright’s communist decade is distorted through his unfairly negative, latter-day anti-communism.  In the end, though, even this ideological filter could not screen out the blot of racism from the American capitalist tapestry which Wright had portrayed with force and artistry.

BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History by FLORENCE WILLIAMS

BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History

By FLORENCE WILLIAMS
Text Publishing, 2012, 338 pages, $34.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The reason women have evolved breasts, says science journalist, Florence Williams, is for feeding and protecting the health of infants and not as sexual objects, the usual reason advanced in a field of science for so long dominated by breast-fancying men.  The natural history of the breast, however, is threatened by an unnaturally toxic world.

Breast milk, for example, contains a suite of industrial additives, many of them known or probable carcinogens, never meant to be ingested by mothers or passed onto their infants.  These include flame-retardants, perchlorate (a jet-fuel ingredient), DDT, polychlorinated biphenyls (industrial solvents), mercury, lead, benzene and arsenic.  From paint thinners and toilet deodorisers, they come.  From electronics and furnishings.  From food and from cosmetics.

Phthalates, which guarantee cancer in mice, are ubiquitous in human lives.  Used as scent binders in personal hygiene products, and as a softening agent in plastics, phthalates migrate into human tissue, with a special fondness for the fat-laden breast.  Their partner in cancer is Bisphenol A (BPA), an ingredient of polycarbonate plastic which is perpetually to hand in plastic bottles, plastic toys, rubber gloves, food cans, CDs, mobile phones, shopping receipts and dozens more household objects.

This deadly duo saturate the breast, the site of most tumours in women, and they are amongst the prime chemical suspects for the doubling of the incidence of breast cancer since the 1940s.  Better diagnostics and other post-1940s risk factors (such as oral contraceptive use, ageing, obesity, early puberty, older age of first birth and a smaller number of pregnancies) explain only a small part of this increase.

Left in the frame is the increase in chemical exposure, especially to chemicals which mimic oestrogen and other hormones and which increase vulnerability to cancerous mutation or errors from breast cell replication.  Breast cancer is most common in the developed world which has the highest household presence of toxic chemicals.

This breast-hostile environment pits health against capitalist profit and its government guardians.  BPA, for example, generates annual profits in the US of $6 billion as well as breast cancer.  “The phenomenal power of the chemical industry”, says Williams, ensures a lax regulatory environment allowing the 82,000 different chemicals in use, with 800 more added each year, virtually free reign from government oversight.

Standard business and government policy is to assume that all chemicals are safe until proven otherwise.  Adequate testing is not required whilst food, drugs and cosmetics are exempt from labelling for biologically-active synthetic chemicals.  The long latency between chemical exposure and cancer, allows a chemical industry to cynically “sow seeds of scientific doubt” about the link between chemicals and cancer.

Government reluctance to harm corporate profit also smooths the way for tumours through public health crises.  Obesity, and a diet high in fats and low in fibre, increases the risk of breast cancer but little government action, if any, is taken against the food industry to counter the five thousand commercials, half about junk food, which the average American girl will watch during her childhood.

The same irresponsible corporate and government attitude has marked the rest of the unnatural history of breasts.  For post-menopausal women, the ill-fated Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) assisted only around 10% of menopausal women whose symptoms were clinically serious whilst the other 90% were subjected to HRT’s dangerous dose of synthetic hormones because it is “more profitable to do so”.  The 26% increase in breast cancer associated with HRT use was the human cost of greedy pharmaceutical companies doing business.

As with menopause, so too is ‘micromastia’ (small breasts) a concocted ‘disease’ requiring a profitable technology (a global market of $800 million for breast implants) in a tale of “marketing and mass hysteria” over breast envy.  Mastectomy patients account for only 20% of silicone gel injections or implant surgery but the ‘vanity’ majority bear the health burden of complications such as toxic ruptures (especially if the implant is secretly made from cheap industrial-grade silicone), plus a recipe of re-operations, costly MRIs and reduced ability to detect early breast cancer.

Infant formula rounds out the depressing theme of corporate greed and government negligence.  Breast is best for infant nutrition, for disease protection, for cognitive development (formula milk is as detrimental to child IQ as lead in gasoline and paint) and for immunological future-proofing (the 800 species of bacteria in human breast milk establish essential colonies of pathogen-fighting gut flora).  Formula companies, however, seek to crash this monopoly by exploiting the guilt that can arise from mothers who give up breast-feeding because of soreness and mastitis.

Williams concludes that it is folly to try to individually safeguard one’s family from chemicals and from synthetic breast components.  Government, and chemical and medical companies, she says, “need to change the way they test, manufacture and market” their potentially lethal products.  She is right - keeping abreast of the profit motive is the biggest challenge to women’s health under capitalism.