Sudan is such a name in history; a fine name of a people beautifully ebony-skinned; fine country with the River Nile slicing through its Saharan topography; a name also of troubled history; a name that keeps participating in history in a way that makes it appear to be a permanent modern historical antiquity. History may very much be Leila Aboulela’s subject in River Spirit, but as its title suggests, it is about much more. It is about resilience, or continuity, which is what a river is, after all—not stopping for the world or anything, a continual flow even as it bears witness.
This witness in Aboulela’s very moving tale and sixth novel is the story of Akuany and her merchant lover Yaseen set in late 19th century Sudan during the al-Mahdiyyah or Mahdist movement of 1881 to 1898 and the Ottoman and Egyptian khedival occupation of the country, which was a time of dynamic political upheavals. We follow eleven-year-old Akuany who lives south of Sudan, in Malakal, who stands “in the shallow, humming Nile, listening to what the water is saying, believing.” Her brother Bol is with Yaseen the young merchant from Khartoum who comes every year to buy gum from her father. She has grown to be fond of the merchant and recalls earlier years when he came along with his father to trade. It’s a peaceful scenery; we fall in love with life at the shores of the Nile, the calm, beauty, love, the possibility of the future, as things should be. But suddenly a woman sees smoke rising from the village. There has been a raid.
Storytelling in Aboulela’s River Spirit is a continuous, forward-moving organism; no mulls over a topic or scenes or such fatigued contemplations writers indulge in. So we move from this raid; the merchant Yaseen, Akuany and her younger brother walk through the destroyed village. Akuany sees her father has been killed, her people taken as slaves. The orphans become Yaseen’s responsibility as he decides to take them back with him to Khartoum. This begins a spin into a patient, deeply-moving and kind story as the trio journey up north and as the tale unravels.
According to Islamic belief, in times of great injustice and conflict, God shall send a messiah, a Mahdi, to set things right and reinforce religion. The historical self-proclaimed Mahdi who led a revolt against the imperial powers of his day in Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad, is the same Mahdi in Aboulela’s novel. A mystic force that upturned the course of history as he does in the lives of the characters in this novel. Even if he has risen to actually fulfill the tasks of a Mahdi, in liberating the Sudanese from foreign rule, the violence characterised by conquest, heavy taxation, and religious contamination, commanding a fevered followership, others do not believe him to be the Mahdi, including Yaseen, who, after leaving Akuany and her brother in the care of his sister Halima in Al-Ubayyid, later attends the prestigious Al-Azhar in Egypt to study Islamic law, or fiqh.
One time after he’s returned to Sudan and working under a senior Sheikh, Yaseen is sent as an emissary of the state to debate the Mahdi into renouncing his mahdiship but the Mahdi tells him “whoever doubts me has disbelieved Allah and His Prophet, whoever does not support me is an infidel,” leaving Yaseen in fear for his life, weighing the Mahdi’s tyrannical disposition. But River Spirit is not essentially a story about men and their conflicts but about how their affairs in ruling the world wreak havoc, woven with a feminine perspective in engaging a history the novel is set in, which was brutal and unkind to women.
Although this story has other very interesting characters, Akuany is the nucleus with which Aboulela tells it. In Al-Ubayyid, Yaseen’s sister gives into the request of the Governor General’s wife and sells Akuany (whom she’d renamed Zamzam) for a tempting sum of fifty pounds. Uprooted from a family setting and in the house of the governor, Akuany or Zamzam witnesses firsthand the injustice in society, especially the ill treatment of Sudanese people in indentured servitude and fellow women treated as property; herself treated like a toy by the governor’s wife and eventually discarded and sold off once again.
Her life becomes so wretched, always turbulent, moved about, invisible, dispensable, in a heartbreaking narration that leads to redemption and recovery one time, but then plunges again into despair. A village girl, to whom “the river was her language,” whose beginnings and aspirations were simply domestic, but thrown into a catastrophe of events beyond her imagination. Yaseen once saved her, taking her in; and in the smallness of her world, he is the constant light she yearns for in her troubled life, the same Yaseen caught up in the turbulence of the times. When Al-Ubayyid is claimed by the Mahdi, Yaseen would be locked up for a year for refusing to declare allegiance to the Mahdi.
Aboulela uses Akuany’s character as a synecdoche of Sudan. Whatever Akuany faces is a reflection of a larger problem. If we are able to see Akuany, the near destruction of her personhood and humanity, we are therefore able to judge in clarity the hostility of Sudan’s history during that time, its effects in individual life and that of the country itself. And the project with Akuany’s character are serious questions of womanhood or the fact that she almost loses it. Or that perhaps she does. It is why after hearing the words of an older woman about how the world works—“People exchange things. When it’s fair trade, it’s blessed, and when it’s unfair it’s an injustice”—she asks herself, “What did she want?” She wants Yaseen, the river, and children. But what could she exchange for these? She is just a slave, dehumanised by captivity.
A striking demonstration of this dehumanisation is when a Scottish painter Robert—a fictional character based on the painter George William Joy who painted General Gordon’s Last Stand—buys Akuany to paint a nude portrait of her. It is something she doesn’t understand and it torments her. Fanon’s psycho affective theory can be applied here, in understanding the trauma of the colonised, so that she dreams one day that Yaseen has seen the portrait, “sees her neck, her shoulders, sees her breasts and stomach like everyone else can see them, and if it were up to [Robert’s] ambition the whole world will see them,” that it makes Yaseen turn away from her. Horrified, she wakes up, finds a knife and tears up the painting. A heartbreaking experience to Robert; it is a masterpiece which he was going to be renowned for.
