Reviews: Bees and Monsters

 

Bees and Monsters: Politics, Democracy,

and Symbolism in ‘The Ardent Swarm’

and ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’

A review by Isidra Mencos

 

Yamen Manai, “The Ardent Swarm”
Amazon Crossing, 2021
204 pages, hardcover, $15.99
 

Yellow book cover with beesDespite four decades, a continent, and a language separating the creation of two powerful works of art, the new novel “The Ardent Swarm” by Tunisian Yamen Manai and the classic Spanish film from 1973 “The Spirit of the Beehive” by director Víctor Erice share many crucial elements: setting, plot, symbols, and cultural and literary traditions. Both narratives respond to political upheaval; literary and oral traditions of fables and children’s stories frame them; tiny rural towns marked by poverty and isolation become a cipher for a whole country; and a beekeeper and a monster (or monsters) are key figures that drive the works’ symbolism, while their coded meaning allows the authors to avoid retaliation from radical political movements.

The US publication of “The Ardent Swarm” in February of this year coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. Manai’s novel allegorizes its aftermath. It begins at the onset of democratic rule in a fictitious Arab country, Sidi Bou, that stands for Tunisia. This year also marks the 41st anniversary of the release in the US of the iconic Spanish film, “The Spirit of the Beehive” which is set in 1940, at the beginning of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. The opposite political fates depicted in these works reflect the meaning of their common elements in radically different, but parallel, ways.

“The Ardent Swarm” opens in a yacht, where an Arab prince from the small but petroleum-rich country of “Qafar,” not content with his wealth, seeks to dominate other lands through political puppets. Neighboring Sidi Bou has recently undergone a popular uprising which has fostered democratic elections, and the prince has “a horse in the race”—a candidate of the fundamentalist Islamic Party of God. The hold of the yacht is filled with crates of clothes and canned goods that will be used to bribe the population, so that they vote for the fundamentalist Party of God, the supposed donor of these gifts. As the narrator says, “What was easier to hijack than democracy? Like most things in the world of men, democracy was a question of money, and the prince had plenty.”

We are then taken to the tiny village of Nawa, where a poor and illiterate population is barely making ends meet. The villagers live in almost complete isolation, with one TV in the town’s cafe linking them to the outside world. (The TV is only turned on for the World Cup Series.) In the hills close by, an old beekeeper, Sidi, lives almost like a hermit tending to his “girls,” the bees he adores.

The mysterious slaughter of thousands of bees by an unknown enemy disrupts the town’s calm routine. The monstrous attacker has mutilated Sidi’s girls. The news quickly spread through Nawa, and when Sidi comes to the cafe in town “where the village men puffed themselves up with hookah smoke and endless conversations,” no one can figure out what caused the damage. One thing is for sure: the predator is not native.

This intrusion from the outside world is not the first. Back in September, a group of people visited Nawa to tell the villagers about the upcoming elections and set up a voting booth in the square. The isolated townspeople were surprised to learn that the five decades of authoritarian ruling by the “Handsome One,” and the “Old One” (symbolizing Ben Ali and Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia) were over.

In October, bearded men dressed in long tunics showed up talking about God and gave away crates of food and clothes. The men told the villagers it was a gift from the Party of God and explained how they could vote for this party in the upcoming election—by checking the box with the image of a pigeon on the side.

It turns out that the monsters that attacked Sidi’s bees came with the gifts. The villagers find in one crate the remanent of a nest of huge hornets that nobody had seen before. This discovery sends Sidi on a quest to research where the hornets come from, and how to defend his girls from them. When he goes to the city in search for answers, he finds it changed. The Party of God has started a reign of terror, imposing its views through violence under the guise of religion, banning books, and censoring learning. It will fall on the population to find ways to preserve their freedom, as it falls on Sidi to find ways to preserve his bees from the attack of this foreign invader.

Throughout this novel, the bees are presented—as it has been done since ancient times—as benevolent beings that work together for the benefit of all. Not only do they produce divine honey, they also pollinate flowers and plants, bringing bounty to the world. The Nawis, like the bees, help each other when a challenge comes up, and live a life of relative freedom in their isolation from the rest of the world. The Party of God—the hornets—threaten their freedom of thought and their way of life.

In the simple style of a fable, with humor and an homage to both oral culture and literature, Manai’s novel shows that complete isolation is not viable anymore. Just as today the bees are in danger of extinction because people have forgotten to live in balance with the Earth, the threats to freedom and life can come from anywhere in this global world. It’s impossible to squash every danger and every invader. One must learn to manage them, and for that, coming out of isolation is necessary, as even the reclusive Sidi is forced to understand.

