Born in Kassala in eastern Sudan with roots in Darfur, the novelist Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin now lives in exile in Austria. His works are banned in Oman, Kuwait, and his home country, a fact that has heightened his popularity among his Sudanese readership. Attuned to the plight of the marginalized and fearless of taboo, Baraka Sakin astutely dismantles the mythologies that sustain violence. He is, however, more renowned and feted in France and Germany than in the English-speaking world.
For Anglophone readers whose acquaintance with Sudanese literature stretches as far as Tayeb Salih, the recent publication of Baraka Sakin’s Samahani might arrive as a welcome antidote—a first sally into a prolific and largely untranslated writer’s oeuvre. The novel, delivered to us in Mayada Ibrahim and Adil Babikir’s elegant English translation, stands as a gripping testament to the dream of liberation and love in the era of slavery’s dusk. Its inclusion in the recently established Foundry Editions’ inaugural catalog feels strategic and subversive, given the publisher’s professed predilection for Mediterranean voices. Beyond representing a corrective to Eurocentric understandings of that sea, the selection of a Sudanese voice also illuminates the oft-obscured history of enslavement within the Mediterranean Islamic world.
Polymorphous in scope, Samahani plies a range of genres, timelines, and registers—from the picaresque and the ghostly to the bawdy and the carnivalesque. Right at the outset, we might sense that we are on narrative quicksand. A magician recounts a legend, stating that the Blessed Sultan’s age is identical to Satan’s when he disobeyed God. With hardly any transition, the narrator introduces a clipped overview of the Zanzibar Sultanate, self-reflexively described as “the setting of the novel.” During the seventeenth century, we are told, Omani ships traversed the Indian Ocean and arrived on the shores of the Zanzibar archipelago, laying the foundation for Arab imperial rule. Barely have we acclimatized to this sweeping, detached mode of telling when the carpet is pulled from under our feet yet again, segueing into seemingly irrelevant quotations from “dubious sources”: the memoirs of an Omani princess who eloped to Germany, and the biography of an Afro-Omani slave trader known as Tippu Tip. Both are real personages, from which Samahani at once cobbles together its material and breaks away.
Spliced into these opening pages is the looming, somewhat unwieldy figure of “the reader,” to whom “the narrator” grants permission to skip the prefatory remarks and “proceed directly to the first chapter.” A postmodern shtick seems afoot; the novel disavows historical fidelity and wears its fictionality on its sleeve, announcing its proximity to “the human” over the realm of solid fact. Indeed, the roving tale that follows will bear out a complex hodgepodge of truth and fabrication, preserving the lineaments of the former across coinciding impositions of colonial power while assuming broad liberties with the latter. Dates, often cited with precision, make clear that Samahani’s temporal arc stretches over the twilight of the Zanzibar Sultanate, heralded by the European powers’ rapacious Scramble for Africa and the British agenda of expanding their sphere of influence in East Africa. Baraka Sakin is rigorous when he needs to be; he read more than thirty books in preparation for Samahani, and spent a year forgetting them in order to make room for his imagination.
It should come as no surprise that the catalysts impelling the novel sometimes defy empirical credulity. A case in point is the fictional Sultan’s longevity; already a swaggering adult man by the time of “the shortest war in history” on August 27, 1896 (an actual war, though one with a different potentate at the helm in reality), he somehow lives for longer than a century until January 12, 1964, the day of the Zanzibar Revolution, upon which the Sultan “vanished without a trace, like a shadow at dusk.” It is this insurrection that, in our world, precipitates the overthrow of the Arab government and paves the way for the formation of modern Tanzania. Baraka Sakin slyly throws in these markers without elucidating their significance, as if to render the Blessed Sultan a stealthy allegory for his epoch and for the eclipse of Arab dominance.
Samahani is, then, a kind of speculative parallel history, patterned along the heartlines of revolution. It is interested in how, and along which grooves, history shades into monumental nature—both united beneath the stroke of “decay,” as an epigraph from Karl Marx indicates. Time itself turns mercurial in the Sudanese novelist’s hands; the year 1964, with all its emancipatory promises, gleams like the light at the end of the tunnel, invoked yet again at an anarchic character’s incitements to her people’s liberation. Audiences expecting the metafictional premise to be satisfyingly rounded off might be disappointed. So wholly does the text subsequently pivot into conjuring the lush sights and sounds of nineteenth-century Zanzibar, made possible by Baraka Sakin’s ease with elaborate old-school tropes of historical fiction, that the initial self-referential gesture all but falls away. It lingers only as pastiche, stitching together the immense, transregional reach of the slave trade with the possibilities of freedom and love that might peek out from beneath its unfathomable everyday brutalities.
Unfathomable because everyday. Samahani meets the bodily suffering inflicted on slaves with a kind of laconic courage. It documents grotesque mutilation and punishment, less to parade a crude spectacle than to confront, and therefore indict, empire’s naked cruelties. These are what sustain the decadent languor blissfully inhabited by both the Sultan and his daughter, the Blessed Princess. The perfume of clove, the glimmer of jewelry lend an illusion of eternal continuity—but it is a state that virtually reeks of ripeness and putrefaction, foretelling its own imminent decline. More ruthlessly satirized is the Sultan, who depends on his retinue for the most abject and intimate of functions, from defecation to sexual intercourse. “Why haven’t you brought the shit receptacle?” he yells. He lives with a harem of concubines, none of whose names he bothers to remember.
