Posthegemonic Comments
This is a lovely post. Thank you for this.
I'm still trying to think through your posts about democracy.
English-language escape literature does seem pretty limited, but I'm remembering now when I was about 10 years old (in the late 70s/early 80s), growing up in the Midwest of the US, some friends and I loved books with stories of escapes from Soviet countries, of which there was no shortage. Bypassings of the Berlin Wall was practically a genre in itself, but there were others of train escapes, Siberian escapes, etc.
I don't recall escape stories involving Western institutions, of course. Seems somewhat obvious why now, though it didn't then.
Yes, the whole Cold War theme is another.
One could imagine popular or political narratives of escapes from Western institutions. I think of George Blake or the IRA's Maze breakout, which, interestingly, Time calls a "Great Escape" and which apparently a Republican has claimed "could be a popular film"; except that it isn't.
Then there's the spate of helicopter prison breaks in France: here's one from 2001, but there's also the more romantic tale of Nadine Vaujour.
I used to have a republican pamphlet on the Maze breakout that was written in the style of Second World War POW escape adventure story. One of the details I remember was 6 escapees hiding under the floorboards of a sympathetic house being let up one at a time to have a bath to get rid of the dirt of a couple of days living rough. Then the householders became worried that so much dirty water coming from their pipes would give them away. Anyway it was a great read and consciously played on the centrality of POW escape or defiance films in British culture. After all England fans sing “Colonel Bogie” from “Bridge on the river Kwai” at matches, mind you they also sing “no surrender to the IRA” which shows how effective the republican pamphlet was.
I have often wondered though if there was any way you could transfer those Great Escape narratives to illegal migrants journeys in No Borders literature and the like. There was some wanker from a parliamentary committee on the radio today complaining aboout how he’d gone to Nigeria and seen fake UK electricity bills on sale there. I’ve got a board game from when I was a kid called “Escape from Colditz” where you have to go around the castle getting forged German travel papers and the like, you can see the comparison.
It also makes me think about that popular UK playground game called ‘cross the border’ (also called British bulldog interestingly enough) where one person is the guard who has to catch people as they bundle past them. I'm sure that has World War 2 resonances.
Have you heard of Guillermo Thorndike's "Los topos"? It's precisely about the escape of Víctor Polay from prison. Thorndike is a very interesting figure, too many times a mercenary pen, who has written really good books -in the vein of Capote or Mailer- about important episodes of Peruvian history, like the Aprista Revolution in Trujillo (1932) or the assassination of Banchero in 1972.
Keir, thanks for the comments. Interesting.
And Fernando, thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out.
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