A Revolution Robbed: On Leila Aboulela’s “River Spirit”

LEILA ABOULELA’S new novel River Spirit is a blazing historical epic of war, love, and revolution. Set mainly in Sudan, the novel recounts the Mahdist Revolts of the late 19th century, when Sufi leader Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi—the messianic figure prophesied in Islam—and waged a holy war against the Ottoman-Egyptian rule of Sudan. In the narrative, Ahmad garners support from Indigenous tribes, local merchants, and religious orders as he promises to bring a permanent end to a despotic foreign rule whose crippling taxes, slave trade, and ruthless military conscriptions have decimated the local communities. But as the movement gains ground, Ahmad and his followers begin to lose sight of the political impetus behind their religious insurgency and become tyrants themselves. It is a story about how within the contingencies that birth a revolution lie dormant the means of its own undoing.

Born in Cairo and raised in Khartoum, Aboulela moved to Scotland in 1990, where she began her literary career. The first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, she rose to international prominence with her 1999 novel, The Translator. Aboulela’s writing is frequently celebrated for its nuanced depictions of the inner worlds and public lives of Muslim women. River Spirit is her sixth novel.

In this most recent work, Aboulela is more interested in the impossible exigencies of history than in history’s leading men. The elite actors of the period, Muhammad Ahmad and Charles Gordon (the acting governor-general of Khartoum who was sent by the British to quell the Mahdists’ revolt), are virtually absent from the novel’s polyvocality. The one chapter on Gordon, told in the second person, is the novel’s weakest. As for the Mahdi, the closest we get to his perspective is through Musa, his loyal soldier. Instead, Aboulela recasts this legendary episode in world history to tell the story not of the revolutionaries but of those who are charged with executing their vision, those who resist them, and those who must endure them. There is Fatimah, a northerner widow with shrewd business sense who wields the fact that she is invisible to society to her advantage. Her youngest son, Yaseen, abandons merchantry for a scholarly life, only to find himself in a treacherous religious struggle with the Mahdi. There is Salha, Yaseen’s outspoken, highly educated wife, who at every turn refuses to be reduced to what she is forced to sacrifice. Then there is Robert, a Scottish shipbuilder and talented painter living in Khartoum in self-imposed, self-fashioning exile.

But the emotional core of the novel is Akuany, who survives the slave raid that had orphaned her and destroyed her village in the south. With the help of Yaseen, she makes her way to the north in search of safety and belonging, only to be sold into slavery by Yaseen’s family and renamed Zamzam. It is through Akuany’s story and her indestructible bond with Yaseen that the novel makes its most daring interventions. Rather than asking what it means to belong to someone, the book instead inquires what it takes to belong to them. Can love ever really be just? Akuany and Yaseen’s bond cannot transcend their historical circumstances, but it cannot be destroyed by them either.

In this society where slavery is rampant, the language of ownership and property suffuses all social discourse, including the very grammar of intimacy and devotion. When Yaseen learns of Akuany’s enslavement upon his return from Al-Azhar University, he vows to free her. But when he finally manages to pay the Turkish governor who bought her, Akuany refuses to go with him. She has been used and abused by other men, and she believes she is no longer “right for” him. Yaseen wants to convince her of his devotion, remind her that he is faithful to his word, reassure her of his affection. But in the end, all he manages to utter is “I paid for you.” Similarly, Akuany frequently declares, “I belong to Yaseen”—she maintains this even when she is enslaved. There is something deeply provocative and dizzying about her invocation of proprietary language to describe her ardor for Yaseen.

And yet, the novel insists on locating an ethics of relationality that is not entirely assimilable to the cultural logic of slavery. Akuany’s love for Yaseen makes demands in a manner that precludes possession. For instance, she never wishes for him to leave his wife. Likewise, Salha does not feel threatened by Yaseen’s enduring love for Akuany, which predates and survives their marriage. In fact, when she learns about Akuany, she goes searching for her not to confront her but to bring her back because Akuany “was a member of their family, and she must be with them.” In time, the two women negotiate their way into a friendship, one that is not exempt from the pitfalls of their power differentials but not foreclosed by them either. The heterogeneous and at times hierarchal bond shared by these three characters formulates an alternative vision of love that is imagined over and against the logics of ownership, a vision for nonpossessive relationality.

