Book Review: Voice Of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba by Ivor L. Miller

Voice Of the Leopard:

African Secret Societies and Cuba

by Ivor L. Miller

     The general public is familiar with African diaspora religions in the Caribbean and South America via popular culture. Most of what people think of in association with Voudou (voodoo) or Lukumi (Santeria) involves skulls, drums, zombies, and black magic. It isn’t hard to see how film makers, artists, writers, and musicians have appropriated elements from these religions since mystical and sometimes dark imagery can easily capture the imagination. But not so many people realize that African diaspora religions are complex social systems that exist within broader historical, socio-political, and economic systems and thereby have function and meaning as groups within those larger systems. One of the lesser acknowledged African diaspora religions is Abakua, a secret society that began in Cuba in the 19^th century and continues to thrive today. Voice Of the Leopard, by the American anthropologist Ivor L. Miller, gives a broad overview of this group and the role they played in Cuban history.

When West African people were brought to Cuba as slaves, their religious practices accompanied them. While these religions were mostly forbidden in the United States, slave owners in places like Brazil, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Cuba allowed them to flourish, mostly because they relieved some psychological pressure that built up under the living conditions of slavery. This may have worked to some degree, but the number of slaves who escaped to live in isolated communities in the Sierra Maestra mountains, called “cimmanrones” or “maroons”, proves their situation was not one to envy. Nonetheless, Cuba was unique in that the colonialists allowed slaves to earn and save money which they could use to buy their way to freedom. That is one reason for Cuba having a small population of free African criollos who survived by working as craftsmen. According to members of Abakua societies, there was even a smaller number of West African immigrants who voluntarily came to Cuba to give slaves guidance on how to safeguard their religion in the new land. The accuracy of that belief is of no importance in this book because that is what the Abakua believe and it influences how they see the world.

Using linguistics and cross-cultural comparisons along with historical records, Miller has traced the origins of Abakua back to the Cross Rivers region along the border of Nigeria and Cameroon. In that part of Africa, fraternal societies called Ekpe have existed since times long before colonialism. The language, rituals, and mythologies of Abakua and Ekpe bear too many similarities to be coincidental. This is especially true because Abakua initiates have their own language that is only spoken with Abakua members and, although time and distance have caused morphological changes, it is essentially the same language spoken by Ekpe initiates. A similar linguistic analysis has been used to trace the origins of Roma (Gypsy) people to Rajastan in northern India, a significant discovery since that ethnic group existed for centuries without knowing precisely where they originated. The mapping of the human genome has recently justified these ancestral histories.

Miller gives some brief explanations about what Abakua members do. He starts by analyzing what kind of a group they are. He prefers the term “initiate society” over “secret society” since membership in the group is not kept secret, only their beliefs and practices are. Readers hoping for a detailed explanation of those beliefs and practices will inevitably be disappointed since such information is only transmitted to initiates who have risen through s series of degrees and offices to widen their scope of Abakua. Some basic information is shared with the public though, for example various motifs from the Ekpe/Abakua mythology, their transmission of historical narratives through call and response chanting done to the accompaniment of drumming and dancing, and the presence of the fundamento in every juego (lodge). The fundamento is the ceremonial centerpiece, or omphalos, of each juego. The original is said to have been brought over from Africa by the aforementioned voluntary immigrants from the Cross Rivers region who taught the slaves how to practice Abakua in Cuba. The Abakua juegos are open to men only. There is no discussion as to whether Abakua is actually a religion or not. From my limited knowledge of the society, I prefer to think it doesn’t fit easily into any category, containing elements of religion, magic, political secret societies, social clubs, and mutual aid fraternities.

Abakua juegos serve various functions. One is that of a mutual aid society. Dues collected by each juego can be used as health or life insurance for each member. Money is also collected for charity or educational funding. During the 19^th century, illiterate slaves who joined Abakua could receive some education they wouldn’t get elsewhere. At a local level, lodges provided a means for upward social mobility in a colony where such mobility was limited for free Afro-Cubans and usually unobtainable for slaves. Membership in a lodge required the mastery of knowledge, commitment, and responsibility. Money could also be raised in an Abakua society to help a slave buy their own freedom. Plus, the hierarchical nature of the juegos gave motivated individuals a means for moving up a social ladder thereby growing and maturing as people.

Abakua was also important for historical reasons. Since juego activities were secret and only accessible to initiates, they served as near-perfect places for clandestine political activity. Afro-Cubans who sought for an end to slavery were deeply committed to the two Cuban Wars of Independence and used their gathering places for planning military and political strategies. The Independence leader and national hero Antonio Maceo was a member of Abakua for this reason. Freemasonry also had a strong presence in 19^th century Cuba and pro-Independence Masons collaborated with Abakua to fight against the Spanish crown. The Wars of Independence also led to the establishment of Abakua juegos for both white and Chinese members who were dedicated to the Cuban nationhood cause.

Other topics covered by Miller include the reasons why Abakua has not spread further geographically than it already has and the influence Abakua has had on Cuban music and art. In the latter case, Abakua drum rhythms have a strong presence in the syncretistic styles of mambo and son. The chapter covering music is not highly detailed so deeper insights into the subject should be looked for elsewhere. In the former topic, the explanation is that strict and complicated protocols for establishing new lodges has made it nearly impossible for Abakua to spread much farther than the regions surrounding Havana and and the nearby city of Matanzas. If you want to join, your only option would be to move to Cuba. Miller also writes about recent contact and collaboration between Ekpe initiates in Nigeria and Abakua members in Cuba who have traveled to Nigeria recently with assistance from the author who is an Ekpe initiate himself aside from being an anthropologist.

Since the practice of Abakua is kept secret and only accessible to members, this book is mostly historical in nature. However, some of their ceremonies, including dances, drumming, and call and response chanting, are publicly accessible since some ceremonies are done in the yards of juegos were neighbors can observe them or hear them from a distance. I speculate that this is done as a means of proselytizing and arousing the curiosity of potential recruits. Despite not providing much information about the inner workings of this society, its influence on Cuban history is a fascinating story to learn about, especially because mainstream historians have given so little space to Abakua’s role in achieving independence and building national identity. Unfortunately, there is nothing said about Abakua in their relation to the Cuban Revolution of 1958 and Fidel Castro’s subsequent dictatorship. Abakua survived throughout all of that so there must be something to be said about them during those times.

