Dream is based on the life of Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist who began as a functionary in the British Empire. As a young man, he dreamed of the romantic world of explorers, like David Livingston, and eventually joined the entourage of Henry Morton ("Dr. Livingston, I presume?") Stanley in the Congo, then a Belgian colony. His experience throughout the rubber plantations is one of constant disillusionment with the colonial exercise. Casement signed up with simplistic dreams of bringing civilization (mostly in the form of Christianity and Commerce) to the "savage" natives, but he rapidly learns that the colonists are the savages, capable of astonishing cruelty and violence, which is narrated (as in The War of the End of the World) at great length. This is not a book for the faint of heart.
Casement returns to England, writes an exposé, and gains a reputation as a crusader against social injustice. This lands him a post in Amazonia, again on rubber plantations, and again filled with grisly horrors. He first realizes that Amazonia is just "[t]he Congo, again. The Congo, everywhere, …" The inhuman cruelties he saw in the Congo are ubiquitous. His greater realization, though, is that he is not colonizer, but colonized native -- as an Irishman of hidden Catholic descent, he is a subject of, and lackey for the British Empire.
As Casement thinks it through, he concludes, "Wasn't Ireland a colony too, like the Congo?" His native land is, no less, a colonized region: "There in the Congo, living with injustice and violence, he had discovered the great lie of colonialism and began to feel 'Irish,' that is, like the citizen of a country occupied and exploited by the Empire that had bled and weakened Ireland." In this sense, the novel takes a postcolonial perspective, and its insights are applicable not merely to the novel's three settings but to the whole world, colonized through and through in one way or another. The ultimate accomplishment of colonizing forces is the complete dehumanization of the colonized, which allows for any level of mistreatment:
For them the Amazonian indigenous people were not, strictly speaking, human beings, but an inferior, contemptible for of existence, closer to animals than civilized people. That's why it was legitimate to exploit them, whip them, abduct them, take them to rubber plantations or, if they resisted, kill them like rabid dogs.The history is rather complex, and much of the prose of the novel is given over to it. Llosa succeeds most boldly when he humanizes his subjects and hovers inward to the small moments of interaction -- Casement's brief and frantic love affairs with young men on four continents, his discussions with priests on the nature of humanity.
As a whole, Dream is an intricately postcolonial novel. Chapters alternate between Casement awaiting his death sentence in a prison in English-colonized Ireland and his adventures as colonizer in Africa and Amazonia. In both locations, Casement (really, of course, Llosa) has much time to reflect on the base nature of humanity:
The Congo had humanized him ..., if being human meant knowing the extremes that could be reached by greed, avarice, prejudice, and cruelty. That's what moral corruption was: something that did not exist in animals but belonged exclusively to humans.And finally, there is a lesson in here for me and my fellow historians:
Was all of history like that? The history learned at school? The one written by historians? A more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous event, coincidences multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals, advances, and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipated or experienced by the protagonists.Indeed, so it is.
