“How can you be scared of a regime that trembles when seven young people with absolutely no power raise their voices?”

There are two types of dreams – private and fleeting, disappearing at the first brushes with consciousness, and the shared, long-held kind that, with luck, metamorphoses into reality.

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, excavates dreams and prophecies – shared and private – to reveal the earnest desire for fairness and justice. Agualusa examines this possibility in Angola, especially among the youth, who are sensitive to the deep class differences and the social divides that allow corruption, degeneracy, and violence to thrive.

Promises of liberation

The narrator, Daniel Benchimol, a journalist who writes about culture and interviews artists who are “foreigners or live abroad”, is a man caught between a sour marriage and commitment to personal freedom. His marriage to the daughter of one of Angola’s most prominent and wealthiest individuals comes to an end when his father-in-law offers to pay him to give up an honest journalist’s job. Daniel’s daughter, Karinguiri, despite being born in a privileged bubble and strictly away from Angola’s destitution, grows up to be sympathetic to the poor and detests the despotic control of the rich and the powerful. She admits to her father that, as a child, she thought of Angola as a “big network of condos separated by one another by pieces of waste ground: Africa.” Karinguiri and six of her friends begin their protest against the ruling government and go on a hunger strike when they’re arrested.

Torn between fatherly anxiety and pride in his daughter’s convictions, Daniel reminded me of India’s very own Umar Khalid, Gulfish Fatima, Sharjeel Imam, and countless other young political prisoners’ parents who have exemplified grit and perseverance as their children take on a hard-hearted, insolent regime. Their likeness so eerie that it could’ve been as much India’s story as Angola’s.

But Agualusa avoids a straightforward, linear narrative. He relies on magical realism and fantastical possibilities. A central occupation of the novel is Daniel’s quest to record dreams, including photographing them. In doing so, Agualusa illuminates that the present is never severed from the past or the future, and what we believe is simply a private anguish is often a widespread malaise. To capture dreams, read and record them, is a violation of our most unguarded moments – but to Agualusa, dreams are our most distilled form of desire. It is in our half-conscious, unawakened state that we find language for what we dare not verbalise while our faculties are intact.

Dreams and reality

Even in the midst of a revolution, there is scope for romance, friendships, family drama, and sleep and dreams. Daniel travels across Angola, South Africa, and Brazil in search of the strangers who appear in his dreams, and he in theirs. As he gets pulled into their lives and dreams, Daniel forms his own troop of misfits of varying political beliefs and personal ideologies as each dreams in their own unique ways of a life of freedom and dignity.

We peer into these lives through journal entries, letters, recountings, and prophecies. The lucid world of dreams is interspersed by the hazy goings-on in Karinguiri’s imprisonment. Every now and then, Daniel is jolted back to reality when he visits his daughter in prison or sees how weak she has become by refusing to eat. His pursuit, decidedly trivial in comparison, also provokes comparisons between the resigned acceptance of elders and the fiery determination of the youth.

As his daughter and her comrades become increasingly resolute in their dream of a just future, so do Daniel’s dreams find echoes in the world around him – the web of misfits becoming allies as possibilities begin to emerge of dreams transforming into reality. The unusual alliance between realists and dreamers bear fruition – democracy needs both to exist and thrive.

The magical realism genre is a tried and tested method to do fine political talking. The final chapters of the novel, where dreams and reality clash, are a reminder to the reader that things often get nightmarish before one can start to feel hopeful about the future. Like a tipping point that is bound to come, so are dreams, catalysed by revolution and courage, bound to manifest into a happier reality.

The Society of Reluctant Dreams, José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, Harvill Secker.

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