No governing power is let off the hook. Though the Arabs may be the enslavers, agents of the most unconscionable racism, British interventionism in Zanzibar is likewise excoriated for its Islamophobia and greed, and the “millions of slaves” sold and traded under the British empire’s own auspices. As a pushy consul harangues the Sultan, “An astute politician always starts from the present moment, not from the past, and reads history only for entertainment and not to settle scores with people who have long been buried underground.”
By the end, the picture that emerges in Samahani is of the globality of slavery’s economy, and of the inter-imperial rivalries that trickle down into quotidian oppression. A particularly haunting scene in the novel presents a vision of waste after the British, feigning a concern for human rights, force the Arabs to emancipate their slaves:
Who will sell the vegetables?
Who will prepare the food?
Who will fetch fresh water from the well or river?
Who will break their backs carrying basic necessities?
Who will clean the masters’ shoes?
Who will sew and wash and iron their clothes?
And on and on, the catalog of rhetorical questions gathering a kind of poetic weight. Presciently, it suggests that there would be no capitalism, no modernity as we know it, without the fatal labor extracted from the bodies of the underclass. The legacies of these asymmetries, of course, are still with us today; witness the ongoing cataclysmic war being waged between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces militia in Sudan, at the expense of the displacement and starvation of millions. The academic Bedour Alagraa situates Sudan’s fraught position within the troubled inheritance of enforced Arabization—ultimately a “genocidal ethnonationalism” with repercussions extending into the systematic, regime-led ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the non-Arab populations of Darfur.
Here might be the oracular import of Baraka Sakin’s historicizing gesture, the unsaid kinship between Zanzibar and Sudan—two otherwise divergent parts of Africa—in their shared subjection to overlapping colonialisms. For it was in Sudan, too, that the British exploited the ubiquitous purchase of slaves to paint the colonizing (Egyptian) Arabs as despots from whom the vulnerable nation needed to be saved. According to Sudanese activists, independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule only “exchanged an extractive colonial system for an extractive global capitalist system.”
In contrast to the “recently blessed” Sultan, the Princess is given more latitude and psychological density, as she is subjected to the machinations of more powerful men and genital mutilation at birth, and is refused accession to the throne by virtue of her gender. Caught between a chauvinistic father and an unabashedly promiscuous merchant husband who sanctions his adultery in the name of religion, she seeks emotional refuge in a body more vulnerable than hers: Sondus, her mute slave-companion, tasked with bathing her daily.
Such uninhibited access to the Princess is permitted for Sondus because, castrated, he can be regarded as denuded of desire—yet another detail trotted out in Baraka Sakin’s matter-of-fact, well-honed style. One might surmise that Baraka Sakin is subtly alluding to a literary precedent for Sondus’s unplaceable androgyny in the Arabic textual tradition. The legendary (and quite racist) Abbasid poet Al-Mutanabbi, known today as “Shakespeare of the Arabs,” variously satirized the Black African eunuch ruler Kafur as a dog, a gluttonous fox, and a “soft-fleshed corpulent” being “counted neither among men nor women.” The name Sondus, forcibly thrust upon him by the Arabs, is itself a Qur’anic word referring to the green silk brocade that will clothe the righteous in Paradise. From the moment of capture, he is destined to be nothing more than a lush accoutrement lubricating the royalty’s idyllic lives.
Yet, over the course of Samahani, Sondus’s servitude begins to feel to himself like “acts of love”; he sings quiet rhapsodies to the shape of the Princess’s body, “which bent like a creek running over rocks on a beach.” This burgeoning relationship, transgressing all limits of race, class, and propriety, risks being cheapened in the hands of a lesser writer. But here, otherwise unthinkable desires are aired, structured by the asymmetry within their dynamic. Sondus imagines the Princess as a channel for “his freedom”—a dream for which he lacks any vocabulary. The Princess discovers in herself a “deeply buried masculinity,” a wish to possess and dominate. Might we call her proclivities queer, as troubling as they likely look to us today? What do we make, in turn, of Sondus’s fantasies of enslaving and owning the Princess’s body, and the way gender itself feels like a privilege denied to the slave’s wounded and racialized flesh? No direct answer might be possible, but Baraka Sakin’s sympathies are capacious enough to make room for the unspeakable.
When discontented slaves stage an uprising, Sondus seizes an opportunity to kidnap the Princess. Romance, then, is crucially enabled by revolt—Samahani’s entire narrative engine will, indeed, be fueled by subaltern rebellion and elite panic. And revolt is enabled by not only the “fluent Swahili” carved out of various local languages but also the slow work of intergenerational education and storytelling. The rebels come across as remarkably organized, each individual aware of their role, leading the errant princess-slave pair into the jungles on the African mainland. Sondus himself becomes our unlikely hero, the novel’s beating heart. Baraka Sakin, however, does not naively forge a nativist politics from indigenous tradition. The village that the couple arrives at treats them as an “abomination,” even an augur of a curse to come. Ridden with their own prejudices, the villagers set in motion a train of disastrous consequences, each more surprising than the last. The finale, crosscut with touches of surrealism and interspecies metamorphoses, is devastating, but not without the habitual irony in which the novel abounds.
Who pays for whose sins, when no one is innocent? It is a remarkably timely question, given the frequency with which Palestinian resistance—to cite only the most urgent of examples—is routinely demonized as terrorism today. Samahani might be a decolonial touchstone for us, if we are to reckon with the difficulty of violence, even its necessity. Baraka Sakin’s masterful tragicomic work, in that light, reads like a weighing-scale in which different—and often competing—logics of justice and freedom are tested. Sometimes, they take the shape of revenge.
Copyright © 2024 by Alex Tan. All rights reserved.
