Photo credit: Judy Laing
Review by Feroz Rather
I read Leila Aboulela’s latest novel, River Spirit, soon after it was published in March of last year, admiring how the author endows her Muslim women characters with distinct voices and forceful, fully realized personalities. This is especially true about the novel’s protagonist, Akuany, the young intrepid woman who is at the centre of the story that unfolds in late 19th century Sudan. Sold into slavery as a child, she is eventually bought and hired by the cruel and capricious wife of the Ottoman governor in Khartoum and comes in contact with the other members of the retinue, such as the old wise cook, Hadija, and the young and beautiful Hibra, two women who take on the role of mother and aunt respectively. Despite Sudan’s entrenched patriarchy and the terrible suffering caused by a flawed Mahdi’s campaign against the British and Turco-Egyptian control, it is impressive how Leila creates multiple liminal spaces where women can breathe and form warm, meaningful friendships and alliances.
I’m currently engaged in a dialogue with writers of historical/political fiction around the world. I have spoken to Isabella Hammad about her novel, Enter Ghost for Bomb and with Siddhartha Deb about his novel, The Light at the End of the World for The Nation. To conduct the third interview in this series, I recently caught up with Leila to discuss her views on River Spirit and what place faith holds in writing literary fiction. Our conversation took place over email.
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Feroz Rather: One of the first things that stood out to me about River Spirit was how despite the incredibly harsh and pressing circumstances, despite the bloodshed and political uncertainty that come with the kind of revolt that you depict in unwavering detail, you’re committed to realizing the inner worlds of your characters. I especially enjoyed the tenacity with which you trace your main character Akuany’s journey. What is it like to inhabit the distant period—the last decades of the 19th century—in the history of Sudan, and re-create the inner worlds of the characters who are in the midst of a violent, anti-colonial struggle?
Leila Aboulela: I wrote the first draft of the novel during the pandemic lockdown. Usually, my writing is interrupted by travel and other commitments but with River Spirit, I was able to have a fully immersive writing experience. It was as if the characters and events existed in a plane parallel to my day-to-day life and all I had to do was ‘visit’ them or ‘dive’ to where they were and find out what they were up to or how they’d been faring since I last left them. This was not entirely new to me, I’ve had snatches of that experience with other novels but with River Spirit, the lockdown gave me swaths of uninterrupted time and made it easier for me to access the interior life of the characters. It was an interior time, people staying indoors, away from public space and somehow that was reflected in the writing. I structured the novel so that the narrative would follow closely the overall arc of history – starting with the rise of the charismatic Mahdi and ending with the British conquest of Sudan in 1898. Each character would then pass on the baton of the story to the next character. The trick was to position the right character in the right place and time in a way that seemed natural and unforced. Once they were positioned, their interior life became more interesting to me, and I could focus on each one of them.
FR: Akuany’s desire to reunite with Yaseen, it seems to me, is central to her yearning and growth as a character. But I wonder if it’s a source of her agency or of her constraint?
LA: Love is, by definition, a source of energy and a constraint. Akuany’s love for Yaseen evolves and matures through the novel. At first, when she is very young, he is an embodiment of safety and protection. She loves him for all that he is providing for her – escape from the devastation of her village and a figure of authority she can trust to guide her and her toddler brother. As the years pass, her yearning becomes womanly, and they become lovers in a traditional and romantic sense. When she moves to Khartoum, he becomes the family that she is seeking, the provider of a teeming family life. At the end of the novel when Yaseen loses his career and social position in addition to becoming disabled, there is a reversal in their roles. It is now Akuany who rises to become his protector, to offer her village as a place of sanctuary for him. She is the one who will give him a new family and a new position in society. This is an empowerment for her and, in a sense, a triumph. Akuany’s yearning could also be seen as spiritual. This is not explicit in the text as I felt that I had already written about a woman’s spiritual awakening in other novels, and I did not want to repeat myself. But yes, Akuany does go through a spiritual maturity and her yearning for Yaseen can be seen as a subconscious desire to move from a religion that centres the natural world (the river) to one that worships the one creator. “She was ready. The river’s song had always been that she would follow him, but now a more compelling power was taking them back where they started.” From a purely legislative point of view, Yaseen could not marry Akuany until she converted to Islam. This is not explicit in the text and takes place off-stage. But it is there. Through her yearning for Yaseen, Akuany becomes Muslim.