The dynamic of Akuany’s repulsion and Robert’s ambition starkly depicts the conflicts in the ambition of the colonist and the misfortunes of the colonised. Akuany is an object to redeem Robert’s insecurities, although he thinks it is a favour to her, to be painted; and that as his slave she does less labour; and that he would make her a free citizen when he completes his painting of her. Sounds familiar? But would Akuany be compared to Salha, the woman Yaseen later marries? Salha who is educated, who never experienced “violation or violence. Her feelings acknowledged, her body precious. Fertile and healthy. Beautiful because that beauty had never been soiled, nor sold, nor twisted”? It is what Akuany thinks of when she meets Salha:
Her words clear and round. There were qualities in her that Zamzam had never seen before. This was how a free woman looked and spoke, after growing up safe in a father’s house and moving to that of a trustworthy husband. All through life protected and held firm. A virgin on her wedding night, chaste afterward, luxuriant in modesty, never been whipped, never been violated. Bowing down only in prayer, eyes only downcast over books and ink.
Through Salha we see the woman Aboulela celebrates, a woman with agency, which Akuany has been robbed of becoming. It is also a vision of what the country itself could have become without the accidents in its history. Such dreams of completeness is what warms Akuany’s heart on a day Yaseen’s tells his family about her village and about her father before she lost everything, that “she was not a nonentity, a wild catch. She had a father and a mother and a village; she had an ancestry she could trace, a homeland she could return to.”
Through Akuany’s life this novel teaches us that we are actors in the game of time. That history chooses whom it favours, and what can be taken away from victims it doesn’t favour. It teaches us that history has always been a conflict of ideas: whose is more superior? That in fighting for this supremacy we give ideas more importance over our humanity. And that sometimes ideas take root not in the best places or time, be it a religious visionary leading a revolt or an invasive foreign culture, forever upending the flow of certain river spirits, like Akuany, who can be any of us. Thus, we cannot allow ourselves to be enslaved by ideas; that the constant thing is to seek freedom.
Aboulela understands language and uses it in this novel to cushion its overwhelming subject. We read beautiful sentences like “She paused to take all that in, to breathe the possibilities.” There’s delight in simple sentences like “I am told the man I am seeking is in a cave.” Or when a new chapter begins with a fine opener like “The first time he saw the confluence of the two rivers, the Blue Nile and the White, he was reminded of the drawing Sunrise over Mars.” Or when the painter Robert is at the Nile trying to paint:
He was full of the beauty around him, the scents of water and grass, aware of the light and the shades of green. . . . The privilege of seeing all this was almost an ache, grace beginning to expand, but the artist in him knew that awe would freeze him; it must be held back, kept under control. . . . He wanted them to feel what he was feeling now, to know what is was like to be here in this place. . . . All the effort to render it on canvas, desperate to pin it down, enclose it in three dimensions, kill it and through skill and colour bring it to life.
We think Robert’s painting of Akuany is forgotten. Surely, the painter tried to salvage it, although he never displayed it. After his death, his daughter Christiana discovers it:
. . . it rose to assault her. The shock of a nude Black woman, pitch-black, like no other Christiana had ever seen. Breasts thrust forward as if they were real, carved in stone. Such savage eyes . . . This woman bore the ugliest of scars all along her shoulder; her muscular arms were unfeminine. She looked out—at whom? Robert—with utter disdain, unspeakable insolence. Christiana shuddered. She would not have that woman soiling her father’s name, his memory. . . . The painting was damaged. It was right that it was damaged; it deserved violence. It should not exist, it was gratuitous . . . She threw it in the fire.
We know what Aboulela has done here; it’s a solid, visceral enactment of the violence of colonialism. As the painting thrown in the fireplace burns Christiana sees its name on the last piece of it before it is eaten up by the fire: it is The Negress of the Nile. Oh, river spirit! Taking us to the ending in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart where the Commissioner thinks of writing a book about his own adventure in Africa, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. Did he ever complete that book? This highlights the questions of what happens after the conquest of a people, what happens when the conquerors leave, whose story is told, which is discarded, and which is passed on? Akuany’s violence on her painting, knifing it, Christiana’s violence to it in burning it, raises tough questions on the humanity of black life. Both women reacting to the violence of history, one out of shame, the other, of guilt; the painting deserves to exist, irrespective of the violence that created it, it tells a story.
Upon arriving at the end of this novel, you want to rewind it somehow—to feel the story unravel from the end to its beginning instead, so that you can move from turmoil back to the innocence of its first pages, in a kind of attempt to correct history. Because this story of pain is also of recovery, except now only you the reader can take part in that recovery. It is the river’s spirit and Aboulela wants us to embrace it. A strong message is left in the ending pages of the novel, worth bringing up: “Ignorance is darkness and everyone deserves to be rescued from it.” This is a powerful novel.♦
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Carl Terver is the author of Glory to the Sky (forthcoming July 2024). He writes on film, literature, and music.
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