Voice Of the Leopard gives a good overview of Abakua and its history. It serves the purpose of demonstrating how such a secret society can maintain social stability and mental health in the midst of a chaotic and ever-changing world. By giving members a sense of participation in history and having roots in an antiquarian culture, a direct line between past and present is maintained which contributes stability to the community. In this way, Abakua has acted as a positive force in Cuban society. Up until recent times, America had societies based around common interests in much the same way that the Cubans have Abakua. In 2025, fraternal orders like the Masons or the Elks, hobbyist groups, bowling leagues, labor unions, social clubs, and other societies in which people create social bonds and a sense of belonging are mostly on life support if they still exist at all. As a result of the internet, people spend more time looking at screens on laptops and cell phones then they do in the presence of others. As a result, the rates of loneliness, depression, mental illness, and suicide have spiked, especially among young people. It would be interesting to research what the rate of these ailments are in African diaspora religions. My educated guess is that they would be far less frequent than in American society. Maybe a few more groups like the Abakua could save us from ourselves.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Cities Of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs

Cities Of the Red Night

by William S. Burroughs

      The performance of violent sexuality as spectacle is a persistent theme running throughout Cities Of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs. It isn’t the only theme, but it is one among many. When you’re being hit in the face with a firehose of surrealistic imagery, some of which is quite disgusting, it’s a good idea to grasp a hold of whatever you can to avoid being completely overwhelmed, subjugated, and absorbed into the wildly colorful filth washing over you.

This novel begins with a chapter about a man in a South American jungle who contracts a virus and has sex with his local guide on the shore of a river. A link between sexuality and viruses is established early on even though these characters never re-emerge in the story afterwards. Next a Chinese military unit enters a mountain village in Tibet where a death-virus is spreading outwards from a temple overlooking it from the peak. Then we are in a hospital where a heroin addicted doctor is called in to manage a giant influx of patients with a virus that causes them to have seizures and orgasms simultaneously. In a board meeting at the hospital, a scientist shares a crackpot theory that a spaceship crashed in the Gobi desert and unleashed a virus that ran rampant in seven lost cities, spreading radiation over them causing the night time sky to turn red. Viruses spread from these cities and these viruses are closely linked with both language and opiate based addictive drugs. This is coherent writing considering it came from the mind of William S. Burroughs.

Then we’ve got the pirates. The young Noah Blake, an expert in building and repairing firearms, gets hired to work on a ship with a bunch of his friends. While sailing to Veracruz, they encounter a pirate ship, led by Captain Strobe, and form an alliance that goes on to Port Roger on the eastern coast of Panama. These lost boys form a utopian society that plots to free Latin America from Spanish colonial rule. Part of their plan is to hook the Spaniards on opiates to weaken them. Another is to have Noah Blake invent superior weaponry; while having sex with another man his ejaculations inspire him to invent cannons and guns with exploding shells. The power of phallo-centric violence is ever-present in this novel and most of Burroughs’ other novels too. His writing really takes on life when the reader is able to make the proper connections between semiotic elements like sex, guns, and magic.

The commune is also a place where gay sex is freely explored among members of all races and ethnic groups. Noah Blake rises to prominence as he lays out a plan for a constitution as law for a free, equitable, and just society based on leftist libertarian principles. These boys eventually launch an attack on Panama City. Some biographers of Burroughs have pointed out that this commune was inspired by the Lost Boys in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

The sex and violence spectacle is present in this commune when a ritual theatrical performance is staged. These gay men are paired up with women, or sometimes groups of women, and they dress up in costumes of their choice representing animals or Pagan gods. Then they have sex for the purpose of procreation while all the others watch. Since these gay men have no interest in women, the act of private lovemaking has to be put on public display as a ritual to ensure that their society is able to reproduce. This is the worst part of the novel. It is hastily written, without much description, and pretentious, kind of like an eccentric camp porno movie filmed in a tiki bar by tacky people with really bad taste. And I don’t mean to suggest that there are any pornographers with good taste either. It’s just that there is bad taste and then there is really bad taste. But a John Waters disciple will be quick to point out that bad taste is entertaining and sometimes even makes a statement.

Otherwise there are the ubiquitous hangings resulting in orgasm. Captain Strobe tells a story about how he got sentenced to hang for some criminal offense. After the noose pulled taught around his neck and he ejaculated, someone climbed onto the gallows and cut him down, helping him to escape before he died. Since Strobe cheated death in this way, he is considered to have magical powers. These hangings happen frequently in most of Burroughs’ writings going all the way back to Naked Lunch. They are always on display to an audience and the man’s pants are always pulled down so they can see the ejaculation. Burroughs fetishizes this image and treats it as through the spectacle of it makes magic possible.

The story line of the 17^th century pirates alternates every two chapters with the 20^th century story line of Clem Snide. This character reoccurs after having first appeared in The Soft Machine. Clem Snide refers to himself as a “private asshole”; no doubt this is a play on the noir term “private dick” meaning “detective”. And that is what Clem Snide is. He gets hired to track down a missing boy named Jerry Green, a seemingly ordinary kid who disappeared in Greece. Snide indulges in a sex magic ritual with his assistant Jim for guidance in the case. He ends up traveling to Athens and working with a detective named Dmitri who is also an expert on the occult. Sex and witchcraft are also closely linked in Burroughs’ novels. But anyhow, Snide learns that Jerry Green secretly had a gay lover and the two of them had been kidnapped, taken to Mexico City, and involved in the science of transplanting one human head onto the body of another. Experimentation with this technique began in Panama in the 17^th century at the time of the pirate escapades written out in the alternate story line of this novel.

The two threads merge when Snide meets the Iguana Twins, a Mexican brother and sister pair, also portrayed in The Burroughs File as a hermaphroditic spirit that changes sex during intercourse, that liaised with Noah Blake in earlier times. Snide goes to Lima in search of a dead body being shipped by sea and some Mayan manuscripts the Iguana Twins want him to locate and buy. Things take a bizarre turn in one of those unpredictable about-faces you find in Burroughs’ later works when something so unexpected happens so that you become completely disoriented and remain that way until you reach the end. Clem Snide gets blackmailed into writing a movie script for a Nazi commune of genetically engineered white boys run by a CIA agent. Here Burroughs exposes the homo-erotic nature of white supremacy. Some of the men on this commune are pirates from the other narrative thread and they appear, disappear, and reappear throughout several chapters near the end of the book.

The narrative then moves erratically and abrasively, skipping from one unrelated scene to another. Some nude men parachute into a desert crater, probably the site of the previously mentioned ancient spaceship crash. The crater figures into the final passages of The Place of Dead Roads and also appeared first in The Soft Machine. In Burroughs’ mythology, the space ship unleashed a virus that infected the throats of primates living in the crater and this caused them to develop language. This viral infection, and how it caused language to develop, is graphically described in The Soft Machine.

These boys wander off into one of the seven cities where the sky turns red at night. They end up in a nightclub where hangings of men are done, complete with ejaculations, for the entertainment of the patrons. In this same city, a riot happens when the lower classes rebel against the controlling authorities. The bar tender recounts the history of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, forcing you to question whether or not the city is an alternative version of New York. Is it the same city in a different time or a different dimension? A parallel universe or a reoccurrence in a different form? A theme of the transmigration of souls runs throughout the entire novel. But the author offers no clear explanations while holding the whole novel together like a lump of gelatin which is why he is a great writer.