How do we experience our desire for the other in a way that does not demand surrender? The novel returns to this question over and over, but it manifests most brutally in Akuany’s relationship with Robert, the Scottish painter. The first time she becomes aware of Robert’s gaze, she is being exhibited at a slave market in Khartoum after she had been sold back into slavery following the imprisonment of Yaseen by the Mahdists. She notices Robert drawing her “as if he were scraping bits of herself.” To escape his frightening gaze, she begs one of the women at the market to buy her instead. But it is not long before Robert finds the woman’s home and buys Akuany from her—an act he finds ethically reprehensible but is willing to justify if it means he can paint her.

It is curious that, more than all the other forms of subjugation she is made to endure, Akuany resists Robert’s probing gaze the most. When she refuses to sit still for a painting, he ties her to the chair. When he shows her the final product, “expecting her to appreciate and understand,” she spits on the canvas. Fatimah pleads with her to “humor him,” especially if looking is all he is after. But Akuany, on a mission to thwart Robert’s “insistence on paralyzing her on canvas,” stabs a nude miniature oil painting of her, which he had hoped would secure his legacy as a painter. In response, he beats her unconscious. “Ungrateful,” he laments, “did she not understand what was at stake”? It is left to the reader to reckon with what exactly is at stake in Robert’s violent obsession, in Akuany’s absolute refusal.

In the acknowledgments,  Aboulela traces the origin of Akuany’s character to a name she found in the Sudan Archive of Durham University in a bill of sale and in a petition regarding a runaway slave girl. Aboulela excavates this vital history with great humanity and vision. But as the narrative progresses, history overwhelms, and more and more characters fall off the page. In the last quarter, for instance, the novel switches to an epistolary form, with Salha penning a series of letters to her young son about the slow decline and ultimate defeat of the Mahdists. This shift in the narrative runs the risk of turning the complex, vividly drawn characters into expedient raconteurs of history.

River Spirit is a magnificent novel about the price of unwavering devotion and the inexhaustible pursuit for freedom. Its efforts to explicate the fundamental precarity of a revolution, to render the many ways a movement can quickly become undone, are astonishingly prescient. Consider, for instance, how, alongside the imperialist forces, a small but influential faction of Khartoum’s clergy objects to the Mahdists because they believe Ahmad to be an imposter. They insist he does not fulfill the criteria for the prophesied Mahdi. For his part, Ahmad demands they recognize the divinity of his leadership. Each side pays a hefty price for what they believe, and in the process, they lose a nation. It is only in the end, some two decades later, when Muhammad Ahmad is dead and the British have gained total dominance over Sudan, that it becomes apparent that what was at stake was perhaps greater than God. When Salha reflects on how the circumstance of the Mahdi’s death diverged from the prophecy, she imagines her relatives feeling justified having secured the religious argument. “But religion was only the outer shell,” she concedes. “The Mahdi was never the Mahdi, and this was a revolution happening under our noses and not only a religious deviancy.”

But for the novel, the tragedy of hindsight lies elsewhere. What secures the demise of the Mahdists is neither the unexpected death of Muhammad Ahmad nor the disapproval of a few elite clergies nor the formidable army of the British Empire. The Mahdists fall because they fail those on whose behalf they waged a revolution. It is no surprise then that, long before the British descend upon the Sudan and trounce the Mahdists, the people have already gone searching for a new redeemer. “This fresh ardor for a new Mahdi is because people have been let down,” observes Salha. “Neglecting agriculture in favor of war—how are people expected to live!” One cannot miss the contemporary resonances of Salha’s blazing fury and anguished hope. Today, Sudan has plunged deep into another civil war. Four years after a prodemocratic popular uprising led to the removal of Omar al-Bashir from office, the Sudanese people find themselves caught in the crosshairs of violent clashes between paramilitary rebel groups and the fractured Sudanese army. And as each side strafes towns and shells civilian homes, displacing millions, the dream of transitioning into a civilian-led democratic government has rapidly vanished from the political horizon. Neglecting politics in favor of power—how are people expected to live? It is here, in the irate aftermath of a revolution robbed, that Aboulela’s novel ends and our present begins.

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Farah Bakaari is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University.