Edo's Souls by Stella Gaitano

It's been ten years I have been away from my village, the same age as my daughter Maria, whom we like to call Edo, named after her grandmother, who hovers around me like a thick, transparent cloud of air. I could only feel her presence, whereas I think my babies could see her more clearly. She'd play with them while I was busy with something else, like washing their tiny clothes covered in dust and poop. They'd be beating t he air with their hands and small legs, babbling and smiling, their wide black eyes following silhouettes floating in the air. I got the sense this was more than a child entertaining themselves with angels, as people say--the bond with this other being felt too strong. Maria-Edo was there, the children's grandmother, sitting on the edge of the bed, stopping my children--or what she probably saw as her own children reincarnated--from rolling off and hitting the floor.

Lucy-Eghino, a young girl living in the south of Sudan (which is now, you know, South Sudan) is the only one of her mother's children who survives. On her deathbed, Lucy's mother Maria, never having gotten over the struggles of her offspring, declares that Lucy's children will be the reincarnations of her own. But the children that Lucy will raise will see a different life than the traditional Sudanese village in which Lucy was raised. When violence breaks out, Lucy and her husband Marco must travel first to Juba, then to Khartoum in the north, a busy megalopolis where safety is only temporary, and civil war begins to approach. In Khartoum they live with Peter, another southerner raised by an Arab family in the north who has joined the military in order to find his imprisoned father, and his wife, Theresa. Together with Peter's extended family--who have a couple of other subplots related to the military oppression in Sudan in the 1970s and 80s--these four do their best to maintain the life of their family in the midst of upheaval.

I liked the first part of Edo's Souls. South Sudanese author Stella Gaitano draws on the traditions and legends of the country's small village to give us a sense of a woman with a deep-rooted power to transform the life of her child; we believe that Maria-Edo's--what, blessing? curse?--will come true. And when Lucy finds a baby on the road to Juba--the only survivor of a horrible killing--we understand it as a kind of fulfillment of the prophecy; what Maria-Edo has condemned Lucy to be is simply that, a mother. But the rest of the novel felt sadly familiar to me--a novel about political violence in the developing world where the violence hovers mostly somewhere offstage, operating opaquely. Gaitano makes Peter a kind of reluctant soldier, wavering over his multiple loyalties, but this fails to give us a real sense of what the violence in the Sudan is about or why. It's all very bloodless--not in a literal sense, of course. But the real problem is that, just as Lucy is disenchanted with the north to which she must flee, the novel becomes disenchanted as well. Gaitano tells us that the spirit of Maria-Edo watches over Lucy's children, but Lucy's children are more or less nonentities to the narrative, having been totally subsumed by the adventures of Peter, or Peter's sister and her Arab lover. It was a mistake, too, I think, for the novel to move from a third person that mystifies and enchants the narrative to a series of first-person narratives where the characters exhibit a shallow, plotty inner life. Oh well.

With the addition of South Sudan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 123!

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

The world has suddenly turned upside down. Love? Love does not do this. This is hatred. I feel hatred and seek revenge; my adversary is within and I needs must confront him. Even so, there is still in my mind a modicum of sense that is aware of the irony of the situation. I begin from where Mustafa Sa'eed had left off. Yet he at least made a choice, while I have chosen nothing. For a while the disk of the sun remained motionless just above the western horizon, then hurriedly disappeared. The armies of darkness, ever encamped near by, bounded in and occupied the world in an instant. If only I had told her the truth perhaps she would not have acted as she did. I had lost the war because I did not know and did not choose. For a long time I stood in front of the iron door. Now I am on my own: there is no escape, no place of refuge, no safeguard. Outside, my world was a wide one; now it had contracted, had withdrawn upon itself, until I myself had become the world, no world existing outside of me. Where, then, were the roots that struck down into times past? Where the memories of death and life? What had happened to the caravan and the tribe?