Clem Snide shows up in another one of the seven red night cities, one that is divided by a river. On pne side is a casbah inhabited by the lower classes where all manner of vice and illicit activities take place. On the other is the upper class neighborhoods who have declared war on the casbah with the intention of exterminating the lower classes. The casbah dwellers, being those most sympathetic to Burroughs, are described as a bunch of men whose faces bear traces of all ethnic groups and races; the faces’ features begin to alter and swirl, making all the ethnicities blend together to the point where it is impossible to tell them apart. This is the culmination of the 17^th century pirates’ vision of utopia which complicates the narrative since the pirates reemerge in the story as members of the white supremacist commune although they do show up to fight in the final war along with Clem Snide on the side of the casbah classes. That war is described like an epic Hollywood movie, overblown as if Cecil B. DeMille had filmed a version of a Hieronymous Bosch painting. Just as importantly, when Clem Snide gets taken to the upper class neighborhood, he finds the evil and controlling Contessa de Gulpa who is running the human head transplant operation that erry Green fell into.

One extraneous passage explains a lot of what might be going on in this book. Burroughs describes a warehouse with theaters, stages, and audiences. Dressing rooms have people changing character by changing costumes. Many of these performances are of sex and the voyeurism of the hanging and orgasm ritual in which souls escaping from bodies can be harnessed and directed for magical purposes. Or else the escaping soul can also be permitted to transmigrate into other bodies. This comparison of souls changing bodies the way actors change costumes to play different roles might be part of what Burroughs is attempting to say about the passage of time and the nature of human existence. It could also be emblematic of a man with an unstable identity, the kind of man who might imagine himself as a secret agent, a magician, a doctor an outlaw, an imaginary animal, or any of the other literary personas created by Burroughs. It could also be emblematic, self-consciously or not, of the writing process as an author is someone who enters the minds of literary personas, seeing the world through their eyes, and doing what they do in the imagination so that they can be written as characters into a story. This is why I say you don’t need to believe any of Burroughs’ far out theories to harmonize with what he has to say. Besides, if you take critique, satire, or symbolism at literal face value then it doesn’t function as critique, satire, or symbolism. Multiple meanings of signs are necessary to make these things work.

Cities Of the Red Night is probably the most linear novel Burroughs has written since Junky. That’s not to say it is linear in a conventional sense in any way. The two threads that course through the first half of the book follow time lines, but they don’t tell a story in the way that traditional story telling is done. Actually the plot lines are weak and even generic. Half way through everything goes haywire and Burroughs hits you with a grenade full of sentences reminiscent of the proto-Surrealist writer Lautreamont. The plot is still there but the wheels have flown off the narrative train and the reader proceeds by attempting, sometimes in vain, to connect all the shards and shrapnel into a picture forming a coherent whole. I think this is too much of a task for most readers, but I also say that Burroughs is like Thomas Pynchon of the field of modern art; you need to commit over a long period of time to get the most out of it. By looking for interconnections and overlapping themes, you will reach a point where some things snap into place and the incomprehensible becomes somewhat comprehensible. But then again, confusion is part of what Burroughs is expressing. Notice the formula of viruses-guns-sex-magic-time. It is like a semiotic chain whose links recombine in varying pairings and orders like DNA to build wordscapes reflecting the inner world of the author’s mind.

So what can be made of the public spectacle of hanging with orgasm in front of an audience? Burroughs draws links early on between guns and ejaculation as well as between magic and ejaculation. He also draws a connection between public hangings and the release of the soul for transmigration and habitation of another body. In all these cases, the idea of a powerful energy being released towards a specific goal is present. In an early chapter, the pirates watch a ritual performance of sex for the purpose of procreation. In later chapters, audiences in town squares, night clubs, films, and other social gatherings watch hangings that end with ejaculation in a ritualized form of death and voyeurism. By linking the actions of sex, death, and transmigration we get a continual cycle of eternal return, hence the references to ancient Egyptian mythology. Since this is the writing of Burroughs, the parts of that eternal cycle are never presented in any specific order. Burroughs might say that time for heroin addicts follows no definite pattern the way it would for everybody else. Junkies live on junk time as he says in Naked Lunch and the sun rises and sets the way a junky gets high and comes down, repeating over and over the same ritual shooting up since he is an addict.

The audience might be there to receive the spiritual energy being released during the death/orgasm ritual of a public hanging. In any case, I recently read something by the anthropologist Ivor Miller who claims that magic only works if it has an audience. He defines “magic” as ceremonial actions that are designed to persuade people to change their behavior in specified ways. In other words, witnessing somebody casting a love spell may influence them to feel love whereas the same ceremony performed in solitude might be nothing more than pissing into the wind. Therefore a hanging without an audience might result in the loss or disappearance of a soul since its magic power is dissipated without being directed towards a specific goal. This goes back to viruses and language since both replicate by moving from host to host. Both survive by circulating throughout communities. Both are discharged from one body to another like semen discharging during an ejaculation or bullets fired from a gun. Without any intended target, semen, bullets, and language serve no function. Burrughs would also say that since a virus resulted in language that makes language a foreign entity in the body. Just like a bullet. Maybe this is nothing but poetry. Maybe not. But at least it’s interesting and gets you thinking hard.

These days, people on the internet have an annoying habit of calling any work of art that is weird or difficult to understand a “fever dream”. Personally I find this term to be so cliché now that I wish people would just stop using it. But then again, a character named Audrey at the end of Cities Of the Red Night wakes up in a hospital bed in Greece. He is probably an altar ego of Clem Snide and, possibly, one persona among many representing the same person throughout the story. The entire narrative was made up of dreams Audrey had while sick in bed with a fever caused by a virus. This book literally is a fever dream. So I have to shut up about that pet peeve for now. Aside from that, this is one of William S. Burroughs’ more accessible books if you are looking for a good start to get into his wilder writings. It is also a rewarding read for veteran Burroughs readers. If you enjoy reading novels that drive you crazy then go for it. You might come out psychologically intact if you are lucky.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom by Hugh Thomas

Cuba:

The Pursuit of Freedom

by Hugh Thomas

           It’s amazing how little Americans know about neighboring countries. Actually it’s amazing how little Americans know about America, but that’s another matter. Miami is closer to Havana than it is to Orlando or Atlanta and yet a lot of people couldn’t name the capital of Cuba if you asked them. What some people do know abut Cuba doesn’t extend much farther beyond cigars, salsa, and communism. Obviously there is so much more and a lot of Cuban history has been directly influenced by American politics and business. Hugh Thomas’s Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom gives an epic rundown of Cuban history that is far from complete. Yet with about 1.500 pages, you can’t fault the author for leaving a few things out.

