Meet: 'The Flying Man of Stone' by Dilman Dila
Day three of this extra, extra special 'Meet' series, sees Dilman
Dila talk about his novella The Flying Man of Stone and the characters such as Luanda Magere from Luo folklore that the title comes from. Dilman also gets candid about the ways in which the 'fragile peace' in Uganda and his
experiences of racial abuse during his time in Nepal fed into the writing of
the story.
Dilman Dila is
a writer and filmmaker. He recently published a collection of short speculative
stories, A Killing in the Sun. His works have been honoured in many
international and prestigious prizes. Enjoy!
I found violence (in different shapes and forms) to be
a recurring theme in this anthology, but The Flying Man of Stone I
found the most violent. One scene actually caught me by surprise - when teacher
struck the missionary in the village. Could you reflect on the theme of
violence in the story?
I
set out to write a war story, and thus it had to have a bit of violence in it,
partly as a plot device. The radicals needed a motivation. The teacher needed
something to justify his ideology, and his followers needed something more than
just rhetoric to follow him. The superhero and the teacher believe violence is
the only way to stop violence. You are not the first to mention it. I’ve seen
it in a few other reviews, and I was surprised the first time I saw that
comment. I couldn’t help asking myself, ‘Really? Is there too much violence or
are readers being too sensitive?’ I did not even think of it as a theme for the
story. I wanted it to be a simple father-son story, in which a father helps his
son become a superhero. But after I wrote the first scene I knew it was going
to be a father-son superhero war story.
That
first scene, of a family fleeing from fighting, has plagued me for many years.
I’ve had nightmares about it, with one question troubling me ever since I was a
little child: ‘What if I find myself fleeing as a refugee?’ This nightmare I
think comes from the trauma of growing up in a fragile peace.
In
the ‘80s, there were various civil wars in Uganda. My town was so far from any of
it that we only heard about it in rumors, and we only saw it from the
occasional convoys of military vehicles that sped through the streets, with
soldiers perched atop lorries singing about how they were going to fight. Our
parents and teachers never tired telling us not to play with strange objects,
and we heard stories of children who picked up strange metals, only for it to
explode and they lost their limbs, or lives. We used to play a lot of war
games, but mostly inspired by Vietnam War movies, and by action films like Rambo.
The stadium in our town, with its overgrown hedge fence that was the closest
thing we had to a jungle, was our favorite playground. One day, I stayed at
home to wash dishes after lunch, but other kids were playing when one of them
burst out of the fence with a real gun, an AK47. Lucky there were adults in the
pavilion playing cards (gambling) and they took it away and gave it to the
police.
In
’86, when Museveni’s rebels took over power, that’s the closest I came to
witness soldiers in action. Not their fighting. But we kept picking up bullet
shells in the streets and playing with them, and some of what I’ve witnessed remains
imprinted in my mind forever: civilians attacking a soldier and disarming him;
a soldier returning home after a looting spree, a long line of people in front
of him carrying the loot, as the soldier keeps shooting into the air and
swigging from a bottle of beer. Later when I saw depictions of the slave trade,
I kept thinking of that soldier and his line of captives carrying his loot.
We
allegedly have been at peace since 1986, with regular elections. However, every
time there is an election, the predominant issue is not jobs, or the economy,
or health care, but whether there will be chaos and violence. In earlier
elections, the ruling candidate Museveni had radio adverts with war scenes in
them, driving home a clear message. Those kinds of adverts are no longer
played, but his speech threats have always been the same: ‘Vote for me or there
will be a war.’ For this to dominate a country’s elections says a lot about the
fragility of peace in that country, which is worsened by a leader who won’t
leave power, and who is such a darling of the US and UK that while in public
they condemn him, they support him with economic and military aid.
This
is the second war story I have published, but it’s the first to talk about a
war breaking out after a failed election. I guess it betrays my fears, and my
feelings of helplessness at the hands of corrupt leaders and their
international allies who do anything to stay in power.
The Flying Man of Stone
is also about colonialism, and really what got left behind. While there is a
war going on in this unnamed country, I am quite interested in the internal
conflict going on with the villagers particularly around indigenous faiths vs.
Christianity and Islam - which is probably as devastating as the war itself.
Could you speak to the theme of identity post-colonialism in the story?
The
theme of identity in contemporary Africa is something everyone in Africa struggles
with. Uganda for example is largely Christian, with a Muslim minority. Religion
has never been a major factor in our politics. It happened in the 1800s in
Buganda kingdom, but has hardly featured in politics after independence. Maybe
it is because a vast majority of both Christians and Muslims still practice ancestral
spirit worship (in secret), and so that unites them with a bond they cannot
acknowledge in public. In public, they proclaim to be either Christian (80%) or
Muslim (12%), but this does not of course reflect their true religious identity,
which is in the vague area between fully accepting foreign religions and still
clinging on to ancestral norms.
