Mo Yan's World in RED SORGHUM

Sorghum, though not red

Guan Moye is the real name of Mo Yan.He was born in the same province that provides the setting of his novel ‘Red Sorghum’.

Mo Yan’s narrative technique involves even the minute details of every incident and location in the novel.

Mo Yan

An example from the first chapter of ‘Red Sorghum’:

 

‘The surrounding mist grew more sluggish once they were in the sorghum field. The stalks screeched in secret resentment when the men and equipment bumped against them, sending large, mournful beads of water splashing to the ground. The water was ice-cold, clear and sparkling, and deliciously refreshing. Father looked up, and a large drop fell into his mouth.’

Even those who have not walked through such a field in their life may feel the splash of water beads on their face when they read it.

This is the field where the main heroine, Dai Fanglian- the novelist’s grandma, is ‘raped’ or  ‘consummated’ at the age of fifteen by his granddad. When you read the novel, you understand why both these terms are correct to refer to the sex they had among the sorghum stalks. The way she is betrothed to Shan Bianlang, the richest man in the Northeast Gaomi Township and carried away in a sedan chair later will clarify your doubt.

Shan Tingxiu, the groom’s father one day spots her among other ‘local flowers’ and three months later a bridal sedan chair is sent to carry her away. Like every girl of her age, she too longed for a handsome and well-educated husband.

In the days after the betrothal, girls hear pleasant sexual innuendoes usually from their friends but here what she hears is about the leprosy of her groom. Her dreams evaporate. She still believes her parents. She hopes that they will never plan anything bad for her. However, to her dismay, she understands the truth from the sedan bearers later.

                Even today, many girls have no say in choosing their life partners in many parts of this world. The part in which I live is no exception to it. Some are even deprived of their right to show their face to their fellow-beings. They are hidden in dark clothes through out their life. Nevertheless, a highly fanatic or patriarchal set up, without any scruple, claims that their women are freer under their ‘protection’. Any attempt to challenge this conviction by a non-member of such groups will be interpreted as blasphemous or against their faith.

Social myths are often interwoven with religious faith and different peoples who follow the same religion construe these myths as the inevitable part of their religion.

Although China is a nation whose foundations are thought to be cemented with the tenets of dialectical materialism, people still cherish some mythical notions.

If you are cruel to your pets or domestic animals, you should be ready to ‘reap what you have sown’.

Does Mo Yan tell this to us indirectly in this novel?

Uncle Arhat kills his mules brutally in a rage and a few hours later he is killed by the Japanese army in the same manner. On a few other occasions also, you find similar incidents.

Old Geng otherwise called Eighteen Stabs Geng, a pensioner over seventy, shoots a fox and a few seconds later the Japanese soldiers bayonet him. Whether foxes, dogs, or roosters as the victims, the sinner is, however, ‘paid for his sin’.

         Even in the case of human beings, it is the same. Japanese soldiers rape many women to death during their siege .Especially, the way the novelist’s second grandma and her ten-year-old daughter were treated by the army depicts the horror of war. Such soldiers- ‘Japanese dogs’- in the words of the hero and his men in the novel – are killed in a similar way by  Granddad later.

                The number of people killed during the Sino- Japanese war  varies in accordance with different sources.Athough the number varies from one another, the word ‘million’ is used by everyone to refer to it.

                 The war in the 1930 –s is called the Second Sino- Japanese war. Many people, particularly in China, are still said to harbour grudges over the war.

 

                In 1972, however, the People’s Republic of China established a diplomatic relationship with Japan. When the then Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, during their meeting, personally apologised to Mao Zedong for the incident, Mao said:

                “(You) don't have to say sorry; your country had made a great contribution to China. Why? Because if Imperial Japan did not start the war, how could we communists become mighty and powerful? How could we overthrow KMT? How could we defeat Chiang Kai-shek? No, we are grateful and do not want your war reparations!”