This history book, which weighs weighs about as much as an iron dumbbell, doesn’t start with the Taino or Arawak Indians. It doesn’t even start with the arrival of Columbus. It starts with the British invasion of Havana led by Lord Albemarle. This might be a strange starting point considering how minor an event it is in Cuban history and all that came after, but as stated before, a book of this length wouldn’t benefit from any extra information. In any case, the 18^th century was when Cuba became an island of central importance to colonial businessmen in the Caribbean. The tropical jungle island had a perfect climate for sugarcane and tobacco farming and its location made it ideal as a hub for distribution and transport of cargo. This led to an influx of Spanish criollos and, regrettably, a thriving trade of slaves brought over from West Africa and indentured servants from China.

The most interesting parts of these early chapters include descriptions of the social lives of Cuba’s inhabitants. It’s especially interesting to learn about how the plantation and factory owners allowed the slave laborers to practice their traditional religions, something that helped them to cope with slavery and later catalyzed the thriving of African diaspora religions in the Caribbean. It’s also interesting that slaves were allowed to buy their own freedom and a class of African craftsmen grew in Havana as a result.

Yet as agriculture and industry in Cuba grew, more Africans were brought in from Jamaica and Haiti, making them the dominant demographic of the colony. The Spanish criollos grew uneasy because small slave rebellions broke out, setting off a long string of political violence and rebellions that culminated in the Cuban Revolution of 1958. On the other side of that was a small group of Spanish businessmen who wanted Cuba to be annexed by the United States. At this time, Cuba was owned and politically dominated by the Spanish crown who paid little attention to the distant island. Simultaneously, the economy and industry were largely influenced, if not outright controlled, by the U.S.

The annexation movement may have been obscure and ineffective, but it did inspire a nationalist movement and an eventual War of Independence. During this time in the 19^th century, the journalist and poet Jose Marti emerged as the voice of Cuban independence. Rebellions were led from the eastern province of Oriente by the mulatto captain Antonio Maceo as well. Both of these men are considered to be Cuba’s first national heroes. Adding to the turbulence of the 1800s were also the boom and bust cycles of sugar production and their reliance on the fickle international market. Sugarcane was the dominant crop of Cuba’s agriculture and the island’s economy relied heavily on the sugar market, something that could be easily offset by the farming of sugar beets in Europe and the United States where transport costs were lower and import tariffs non-existent if grown locally.

By the end of the 19^th century, the Spanish-American War had broken out. As the Spanish Empire grew weaker and they began to lose control over their overseas territories, the U.S. used the explosion of the battleship Maine, anchored off the coast of the Florida Keys, as an excuse to “liberate” the remaining colonies of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. For the Cubans, this meant the much desired nationhood they craved, but it also meant a subservient position to the United States. The Platt Amendment was attached to the first Constitution of Cuba, giving the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuban affairs under certain circumstances. This remained a sore point in the minds of nationalists who wanted complete independence. But Thomas argues that some guidance was necessary for the fledgling nation. Early Cuban politicians lacked political will and expertise, and the economy was largely dependent on businesses owned by Americans. The American government was paternalistic and patronizing to Cuban politicos and this caused friction with the Cuban populace, something that Americans were too blind and arrogant to see.

Eventually, a democracy emerged on the island nation, but it was fraught with difficulties and instability from the beginning. The term “gangsterismo” was coined to describe the Cuban political style. After the election of Fulgencio Batista to his first term of office, corruption and violence took hold of the government. The lines between politics, organized crime, and guerilla warfare became blurred as different factions emerged out of the underground to fight for power. These political gangs had less to do with ideology than they did with violence, graft, and loyalty, a factor that made Havana volatile and sporadically dangerous until the middle of the 20^th century. After a string of corrupt and ineffective presidents who were constantly under threat of assassination, Batista returned to power as a dictator; at first he was welcomed as a savior, but the Cubans quickly turned against him when they saw he was all about business as usual.

Enter Fidel Castro.

The future Cuban dictator was raised by a wealthy family of sugarcane farmers. After passing the bar exam, the young intellectual worked for a law firm of no importance before assembling a small army and launching a raid against the Moncada military barracks. After a stint in prison, Castro went to Mexico and met up with his right hand man Che Guevara. The two of them trained a small band of guerillas, sailed a decrepit boat through a storm to Oriente province in Cuba, and launched a revolution that caught on in the rural areas and mountains of the island nation. It is important to note that Fidel Castro was never an ideologue. He was an adventurer and a natural born leader with outsize charisma. This goes a long way in understanding what the Cuban Revolution of 1958 was all about. To the surprise of many, the revolution quickly gained momentum and soon the CIA and American media were lending some reluctant support to his cause. The CIA, seeing Batista as a weak leader, convinced him to step down and allow Castro to take over the country. Castro’s success did not come solely from his charisma; his revolutionary message about Cuban independence was sufficiently vague enough to appeal to varied groups of people, many of which had opposing points of view. One thing they all had in common was the weariness of political instability and economic backwardness, something they ironically coped with by nurturing a strong and passionate culture.

After the rise of Castro, Hugh Thomas revisits the state of Cuban society around the time of the Revolution. It’s an interesting contrast with the section at the beginning of the book that addresses the same issues as they stood in at the turn of the 19^th century. The book ends with America’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also ends with an analysis of Cuban politics and society after the Revolution. Thomas is certainly biased against Castro although he does a fair job of presenting nuanced views of the country in the 1960s. Living standards rose for some while going down for others. Massive amounts of refugees left to settle in the United States. Castro, with no political experience or ideology, grasped on to communism and made everything up as he went along. He appointed Che Guevara to manage Cuba’s industry and economy, but Guevara made a mess out of that due to his similar lack of experience in the real world. Thomas accuses Guevara of being a quasi-fascist due to his enthusiasm for political violence and warfare over the less exciting nuts and bolts of economic policy. Fidel Castro essentially turned Cuba into a personality cult.

Due to its length, this book is not for readers looking for a quick and easy understanding of Cuban history. It starts out strong with its sociological history of the colony in the 1700s. The author clearly identifies and outlines the key events, rebellions, wars, and political movements of the subsequent century. His analysis of the sugar and tobacco industries is top notch in its detail even if it is a bit dry. But some of the politics get bogged down in excessive detail. There are a lot of obscure arguments made by obscure men with obscure intentions over obscure issues. There are times when the reader has to keep a stiff upper lip while plowing through all the muck. The same can be said for some passages of the democratic and gangsterismo era of the 20^th century that led up to the Revolution. The peaks of early and mid Cuban history are fascinating enough to keep the narrative going though. And Fidel Castro’s Revolution is one of the most exciting political adventure stories I know of. As a reader, Thomas makes it easy to see how people could get caught up in all the intrigue. I have read better accounts of the Cuban Revolution though.

