Dictator lit
April 28, 2017 7:21 AM   Subscribe

The author's goal is to subject himself to as much tyrant prose as he can bear, reporting back on his findings in this space, until the will to live deserts him. In 2009, Daniel Kalder began an occasional series of reviews of books written by dictators, starting with Hoxha's memoir on Stalin. He moved on to Brezhnev ("bathetic agitprop"), Rahmon ("it could be much worse"), Khomeini ("Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night"), Gaddafi ("surreal rants and bizarre streams of consciousness"), Kim Jong Il ("awful enough to kill infants if read aloud"), and Saddam Hussein ("a sudden eruption of interspecies lust"). Castro's Che memoir seems to have finally done him in in 2013.
posted by clawsoon (16 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
Start of the Hoxha piece:
Even by the standards of psychotic 20th-century communist dictators, Albania's Enver Hoxha (1908-1985) stands out as exceptional. Born in a country that was still 99% agrarian and ruled between 1925 and 1939 by a chap named Zog, Hoxha rose to power after the second world war and soon gained notoriety as an ultra-Stalinist, continuously purging the ruling Party of Labour for 40 years while steering Albania into a state of profound poverty and near total isolation.
Somebody needs to register the username "a chap named Zog" ASAP. That is all.
posted by languagehat at 7:52 AM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Kalder also wrote two entertaining travelogues around the former Soviet world, Lost Cosmonaut and Strange Telescopes.
posted by acb at 7:53 AM on April 28, 2017


Kalder's personal website is full of interesting little nooks and crannies in ye olde blogge mould. His link to the Guardian archive of his work for them turns up a few more of these Dictator Lit reviews: Turkmenistan's Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov and Saparmurat Turkmenbashi, and Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov.

Nice find - thanks!
posted by rory at 8:06 AM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


But is Khomeini's stuff any good? According to a pro-regime site:

Imam Khomeini was an outstanding poet and literary figure of Persian language. His prose was elegant and his poetry delicate. He was popular in this respect from the very beginning of his student days in Qum and was known for the soundness of his speech and writings.

But they would say that, wouldn't they? As for those of us who don't speak Persian, how are we to judge?


Uh, maybe ask someone who speaks Persian? It's not ancient Babylonian, for cripes sake, there's 4+ million speakers outside Iran. It's not even that hard; it's Indo-European!
posted by leotrotsky at 8:14 AM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Cue my only Enver Hoxha joke:

A line forms at the gates of the afterlife as the dead wait to be processed by Saint Peter. The soul at the head of the line steps up, and Peter asks:

"Who are you?"
"I am Ludwig van Beethoven!"
"Well, I'm afraid you'll have to prove that."
"Give me paper and a quill!"

Beethoven dashes off a quick, beautiful sonata.

"Very good, Maestro. Please go on in."

The next soul steps up.

"And who are you?"
"I am William Shakespeare."
"I'll need some proof of your identity."

Shakespeare thinks a moment, and recites a freshly-composed sonnet.

"That's fine, thank you. Please proceed."

The next soul steps up.

"And you are?"
"I am Enver Hoxha, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Albania!"
"Well, you'll have to prove who you are, just like Beethoven and Shakespeare."
"Beethoven? Shakespeare? Who are they?"
"That's perfect, Mr. General Secretary. Go right on in."
posted by McCoy Pauley at 8:49 AM on April 28, 2017 [15 favorites]


In Syracuse NY, in the 80s, the local paper "Syracuse New Times" columnist, Roland Sweet, created a cartoon called Albania, lampooning the absurdity there. Characters often remarked, "Hoxha!" He is the only reason I ever knew Hoxha's name.
posted by corvikate at 8:51 AM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


leotrotsky: Uh, maybe ask someone who speaks Persian?

Part of Kalder's accomplishment here lies in merely getting through most of these works; asking for effort beyond that may be asking too much.

But you may not know for what you wish: According to this article, Persian literary critics have ignored entirely the modern incarnation of the poetic genre favoured by Khomeini.
posted by clawsoon at 9:11 AM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Somebody needs to register the username "a chap named Zog" ASAP

I strongly advise reading as much about King Zog of Albania as you can. He survived more assassination attempts than any other head of state, including one in which he returned fire with his own personal revolver.