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| From African Shamans and Ancient Shrines |
Most
homesteads in rural areas will have a shrine dedicated to the ancestors, and
many individuals consult shamans for blessings in all aspects of their lives.
It is common to see people with charms, to see babies with ritual beads around
their waists even as these babies are being baptised in church. The President,
whose family is born-again, and has championed the rise of Pentecostalism in
the country, has publicly sought the support of shamans, who in 2001 gathered
at Nakivubo stadium to bless his campaigns. There are talks of politicians who,
upon being elected, won’t enter office until after a shaman has performed
certain rituals to cleanse the office of the previous office bearer’s charms. I
think it’s only a matter of time, and a matter of the right factors happening,
before we see people going to worship openly in shrines the way Christians and
Muslims go to churches and mosques. I heard a few years back of shamans who
started to wed people in shrines, and encourage them not to go to churches. But
I also think that there will be a marriage of foreign and indigenous faiths as
people pick the best in both. This is already happening in some nations within
Ugandan, where people have abandoned Christian names like John, Peter, Mary,
and instead directly translated African names into English words (to comply
with Christian teachings and norms, I suppose) and so you find people called ‘Grace’
‘Praise’ ‘Flower’ ‘Happy’ ‘Patience’. So a person called ‘Kwikiriza’ which could
have been an indigenous name to say someone has faith in an ancestor or the
other, becomes ‘Faith’, and is interpreted to mean someone has faith in the
Christian God.
When
people first learn my name, the first question they ask is; ‘Where are you from?’
They cannot place me in any of the national groupings in Uganda. I grew up in at
the border of Uganda and Kenya. One small town about only six kilometres away
from my home that had one side of the street in Uganda and the other side in
Kenya. People of that town never know which country they belong too. My father
is from the Western region, my mother from the North, but I grew up in the
East, and so I consider myself as one from the East, but this only adds to the
confusion of my identity. When people first see me, they assume I am from the North,
then they look at my full names, and they see I have a mixture of Northern and
Western names. The last time I went to get a passport, the immigration officers
wouldn’t give it to me until I had to bring my father to them to prove I was a
Ugandan.
There’s
also an ancient alien race, new technology and their relationship with humans -
could you talk more about this relationship?
It’s
not really an ‘alien’ race. I wonder why people keep seeing them as ‘alien’.
Maybe because we have been conditioned to believe that we are the only
intelligent species to have ever walked on this planet, and so any other
intelligent beings have to be from outer space. But what do we really know
about the history of Earth? What do we know about beings that lived here ten
thousand years ago? Just because we have not found their fossils doesn’t mean
they did not exist.
We
know about ancient Egyptians and the Mayans and the Sumerians because our
civilisations sprung from theirs, but what about those structures we cannot
explain, like the Stonehenge and the Nazca Lines? How do we know there were/are
no other intelligent species that went extinct, maybe as a result of human expansion
and migration? All over eastern Uganda, there are strange rock formations. You
look at some and you think it imitates a shape that you know. There has been
little study of these rocks (apart from the famous stone musical instruments in
Dolwe Island, Lake Victoria, that survive till today), which are dismissed as
works of nature. Yet folklore in some communities talk about how these rocks
have life, how they move in the night and return to their spots in the day. These
rocks make me think that maybe there was a species long before us who fashioned
them. Maybe this/these species was so intelligent that they did not need metal
and fuel the way we do. That’s why Kera’s father only tells him those creatures
are not spirits, but an ancient being. Not aliens. :-)
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| Ancient Star Beings of the Hopi |
What’s their
relationship with humans? None, I should think. They live in the darkness. When
we think of life, we think of light, and we think there can be no life where
there is no light. But these creatures live in the darkness, and light hurts
them. Maybe the people who live near the valley see signs of them every once in
a while, and believe them to be spirits, so they worship them. I think if we
came upon another intelligent species, and there is no sign of their spaceship,
we might mistake them for spirits. They, on the other hand, are only concerned
about keeping the light out of their caves, so when they come into contact with
humans, they turn humans into slaves to make this happen. In later works I
might explore more in depth into these creatures, but for now I don’t know much
about them :-).
This
is also a superhero story (but in a different way to The Last Pantheon) and Kera is quite an unlikely hero. What was the
reason behind placing so much power and responsibility in the hands of a
teenage boy?
I see this
more as a father-son story dealing with the death of their beloved ones. Maybe
I was trying to purge the demons that bothered me in my childhood, as stated
above, about the recurrent nightmare where I find myself a refugee because of
war, all alone without family. Kera’s father doesn’t have long to live, and after
he goes Kera will need a family, unless he can rescue his brother from
captivity, so he gives Kera a flying machine and a long range gun. I did not
really want to make Kera into a superhero, his only mission was to rescue his
brother, and then surrender the weapon, but like any boy who finds himself with
powerful toys, Kera gets other ideas.
