From communism to bolo’bolo
bolo’bolo is a utopian novel written in 1983 by the anonymous Swiss author and activist p.m. (a name taken from the most common initials in the Swiss phonebook). One amazon reviewer describes the book as having “No tedious sermons on recycling, condom use, or literacy. Instead, the Magus of Zurich talks about a possible world of duels, sprouting micro-religions, bizarre local cuisines, the transformation of bland existing buildings into bohemian funhouses, dramatic suicides, wild barter economics, and Tarkovskyesque railway systems.”
Central to the brief novel is an invented auxillary language. By simply inventing new terms, p.m. is able to group together concepts in simple, succinct ways. “Pili,” for instance, means “communication, education, language, media,” whereas “vudo” means “city, county, trading area, bioregion.” Each word has a corresponding abstract glyph, and the language has an interesting and elegant grammar system.
p.m. himself speaks of his motivation for creating a new language:
“The original idea for creating this weird secret language came up because the European left-wing terminology was no longer viable. Nowadays when people talk about communism, that’s gulag, no one wants to hear about it. Or if people talk about socialism, then they are speaking of Schröder’s politics - retirement cuts - and no one wants that, either. And all of the other standard left-wing expressions such as ’solidarity,’ ‘community,’ they’re all contaminated and no longer useful. But the things that they stand for are actually quite good. I don’t want to suffer because of terminology for which I am not to blame; instead, I’d rather create my own. It would probably take longer to explain that the communism that I am talking about is not the one that I saw. It is easier to simply say I am for bolo’bolo, and then everyone starts to think of the things all over again, to re-think them. […] I want to emphasize that there is not one single idea in this book that is new. Everything in it is something that I found.”