                (If that is the point, Indians must be thankful to the British in many ways.)

                The war started in the early thirties and the meeting between Mao and Tanaka was in the early seventies. Mo Yan was born in 1956. When his Granddad (Commander Yu in the novel) fought the Japanese army, his father (Douguan in the novel) was a young boy. Douguan witnessed the ambush directly and he led his life in the post-war period. He fought the dogs feeding on the corpses of war victims. The dogs themselves were an army. When his Granddad’s generation fought the Japanese army, they called the enemies ‘Japanese dogs.’ His father’s generation in Red Sorghum could not have considered the dogs ‘Japanese’ because they ate human flesh – whether of the Japanese or of the Chinese. As the novelist writes, ‘months of vagabond lives and feasting on rotting meat had awakened primal memories anaesthetised over aeons and domestication’. We learn that, in a war zone, the ‘two-legged creatures that walk erect’ are not different from such dogs.

Sedan bearers including Granddad - A still from the movie Red Sorghum

                The novelist indirectly tells us that domestication is a social and historical condition. When history leads us to the situations that awaken primal memories, man ceases to be humane and becomes simply a two-legged creature that walks erect. As public memory is short, after the revival of humane qualities, the new generation keeps on their journey to future with a ‘let bygones be bygones’-attitude.In a sense, it is as important as the need to keep up the memories of the past. Raking up the past with minute details is a herculean task. That is what Mo Yan does here. The structure of the novel itself makes it clear. A summary of the first chapter itself will elucidate it.

                Mo Yan begins the first chapter of ‘Red Sorghum’ giving us the idea that it is autobiographical. The heroine and the hero mentioned in the novel are his grandma and granddad. Although his father Douguan witnessed most of the incidents in the novel, he did not have the literary acumen or necessary insight to pen them.

                Take the following words of the narrator about Douguan:

 

He never knew how many sexual comedies my grandma had performed on this dirt path, but I knew.

 

The novel comprises frequent flashbacks that span three generations.

             From the first part of the first chapter itself, we learn the narrator’s relationship with the main characters.

 In the second part of the same chapter, you find his granddad and his father wading their way through the corpses driving a pack of dogs that are feeding on the rotten corpses.

                In the third part, read about Commander Yu and his troop comprising a few of the villagers.

                The next paragraph is the continuation of it in which Douguan is pulled along with Commander Yu.

                The fifth piece tells us what his father, Grandma and Uncle Arhat ate.

                Next paragraph: the shocking, brutal murder of Uncle Arhat by the Japanese army. They skin him alive.(Sun Five, the man who does it as no other option was left before him, goes mad.)

                Again, memory shifts to Commander Yu and his valour.

                Thus the seven ‘chunks’ make your reading memorable through the ‘events of staggering horror’ as the blurb claims. By the end of this first chapter itself, you get the feeling that you are not going to have the reading experience of a family drama with a simple love affair or domestic squabbles.

Any novel spanning more than two generations reminds us first of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Hundred years of Solitude’, especially when we find magical elements in it. On the cover page of the novel ‘ Red sorghum’,  Amy Tan , a well-known American novelist, says that Mo Yan deserves a space with Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the heart of the readers.

            Mo Yan’s characters in ‘Red Sorghum’ belong to Shandong Province, a northeast part of China, the place where the central theme spins around with the saga of the first generation in the novel.

            All the troops who fought against the Japanese army were not the personnel of the Chinese army. Yu Zhan’ao was the son of a bandit. He was, in a sense, a bandit king who commanded a troop of bandits against the invaders from Japan.