Death to the monarchy etc., but anybody in this photo of Zog and his siblings could definitely get it.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/1f/3d/da/1f3ddafcb5cc7a0141f657435680b49e.jpg
posted by turntraitor at 9:30 AM on April 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


so on the one hand, hoxha jokes are sort of all over contemporary marxist meme culture — from the outside, the combination of the bunkerization of Albania and the ever-increasingly deranged insistence that only hoxha could defend marxism-leninism against the scourge of revisionism is irresistible.

But on the other hand, there's an article in this odd collection titled "The Absence of Albanian Joke about Socialism, Or Why Some Dictatorships are Not Funny" (you can read at least some of it on google books), that attempts to explain why there were relatively few jokes about Hoxha during and after his regime. It's been a while since I've read it, but the thesis as I remember it is that the Albanian response to the Hoxha dictatorship didn't really accommodate humor as a means of playful resistance like (for example) the Romanian response to CeauČ™escu did. On the one hand, this is because Hoxha's regime viciously punished jokes against it — the author quotes an Albanian who had spent twenty years in prison for having once said he wanted to eat a steak as big as Mao's face — but on the other hand, the people of Albania were on the whole as devoted to the project of Albanian independence as Hoxha was, and so Hoxha's brutal regime's exploitation of that underdog-nationalist drive was met with deep, deep sadness rather than with resistance, and that sadness just wasn't something that anyone could joke about. There's a bit in that article... lemme find it... where an Albanian who had lived through Hoxha responded to the author's question about what jokes they told about the Hoxha regime by saying "we tell jokes that are funny, not about Enver Hoxha."

but perversely, midway through the article there's a joke about Hoxha that's just devastatingly funny, if also very sad. context: one of Hoxha's slogans was "We will eat grass before we ask the enemy for help!" (more context: once Hoxha split from Mao, literally every other country in the world was considered "the enemy"). anyway, the joke:
A poor villager tells her husband, "Your family is starving, go down to Tirana and ask our leaders for help." So the villager walks to Tirana, knocks on the door of the first house he sees, and Mehmet Shehu, Hoxha's right hand man, opens it. "Comrad Shehu," says the villager, "my family is starving and I would rather eat grass than go to the enemy for help." Shehu says, "you have done the right thing," gives him 100 lek, and closes the door. Remembering the order of his wife, the villager goes to the house of Enver Hoxha and knocks. When Enver answers he says "Uncle Enver, my family is starving and I would rather eat grass than go to the enemy for help." Enver replies "Comrade, you have done the right thing. Start on this side of the yard and if you're still hungry you can go round the back."
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:01 AM on April 28, 2017 [12 favorites]


one in which he returned fire with his own personal revolver

As dramatized in Aria; King Zog was played by Theresa Russell.
posted by zompist at 3:29 PM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


A (very) distant analogy to the experience of reading Hoxha is suffering through the "dizzy with success" rhetoric the government produces every summer when the year's inflated exam results are released.

Written in 2009; those, indeed, were more innocent times.
posted by acb at 3:43 PM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is just one reason I love Metafilter -- I'm going to sleep knowing twice as many Enver Hoxha jokes as I did when I woke up this morning.

Thank you as always, You Can't Tip a Buick, for teaching me something I didn't know.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 8:46 PM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


> Uh, maybe ask someone who speaks Persian?

He did. He went to the pro-regime site. If he had gone to an anti-regime site, he might have gotten a different answer. When you're dealing with a polarizing figure, a straight answer is hard to come by.

And yes, he could learn Persian himself, but to get to a level where one can judge poetry - that's a lot to expect. This is a novelty piece for a newspaper, it ain't a serious study for all time.
posted by IndigoJones at 4:30 AM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


"bathetic agitprop" is totally the name of my new post-punk band.
posted by kaymac at 6:24 AM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Cue my only Enver Hoxha joke:

I know one in which he plays a supporting role: decades ago I saw a Venn diagram of two partly overlapping circles. One contained a point marked "Enver Hoxha" and the circle was labelled "BALKAN DICTATORS." The other circle had a point marked "Michael" and was marked as "JACKSON BROTHERS."

In the overlap, a point was indicated as "Tito."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:11 PM on April 29, 2017 [8 favorites]


Poetry which makes mention of taverns and love, often same sex love is common in a number of Muslim countries. It's considered mystical and refined and is fairly old-fashioned.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 7:47 PM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


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