MONDAY, MARCH 7 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
Yara’s description of her friends
back home as too afraid to sleep
lest they never wake up hit all the
harder for how much of a shock
the Russian invasion is to people
like them who, until recently, led
fairly ordinary lives.
We don’t need to be personally
acquainted with anyone in
Ukraine, of course, to find the
war abhorrent and its casualties
gallingly tragic. But perhaps
these are parasocial relationships
in their most productive form:
empathizing with the injustice
and terror of war through some-
one we “know.”
“I just saw a reporter doing a
piece from the square where Da-
vid [Murphey] finally met Lana
and it was so sad and surreal to
see it like this now,” wrote one
Reddit commenter. “Yes, this
show gave u s a special connection
we would never have had,” re-
sponded another. Perhaps that
sympathy will eventually veer
away from policing the reactions
of the show’s Russian partici-
pants (who have displayed a fasci-
natingly wide array of responses
to the war) and toward donations
for humanitarian relief.
“90 Day Fiance” never aspired
to be anything more than an
extremely entertaining dumpster
fire. But global events have some-
how transformed a heavily staged
show fueled by American ethno-
centrism into a vehicle for cross-
border affinity and real-life grief.
Stranger things have happened,
especially where entertainers
are involved. Just ask Volodymyr
Zelensky.ma that prompted her departure,
Destiny becomes a chronicler of
her nation’s history and an advo-
cate for its future. Her writing
provides a “way of rising above the
past, of putting together that
which w as broken.”
In her author’s note, Bulawayo
shares how her book’s most obvi-
ous literary inspiration, George
Orwell’s anti-Stalinism allegory
“A nimal Farm,” became a trending
topic on social media in the wake
of Mugabe’s ouster. The parallels
between post-revolution Manor
Farm and post-coup Zimbabwe
were too p ainful to ignore. “ Pivot-
ing from nonfiction to create ‘Glo-
ry’ became an extension of my
fellow citizens’ impulse to articu-
late the absurd and the surreal,”
she writes.
Any satire worth its weight in
talking animals is really a warning
— to the powers that be, the com-
plicit and anyone who thinks
nothing so t errible could ever hap-
pen to them. When Destiny diag-
noses Jidada’s condition as “the
willingness of citizens to get used
to that which should have other-
wise been the source of outrage,”
she could be describing a great
number of places. By almost any
measure, “Glory” w eighs a ton.Jake Cline is a writer and editor in
Miami.The animals are gleeful insulters
(“You have a demon of idiocy!”)
and inventive cussers. Tuvy and
the Father are as foolish as they
are evil. The latter’s reaction to
finding himself in hell, to which
he’s b een led by a lipstick-wearing
monkey, is wickedly funny. Bula-
wayo even delights in satirizing a
certain U. S. president, represent-
ed here as a tweeting primate
prone to subliterate warnings of
electoral malfeasance. His han-
dle: @bigbaboonoftheUS.
The citizens of Jidada often
speak with one voice. They recite
long lists, grim tautologies
(“killed dead,” “died death”) and
anecdotes that circle back on
themselves like tail-chasing dogs.
Tr aumatized by violence at home
and abroad, they repeat phrases
that fill entire pages of the book:
“and talks to the dead,” “and con-
sidered the maths of the revolu-
tion,” “I can’t b reathe.”
“Glory” reads longer than its
400 pages. Bulawayo shifts
among omniscient narration,
first-person plural, oral history
and even chapters written as Twit-
ter threads. The effect can be dis-
orienting, but individual voices
stand out. None resonates as
strongly as that of Destiny
Lozikeyi Khumalo, a goat who
returns to Jidada after a decade
away. Hoping to exorcise the trau-Among her new book’s many
strengths is Bulawayo’s portrayal
of the Jidadans’ experience as at
once distinct and universal. A host
of real-life tyrants can be seen in
the novel’s f our-legged bad guys.
This is not a humorless book.Bulawayo’s storytelling gifts,
which are prodigious. Her 20 13
debut novel, “We Need New
Names,” was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize for its indelible tale
of a Zimbabwean girl who immi-
grates to the United States.93 -year-old strongman’s replace-
ment was Emmerson Mnangag-
wa, the 75 -year-old vice president
whom Mugabe fired in one of his
last acts as head of state. Mnan-
gagwa, a former military leader
with an allegedly brutal history
and a vicious nickname, the Croc-
odile, won the presidency by a
narrow margin in 20 18. Mugabe
died the following y ear.