An unnamed Sudanese man returns to the village on the banks of the Nile where he was born; he has been away in England, where he studied the life of an obscure English poet. The village is much as he left it, with one addition: a stranger named Mustafa Sa'eed who has come to settle there. The narrator finds Sa'eed strange and beguiling; while drunk Sa'eed rattles off an English poem that signifies to the narrator that Sa'eed is, like him, a former traveler in the "cold North." If so, how did he end up in this place? Even the narrator has no intention to stay long in his old village; soon enough it will become too constricting and he will flee to Khartoum. Eventually, Sa'eed agrees to tell the man his story: a gifted child, he was sent to school in England, where he became a renowned economist. He quickly discovered that English women were attracted to his exotic identity, but his seductions had deadly consequences: three of his lovers killed themselves, and the fourth he stabbed to death in a fit of anger.

Colonialism, Tayeb Salih illustrates, reaches into the most remote places. The village is not Khartoum, and English control--and flight--have not changed it much, but people like Sa'eed and the narrator bring the disease of the colonial subject with them, infecting the village in their fashion. Sa'eed's relationships with English women are based on the violent fantasies inherent in colonialism: the women are drawn to Sa'eed's exotic nature--something he plays up by inventing fake names and Arabic mannerisms--but their dalliance fails to fix whatever deep lack resides within them. Sa'eed kills his final lover, whom he marries, when the tables are turned: she withholds her love and body, while being continuously unfaithful; she is symbolic of colonizers' easily withdrawn promises. Sa'eed's life is an image of colonial interaction that is cataclysmic for both colonizer and colonized.

Halfway through the novel, Sa'eed disappears, likely drowned, by suicide or accident. He leaves a letter asking the narrator to become the guardian of his wife and children, saying that only the narrator will know how to explain to the children who their father was and how he became it. Along with the letter is a key to a locked room in Sa'eed's house, a blisteringly symbolic space that, when finally opened, turns out to be a study with a replica English fireplace. (Not so useful, one might point out, in the hot Nile basin.) The narrator is a poor guardian, spending all his time in Khartoum. He's caught off guard, then, when Sa'eed's widow is married off against her will, and then kills her new husband and herself. Her appeal as a wife is inherited from Sa'eed--his prestige makes her a prize, because she has been valued by a valued man--but she inherits also his violent indignation, How can the murder of a Sudanese man by a Sudanese woman be fruit of colonialism's pillaging?

Season of Migration to the North is a wonderfully strange and elliptical book. Sa'eed's death and disappearance unsettle the core of the narrative, and Salih amplifies the instability by cutting off Sa'eed's life story early, allowing the grisly details--the suicides and murder--to drib out little by little, as the narrator's obsession with Sa'eed continues to grow after his death. It's a wonderfully psychic and metaphysical novel, all the more convincing it situates madness in geography, in politics.

I've never read a book from the Sudan, so Season of Migration of the North represents the 54th country I've read. Nice!

What is the What by Dave Eggers

The oughts, the 2000s, the O-Os. Call this decade what you will, but Dave Eggers has to be one of the best writers from it. This is somewhere between his 5th and 10th book depending on how you count them. It's the "autobiography" of a Sudanese lost boy. It's a truish story. A novelized memoir, written by a third party. It's hard to put Eggers' works into categories.

The story follows Valentino Achak Deng from his childhood in southern Sudan, along his march to refugee camps during the Sudanese Civil War, and through his adjustments to life in the US. The book opens with a robbery in his apartment in Atlanta. Bound and gagged, he tells his story silently to his assailants. Jumping back and forth from the present, he explains the conflict and how a whole population of Sudanese boys wound up in the States.

It's a personal story. People all around him die. He's separated from his family, forced to join a rebel army. He finds love. He struggles to adapt to a new culture, contemplates murder and suicide. And nowadays he travels the country recounting all of this, in short and long versions, to churches, schools, crowded bookstores, and youtube-ees. All Eggers did was come up with a way to get all that down in book form.

If you like audio books, definitely go that route with this one. It's narrated by Dion Graham (of The Wire) who does an excellent job with the voices. I listened to it on two consecutive 8 hour drives and never got road weary. A+ to everyone involved.