While writing this story, I discovered I don’t like superheroes, not
just because there’s always a thin line between a hero and villain. There’s
something wrong with the concept that only one person can save the world. That
is a childish concept.
I wrote this
story upon request from Ivor, after he had read two other stories in my book ‘A Killing in the Sun’. The two stories were ‘A Wife and a Slave’ and ‘Lights on
Water’. He wanted me to write something about that world, but it’s a dark
world, where Africa is mono-racial and a very evil force rules. It’s not a
world I love at all. I don’t even like writing about it for it drains my
emotions.
I lived in
Nepal for two years, where I experienced racial abuse for the first time in my
life, where I was called a dog, a ghost, and where mothers told their children
that I would eat them even as I watched, and I think that experience gave birth
to these stories, as I struggle to make sense of the question of race. Ivor
urged me to write about it. His argument was simple. It’s the same anyone who
writes dystopian scifi gives: Humans need warnings. In Nepal, I coped with what
I was facing by rationalising things. I looked at it from their point of view,
saying it was a case of first contact and these people were meeting a black
person for the first time after centuries of two things; 1) in Hindu mythology
demons are black, and 2) colonialism taught them to look down upon dark skins. I
had to come up with this line of thinking to forgive, but I couldn’t take away
the trauma. All three stories in this world are set in Africa, where many real-world
events give us a cause to worry, including the expulsion of Asians from Uganda
in the 1970s, the attack on white farmers in Zimbabwe, and xenophobia in South
Africa. Many socio-political and economic factors influenced these unfortunate
events, and the big question is; Will it happen again, or will something worse
happen? What can prevent it? I have no answers. I can only provide a scenario of
how it might unfold, and of what might happen if we do nothing about it.
Which brings
me back to the question of superheroes. Humanity is forever faced with the
threat of descending into darkness. Any moment, any human society can slip over
the edge. And who can stop this from happening? Superheroes? I would say yes, if
pop culture did not place all the responsibility on one individual. The classic
superheroes, like Hercules, never worked alone. Hercules accomplished his tasks
with the help of a team. He was merely their leader. The two [characters] who lend the story
its title are Luanda Magere and Kibuuka. Magerere, a man of stone, he was
invincible in battle, but he always fought with the Luo army by his side, and Kibuuka,
a man who could fly and shoot arrows from the sky, never went to war without
the support of the Buganda army.
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| Illustration of Luanda Magere: The Warrior of Stone |
So why are superheroes today often lone individuals,
with only one or two people to support them? Very rarely do we see teams,
though Hollywood has started to play with that concept, very rarely do we see
an army, or a community, coming together to put an end to an injustice. It often
is a lone hero who no one believes in, who no one supports, until the end when
s/he defeats evil, then the community comes out to cheer. But why? Is this because
pop culture is heavily influenced by Christianity, and so it borrows from the
concept of a rejected God (Jesus) sacrificing himself to save the whole world? Is
it a capitalist thing that champions the individual over the community? Maybe A
Flying Man of Stone is a mockery of superheroes, maybe what I was trying to say
is that no one person, whoever s/he is, whatever weapons s/he has, whatever
capabilities s/he has, no one person can save humanity without community
support. Maybe that’s why I made the superhero a weepy teenage boy.
Final
question (which I’m asking everyone) what’s next?
I finished
the first draft of a novel (‘The Thing in Her Dream’) a few days back, so I’ll
be working on that for most of this year. It explores the dream theory that the
universe is a dream. It’s about a scientist who invents a machine that can broadcast
dreams, but his test subject, a woman experiencing severe violence from her
husband, is sucked into one of her own dreams, and she finds herself trapped in
a virtual world made of stuff straight out of her nightmares.
I’m also making
a sci-fi feature film, ‘Her Broken Shadow’, with a similar theme, about an
anthrophobic writer who begins to question reality when one of her characters
materialises and forces her to relive the crimes she committed in her
childhood. It should be ready by the end of this year. I don’t have a lot of
film plans this year, apart from finishing ‘Her Broken Shadow’ (and maybe a
web-series about a lone spaceman stranded in a spaceship, who comes upon a
planet with only one woman in it, or what he thinks is a planet with only one
woman in it), so I think I’ll have a lot of time to write a lot of short
stories. I’ve already had two accepted for publication, one with Mithila Review, a new South Asian SFF mag, the other with Myriad Lands Anthology. My
ultimate goal is to get into one of the top magazines, and maybe get myself
into one of the big prizes, so fingers crossed.
I am learning a lot from each of these interviews with the authors and I really appreciate Dilman Dila sharing such deep insights into his novella - and the different ways in which the components of the story (Christianity and traditional religions, ancient beings, the folklore, conflict and more) led to its creation. Thank you again for taking the time to answer them. Join me tomorrow for the next novella in the series, VIII.
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