In contrast, the bees are not seen as benevolent in Víctor Erice’s film, and isolation is not only accepted but doggedly pursued.

Just as Manai’s novel relies on oral tradition and fables, Erice relies on the tradition of children’s stories. The movie starts with credits scrolling by, children’s drawings, and the narrative voice saying “Érase una vez …” [Once upon a time …]. The voice sets the story in a tiny rural town in the region of La Mancha, Hoyuelos, around 1940. That is, right after the civil war that ended with the right-wing dictator Francisco Franco seizing power, and with the exile, imprisonment, and execution of those supporting the previous leftist democratic government.

the spirit of the beehive posterThe story begins with a truck carrying a cinematographer arriving in the isolated village. Most of the town congregates in the rundown city hall to watch the movie “Frankenstein” (the 1931 version with Boris Karloff). There we meet the young sisters, Ana and Isabel. Ana, the younger, is fascinated by Frankenstein the monster, and tries to understand him. This fascination becomes an obsession as she tries to communicate with him—to Ana, he is a spirit, and as real as herself, not a monster. Later when she finds a man hidden in an abandoned barn near town (possibly a fugitive from the defeated opposition) she believes he is the spirit of Frankenstein himself and gives him an apple. Though she eventually discovers blood in the empty barn and understands the fugitive has been executed, the monster is still alive to her, through her imagination.

Ana’s efforts to communicate with the monster contrast with the efforts of her parents to avoid communicating with each other. The father, a beekeeper from a bourgeois family, spends his day alone with the beehives or in his study, reading and writing. The mother, named Teresa, writes letters to a mysterious man, and when her husband comes to bed, she feigns sleep. The girls are mostly by themselves. Silence reigns in the house and in the movie with scarce exception.

The house windows, yellow and in the pattern of a beehive, spread a honey-colored light inside, so we see the inhabitants of the house as metaphorical bees. But in this story, the bees are not a source of bounty for the community like they are in “The Ardent Swarm.” The father, when writing about the incessant work of the bees, sees it as frenetic and purposeless, and producing “un triste espanto” [a sad horror].

In this postwar, isolated world, the biggest presence is absence: absence of the people lost; absence of communication, and of the capacity to feel, as Teresa writes in her letters. Each person tries to survive a world without hope by keeping on with the daily, empty routine of living. The cells of the beehive are prisons where each individual is enclosed with their private thoughts. Only Ana, through her lively imagination awoken by the art of film, is able to fly free and substitute this emptiness by a dialogue with the spirit she has brought to life. It’s this dialogue—this growth into her private self—that creates her distinct identity: “Soy Ana, soy Ana,” [I am Ana, I am Ana] she whispers from the balcony of her house to the monster towards the end of the movie. The country may be repressed, and its spirit vanquished and broken, but life blooms inside Ana’s mind. Just as Don Quixote (also from la Mancha), from the seventeenth-century novel by Miguel de Cervantes, Ana has created a world with more meaning and purpose than the world surrounding her, through merging reality with fantasy.

The image of the beehive as oppressive and the bees as meaningless workers had already appeared in Spanish culture to represent the dark postwar period. Camilo José Cela published a novel called “La colmena” [The Beehive] in 1953 in Argentina, because it was forbidden for him to publish it in Spain. In that novel, the Madrid of 1943 is a busy beehive, with 300 independent characters struggling to survive in an atmosphere of desolation. Both Erice and Cela narrow their view of the beehive to its hectic activity, and see the bees as condemned by instinct to survive; they disregard the greater ecological role of bees on which the survival of the world is dependent.

In Yamen Manai’s novel we find a more optimistic view of the human beehive. Accepting that isolation has been eradicated by globalization—as opposed to the traumatized and willing isolation of postwar Spain—is a necessary step for survival. Manai proposes a return to a balanced world, both in nature and in society, by upholding knowledge, truth, and solidarity over greed, deception and religious extremism.

Democracy, with all its failings and potential for corruption, is still a space where dialogue can exist, and the future can be planned. With art to show the way and shine a light on both democracy’s successes and its failures, it is our responsibility to keep it alive.

 

Writer Isidra MencosIsidra Mencos has a doctorate in Spanish and Latin American Contemporary literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught for twelve years. Her essays have appeared in The Penmen Review, Front Porch Journal, and Chicago Quarterly Review, and her piece “My Books and I” was listed as a Notable Essay in the “Best American Essays” anthology (2019).