Not your average suicide bomber
Anita Agrawal
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Bissoondath : putting a human face on terrorism
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Neil Bissoondath paints a timely portrait as the Ottawa International Writers Festival takes off
Our views of suicide bombers are often guided by stereotypes, like the notion that these people must be religiously brainwashed or mentally unstable to do what they do. Conjectural media headlines and interpretations devoid of history and context suggest that every now and then fundamentalist loonies just randomly decide to blow people to bits along with themselves. Canadian author Neil Bissoondath wanted to dispel such myths when he wrote his latest novel, The Unyielding Clamour of the Night, a humanistic and timely character sketch of the would-be suicide bomber.
Bissoondath is the author of several novels and one short story collection, but is well known for his one non-fiction best-seller, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. And he's in town this week for the Ottawa International Writers Festival (Monday October 3, at 7:30 p.m.). I asked him in a recent phone conversation from his home in Quebec City about the difference between writing fiction and non-fiction.
"Novels allow us to access human contradiction whereas non-fiction only gives us an intellectual explanation. As humans we are contradictory beings, we are logical as we are also illogical. That element is what is fascinating to me and that's why I prefer fiction."
Surprisingly the idea for his latest novel came to Bissoondath well before the events of September 11, 2001. "The idea of the book first came to me in February of 2001," he said. "I was writing and working on something and then
the first scene of the novel just came to me. I had Arun, the setting and the characters and I just followed Arun wherever he led me." In The Unyielding Clamour of the Night, Bissoondath explores the various political, social, economic and individual circumstances that turn one otherwise ordinary school teacher into a suicide bomber. In our conversation, he used the recent London bombings to put it into perspective. "One of the young men [suicide bombers] in London was a big cricket fan. When I heard that, I thought we could have had a great time talking about cricket."
Bissoondath introduces us to an unlikely "hero." Arun is a quiet 21-year-old amputee who turns his back on a lucrative family publishing business to teach the impoverished children of Omeara. It's a war-torn village in the south of a fictional, nameless island somewhere in the Indian Ocean which Bissoondath claims is "a composite of many places but is inspired in some sense by Trinidad, my having grown up there."
Omeara is reminiscent of any small third world nation riven by ethnic conflict, so Bissoondath provides no detailed account of the nature of the conflict there. "This was a young man's story-Arun's story. I didn't want politics or personal detail to overwhelm his story," he told me. "Religion is incidental to him. Ethnicity is incidental to him. He is not a nationalist and I only wanted to sketch in a historical background, just enough to give a general historical context to the place. This story could have taken place in any country." Or as one of his characters recalls, "We don't remember the past, we live it."
Along his journey, and upon his arrival in Omeara, Arun is introduced to a hodgepodge of characters. There is the town's reputed vegetarian butcher, an alluring bartender who's a teetotaler and Arun's love interest, a religiously zealous general, a Janus-faced captain who in his spare time reads Russian literature, and finally a small-time wheeler and dealer who aspires to live the American capitalist dream. Despite their seemingly contradictory personalities, none of them get any more complex than our initial impressions of them.
One cannot help but be reminded of the ethereal, emotional detachment of "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles after reading The Unyielding Clamour of the Night; everyday bombs shatter, poverty increases, genocide occurs. Yet all of this is received with less than a yawn. Bombs do explode in Omeara and many of the central figures are killed off, but the locals dismiss such violence as background noise. No one breaks down, no one has a life transformation, and people continue to make do with their meagre circumstances.
This is both the strength of Bissoondath's novel and its drawback. For war-rife zones, existence depends on surviving one day at a time, encountering war and all that comes with it becomes a natural process and if this is what Bissoondath meant to convey he has done so quite effortlessly.
Ultimately, stories of such torture and violence as depicted in The Unyielding Clamour of the Night should garner intense emotional responses from readers. But it doesn't happen, and readers will feel detached from both the characters and the calamities that strike them. This especially makes the first two thirds of the book difficult to read; the story is long drawn-out and little happens. We are never deeply involved with the characters of Omeara and they often come off as secondary to Bissoondath's central tenet.
The story shifts rapidly during the last third of the book as the pace quickens and a dramatic turn of events occurs. Readers seeking a treatise to help understand the global political climate will find none of that here, but it is a well crafted coming-of-age story garnering a mixed reception-something the author expected.
"The story is not to be read as a justification for terrorism. I am just hoping that when these attacks occur that people will remember Arun-that these [suicide bombers] are human beings as well-and those human beings are driven to this extreme due to various circumstances. If we insist on seeing the world simply in terms of good and bad, we are simplifying the situation to the point that we will never find the answers."
See Neil Bissoondath in conversation with Wayson Choy, Lawrence Osgood and Jaspreet Singh at Writing Life #4, The Ottawa International Writers Festival, Monday October 3, at 7:30 p.m., Library and Archives (395 Wellington Street).
I am open-minded enough to read a book like this, and try and gain perspective on an issue that I know very little about. As the author states, this book doesn't justify terrorism, and it is giving a face to a group (suicide bombers), that rarely, if ever given any kind of light surrounding their beliefs, or background. As the saying goes, "one person's freedom fighter, is another person's terrorist." There are different forms of what the west has called terrorism. In some cases, it's more appropriate to call it civil war, but that doesn't grab the headlines, right? I wouldn't include suicide bombing as an appropriate form of civil war tactics,or anything else that involves innocent people being killed. It's one thing to have an idea, but when those ideas become more important then human life, something is wrong.
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Kelly Martel
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{24 votes}
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| An incredible opportunity |
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The Ottawa International Writers' Festival has done it again by bringing the best writers to our capital! Neil Bissoondath is no exception. You definately need to open your Western mind to truly value and appreciate such a piece of work. I'm not sure how the text will be taken, but I hope that we can understand (or at least try) why a suicide bomber does what he or she does.
There is so much more to terrorism that we may never know, but here is an opportunity to take a peak at a whole new realm.
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Amie Revell
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{14 votes}
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| Taking the time to understand the life of a suicide bomber is worthwhile |
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I am certain that Neil Bissoondath, being a premier writer, will accomplish the task elegantly. The special element of a novel is that it enables us to experience another person's consciousness, as opposed to something like the news that tells us what occurs with occasionally some enlightening historical background.
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Karen Mohindra
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{8 votes}
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