Stewart Home

[That old fellow traveller of ours, the novelist and cultural terrorist Stewart Home, blogged a few interesting things about Manituana, which we duly reproduce. He also reviewed Q some time ago.]

Manituana by Wu Ming

Following on from Q (authored as Luther Blissett) and 54, comes a new novel Manituana by the Bologna fiction collective known as Wu Ming. Verso are publishing Shaun Whiteside’s English translation, the proof copies were circulated last month, and the book will be available in both the UK and the US shortly. Like the earlier tomes by the same authors, Manituana is a heavily researched historical novel that speaks as much about a future we have yet to make, as the past in which it is set. The main action takes place around the ‘American War of Independence’, with the focus on the alliance the Iroquois Indians made with the English.

The Iroquois way of life was destroyed by the development of capitalism, and this entailed the exploitation of both Africa and the Americas, as well as the European working class. The diseases that accompanied European traders and their goods decimated the indigenous American population and thereby opened the way for their conquest. The Iroquois were caught between a rock and a hard place and mostly chose to ally with ‘perfidious Albion’, rather than the equally barbarous French or – slightly later – the genocidal armies of George Washington. However, for me the real ‘heroes’ of this novel are not the characters who take up the bulk of its pages (some are  actual historical figures), but rather those shadowy proletarian figures who attempt to make an alliance with the Iroquois when some of their leaders visit London.  From page 199 of Marituana: (more…)

The old man’s spit hit the eye of far-right MP Giorgio Almirante.
A metre further on, meanwhile, a monstrous gash rent the face of his twin.
‘That takes nerve,’ Garibaldi cursed as he cleared his throat and prepared new ammunition. ‘A fascist like that, coming here to speak to us, in Bologna, on the 1st of May. What does he think he’s doing?’
‘It’s like this,’ the other man agreed. ‘It’s all very well saying that we’re against the atom bomb and all things like that, but if they give one to me, a nice bomb, and they tell me me to fire it on Washington, the Americans would be scared shitless, the wankers, and stop telling us what to do, you can be sure I’d press that button, I don’t care about women and children, I’d press it and there’s an end to it, because if you have to choose between two misfortunes you have to choose the less severe.’
(more…)