FICTION: Five characters' lives intersect under a cloud of peril in a Sudanese border town
"Ghost Season" by Fatin Abbas; Norton (304 pages, $28.95)
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Google the word "Sudan" and the gamut of depressing news items will appear on your screen. Never shorn of tragedy, the narrative on Sudan and its neighbor, South Sudan, remains disheartening. Many might respond with a heavy dose of cynicism and perhaps resignation. Some — like Sudanese writer Fatin Abbas, whose engrossing debut novel "Ghost Season" arrives in the United States this month — reject those sentiments for a particular kind of cautious optimism, one that centers feminist and humanist ideals, and is not at all blinded to what ails her beloved country.
To that complicated end, Abbas sets her novel during a time when the northern and southern parts of Sudan, still together, are soon to be engulfed by conflict and terror, mostly perpetuated by anti-government rebels and militiamen. Then, with great care and attention to place and character, she writes into the eye of a perilous storm, panning from one orange-hued image to another on the page like a filmmaker.
That place in the novel is Saraaya, a "dusty, sleepy" border town in "the middle of nowhere — desert to the north and endless swamp and grasslands to the south." Because of its location, oil-rich Saaraya becomes a "flashpoint in the civil war between the Southern rebel movement and the Northern government based in Khartoum."
It is also a clever setting, one in which danger stalks the novel's five main characters, especially after a burnt corpse is discovered one morning. This gruesome discovery suggests a murder-mystery, but Abbas has other plans. She relegates the corpse to the realm of omens and focuses on the humanizing arcs of her characters' relationships instead.
The novel opens with Dena, who has returned to Sudan to make documentary films after her parents fled Khartoum for Seattle 15 years earlier. Nonconforming and fiercely independent, she lives in an NGO compound with four strangers who are introduced one by one through alternating points of view.
Alex is an irritable white American with a job to get done in Saaraya — he's the Mapping and Surveying Field Officer, stymied by bureaucracy and climate change. William, a Nilotic Sudanese — deemed inferior to the nomads — is Alex's translator, educated and progressive.
Twelve-year-old Mustafa, a boy smart beyond his age, and Layla, a beautiful, nomadic woman with whom William is in love, help take care of the compound by running errands and cooking.
Naturally, interpersonal issues arise between these characters, heightened by differences in identity, class and gender, and eventually by war. Abbas is in no rush to have this all play out, sometimes at the risk of testing the reader's patience for sentimental love (William and Layla's) and for unabating terror.
One day, soldiers arrive at the compound's doorsteps to disperse the huddled refugees fleeing ransacked village and to wreak more destruction.
At the core of Abbas' novel, however, are those ethical questions that often help gird societal progress, including how we confront violence against women. Each character in the novel must grapple with the right thing to do, and given the stakes, the right thing to do is never easy in war, or after a fragile ceasefire.
What about the question of how Abbas' novel entrenches stereotypes? By closing the novel with Layla's deeply inspiring story — that of a young nomadic woman, dogged by patriarchy and tragedy, who tastes sweet freedom for the first time — Abbas makes her authorial priorities poignantly clear.
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Angela Ajayi is a Minneapolis-based writer and critic.
