In this true and hard-hitting choral novel, served by the pen of the Sudanese-Canadian Reem Gaafar, there is love, conjugal and filial, in spite of everything; the historical ethnic tensions leading to racism between Arabs and Blacks, the aridity of the territory that answers the community’s hostility toward whatever comes from elsewhere; there are also, again and always, the deeply rooted patriarchal norms, sometimes perpetuated by women, and the role of emancipation through education.
“The Nile brings them life. But the Nile also knows how to take back.”
In the 1970s, a small village in northern Sudan wakes up one morning learning that a little boy has drowned. He is Mohammed, the only child of Sulafa, first wife of a polygamous family, mistreated by her husband as much as by her in-laws. Soon after, the camels die of a mysterious disease, while the palm groves catch fire. The villagers whisper that a mysterious witch lives at the foot of the mountains. It is the dry season. The men know what they have to do, the women have their own worries, and the children keep on playing where the river leaves its bed.
Fatima, for her part, at fourteen, aspires to leave in order to study at the University of Khartoum.
“The Nile was calling them, but the Nile was not their friend.”
The 1950s: Sudan is on the eve of its independence from the British. In Khartoum, the capital of the country, a single mother, Nyamakeem, barely earns a living to provide for the needs of her only child, Kheir Alseed. Her marriage to her late husband, Hassan, was disapproved of by both families: she, a dark-skinned Southerner, he, a Northern Arab.
Deprived of his inheritance by his in-laws and by Hassan’s second wife, Kheir Alseed decides to pursue what is rightfully his and to chart his own path in a world that obstinately keeps girls and women back.
But when the civil war rumbles and politics intrudes into the intimate, her position in the capital becomes untenable. She decides to leave for the village.
How do the two stories interlock? How do Fatima, Sulafa or Nyamakeem turn out to be linked by blood, by community, by the village and by the Nile? With this novel, Reem Gaafar skillfully weaves the female destinies over several generations confronted with the violence of History, and depicts a country where women themselves decide which traditions deserve to be preserved and which prophecies it is time to rewrite.
