American Spy

Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

This is a strange book. There are so many difficult themes raised here and there are even more themes that are just hinted at. There are stories, and sub-stories, and back-stories.

I don’t get the narrator who tells these stories, switching between different times. I admire her but I don’t like her and at this point (3/4th into the book) I am not sure I can respect her. Usually, when you are going on a journey with the narrator, you grow to understand them. This woman – she repeatedly claims to be good at reading people, she is smart, she is fearless… and she is blundering, making decisions that do not make sense (to me). 

On the other hand, the way she describes her experiences in Burkina Faso – that’s brilliant and rings so true. 

“Like all cities, Ouagadougou was segregated by class, and I stuck to the handful of places where the wealthy hung out…. I had no anxiety about that as I would’ve at home… Every day I spent in Burkina Faso was a reminder of how American I was. … There was the language, the new culture, the fact that in the United States I thought of myself as black before I thought of myself as American. In Ouagadougou, routinely, those designations were reversed: People saw me as American first.”

The way the power struggle between the USSR and the USA is presented – that’s brilliant, too – with the action taking place, as if on stage, in African countries, and who pays the price (people…), and how those fights shape up with complete disregard to the actual cost (people…). 

I really appreciate how ambiguously communism vs capitalism regimes are presented. The narrator believes Communism is evil and a communist dictatorship would not serve the people of a country well in the long-term (even if some good is done short-term, like improve literacy, medical services, etc). And yet:

 “The CNR has improved the lives of millions of Burkinabe in just a few years. …Thomas Sankara had made it his goal to vaccinate as many Burkinabe children as possible… Sankara had helped save the lives of thousands of children…increased both the literacy rate and school attendance. Before he’d taken office, less than 10 percent of the population had been literate; in two years, the CNR increased that number to 25 percent… [Sankara] committed himself to women’s rights: banning forced marriage, polygamy, and female genital mutilation.”

I only just scraped the surface there, brought up a couple of obvious in-your-face themes from the book. There is also racism, sexism, homophobia; there is manipulation, and abandonment, and abuse, and the reality of being trapped by who we are. There is family – and what we are willing to do for those we love. There is anger and there is hate – for others, for those who deserve it, for those who don’t deserve it, for Otherness. There is a lot of hate for Self and for consequences of choices made under duress.

There is another quote from the book, about Marie’s childhood friend Robbie (who spent some time in jail) that struck me as so very American.

“In too much of what he said, I heard overconfidence about his limited life experience and in his aggressively average intelligence. He was the type of guy that, had he been born white, especially if he’d grown up with a little money, would probably have wound up at an excellent business school.”

Then how many so-called successful white guys would end up in jail or dead if they were born black?

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Is this who we are?

Is this what it means to live in a capitalist society?

Is this what it means to live in a democracy?

(Than how is this better than a communist dictatorship?)