A People Without Shame

by Patrick Colm Hogan

A profoundly beautiful novel commenting on the horrors of colonial oppression, trauma, love, and the power of story. Somota is society divided by change, and by memories. When A. arrives in the protectorate shortly after the first world war, he is unsure of what to expect. Employed by the government as a linguistic anthropologist, he is tasked with documenting the benefits of the new order and reporting them to the Reverend G. But what are these benefits? In his travels throughout the region, A. finds only the physical and emotional scars of conquest, and of routine colonial administration. Yet, even as the indigenous culture is being reduced to mere fragments, he also learns of a sublime
literature responding to those historical traumas. One storyteller in particular, Kehinta, begins to reveal to A. just how much has been lost. A profoundly beautiful novel commenting on the horrors of colonial oppression, trauma, love, and the power of story. "Imaginative and gripping."--Noam Chomsky " A People Without Shame is an artistic triumph composed by a master craftsman whose courageous eye makes all too vivid the abundant horrors suffered by beautiful people and their culture at the hands of soul-dead colonizers eager to extinguish them. Patrick Hogan is -- as Kurosawa says an artist must be -- one who does not look away. Inside this grand and ambitious novel beats an urgent and epic dirge written with magic enough to awaken our collective humanity to the poetry preserved in the raging hearts of people whose stories refuse to die."--Matt Cashion, author of Last Words of the Holy Ghost "Hogan's absorbing and stylistically inventive novel offers a stirring meditation on the cost of colonial appropriation. Told with visceral prose and cinematic sweep, it's also a unique tale of unrequited love. Kehinta, the guardian of her people's epic poem, is Hogan's great achievement, magnetic yet always just beyond our grasp, and A's quest to understand her--to wrest the meaning of a poem from her--brings all the twisted moralities of the colonial enterprise into razorsharp relief."--Ken Kwapis, director of He's Just Not That Into You and The Office Fiction.

384 pages, Paperback

Published May 23, 2023

Reviews

[Melanie Mcgee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was finally able to give A People Without Shame the careful reading it deserves. It was an experience filled with wonder and beauty. Matt Cashion was right of course in praising the book’s artistry. It reminded me of my second year of college, when I read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury for the first time. It showed me what the novel is capable of artistically. Reading Hogan’s book was the second such experience. Hogan’s ability to weave mythological material into his narrative and to create new myths when need, is truly stunning. Of course, the fate of Somota is a synecdoche for the whole bloody history of colonialism, but Hogan does much more. He manages to give us a detailed treatment of that history in all its complexity and richness.

Robert Treu
Professor Emeritus of English
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

[Susan Crutchfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m writing this recommendation after having spent a good hour discussing Patrick Hogan’s many-layered novel with a friend, and we by no means exhausted its complexities and pleasures. I won’t even try to cover them all here, but I will try to describe some aspects of the novel that other reviewers haven’t detailed yet. I agree with others who have described the novel as an exciting addition to the canon of post-colonial literature. Set in an imaginary British-colonized region in the years after WWI, the novel is a scathing indictment of colonialism’s destructive, bloody crimes—against human beings (both colonized and colonizing), against invaded cultures, against history, and against truth. Perhaps more important, though, is the novel’s very contemporary critical reflection on the difficulties—even delusions--of white allyship.

We access events through the notebook entries of “A.”, a likeable, seemingly open-minded linguistic anthropologist and British agent sent to fictional “Samota” in the years after the war. Reminiscent of Conrad’s narrator Marlow in The Heart of Darkness, A. records the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the colonialist project as he journeys from a British outpost further into the supposed “darkness” of Samota. A., however, is a Marlow and a Kurtz: he observes and records, but he also participates in the colonial project. He participates despite his good intentions, and in ways he doesn’t begin to understand until he—like Marlow reflecting on his time in the Congo—has returned to Europe, where he reads his own notebooks with a sense of them having been written by a stranger.

The book is a well-plotted page-turner. In Samota, A.’s goal becomes to hear and record a translation of the epic myths of Samota, which are in danger of disappearing forever due to colonial and civil wars. He meets and begins a professional and, it is implied, intimate relationship with the Samotan storyteller Kehinta. She recounts episodes of her culture’s mythology to A., but she gradually, and inexplicably to A., withdraws from him and his project. He eventually learns she has been violently assaulted and visits in her in hospital only to have her spit in his face.

