Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds is about an endless war unfolding in an unnamed country. In its satirical force, the book is reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s anti-war novel, Catch-22, writes Abhijeet LorengAt a time when there is a perceptible decline in American influence in the world, author Mohammed Hanif’s novel Red Birds reminds us of what it took the United States to become the world’s most powerful nation, economically and militarily and the price the rest of the world has had to pay and is still paying for making America prosperous in the first place, and for helping sustain American prosperity to date.
Red Birds begins with an American fighter pilot, Major Ellie, crashing in the middle of a desert close to a refugee camp, which he was sent to bomb. It is never mentioned which part of the world or in which country the story is based, but it is quite obvious that it is somewhere in the Arab world. Inside the camp we are introduced to the various characters, Mutt the dog, who is a champion of sorts within the camp and who in turn introduces Ellie to a young boy, Momo, who owns an old copy of Fortune magazine and which he uses as a guide to becoming rich. Then there is Momo’s father and mother, who carry the guilt and sadness of letting their elder son, Bro Ali, to go and work at “The Hanger”, a mysterious refueling facility next to the camp and from where Bro Ali went missing.
Pretty early on in the novel the author says, “We used to have art for art’s sake and now we have war for war’s sake. No lands captured, no slaves taken, no mass rapes, forget their oil wealth and ignore their mineral deposits. You can outsource mass rapes. War has been condensed to carpet bombings and dry rations followed by craft classed for the refugees. People who had never left their hamlets for centuries, goatherds who believed in nothing else but grassy fields and folk music, women who had never walked beyond their village well, now they could all go and live in UN tents, eat exotic food donated by USAID and burp after drinking fuzzy drinks.”
These lines pretty much sum up the world that we have come to live in. First you deliberately create a crisis and then try and play saviour and hero to those very people whom you have first attacked and killed and turned into refugees. Does the recent refugee crisis in Europe ring a bell?
These lines set the tone for the satirical novel which gracefully captures the sheer absurdities of the modern world dominated by American foreign policy of always looking out for new enemies to fight a war, and finding a justification to wage the war, with the rest of the world helplessly looking on despite knowing the truth. It is also a sad commentary on how the world has come to accept it all as the new normal, where we have become so numb to human suffering that we do not even bat an eyelid to stop and contemplate about other people’s sufferings caused by war till the time maybe it hits us directly.
Reading Red Birds reminded me of another classic anti-war novel written in the last century, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. While not quite equal to Heller’s book, especially in creating an atmosphere where the protagonist is forced to find innovative means to avoid going to war, Red Birds is quite sharp with its witty lines that capture the essence of our times by holding up a mirror to our faces. Heller’s Catch-22 was set during the Second World War. Red Birds does not specify which war it uses as a background, maybe because there are far too many of them going on at the present moment. But the basic essence of both the books is the same, the sheer uselessness of war for most people and how wars are conducted not to uphold truth and justice but for the benefit of a
few capitalists.
Red Birds does not hit you immediately, but gradually grows on you. Some people might find it a little confusing in the beginning, but once you settle down after a few chapters, you will find it difficult to slow down, despite all the sadness associated with the proceedings. All in all, Mohammed Hanif has come up with a brilliant piece of satire at a time when making fun of the establishment gets you tagged as someone who belongs to the “enemy camp”. Red Birds is definitely worth adding to one’s collection.