Indeed, against the claim that her father stole national money, her mother says if that were true, where is the money.Ĭomments about structural racism feel tired and clichéd - whereas Monica could have had a fascinating perspective as someone with very mixed-race antecedents who has moved from Africa to Asia to Europe, and who speaks a variety of languages. It's quite amazing that Monica works as a retail assistant in a shop, as a chambermaid in a London hotel, low-paid jobs, and yet somehow manages to fly around the world, live in expensive cities (she claims she gets a part-loan for her SOAS studies) and never makes mention of how any of this is funded. But we don't get any real details of everyday life in North Korea, and she's soon off travelling to Spain, back to Equatorial Guinea, South Korea, China, New York and London where she does a masters at SOAS. It's a shame as Monica has had a fascinating life: daughter of the leader of Equatorial Guinea in its independence from its status as a colony of Spain, sent with her siblings at age seven to live in North Korea under the personal patronage of Kim Il Sung. Calling out one extreme form of propaganda does not make its opposite true.
Of course, there is an element of truth in the way that pat anti-communist narratives are spread but, at the same time, this book doesn't engage with the more neutral and documented narratives of brutalities, torture, and abysmal human rights abuses that exist in both states. The story pushed is that her father, Francisco Macias, 'was the victim of powerful enemies who elaborated a meticulous plan to eliminate him from the Guinean political scene' (this is how she summarises the main thrust of her Masters dissertation) and that he and her proxy father, Kim Il Sung, President of North Korea until his death in 1994, have been essentially maligned unfairly by the West. I constantly felt that there's a space between the book that has been intentionally written and the one that we are reading. And yes, we are aware that, to quote the cliché, history is written by the victors.
Hmm, this is essentially a lightweight and patronisingly naïve narrative in which Macias states well-known axioms such as that above as if they're discoveries that only she has made and which she wants to impart to us. Are they aware that, wherever there are asymmetric power dynamics, the victor's version of events is accepted as the truth, creating a warped narrative of historical events?
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