The basis of all political satire is the belief that as human beings we turn away from evil with horror. This seems like a moral position and it is. The satirist is a moralist manqué. The satire seeks your laughter at the possibility of evil-in-the-everyday being taken to its logical extreme. But what if the logical extreme has been crossed? Where can you go?
Just before you begin to think of the New and Improved Axis of Evil that is in power across the globe, know this. There has not been a world that did not think it was in the worst possible state and that there was no going back. I do not espouse factfulness although I see the point of it.
We begin to become less and less accustomed to nature red in tooth and claw and so our points of outrage begin to move; some of them get erased. You aren’t really outraged at the thought of a man with a man as if lying with a woman, are you? But your grandfather might have had a different and much more choleric position on that. I am not being ageist here, merely suggesting that we should not take our own sensitivities to be the sensitivity of the world.
Challenging task
Satire was invented to deal with a world gone mad but it spoke to a world that the satirist assumed was sane. What if you begin
with the assumption that the world is itself a bit abnormal? That makes your position even more of a moral one for you are saying, ‘In holding up a mirror to you, I excuse myself from looking’.
But there is also the possibility now of deploying magic and creating a world in which there are endless possibilities of non-real. This is not the crude and somewhat unstable magic of Rowling; for if you throw out the laws of science and bones may be healed with a spell what price the reversal of death? If a rather pathetic girl in a toilet can speak to the living, why can’t the Mage Dumbledore?
Three voices
Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif sets itself a difficult and challenging task. It seeks to create a credible universe using three narratives that work their way around and into each other. There is a young man called Momo who seeks more than just bare survival in the refugee camp to which international politics has consigned him. There is an airman who has crashed in the middle of the desert and has begun to walk away from the wreckage to confront the mirages of militarism. And there is a dog and before you begin to think Lassie, remember this.
The dog is an unclean animal in Islam. An exception is made I am told for the Saluki, a beautiful hunting dog that can outrun a gazelle and so provide meat for the pot, but that’s not why it has an exemption. (After all, I assume that a hungry Saluki is as likely to be a coprophage as any pi dog or Mutt.) It is said to have kept watch over Prophet Mohammed when he took refuge in sleep as he fled his enemies. This makes the dog an outsider twice over. That he has had a limb fractured is another part of this multilayered metaphor.
Thus we have three voices and Hanif knows well enough that we are most likely to choose the American airman’s as the most reliable voice. The dog is a dog is a dog and so we can only believe in it as much as we are not speciesist. Momo is a Muslim is a conman is a self-confessed go-getter. He has a missing elder brother, Bro Ali, a vital absence, Caesar in the last acts of the play. But we know that an American airman who has crashed his plane is an unreliable narrator too.
And so we are confronted by the possibility that a narrative may no longer take Everyman by the hand and lead him through the maze of today. The narrative is now a mirror and we will see what we want in it. If we do not like what we see, it will be because we do not like who we are. Because we do not like to remember. Mutt acts now as our ethical compass.
We’ll remember
“Red birds are real. The reason we don’t see them is because we don’t want to. Because if we see them, we’ll remember. When someone dies in a raid or a shooting or when someone’s throat is slit, their last drop of blood transforms into a tiny red bird and flies away. And then reappears when we are trying hard to forget them, when we think we have forgotten them, when we think we have learned to live without them, when we utter those stupid words that we have ‘moved on’.”
From what can we move on? The air is filled with red birds, Hanif says. This is not a case of exploding mangoes; it could not be but it reminds you what a magnificent writer Hanif is.
The writer is a poet and novelist.
Red Birds; Mohammed Hanif,