The worst part of this book is the way Thomas insists on listing the names of every single person who contributed to the Revolution so that you get long lists of people like Jose Garcia Ecehvarria Gonzales y Fuentes de las Casas. I’m not saying this to make fun of Spanish names. I’m just saying that these lists can be off-putting to even the most dedicated of readers especially because most of these people never reappear in the narrative after being mentioned once. It’s like reading the genealogies in the Old Testament. It’s the kind of information that should be included in an appendix.

The chapters on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis are hasty and brief; there are far better accounts written in more recently authored books. The chapters on post-Revolutionary Cuba are interesting, but since this book was published in 1972, it is obvious that the author did not have the sufficient historical distance to give a well-rounded perspective. It would be interesting to read accounts of life inside Cuba from the time of the Revolution up to the present.

By the end a pattern emerges. From early slave rebellions to independence movements and liberation from the domination of the United States, Cuban history is marked by a desire for freedom. Ironically, the price they paid for national independence was a dictatorship that restricted civil liberties and political opposition while being somewhat under the wing of the Soviet Union and still economically tied to the turbulent international sugar market. The subtitle of this book is appropriate as it gives form to the chaos of Cuban history. Fortunately, Thomas does not over-emphasize this thesis since doing so would have contained the narrative in an unnecessarily narrow theory of interpretation. Perhaps Cuba’s shortcomings in the pursuit of freedom are overridden in the cultural expressions of their music, dance, and easy going lifestyle as well as the thriving of the African diaspora religious societies known as Abakua, Palo Monte, and Santeria or Lukumi. When political oppression is all-pervasive, passions for freedom can be expressed in other creative ways.

After finishing Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom by Hugh Thomas, it is clear that the author is anal retentive in attention to detail, yet it is written without losing sight of the bigger issues guiding the study of Cuban history. At times, the writing is dense, but when you break through to the more interesting parts, it becomes clear that this is a monumental achievement both for the author and the reader who has enough patience to see it through to the end. 

 

Book Review & Literary Analysis: The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs

The Place of Dead Roads

by William S. Burroughs

      The later works of William S. Burroughs have attracted less attention than his earlier writings. By the 1980s, Burroughs was living off his reputation more than his art. He was living in an abandoned YMCA in Manhattan, hanging out in his orgone accumulator and talking to ghosts. He was also hanging out in CBGB’s with Patti Smith who claimed she admired him so much because he was so difficult to get into bed. Well y’know Patti, a gay junky pushing 70 probably isn’t the best horse to bet on, even if you are a woman with hairy armpits (see the cover of her Easter LP).But he hadn’t been forgotten. Musicians in the punk and first wave industrial music scenes had taken interest in him and his earlier works remained perennial classics in the underground art and literary scenes. He was in desperate need of money so he decided to revive his career. The Nova Convention brought him back into the public eye and he even did an introduction for the opening of a Saturday Night Live episode. Along with this he published a trilogy of novels that were not entirely palatable to most readers of the time. But Burroughs being Burroughs has never been specific to one particular time or place. It may be time for a novel like The Place of Dead Roads to be reconsidered, especially considering our current political climate.

William S. Burroughs always defied categories. Whether he could be classified as a Beat Generation or a science-fiction author can be infinitely debatable. Burroughs would have advised you to not waste time on such distinctions since categories are arbitrary by nature. But you can’t deny that, up to a certain point, this novel is a western. But, just as much, it is a science-fiction novel although nobody else has ever written science-fiction the way Burroughs did. In fact no one else every wrote a western the way he did either. But neither of these categories hold since it could just as well be a work of surrealism, romanticism, pulp crime, gay fictions, utopianism, dystopianism, postmodernism, or anything else you could possibly think of. Burroughs is just a category unto himself.

But true to his own style, his 1980s novels defy his own niche that he created in the earlier years of his writing. Most of his earlier works had no plot or character development. They were mostly series of dream sequences and vignettes with characters that extended no further than what they did in each scene. On the other hand, in The Place of Dead Roads there is both plot and character development. This is definitely new territory for this most unconventional of all unconventional authors.

Kim Carsons is a young man who inherits a plot of rural land after his parents die. When arriving in the nearest town, he buys an arsenal of guns which get excessively described in pornographic detail. The eroticism of guns is firmly established early in the story. Kim brings another boy to his rustic cabin and the two look over his guns before having sex. Soon after, Kim goes out to the woods, sets up targets, and begins shooting. While doing so, a faun appears and then they have sex. But the sex is a kind of foreplay for gun shooting which they do in between bouts of intercourse.

Kim begins to attract a group of followers, all male and gay. They indulge freely in carnal pleasures and have gun fights with those who don’t respect them, primarily homophobic bullies and Christians who won’t leave them alone. They also practice sex magic rituals in which ejaculations function like guns, shooting psychically charged deadly venom at their visualized enemies, killing them from a distance without leaving a trace of evidence. The boys quickly gain a reputation for being outlaws and expert shootists who should never be messed with. They dub themselves the Johnson Gang and live by an ethos of everyone minding their own business. This means they demand the freedom to live close to nature, far from the modern world of technology, where they can indulge in sex and drugs. Anybody who intrudes on them has basically signed their own death certificate. The descriptions are explicit and brutal; Burroughs writes about violence with as much passion as he writes about guns and sex. To the chagrin of most feminists, this novel is a celebration of phallo-centrism to an extreme and the vision is one of a masculine society free from the presence of women. Burroughs doesn’t express any animosity towards women. It’s just that they barely exist in the world he writes about.

One interesting passage near the beginning, when Burroughs describes Kim’s childhood and relationship with his artist father, involves the boy writing a science-fiction story and submitting it to Boy’s Life magazine for publication. The story is about some half-human/half-giant insect creatures on a search and destroy mission in a jungle river gorge on Venus. (This passage seems to parallel a chapter in Cities Of the Red Night where the pirates invade Panama City) This bizarre story is so far from anything that would ever be published in the vanilla teenage magazine that it serves to illustrate how distant Kim feels from boring, mainstream America at the onset of his adolescence. Incidentally, Kim travels to Venus in some later chapters of this novel.

Later on, Kim leaves his rural property and travels around America, sometimes with the Johnson Gang and sometimes without them. He liaises with various members of an underground network of gay criminals. Sometimes he is involved with hit jobs on the Mafia. The already thin plot begins to wear even thinner. But then we hear from a visitor from outer space whose space ship crash landed in the desert and released a virus into the world. This takes on significance later.