SPOILER ALERT and CONTENT WARNING FOR THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH

A. is accused by the British colonial government of sexually assaulting Kehinta. He is imprisoned and treated inhumanely but eventually offered a way to avoid trial and return to Europe. Hogan’s handling of this plot point provides ample opportunity to demonstrate the workings of the colonial mythmaking machine: A.’s colleagues—British colonial leaders and their native puppets—uphold this farce of an accusation to A.’s face (despite our suspicions that one of them, “Reverend G.”, is the actual perpetrator), and the colonial-owned press spin out various versions of the colonialist “truth”.

As I mentioned before, A. is clearly well intentioned throughout. He calls out hypocrisy, state violence, and propaganda whenever he encounters it. However, perhaps his most politically radical act is to recognize that he was immersed in the colonizer’s mindset even as he believed he was working against its corrupt aims (and even though he is Irish and identifies as a colonized subject himself). In the novel’s final pages, A. engages in the kind of uncompromising self-examination that all white allies should. A.’s awakened perspective seems a place to restart his work as an ally, but he is left utterly “humiliated” and “embarrassed,” where the novel suggests feeling “shame” would instead inspire continued action. There is much to unpack here in Hogan’s representation of A.’s self-realization and his painful reaction to it.

Aside from its suspenseful plotting and its incisive examination of anti-colonialism and white allyship, another of the novel’s incredible pleasures is Hogan’s ingenious creation of the Samotan language and culture. Hogan has created not just one new language, but several interrelated languages, each associated with the Samotan, Songhari, and Kelan peoples described in the book. Furthermore, interspersed throughout A.’s narrative are examples of the Samotan epic poems and myths that he is collecting. Exactly what we are reading is called into question by A.’s final self-critique --Can a white colonial linguist record the “truth” of a colonized culture? Was Kehinta ever a willing, consenting participant in A.’s projects (personal and professional)? Nevertheless, filled with gods, kings, queens, mere mortals, and the flora and fauna of water, land, and air, these stories are a joy to read in their own right. They are incredibly imaginative and expansive, clearly drawing on Hogan’s knowledge of world religions and mythologies, but wholly original, instructive, and entertaining. Hogan’s powers of creative world-building are awe-inspiring.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrick Colm Hogan brings a level of virtuosity to his novel about A., an anthropologist in the late colonial era, charged with reporting on the customs and habits of the fictional Somotan people. Although officially a functionary of the British colonial regime, A. finds himself at odds with its acquisitive project as he becomes more and more drawn to the society he is studying and to its enigmatic storyteller, Kehinta. A’s increasingly outspoken criticism of the callous manipulation of local tensions between different clans, encouraged by the unctuous and hypocritical Provincial Officer, the Reverend G., brings him into conflict with the authorities. His burgeoning romantic, yet unreciprocated, feelings for Kehinta provide those who would be rid of him with an opportunity to engineer his downfall. In between times, however, and thanks to the relationship of trust he has tentatively – and temporarily – established with Kehinta, A. is able to hear of, and transcribe, some of the classic legends of the Somotan peoples: from creation myths to tales of heroism and calamitous battles; from the beginnings of the society to its current precarious state under the ‘red man’.
This is a novel that glides between the tale of A., an Irishman whose backstory, revealed in snippets, underscores the scepticism with which he views the actions of the British colonisers and these Somotan stories. Somota is a composite colonial space, and its practices and legends carry echoes of numerous real-world societies from Africa to Asia. There are parallels here with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the way in which the Somotan worldview adds a three-dimensionality and a narrative pre-history to a people who appear to the colonisers only as puppets to be manipulated or beasts of burden. The stories A. learns of also carry echoes of the Indian epics, most notable the Mahabharata, and the classic Greek myths too.
As a protagonist, A. is something of a man out of his time; his sensitivity to the peoples he encounters leavens his scholarly detachment with sympathetic insight. He is also self-aware, sometimes painfully so; in a retrospective turn near the end of the novel A. recognises that his concern for the Somotans has always been tainted by self-interest and the intrusion of power and difference that makes his attentions to Kehinta ‘unreproved, if undesired’, as T.S. Eliot would say. He sees that his principle has been sometimes tinged with sanctimony.
This is an erudite novel, teeming with information and of the kind one might hope to get from a scholar of Patrick Colm Hogan’s interests and standing. Yet it is also an intensely humane text. In their constituent elements, societies and the people who make them up are not so different after all. A. reflects, ‘If there are differences of character, they are a matter only of some slight degree – the fractional means to corrupt the heart varies almost imperceptibly; it is in conditions, not propensities that humans vastly differ’ (p. 368). This insight animates the novel, as it does Hogan’s scholarly work but, in both cases, the viewpoint never deteriorates into false equivalence or the wishing away of what makes all cultures unique, special to themselves and those shaped by them. Here, fiction is shown to be a medium which can balance those contending pressures: the cultural and the individual. It brings people together, albeit briefly and under conditions so inequitable that no long-term links can survive. At one point in ‘The Dream of Garuna’, recording the exploits of a legendary Somotan warrior, the storyteller pauses in her description of the carnage after a battle to offer a reflection which sums up the spirit and achievement of Hogan’s novel: ‘[I]n the end, the soul that is personal to me, the soul that carries its joy and shame everywhere, like a new mother carries her mewling child, that soul is entirely alone … No one else can think its thoughts, foolish, brilliant and banal, remember its queer, uncanny past, feel each delineated sinew of emotion in the erratic movements of the heart. Only, now and then, words bring us messages, like scrolls passed on, through many carriers, from a distant place, with its own idiosyncratic symbols and strange alphabet’ (p. 338).

