Trigger warnings for animal cruelty and references to rape.
In 1980, the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) went to war in Peru. For almost twenty years, Senderistas terrorized anyone who didn’t follow their radical version of communism: urban and rural, rich and poor. Avik Jain Chatlani’s disturbing novel-in-stories, This Country is No Longer Yours, gives us a sense of what living in Peru might have been like in the last decades of the twentieth century. Chatlani shows us revolutionaries, reactionaries, survivors, and victims. Most of all, Chatlani shows us a country in turmoil with itself.
The first tale was the most unsettling to me. A Peruvian academic and socialist travels to Cambodia to learn from, of all people, the Khmer Rouge. This academic (who may or may not be the founder of Sendero Luminoso, Abimael Guzmán) approves of the violent changes the Khmer Rouge has inflicted on the population. The cities have been depopulated. Everyone who wasn’t immediately murdered was either sent to work in the fields with the meagerest of tools or to monstrous prisons for torture and execution. Everyone was suspect, even for things as minor as wearing glasses (which apparently indicated that the wearer was an intellectual). Our narrator feasts with Khmer Rouge officials before falling sick. The regime bends the rules for their guest, giving him forbidden Western medicines to cure him before shipping him back to Peru.
The second and longest story features another nameless narrator. This narrator is just as ruthless as the one we met in the first story but he works for the authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori. We witness not just the violence committed by the Senderistas but also by this narrator as he conducts raids and interrogates sympathizers and suspects. The Senderistas are presented as so vile that it’s easy to side with this government agent at first, at least until the impunity given to him by the Fujimori government corrupts him into using his authority to murder an innocent man in order to gain access to the innocent’s lover.
The third story, one of the few with named characters, didn’t make as much of an impression on me as the other three. The main character of this section, Ximena, is a journalist documenting the last flares of Senderista activity while communicating with someone named Alexandra about her inconsistent efforts to determine if her father really is a leading politician or not.
The last story was, surprisingly given the violence in the first two tales, the one that affected me the most. This layered story is told by two narrators, one reliable and one very unreliable. The unreliable one spots the reliable one on a street one day. He is surprised to see her. He’s surprised but not too surprised to see that she is a sex worker. After he almost gets flattened by a car running across the street to her, we are flooded with his memories of her when they were young revolutionaries. He has idealized her as an indomitable warrior woman. It’s only when the woman gets to tell her side of the tale that we learn that her revolution was devastatingly different from what the man remembers.
This Country is No Longer Yours asks us to reflect on the long shadows caused by years of civil war from the perspective of perpetrators (on both sides of the war) and from those who did their best to survive that war, as well as from the viewpoint of the next generation. We are left to wonder about the cost of remaking the world according to the visions of people who firmly believe that they are right. We have to think about the corrosive effects of committing acts of violence on other humans. We can also think about justice, though I found that difficult because the country in this novel hasn’t known peace long enough to think about truth and reconciliation.
I found a lot of this book very interesting but I struggled to understand it, mostly because of the author’s choice to leave many of the characters unnamed. The lack of names coupled with the use of third-person perspective in most of the stories made it very hard for me to keep track of characters. It’s really hard to know what’s going on when there are so many hes and shes on the page with no names and often no descriptions of their appearance or role.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.