Meanwhile, Kim travels to Europe and begins working as a secret agent, taking on different identities as he goes along. If you think you can read any Burroughs novel without getting thoroughly confused at some point, you are wrong. It becomes hard to tell when Kim is Kim acting under an assumed identity and when a character isn’t Kim at all. Watching him change personas is like watching a blackjack dealer shuffle a deck of cards; you can briefly see what each card is but they go by so fast they all blur together. Even more disorienting is the way Kim can be at a dinner party with spies in France one minutes, then he opens a door and comes out as someone different in Morocco. Any sense of linearity or stability of character disappears. We get led around the world to Burroughs’ favorite haunts like Ecuador, Colombia, London, Paris, and Tangier. Kim shoots up heroin and methadone, visits exotic weapons dealers in North African bazaars, receives coded messages from secret agents in Gibraltar, and goes to a high level drug dealer’s party and gets seduced by a woman who changes sexes. All the while he’s probably some kind of secret agent being contacted by entities in outer space. Who knows what it all amounts to, but the hallucinatory nature of it all makes you question if Burroughs is expressing the feeling of shifting in and out of altered states of consciousness while using drugs.

The most baffling passage is when Kim is living on Venus with his boyfriend. The two live together in a cabin that is described as being similar to the cabin he inhabits in Missouri at the beginning of the novel. This kind of overlapping is a key feature in many of Burroughs’ writings. He leaves to walk around a tourist resort which he at first says is in Egypt, but as he goes away, unauthorized, from the designated resort, he wanders into a nightmarish world where he finds houses full of dwarfs. Centipedes are emerging from the dwarfs’ heads and shedding them as if the little men are cocoons for the monster insects. Kim can do nothing but shoot them and burn the place down. It’s hard to interpret this, but centipedes show up throughout most of Burroughs’ writings as symbols of fear and anxiety. The dwarfs, being small men of slight stature, give birth to this symbol of fear possible meaning that it is the people of lesser value who unleash the most evil into the world.

By destroying these monstrous creatures, Kim is eliminating something that makes his world terrible. Furthermore, the incomprehensibility of the scenario illustrates what it feels like to live in a world where you can’t connect with others, and in fact wouldn’t want to, and feel nothing but alienation, disconnection, and confusion. It is a hostile and incomprehensible place. You can see why a gay heroin addict, and one who had difficulty even relating to other gay men, would feel a desire to destroy everything that creates the psychological oppression of dread, This is a sadistic, ultraviolent fantasy of a man who wants to live someplace where he can be left alone in peace. The extreme violence of Burroughs’ writing is like an artillery shield that protects a vulnerable man from everything that seeks to destroy him. If you read Burroughs carefully, he does express ideas of what it would be like to live in a peaceful and beautiful world. It is a world without persecution and one where everybody minds their own business.

Another baffling passage comes near the end when Kim, in the guise of a secret agent, gets assigned to visit the desert crater where the aforementioned space ship landed. It is secretly guarded by the American military because the last surviving ancestors of the missing link live there. They are the vectors that came between earlier primates and the human species, the vectors that contracted the virus that mutated into human language. Burroughs always had a thing for viruses and his hypothesis that viruses are used by entities from outer space to control humans is lifted directly from Scientology. Actually, if you think about it, language does bear a superficial similarity to a virus in that it survives and replicates by moving from host to host. It is through language that bad ideas spread throughout society, sometimes in the form of memes as Richard Dawkins defines them. A junky high on heroin can lie for days in bed without thinking a single thought. In the absence of language, they would be impermeable to any ideas bad or good. It would be like a womb of silence without any intrusions from words, similar to the way that the Johnson Gang lives on their private plot of land without any intrusions from the outside. This would be an appealing state to be in when confronted by a hostile and alien world that seeks to destroy you for no other purpose than that is what the world does. Life is a killer. Rub out the word. In any case, the primates in the crater let out a virus that spreads to the nearby military base and presumably beyond. How Burroughs got us from a farm in Missouri populated exclusively by gay outlaws to a crater in the desert populated by the missing link is far from clear. But that’s just the way William S. Burroughs rolls.

These are the easiest themes to digest in this novel. There are so many others that it would be impossible to interpret all of it. You don’t have to pursue every element that enters into the story though; in a Joycean sense, you can only grasp on to whatever you can and let everything else flow by especially when everything else is as appealing as vomit and raw sewage. In fact, the worst part of this book is that it is so jam packed (fudge packed?) with information that you might feel exhausted before getting to the end. But what a wild ride it is.

Burroughs’ final novels deserve some reconsideration. If the lack of traditional literary formulas frustrated you when reading his earlier works, The Place of Dead Roads might be a good place to pick up Burroughs again. It is more structured and fine tuned without losing any of the transgressive qualities that made his writing so notorious to begin with. Maybe readers in the 1980s weren’t ready for this kind of book. Maybe they still aren’t. Maybe someday the human race will catch up to this genius writer. Maybe by then everybody will have learned to mind their own business. We aren’t there yet.

 

Book Review: The Burroughs File by William S. Burroughs

The Burroughs File

by William S. Burroughs

            If you’re interested in the works of William S. Burroughs, The Burroughs File is definitely the wrong place to start. This anthology is a collection of writings that previously appeared in scattered publications and some other scraps that were taken from the old Beat Generation author’s private notebooks. If you haven’t already taken a deep dive into his fiction, philosophy on life, and biography, this one probably won’t make much sense. But then again, it’s William Burroughs so a lot of it won’t make sense anyways. That’s the point.

One way to approach Burroughs is to think of his literature as a radio receiver. You tune into his writing the way a radio tunes into a transmitter broadcasting signals via radio waves from stations in varied locations. Reading from beginning to end is like turning the dial, moving from one channel to the next. In between stations, you will mostly hear noise while the stations will deliver clarity. Sometimes there will be interference. When you are too far away from a transmitter, the signals weaken and the static noise overrides and sometimes completely obliterates the signals being broadcast. Most people find the signals being broadcast to be more interesting than the noise, but sometimes you need to pass through the noise or alter the dial to get a clear signal. Or if you’ve used hallucinogenic drugs, you might find patterns in the noise. Reading Burroughs is the literary equivalent of tuning into the radio in this way. Many thanks to Robert Anton Wilson for this insight.

So what is Burroughs trying to communicate? According to one passage in this book, he puts you in the place of an intergalactic secret agent caught in the trap of humanity, trying to receive communications from the Nova Police. They are the ones trying to save the world from self destruction. Their adversaries are the Nova Mob, a gang of space alien vampires who jam and interfere with the instructional signals being sent by the Nova Police. The Nova Mob’s job is to maximize conflict and chaos on this planet to push it towards the Nova, a state where conflicts become so unmanageable that the entire planet explodes. “Get back...back before the whole fucking shithouse explodes,” the Nova Police tell agent K9 when all hell breaks loose and Dr. Benway is summoned to command control over the masses of humanity who aren’t intelligent enough to maintain order on their own. If this sounds familiar to Burroughs’ readers, that’s because it’s been explained in other places. The passage in The Burroughs File is just spelled out a little more clearly.

