A novel that I had wanted to read for a very long time; a story about the dictator Trujillo who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years. The novel is arranged as an episodic narrative tale which follows the events of the deadly, brutal regime from three points of view, that of Urania Cabral, the daughter of disavowed and defamed Senator Cabral, the events during the last days before his assassination from the office and palace of Trujillo and from the camp of the assassins who have conspired to kill Trujillo and avenge their horrors, or insults.
From each of these three (Stations) as such, the horrors of the Trujillo Regime are traced in episodes, reflections, and conversations. The Constitutional head of the state of the Dominican Republic, the Chief, the Generalissimo, his Excellency, the Benefactor, has ruled the Country as his personal fiefdom, suppressing dissent brutally, rewarding the loyalists and using the many machinations of a malfeasant governance; bribe, abduction, torture, murder, blackmail, money, rape and insult to beat the people into complete submission and spiritual colonisation.
The novel has been hailed as a representative of the Latin American; a throwback or a reflection of those cruel times when Latin America was ruled by a cartel of tyrants, dictators, macho-men who were treated as larger than life figures and who in turn treated their subjects as expendables. In this novel, Llosa explores the truculence of our ordered regimes, where seemingly disparate events have a connection in a great web of avarice, artifice and debasement that a regime can spin. A vast majority do not know what is happening; the few that know are either in the scheme of things or have been forced to lick the boots.
The novel is also about comprehension. Comprehension that comes involuntarily about the things and events around you; In Urania’s case it is a complex question of comprehending her past, but also seeking answers. The part is like a metaphoric cloak that weighs down the present with its weight. In its over bearing presence it has already shaped the present; that is the legacy of the Trujillo era. The Feast of the Goat is a recapitulation, wherein the characters dig into themselves: Urania for example when she goes to her home to visit her ailing Papa, keeps talking to him about the events of the Trujillo era. In the process, we get a perspective about the events as seen by her. Trujillo himself is shown interacting with his Generals, officers in several chapters and these offer a perspective of the regime; about what Trujillo did to the country; the burden that he carried on his shoulders, about how he brought order and governance to a chaotic country although at the cost of freedom, liberty and morality. Many of the Latin American novels that I have read have left me befuddled with their attention to memory. One does see it in ‘Chronicle of a death foretold, One hundred years of solitude and here in The Feast of the Goat.’ Dealing with memory may be an attempt to rewind the cognitive process, which is too much wired to forecasting, expectation or prediction when you are living for an objective, towards some achievement in short, leading a pragmatic, and goal driven life. Memory is a looming presence in the Latin American novel, probably because of the horror/scar of the past. The faceless actors, the labyrinthine alleys of voices, persons, works and deeds, registered in the subconscious come together to produce a hypnotic, spell-binding effect.
The novel can be read as an attempt to unravel the making of history; meticulously segregate and expose the different Trujillos that history had aided to gloss over and to create. The carnal, brutal Trujillo, the truculent, trampling Trujillo, vis-a-vis the suave saviour, the great benefactor, the meticulous administrator and the finest leader of the Republic.
Power operates in different ways. Popular culture depicts the operation of power as brute force; the wielding of batons, guns, muscles, fists and assault. But the more insidious power is that which enslaves and colonises the subjects submerging their identity to defer to the word of the leader, the Chief or the despot. And the despot colonises their consciousness in various ways. He colonises their property, their time, their energy and also their women. By being able to freely violate the honour of the wives and daughters of his officers, Trujillo establishes the role of rape and sexual assault as one of the weapons of the tyrant.
The feast of the Goat is an extraordinary work of fiction, which makes use of some real figures in the history of the Dominican Republic. The regime of Rafael Trujillo, because of its past has now more on less acquired the quality of an insomnia. The author conveys the lucidity and irrationality of this dream and why certain events remain emblematic of the collective consciousness of a Nation.