[Megan K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a masterpiece. Maybe the best way I can convey what you’ll encounter in it is to describe the author: a brilliant, prolific and highly accomplished scholar of postcolonial literature and cognitive science, the many intersecting layers of reference to historical events, literature, satire, and reflection he weaves into this novel are staggering. He is also a poet and a keen observer of human nature, on both individual and collective levels, and his articulation of his observations is philosophical, poetic, and deeply evocative – with a good dose of self-effacing humor as well.

My copy is full of highlighted lines and passages of gorgeously put observations about humanity that I will always carry with me, such as these:

"With each person’s death a sort of world is lost."

"Soon people believe what they are told that they believe, what they are told that they have always believed."

“At the end of life, a good man and an evil man both go to Homa and she rewards them equally. But the good man says, ‘I do not deserve this reward’ and he wanders about the beautiful land, weeping, weeping, weeping for his uncountable sins.”

This sentence is a particularly exquisite example of what you get when a poet and leading expert in cognitive science and literature writes a novel:

"Distracted for a moment, the girl’s memory dissolved to mere fragmentary traces, vague impressions, feelings without cause or object, like a dream, fully remembered one moment, then forgotten the next—but still pervasive in the waking day, guiding our desires and our fears, in strange directions we cannot explain and do not understand."

And at the same time, the author’s inimitable sense of humor comes through in passages like these, from a narrator who has been called up by a reverend to stand before the congregation of a missionary church: "Evidently, I was an example of what each and every Somotan, no matter how humble, could become. But what could he possibly mean by this? That by sheer force of will and commitment to the Good News they could become pale, flaccid, and stoop-shouldered? Near-sighted?"

I can’t do this book justice, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It would also make an outstanding choice for a class.

[Blackwater Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an experience filled with wonder, beauty, and artistry. It reminded me of my second year of college, when I read Faulkner’s "The Sound and the Fury" for the first time. It showed me what the novel is capable of artistically. Reading Hogan’s book was the second such experience.
... His ability to weave mythological material into his narrative and to create new myths when need, is truly stunning. Of course, the fate of Somota is a synecdoche for the whole bloody history of colonialism, but Hogan does much more. He manages to give us a detailed treatment of that history in all its complexity and richness.

Robert Treu
Professor Emeritus of English
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a bit difficult to describe, but I think anyone who takes a chance on it will become enrapt by the story. The book's main character, a linguistic anthropologist called "A.," travels to Somota, a land under British occupation, to report on ways life in the region has improved under the new leadership. But what he finds is profound loss; accounts from the land's indigenous people reveal the lingering damage from years of oppression.
This is not a history book, but Hogan's research (he's a professor at the U. of Connecticut) on colonialism clearly informed his writing. He has created a complex character in "A," helping us feel his internal struggle to reconcile what he has been told with what he sees before him. It is beautifully written, absorbing, and insightful.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunningly beautiful book from the outset. The opening of this novel is one of the most moving passages I have ever read in literature. The plot that follows interrogates the role of knowledge and literature in the trauma of the colonial context but in a nuanced way. Highly recommend!