“Glory” repeats this story al-
most as it happened. In
Bulawayo’s telling, how-
ever, Jidada’s deposed au-
tocrat is an elderly stal-
lion long known a s Father
of the Nation but now
derided as Old Horse. F ol-
lowing a bloodless coup
staged by the nation’s ca-
nine military, the Father’s
vice president and fellow
old horse, Tuvius Delight
Shasha, returns from a
brief exile with promises
of “a new dawn, a new
season, a New Dispensa-
tion.” Tuvy, as he’s called,
vows to make Jidada “great
again.” In no time, he acquires a
cultlike following, a new nick-
name (the Savior) and a reputa-
tion for megalomania, misogyny
and corruption that surpasses
that o f his predecessor.
An expected chain of absurdi-
ties follows. That i s not a knock o nBY JAKE CLINEIn NoViolet Bulawayo’s new
novel, “Glory,” a nation riven by
decades of autocratic rule finds
itself dividing once again. Seeking
“to forget the screaming in their
heads,” t he citizens of Jidada flock
to the Internet. Safe inside this
“Other Country,” t hey rage a gainst
their government in ways that
would be unthinkable i n the phys-
ical “Country Country,”
where c ancellation is tru-
ly final.
The gulf between the
world as it is and the
world as it could be is as
wide in Bulawayo’s novel
as it is outside it. The
actions depicted in the
book are so familiar, the
events so recognizable,
the pain so acute, it’s e asy
to see how “Glory” began
as a work of nonfiction.
That the characters are
animals — furred, feath-
ered, scaled and all — is
almost incidental.
In a n ote to readers accompany-
ing pre-publication copies of her
book, Bulawayo reports that be-
fore writing “Glory,” she had been
at w ork on a nonfiction a ccount of
the 20 17 coup that ended Zimba-
bwean President Robert Mugabe’s
oppressive 37-year reign. The
BOOK WORLD
In ‘Glory,’ talking animals bear a striking resemblance to real-life tyrants
GLORY
By NoViolet
Bulawayo
Viking. 400 pp.
$27 NYE' LYN THO
NoViolet Bulawayo’s new novel, “Glory,” began as a work of
nonfiction, and the actions depicted in the book are familiar.and in the process, offered
glimpses of everyday life in
Ukraine. In the flagship series’s
seventh season, we meet Kyiv
resident Natalie Mordovtseva,
then engaged to Washington
state native Mike Youngquist, as
well as her sweet and doting
elderly single mother who fretted
that her only child would move
thousands of miles away.
Because so few U. S. programs
involve other countries, “90 Day
Fiance” may well offer the most
consistent Ukrainian presence on
mainstream television. That’s n ot
necessarily a positive, as the fran-
chise tends to play up cultural or
ethnic stereotypes much more
than it challenges them: Latin
American women are portrayed
as fiery, Caribbean men as un-
faithful and Middle Eastern men
as sexually dysfunctional or reac-
tionary. The majority of the
Ukrainian women featured on
the franchise — among them Alla
Ryan (nee Fedoruk) from Season
4 and the mysterious “Maria” and
“Lana” from “Before the 90
Days’s” third and fourth seasons,
respectively — have been depict-
ed as brutally blunt and unsenti-
mentally practical, if not, as with
the latter two, outright scam-
mers. Only Yara Zaya, of the
original show’s eighth season,
has bucked the trend, coming offinadvertently become a rather
moving medium through which
some Americans with no other
connection to Eastern Europe
have become emotionally invest-
ed in the war in Ukraine.
Launched in 20 14, “90 Day
Fiance” has become such an inte-
gral part of its network’s architec-
ture that it’s never not on the air;
like Bravo’s “Real Housewives”
franchise, new seasons start as
soon as the last one ends. In-
spired by the K-1 visa, which gives
foreigners three months to tie the
knot with their sponsor after
arriving to the United States, the
original series has spawned more
than a dozen spinoffs.
Though the current season —
“90 Day Fiance: Before the 90
Days,” centered on Americans
who travel abroad to meet their
foreign paramours for the first
time after falling in love online —
does not feature any participants
from Ukraine, the country is
heavily represented in the fran-
chise, with American men enter-
ing into relationships, or hoping
to do so, with Ukrainian women.
In a couple of those cases, TLC’s
cameras traveled to Kyiv and
other parts of the country to
follow the Americans’ pursuits of
the women they hoped to woo —
NOTEBOOK FROM C1
‘90 Day Fiance’ becomes
vehicle for real-life grief
were people we were introduced
to in relatively lighthearted con-
texts: Alla, Natalie and Yara, espe-
cially, had relatable lives as moth-
ers, girlfriends, daughters and
daughters-in-law, friends, tour-
ists and/or wannabe influencers.