Other scraps of information we get in this book is that viruses came from outer space for the sake of controlling humans. Language is a mutation brought by the Nova Mob to sow confusion on Planet Earth. Time moves in a linear directions because we exist in a movie prerecorded on a reel of film stock. Therefore time can be manipulated just like film, rewound, sped up, slowed down, chopped up and randomly spliced back together so that the future inserts itself into the present, something that only those trained with psychic perceptions are able to see. The repeating image of a tear in the sky and someone pulling the tear open to start an apocalypse reinforces this idea that we exist on a reel of film.

One memorable passage involves a radio interview with a man named Mr. D. He claims that he acts amorally and takes on whatever form he needs in order to do his work. A careful reading would have you conclude that Mr. D is Death himself. Other recurring characters are Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin who are actually one person, and old junky named the Saint who poses as a Salvation Army Santa Claus at Christmas time to earn money to buy dope, and a hermaphrodite that changes sexes while copulating with a man it picked up at a party hosted by a drug dealer in Mexico. Some of these passages have appeared or been reworked for other novels written by Burroughs. And of course there is the usual mentions of guns, Scientology, witchcraft, ejaculations, hangings, sleazy cops, heartless businessmen, and cut ups you find in every Burroughs book.

There are plenty of passages here showcasing the experimental cut up technique invented by Brion Gysin. Some of them are inserted directly into narrative passages, derailing the narratives and confusing the reader, while others are printed as stand alone projects. Cut ups work best as literature when you are familiar with the texts being spliced together. It can be like watching two films being superimposed over one another so that images at random points collide making unintended meanings. Burroughs insists these lexical coincidences convey information from the future by disrupting the linear time sequences of the texts. He would have you believe these are messages being transmitted by the Nova Police and only those in the know can understand them. To everyone else they look like nonsense. You don’t buy that? Tough shit. Burroughs is a writer of fiction. It doesn’t have to be objectively true. The cut ups in this anthology are some of the least interesting ones Burroughs has produced which is probably why they were never used in any of his major works.

Moving from chapter to chapter, this book is a sequence of dream-like situations, hallucinations, inside jokes, metatextual explanations, nonsense, and characters that repeatedly float in and out of the text like ghosts. In short, even though this is a collection of odds and ends, it reads just like one of his novels which are usually not driven by plot or character development. What you get out of this will largely depend on how familiar you are with the author’s work and how much of it you can comprehend. What is good about this book is that, at its most lucid moments, it explains some of the more difficult points to grasp in Burrough’s other writings.

The Burroughs File is an acquired taste. Those who aren’t in on the William S. Burroughs mind fuck and head trip won’t get much out of it. For those who are, it is a good supplement to whatever else has already been read.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology by William S. Burroughs

Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology

by William S. Burroughs

      A lot of William S. Burroughs’ readers don’t realize how much Scientology influenced his writings, especially the science-fiction novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In those years, Burroughs was introduced to Scientology by Brion Gysin and the two of them unofficially practiced those techniques outside the cult. This actually is not as bizarre as you might think at first since a lot of science-fiction authors of the 1950s were heavily influenced by Scientology as well. This is largely because the cult’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, started out as a science-fiction writer and moved in the circles of those other authors. But none of those writers took their interest to such an extreme as William S. Burroughs did. In the 1970s he was still convinced of the veracity of Scientology so he decided to join the organization and receive the official teachings and methods. According to biographers, he specifically thought they could cure him of his homosexuality and his heroin addiction. Of course, he continued being a gay junky until he died so that doesn’t reflect well on the efficacy of Scientology. While being a member of the cult, Burroughs wrote three magazine articles and some brief columns about being a member. Along with a Scientology-themed short story, two of these articles were published as Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology.

The first articles included in this slim volume originally appeared in the L.A. Free Press and the East Village Other, two underground newspapers spawned by the hippie counter-cultural generation. Burroughs here wrote polemically against the Church of Scientology because of their rightward leaning political values. He accuses them of being an authoritarian organization that is racist and politically aligned with the values of the John Birch Society. He laments this because he thinks that Scientology has a lot to offer the psychonauts of the LSD generation with their taste for drugs, occultism, meditation, yoga, and altered states of consciousness in general. He argues that Scientology would be better off aligning with the Esalen Institute rather than the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican party. Burroughs’ writings on this subject are more interesting than convincing, though he is right about the disturbing nature of the Church’s quasi-fascist political leanings.

The other article of most interest in this collection appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. Previous to its initial publication, Burroughs had written an in depth article about life in the Church of Scientology for the British porn magazine Mayfair. The cult sued the publishers for defamation and all remaining copies of that issue were ordered destroyed. Under British law, that article, unfortunately, could not be included in this book. But anyhow, a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology wrote a response to it which is published here. In response, Burroughs dissects the Scientology representative’s critique line by line and point by point in the article for Rolling Stone. The first thing to notice about the Church’s representative is that he has poor spelling and grammatical skills; his reading comprehension skills are almost as bad. Burroughs doesn’t comment on this, but it fits in with other things he has said in other places about the shabbiness of the whole Scientology operation. Burroughs does respond in an overly polite manner by pointing out the representative’s misinterpretations of the Mayfair article, along with criticisms that he stands by. He even points out some places where he said he felt some degree of satisfaction with the results of Scientology auditing and e-meter techniques. This article is brief, simple, and doesn’t qualify as something you would read if you wanted any real information on Scientology.

The standout piece in this book is the short story “Ali’s Smile” which previously appeared in Burroughs’ novel Exterminator. It involves a British colonial linguist, stationed in Malaysia, who takes a local boy home, presumably for sexual purposes although that isn’t clearly stated. The linguist inherits a kris from the boy whose name is Ali. A “kris” is a tribal and ceremonial dagger carried by males in some Islamic cultures. Meanwhile back in an unnamed village, which is probably in England, an aristocrat hires a private espionage agent to infiltrate the Church of Scientology and return to administer the techniques to the aristocrat who doesn’t want to join the cult. Meanwhile, a riot starts in the village center. A gang of hippies begin fighting with locals and an army of uniformed Scientologists show up to fight too. The previously mentioned linguist attacks the rioters with Ali’s kris and they all end up dead. My knowledge of Scientology is limited, but I do know that they believe negative thoughts and behaviors are caused by spirit invaders from outer space. Burroughs appears to be saying that such a spirit is possessed in the kris and it causes those who bear the kris to become violent. But this is a William S. Burroughs story so he also appears to be saying that such a spirit can be useful when used against your enemies. Making sense of this story requires some thinking outside the box. In fact, you may have to destroy the box altogether. But it’s a story that is both acerbic and horrifying for those who care to grapple with its obscure meaning.