FR: In the Western tradition, the novel is the epic of the godless world where, to paraphrase the Hungarian literary theorist and philosopher, György Lukács, meaning can’t quite penetrate reality. Unlike antiquity when epic flourished as a form, after Europe experienced the Enlightenment, faith about meaning being immanent or pre-given eroded. This erosion created a necessity to impose illusions of totality through the seemingly coherent form of the novel. How do you view the Western novelistic tradition and your relationship with it?
LA: My belief is that the Western novel continues to be Christian-centric. Its rise might have coincided with the decline of the Church, but the novel has not been able to totally shed Christianity. Readers and writers approach the novel as secular or humanist but scrutinizing the content provides a different picture. Every genre from crime to science fiction is heavy with Christian symbolism, while secular literary fiction, even if it is in opposition to Christianity, is also engaged with its ethos. As a Muslim reader, who reads with Muslim eyes, I am very conscious of this in the same way as I am conscious of Euro-centricity and white-centricity. I don’t only mean social and cultural customs, specific themes such as an existential struggle between Good and Evil, the return of the prodigal son, the noble sacrifice of the individual for the sake of a group, the dichotomy between the harlot and the Madonna – continue to have a heavy influence on the supposedly secular novel and such themes are rooted in Christian teaching. I would also point out a number of writers who successfully incorporated Christianity in the modern novel – C.S Lewis, Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, Marilynn Robinson.
It is also possible to separate the form of the novel from storytelling. Storytelling is universal and has always existed, even before Christianity or any organized religion. Stories will always echo human life, society, what people are seeking and what they are fleeing from. Humans have a spiritual dimension, and spiritual struggles and stories will mirror this.
FR: How do you explore the lives of your Muslim characters such as Yaseen and his wife, Salha, but also and perhaps even more significantly the Mahdi who observe ritual and profess faith?
LA: It’s always been important for me to centre Islam in my fiction and to write about characters who are practising Muslims. I want to do more than present Islam as a culture. I want it to be pervading the novel, giving it its logic and deeper meaning. Yes, Yaseen and Salha are the most articulate and observant (in more than one sense) Muslims in the novel. It was easy for me to write about them and they, more than the other characters, are close to my own viewpoint. Writing about Musa, the follower of the Mahdi and the Mahdi himself, was hugely challenging. I did not want to write about ‘extremist, radical’ Muslims, and I was nagged by the awareness that I could easily portray them as the typical Muslim fanatic familiar in Western media.
The reason I did not write from the Mahdi’s point of view, was that he did not fascinate me enough. I think Muhammad Ahmed did believe that he was the Expected Mahdi and the fact that someone righteous could be so misled terrifies me and makes my blood run cold. I think that when he called for the movement, he had idealistic aims but, as so happens with revolutions, they turn bloody and are hijacked by other ambitions. This is a valid story but not one that I wanted to focus on. I was more fascinated by the position of Yaseen, how do you hold on to the truth when popular public opinion and the whole country is against you. Islamic scholars are often attacked for siding with the government against the people and we see this nowadays too with the scholars who preach obedience to authority versus activism Islam which demands a more radical, progressive stance. In the case of 19th century Sudan, Yaseen and his colleagues were smeared with the accusation that they were ‘supping with the Sultan’ but in hindsight they were the ones who were on the side of the truth, and they were the ones whose stories moved me the most.
FR: It is very impressive how effortlessly you portray your characters on both sides of the colonial divide. When you were writing the chapters from the point of view of the Scottish shipbuilder and talented painter, Robert, did the way he inflicts violence on Akuany bother you?
LA: Robert was the first character that I imagined for this novel. The young European man in the colonies is a familiar figure, the protagonist in classics such as King Solomon’s Mines by Alan Quartermain, Burmese Days by George Orwell and more recently The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchel. Often, as the main character in such novels, this young man displays progressive sentiments and is at odds with the more conservative members of the colonial class. In my first initial idea for River Spirit, Robert belonged to that group. I envisaged him as a young man from Edinburgh who becomes fascinated by the vernacular architecture of colonial Sudan. He paints the Nile and starts to dress like a native. When he sketches the wife of a tribal chief and the drawing is discovered, his career in the colonial administration and his personal safety are put in jeopardy. With time, I lost faith in this vision and became aware of how derivative it was. My imagination went through a process of decolonizing! The Sudanese woman in the drawing took centre stage, and I saw the artist through her eyes – opportunistic, focused and ambitious. Africa and most of the Empire was a backdrop for European men, a playing field, a place where they could advance and shine back home. This should not be shocking to us. Even modern-day immigrants to the West or the Arab Gulf states can have this sense of opportunistic detachment, but the biggest difference is that they are in a position of weakness and not corruptible by power. Power, of course, has an immense effect on people’s attitudes and behaviour. For Robert, Akuany is a fascinating creature, someone he needs to fulfil his artistic vision. No, it didn’t bother me that he hit her. It felt true to the character and to the situation. Overall, based on my research, I would say that there was much more violence in 19th century Sudan (and the rest of the world) than I depicted in River Spirit. This violence was ubiquitous, but I felt that focusing on one or two incidents would have a more powerful effect on the reader.