Natalie’s recent update about her
mother’s safety, Lana’s since-
privatized Instagram post about
taking shelter underground andmarks. (The most likable Ukrai-
nian participant may be “Maria,”
who became an instant meme
when she shut down a question
about how much money she’s
received over the years from the
tip-dependent manicurist Caesar
Mack with a cold “I’m not accoun-
tant.”)
But it probably matters more
that the Ukrainians on the showas a worldly if spoiled young
woman who met her now-hus-
band, Jovi Dufren, on an app for
travelers.
None of the Ukrainians on “90
Day Fiance” would be considered
fan favorites, even for a franchise
like this one, where the viewer-
ship often rallies around the for-
eign fraudsters instead of their
dopey or entitled AmericanTLC
Yara Zaya and Jovi Dufren from “90 Day Fiance.” Ukraine is heavily represented in the franchise,
with American men entering into relationships, or hoping to do so, with Ukrainian women.smartphones by s oldiers last year.
Russia, they w rote, has become
“an atomized society held
together b y a hermetically sealed
ideology.”
Efforts to keep that hermetic
seal are getting more desperate.
Late last week, R ussia’s
parliament passed a l aw t o
punish j ournalists who
contradict the p arty l ine on
Ukraine, banning the words
“war,” “ invasion,” and “attacks.”
It’s n ow a criminal o ffense — with
jail terms u p to 15 years — to
publish “fake n ews,” a term
popularized by a certain Putin-
friendly former American
president.
As h e tries to deal with u gly
truth — images leaking out of
Ukraine showing the destruction
of civilian neighborhoods —
Putin i s relying on u glier lies,
trying t o insist that his military is
doing e verything it can to avoid
civilian deaths.
He s everely limits truthful
information i nside Russia a nd
uses politically friendly
Americans — and their media
magnifiers — to plant
propaganda and lead cheers in
the West.
In t he age of real-time video
and t he relentless presence of
social media, controlling t he
message has become more
challenging for Putin. As t he
estimable Fiona Hill argues, he’s
trying t o do nothing less than
take down the world order a nd
reconstitute t he Russian-
speaking w orld a s one entity.
That’s a n ambitious plan. But
at l east his trusty A merican
apologists laid some groundwork
for h im.just how well-received his
rhetoric has been by Putin and
his allies.
Laura Ingraham’s s how was a
big h elp l ate last month a s she
trashed a speech by Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky as
“really p athetic” and b rought
Tr ump o n as a guest. The former
president’s a nalysis: His
strongman idol would merely
have taken over two regions in
eastern Ukraine but w ent further
because “ he sees t he weakness
and t he incompetence and the
stupidity” of the Biden
administration.
The circularity and symbiosis
of right-wing media and Russia’s
own t alking points can be quite
remarkable.
On Tuesday, f ormer Tr ump-era
assistant treasury secretary
Monica Crowley told Fox N ews’s
Jesse Watters that economic
sanctions were so severe t hat
“Russia is now being c anceled.”
Within days, we heard about
Russian Foreign Intelligence
Director Sergei Naryshkin using
the s ame cancel-culture rhetoric.
“The West i sn’t s imply trying to
close off Russia behind a new iron
curtain. This i s about an attempt
to ruin our government — t o
‘cancel’ it, a s they now s ay i n
‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist circles,”
Naryshkin said.
As o ne Twitter wag responded,
“sounds like a press release f rom
the R epublican National
Committee.”
How serious i s Putin’s e ffort to
control information? Russian
American journalist Masha
Gessen noted in the New Yorker
last week that the R ussian
military banned t he possession ofreportedly argued to fellow world
leaders in 2018 that Crimea — t he
Ukrainian peninsula that Russia
invaded and annexed i n 2014 —
was R ussian because, after all,
people who live t here speak
Russian.
Carlson, meanwhile, r ecently
wondered on air why Putin is
hated b y “permanent
Washington,” describing Ukraine
as “not a democracy” b ut a “pure
client s tate of the United States
State Department.”
In more recent days, Carlson
has changed his tune to oppose
Putin — while managing t o fault
Democrats as not s ending a clear
message about the i mpending
crisis. But, to a large extent, the
propaganda mission had already
been accomplished. In 2019,
Carlson had even asked on the air,
“Why s houldn’t I root for Russia,
which b y the way I am?” (He tried
to walk t hat comment back a fter
it went v iral, saying he was o nly
kidding.)