While “Ali’s Smile” is a good story if you are a devoted Burroughs reader, the articles in “Naked Scientology” don’t add up to much. It would have been more compelling if the notorious Mayfair article had been included. I wish Burroughs had written an essay where he goes more in depth into his involvement with the Church of Scientology since it had such a big influence over his writings and most readers would concede that he had a unique mind and a wild imagination. As it stands, this book is probably best for archivists and collectors, not so much for general readers.

I remember the first time I became aware of the Church of Scientology. While walking down Yonge Street in Toronto, I passed by their building. Men wearing suits were standing in front handing out pamphlets to passersby, most of which threw them on the ground creating a giant pile of litter. The front of the building had large plate glass windows so you could see into the reading room. A bunch of men were sitting inside smoking cigarettes. This was back in the day when smoking was common and done freely in public. It looked about as inviting as a bus terminal in a Midwestern city struggling with its economy. I thought it was a trashy looking place. William Burroughs was a man of some intelligence and it seems surprising that he would get so caught up in such a scam of an organization. But he always did have a fascination for pseudoscience and pop occultism like the fake shamanism of Carlos Castaneda. But I’ll forgive him that considering he wrote some of the most imaginative and provocative books in the history of American literature. John Coltrane, one of the greatest jazz musicians ever, was was deeply inspired by junk mysticism like Theosophy. Arthur Conan Doyle was a true believer in Spiritualism. If this kind of stuff serves as inspiration for great art then I’m willing to set my convictions aside for a short time and tolerate a con game or two. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Exterminator! by William S. Burroughs

Exterminator!

by William S. Burroughs

      William S. Burroughs once famously said that, “the novel is just as outdated a literary form as the sonnet.” That goes a long way in explaining what you’re in for when you pick up one of his books. Exterminator Is one work that challenges our ideas about what literary fiction should be.

One issue a reader might encounter is the impossibility of situating this book in any formal literary category or style. You can’t say it’s a book of short stories because the chapters aren’t really stories. They are more like vignettes or situations. Even quaint terms like “snapshots” or “slices of life” don’t adequately address what is going on since since most often there is no narrative arc. The signals in the prose are often overridden by noise from randomly inserted cut-ups or interference from nonsensical sentences that appear without warning and completely derail any train of thought you might have latched on to. You can never tell where you will end up once a scenario has begun. When you do find some traces of a story line, they sometimes, but not always, have conflicts that never get resolves or even explained. Looking at it from another angle, you can’t really say this is a novel either since there is no plot and no character development. The characters are largely defined by what they do or say in the brief moments they appear. But there are definite patterns in the recurring themes, most of which involves drug use, gay sex, and the eternal conflict between chaos and control. But I’m sure Burroughs would say you’re wasting your time by trying to fit his writing into a category. An unspoken theme in his writing is the navigation, expression, exploration, and manipulation of fluid boundaries.

The book opens with the narrator working as an exterminator. He is more preoccupied with portraying the customers and the people he works with than the vermin he is assigned to kill. You might be temped to read some kind of deeper meaning into this introduction although there probably isn’t anything there. In one sentence though he does compare cockroaches to drug addicts. If there is one theme that crops up throughout the whole book it is that the authorities in America, be they police, military officials, or politicians, think of their country as being populated by human undesirables who deserve to be wiped out.

In another story, a vigilante gang of such undesirables, made up of a gay man, a Mexican, an African American, a drug addict, and a radical anarchist conspire to blow up a military truck shipping a deadly virus across the continent. Notice t4hat the most sympathetic people in Burroughs’ writing tend to be members of minority and marginalized populations. In another story, the military authorities, as propagators of biological warfare, unleash a respiratory disease on the country after accidentally being exposed to it in an office on a military base. Also note the symbolic link Burroughs creates between military officials and viruses. What could he be saying about the military industrial complex and the American impulse towards authoritarian control?

The most memorable passage involves Burroughs in the crowd of activists in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 when the police stormtroopers began rioting, beating the peace activists with billy clubs, and spraying them with teargas. A colonial style boat is set up in the park where a radical political party announces they are running a baboon for president of the United States. (Did Burroughs lift this idea from the Yippies who ran a pig named Pigasus for president?) The baboon gives a speech, but as Burroughs explains it, he has had computer chips implanted in his brain so that his speech and activities are controlled by a technician stationed at a control panel. Of course, as the police enter the scene and start beating people, it turns into a riot that gets blamed on the demonstrators. By bringing a 15^th century colonialist ship into the scene, Burroughs plays with both symbolism and his characteristic manipulation of linear time to make a statement about the invasive founding of America and its relation to present day political attitudes of domination. The baboon as presidential candidate is also an obvious parody of who our presidents really are and how they are not the ones in control.

One of the weakest chapters is about an author, presumably Burroughs himself, who writes a story about a man who goes to a publisher’s office. While in the waiting room he reads an article in a magazine about a man who enters another time and place. It ends with a self-congratulatory note about how he was able to shift his character through multiple times and places within one sentence. If you’ve read The Arabian Nights or The Saragossa Manuscript you’ll know there isn’t anything especially novel about this narrative shuffling. Yet Burroughs beams with pride like a sixth grader who has just been told by his teacher that he wrote the most imaginative story in the class.

These are some of the easier parts to describe. The whole chaotic mess of a narrative is framed by a vignette at the beginning that gets reprised at the end, acting as literary parentheses to contain the book’s contents which seem to ne bursting out in all directions at once. The story is about two red haired men that have sex on a stage in a theater with an audience watching them. While having sex they turn into red haired wolves. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean, but Burroughs sure did have a fondness for guys with red hair as can be seen in his other writings. Does it matter if it means anything? With William Burroughs, it is often the atmosphere that matters most and, quite often, that atmosphere is not one that is comforting.

While the content of Exterminator is continuously exciting, the actual writing isn’t. By comparison, the prose in Naked Lunch is written with carefree, wild abandon as if Burroughs is more concerned with just getting everything he has to say out in the open. The writing in Exterminator is more controlled and deliberate as if Burroughs became too self-conscious of the language he was using. Its restraint makes it lack the vitality and energy of his previous nooks.

While Exterminator is one of William S. Burroughs’ minor works, it does have enough to offer to make it worth reading. This is actually my second time through it and I got a lot more out of it with this re-read. If you feel like an outsider in American society and are also disgusted with the authoritarian and hypcritical nature of the power structure, you will probably find something to relate to as the narrative shifts between comprehensibility and incomprehensibility. In both form and content it explodes the traditional styles of literature and does so without mercy. All the while, it’s a full-throttled assault on the establishment. If you’re clean cut and have no tolerance for disorder, violence, absurdity, filth, and horrifically bad odors, you might as well avoid Burroughs at all costs. You might as well avoid me too because I’ll probably think you’re a bore.