            The wounds that the war inflicted in the heart of the people of ‘Red Sorghum’ were inexplicable. Mo Yan’s narration has photographic fidelity to all the events. He depicts the war front-turned village very vividly. Even the slightest movement of a leaf nearby and the colour of the rectum of the flying crows after feeding on the corpses are described better than an eyewitness could do it. The director of the film ‘Red Sorghum’ has tried to include maximum details as such in his movie based on the novel but when we watch it, we miss the details unless we watch it repeatedly. (I watched the movie and as it was before I completed reading the novel, it had profound influence on my mental images of the characters. Granddad in the movie best fits my imagination of the character in the novel.) When we read the novel, we never feel like skipping his descriptions of its location or characters. In fact, these descriptions make the novel a treat to our reading.

            The narrator, his father and granddad are the three characters which link the three periods in the history. The scenes, that show us how inhuman can human beings be in a warfront, make us dumbfounded. Two of the horrific scenes in the post-war (or ‘after the ambush’ period) are when the dogs chew up the thighs of the dead women and they attack Douguan (narrator’s father) resulting in the loss of one of his testicles.Such scenes make us think of the gruesome consequence of a war. The wounds left by war in the minds of the survivors take long time to heal.

            Granddad first kills a monk who would sleep with his mother and then Dai fenglian’s husband the leper and his son. The next one is the murder of Spotted Neck. By the time he became commander Yu, he was on a ‘killing spree’.

            During his fight with the Japanese, a Japanese soldier attacked by him pleads for his life. The soldier shows the photos of his wife and a child and ‘whimpers’. Commander’s son (i.e. the narrator’s father) requests him to let the Japanese go. However, Yu does not spare his life. We may think how cruel he is  but when we read about  the brutalities of the Japanese soldiers to his family, later i.e. the way his pregnant wife (Second grandma) and their ten year old daughter, were treated, the lack of mercy that granddad showed to the soldier who pleaded mercy is vindicated. (A Japanese soldier who survived the war can of course write another novel from his point of view.) But whatever may be the reasons, it is a fact that wars kill not only the living things, but also obliterate the qualities that human beings have acquired through their social life.

            You must have already noted the peculiar names of some characters mentioned already. The heroine Dai Fenglian is also called ‘Little Nine’ just because she was born on the ninth day of the sixth month. The novel begins with the phrase ‘The ninth day of the eighth lunar month, 1939’                 

            The magistrate Nine Dreams Cao, Five Monkeys Shan, Five Troubles, Fang Six, Fang Seven, Big Tooth Yu, Black Eye, and Spotted Neck, Eighteen stabs Geng...

            You find the names quite funny but they are not funny characters. The incidents with which they are associated  cannot be considered funny. However, there are humorous incidents in the novel. The secret of the taste of Sorghum Wine is one of them.

            The heroine Dai Fenglian (Little Nine) is never touched by her leper husband but the propaganda that she has been touched saves her from some sexual assaults.

Little Nine from the movie Red Sorgum

            In fact, her legal husband and his son were killed by Commander Yu before they could touch the lady. She becomes the legal heir of the rich distillery and later, when she is kidnapped by Spotted Neck, he does not dare to do anything  other than to ‘feel her breast’. It is this bit of information that leads the narrator’s Granddad to the incidents that prove his determination and valour as a fighter. He kills spotted Neck.

            Anyway, the reading of the novel ‘Red Sorghum’ will lead you through many breathtaking incidents. But those who expect only the details of the communist upsurge or anti- communist connotations may not derive much satisfaction in their reading. Whatever may be your reason for reading it, ‘Red Sorghum’ will arrest your attention until the last word in it.

            I tried to associate it with a few other books based on the life of the people of China. Jack Belden’s ‘China Shakes the World’ gives us almost a clear picture of China especially during the much-feted Cultural Revolution.  ‘An African Student in China’ by Emmanuel John Hevi caters to the needs of anti- communist readers. ‘To Live’, a novel by Yu Hua presents the life of the people in China from a different point of view. The Sino - Japanese war, nationalists and communists play significant roles in the lives of the characters in his novel too.

 But Mo Yan’s style of narration is unique and, most probably, that is why he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The world that the novel ‘Red Sorghum’ opens before us is a grim reminder to warmongers.