On dictatoriship living

I went to an art exhibit last week called the Biennale. Their virtually incoherent website piqued my interest.

Crossing the threshold of the former Fine Arts Academy, a grand classical building on the corner of Saint-Urbain and Sherbrooke, I had no idea what to expect. Turns out it's a sprawling selection of contemporary Montreal visual artists. Works ranged from
: eyebrow-raisingly terrible (reproduction of a squalid apartment, the hyper-realism uncomfortably torn by the ten pieces of buttered toast lying on the counter),
: to stimulating (a white room, with white sheets covering all the furniture, and careful piles of confetti created out of the accumulated works the artist read for her museum studies masters degree)
: to sublime (a video piece about Turkmenistan)

Let's elaborate on the last one shall we? It's clearly the heart of the posting, as your knowledge of Central Asian republics' recent history probably has alerted you.

Truly, I have no idea of the artist's intent with the fairly long video featuring a soothingly repetitive, sonorous ringing soundtrack and long still shots of statues, empty boulevards, and meticulous grocery stores. The video intersperses quotes from a book written by a Turkmenistani civilian expressing her love, admiration and devotion towards the great leader with adjective-free quotes about Turkmenistan and some of the dictator's nuttier decrees.  

I was entranced. I sat through the entire loop (no-one else did). It wasn't til walking down the stairs that I realized why. That must be what it's like to live in a dictatorship, I said to my friend Olivia. When we hear about dictatorship living it sounds truly awful. Mostly we hear about repression, fear, and horrible treatment of dissidents. But the day-to-day, as a regular Joe, life must feel overwhelmingly stable, calm, predictable, quiet. Reports of North Korea note this. It is civil wars, well any war but particularly civil ones, that are chaotically awful. With a dictatorship, you do know what you're getting. It's suburbia, to the max.

The theme recurred tonight as I'm listening to -- nay, devouring -- a series of podcasts of the CBC radio show Writers and Company on contemporary Spanish writers. It's called Franco's Ghosts. Finally, I learn, Spain is facing its demonic past.

The podcast I'm currently listening to features acclaimed Spanish writer Javier Cercas. It's about a botched coup, which occurred after the handover of power from the King to a democracy (shortly after Franco's death). Francoists stormed into the Parliament and were going to kill the new democracy's leaders. Cercas' most recent novel is entirely about the coup, about the Francoists' desire for a return to order and tradition and the population's horror and fear at the resurfacing bile from their past.

I think you know I love Spanish history for its inspiring transition to democracy. Spain's shift is an interesting counter-point to the North African spring, as Cercas notes, because it was not the result of a revolution. Spain's revolution yielded, well, Franco (let's hope the North African and Arab states do better, although I doubt all of them will). Rather, it was a solemn handing over, a noble King actually going back on his word to a dying tyrant and putting his faith entirely in the hands of his people despite their bloody and undemocratic history. It is about choosing uncertainty and the belief that it can, indeed will, yield a better stability, a dynamic instead of a stifling one.