Bait and Switch

“How To Be A Revolutionary – a Novel” by C.A. Davids, 2021

This is a novel about how perhaps not to be a revolutionary. It bounces between Shanghai, Cape Town, Harlem and a bit in Beijing. The author worked in advertising for many years and lives in Cape Town. It attempts to weave together the stories of anti-Apartheid youth activists; a CCP propagandist who finds out intimate facts about Tienanmen and the great famine of the late 1950s in China … and Langston Hughes. In a way the use of 'revolution' is similar to advertising, to get people to buy the book. The 'revolution' in cleansers, for instance. So I did.

Hughes was red-baited because of his closeness to the Communist Party. In scenes here he is detained by Japanese security for talking to Madame Sun-Yat Sen, who was friendly to socialism, and the great writer Le Hsun, who was close to the CCP when he visited him in Shanghai in 1933. Why Hughes is in this book seems to be an attempt to give it some literary and cultural gravitas. He's represented here in a series of letters to an unknown friend he wrote from Harlem. Hughes was never a Communist or a small 'c' communist but he was an anti-racist, which is his link to the CP and other socialists. Right-wingers think everyone to their left is a communist and his politics got him alienated from the proper social forces, so he might as well have been.

The lead character is a sub-consul for South Africa in the post-Apartheid government in Shanghai. Years earlier she was the close friend of a young woman in Cape Town who tried to bomb a police station and was fooled by state security, BOSS, into using a bomb that would kill her instead. Now this consul woman seems to be having a moment of rebellion, as she's working for the increasingly conservative South African ANC as a government asset. She testifies at the 1990s “Truth and Reconciliation” events about the set-up that killed her friend. The South African T&RC process never put anyone in jail; it served as a sort of national talk therapy. The BOSS got off scot-free, as is usual with unfinished revolutions.

In Shanghai, she is handed several manuscripts she can't read by an older Chinese man who has gathered personal information on the great famine in the countryside, which killed many in his village, including his parents and relatives. He seeks information about their fate and finds out his starving mother was executed by the government for complaining. It is alleged that food was taken from rural areas to feed the urban population while the peasants died. The cause of the famine is left unknown, a vagary that seems dishonest. She involves others in the consular world to translate the pages, then sends copies off to her alienated husband back in Cape Town for safe-keeping. She loses her job because of this and is expelled from China.

That is it in a nutshell. This is more a personal story then a voyage into how to be a revolutionary, because she certainly is not. At best she is a journalist and at one time a youthful anti-Apartheid activist. Nor was Langston Hughes strictly a 'revolutionary' – he was a poet and a truth-teller. Nor was the Chinese man, as he worked for many years as a propagandist for the CCP, and only later started digging into the facts as a researcher. Perhaps journalists, truth-tellers and researchers are her definition of revolutionaries but that is a liberal definition. None of these people wanted or wants a social revolution in the first place. There is no class struggle here. It's use is part of literary license.

The selection of letters from Hughes are from a real collection he wrote to writers in South Africa. The manuscript on the horrors of the famine and the rebellion around Tienanmen will probably find its way to a publisher outside China under a pseudonym, according to the book. It is even hinted that this book is that, but fictionalized. Tienanmen is a far larger topic than the killings in the square, as it relates to labor struggle, rising prices, bureaucratic control and nation-wide unrest. The lead character and her consular friends are subjected to intensive surveillance – tails, surreptitious entry into apartments, probably eves-dropping, so it paints a dark picture of Chinese surveillance methods, which include blocking any internal internet references to politically touchy subjects – like Tienanmen, the Great Leap Forward, the GPCR or the famine.  Certainly the CCP learned from that crisis, always attempting not to repeat it.

Davids is not a socialist or an apparent activist, but does advertising for arts organizations and at one time, Levi-Strauss. I'm not sure what to say about this book but it's a predictable, gauzy and impressionistic approach to the subject. This is a product of Davids' MA in creative writing, and certainly reads like it. It does paint a picture of political activism, which is rare in fiction. But it provides no hard guide to success against the forces of capital or authoritarian bureaucracy. In a way, it's just another prop to concerned liberalism. Certainly the New York Times saw it that way in their review.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “China,” “South Africa,” “Langston Hughes” or “Harlem.”

And I bought it at Boneshaker Books!

The Cultural Marxist / July 19, 2024