FR: One of the most compelling chapters in River Spirit is about Charles Gordon. Chapter 19 is a brilliant exposition of the arrogance but also the psychological complexity that is integral to the colonialist attitude and the kind of delusional sense of power it can engender within a character.
LA: Thank you. I’m glad you highlighted this chapter as I’m quite proud of it. The challenge with writing about Gordon was that there was far too much information about him. Countless books, a Hollywood film, treatments in novels and his own extensive personal journals, which covered his last months in Khartoum. These journals are amazing, very revealing, very well written and detailed. They stop a few months before his death and survived because he succeeded in smuggling them out of besieged Khartoum. They were intended as official accounts for his superiors to read, but often, he digressed, and the tone became far more personal and less professional. This is what makes the journals fascinating reading. For sure, he must have continued writing, but these later entries were never found and were probably destroyed when the Mahdists took over the city and he was assassinated. So, I did know a lot about Gordon. The challenge was to write something new, to not regurgitate what I had already read about him either through the words of others or through his own words. I hesitated a lot before writing from his point of view. Somehow, using the second person freed my own voice and I was able to write about him. It was helpful too that I was writing about someone my own age. When studying him in school or reading about him in my youth in Sudan, he was always an older figure. But having lived in Scotland for years and viewing him as someone my own age, I didn’t have any awe or reverence for him anymore, only curiosity. I understood the complexities of his situation, his heavy feeling of responsibility. He was someone with a lot of successes under his belt, he was confident in himself in addition to the colonialist arrogance. Gordon was also religious, a practising Christian, and this made him an interesting character for me. He was an imperialist and a racist, but I admired his austerity and dedication.
FR: You’ve had a productive career as a fiction writer. It’s quite exciting that you’ve written six novels and two collections of stories. Do you ever think of your beginnings and the evolution of your style and things you do or wish to do differently in what you’re working on now? I feel the tone in your debut novel, The Translator, that you published in 1999, is measured while in River Spirit, the way the sentences are written reflect a quickening of thought and brisk plot progression.
LA: When I first started writing, despite my sense of urgency, the words didn’t flow easily. There was a sluggish quality to the flow, and it took me a long time to generate enough words. That was one of the reasons I was attracted to the short story; I did not have to write copious amounts of words! I remember feeling that what I was saying was coming from a deep place, thoughts and emotions that had never been put into words before. I was always eager to get the writing to pour out and I was delighted when it did. With time, the writing started to flow more briskly and so I would say that, yes, I am finding it easier to write now. Certainly, I am writing quicker, more confident of where I am heading. It is worth noting that with every novel I published up until River Spirit, I was asked by my editor to add more scenes or more descriptions. The final published version would end up being about 7% longer than the initial first draft. The opposite happened with River Spirit. For the first time in my writing life, my editor asked me to remove text and I ended up deleting almost twenty percent of what I’d written!
What I wish I had done differently was to have kept a journal or a diary. This was a piece of advice that I consistently ignored. I found it excruciatingly embarrassing, boring and the idea of writing without an intended reader felt like a waste of time. Unfortunately, I lost many details over the years, ‘research’ facts that would have been useful now for my present writing. I also don’t remember things as well as I used to, and a journal would have been useful to keep my memory fresh.
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Feroz Rather is the author of The Night of Broken Glass, a novel-in-stories about the war in Kashmir. His short fiction has appeared in Granta, The Common, and Adroit Journal and his non-fiction has been published in World Literature Today and Carve. He is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Humanities Department at Simmons University in Boston and is working on his second novel, The Derby Shoe, in which he follows a Kashmiri flaneur who’s adrift in New Delhi.