Do these pro-Putin messages
sink in? No d oubt they do, here i n
the United States and i n Russia
itself.
Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.)
said that in the run-up to the
invasion, h is o ffice heard
complaints from c onstituents
who watch Carlson a nd “are
upset that we’re not s iding w ith
Russia i n its t hreats to invade
Ukraine, a nd who want me to
support Russia’s ‘ reasonable’
positions.”
That R ussian state TV h as
repeatedly played clips of
Carlson’s rants, c omplete with
Russian subtitles, is a tribute to
SULLIVAN FROM C1
MARGARET SULLIVAN
Putin’s key assists from Trump, GOP
25 0,000, with about 20 percent of
that traffic coming through cir-
cumvention networks such as
VPNs. Patrick B oehler, head of dig-
ital strategy at RFE/RL, tweeted
recently that data from Crowd -
Tangle showed that independent
Russian-language news stories
were being shared, worldwide,
more often than stories from s tate-
run media.
The media blockade is an at-
tempt to control the narrative
around the invasion, which the
Russian government and state me-
dia have insisted on referring to as
a “special military operation.” But
there a re workarounds.
VPNs can help u sers circumvent
Internet restrictions and are al-
ready widely used in China —
where Internet access has long
been restricted by a “Great Fire-
wall,” blocking Facebook, Twitter,
the New York Times, The Washing-
ton Post and other Western media
sites. In a p ost on its website S atur-
day, RFE/RL directed people to
nthLink, a free VPN service sup-
ported by the Open Technology
Fund. RFE also provided a link to
its website on the Tor browser,
which allows users to search the
Web anonymously, and encour-
aged people to join its channel on
Telegram, an encrypted messaging
platform that Russia tried to ban i n
20 18.
In a tweet on Friday (and a post
on its website), the BBC pointed
readers to Psiphon, a free, open-
source app created by the Univer-
sity of Toronto’s C itizen Lab. Alter-
nately, it directed people to access
BBC’s website via the Tor app,
widely used during the Arab
Spring of the early 2010 s to access
blocked social media sites. For any-MEDIA FROM C1 one unable to download either app
— given Russia’s crackdown — the
BBC invited people to send a blank
email t o [email protected] o r get-
[email protected] to receive a
safe l ink.
Circumventing censorship is
sometimes low-tech. In China, so-
cial media users have taken to
posting upside-down screenshots
of articles on platforms such as
Weibo (akin to Twitter). Russianreaders still have access to
RFE/RL’s n ewsletter “The Week In
Russia,” for instance, because
email has not been restricted. The
BBC announced Wednesday that it
would u se shortwave radio, a tech-
nology used during the Cold War,
to broadcast four hours of news
each day in Ukraine and parts of
Russia.
The blockade of Western media
comes amid increased restric-
tions: Russia shut down many of
its own independent media out-
lets, including Echo Moscow, TV
Rain and Meduza. Some journal-
ists have fled the c ountry.
CNN announced Friday that it
had stopped broadcasting its pro-grams in Russia. CBS and ABC said
they would no longer put their
Russia correspondents o n air. And
the BBC announced that it would
halt its journalists’ work in Russia
for the time being. “We are not
prepared to expose them to the
risk of criminal prosecution sim-
ply for doing their jobs,” a state-
ment said.
In a r elated move, a spokeswom-
an from T he Washington Post s aid
that the p ublication would remove
some bylines and datelines from
certain stories, to “help protect our
Moscow-based journalists,” while
the organization seeks “clarity
about whether Russia’s new re-
strictions will apply to interna-
tional news organizations.”
RFE/RL, which operates in
23 countries, has a history of re-
porting in tightly controlled media
environments and has led digital-
literacy campaigns in several
countries. An RFE/RL employee,
who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because he was not au-
thorized to comment on behalf of
the organization, told The Post
that the organization had shown
people in Afghanistan how to wipe
information from their phones in
case they were stopped at Taliban
checkpoints, and had taught
Ukrainians how to use VPNs.
In Russia, RFE/RL has set up
multiple mechanisms to evade
censorship. I ts mobile app has cen-
sorship-circumvention tools built
into it, and the organization has
made mirror websites that repro-
duce whatever is on the official
homepage. If the state blocks one
mirror site, it’s easy to make an-
other. “It’s like this cat-and-mouse
game,” the staffer said. “But we’re
just a very, v ery fast mouse.”Paul Farhi contributed to this report.News ban spurs technical workarounds“Access to accurate,independentinformation is afundamental humanright which should notbe denied to the peopleof Russia.”
The BBC, in a statement