The Wedding of Zein Read online

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  CLASSICS

  THE WEDDING OF ZEIN

  TAYEB SALIH (1929–2009) was born in northern Sudan and educated at the University of Khartoum. After a brief period working as a teacher, he moved to London to work with the BBC Arabic Service. Salih later worked as director general of information in Qatar in the Arabian Gulf, and then with UNESCO in Paris and the Arab Gulf States. Along with The Wedding of Zein, his books in English include Season of Migration to the North (also published as an NYRB Classic) and Bandarshah.

  DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES has translated more than thirty-five books by modern Arab authors, including Naguib Mahfouz and Mahmoud Darwish. He has also produced more than fifty books for children, mostly taken from traditional Arabic sources. He was recently awarded the Sheikh Zayed Prize for his services to Arabic literature. He lives in Cairo.

  HISHAM MATAR was born in 1970 in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo. His first novel, In the Country of Men (2006), was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.

  THE WEDDING OF ZEIN

  And Other Stories

  TAYEB SALIH

  Translated from the Arabic by

  DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

  Introduction by

  HISHAM MATAR

  Illustrated by

  IBRAHIM SALAHI

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  THE WEDDING OF ZEIN

  Dedication

  The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid

  A Handful of Dates

  The Wedding of Zein

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  In the opening chapters of the nineteenth century the Ottoman sultan’s viceroy in Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, ordered his troops south. They rode behind the pasha’s son into Nubia and farther down into the heartland of the Sudan, where they seized the province of Kordofan. They then turned east into the state of Sennar. Such was the painful birth of modern Sudan.

  Paradoxically, the invaders’ actions had the effect of uniting the native farmers, merchants, and tribesmen in resistance to them, thus planting the seed of the Mahdist Revolution that, sixty years later, in 1881, erupted in that same central Kordofan province. The Mahdists snatched the country out of the mighty claws of the British Empire, which by then controlled Egypt and with it the Sudan. That a collection of untrained people armed with swords, sticks, and spears had defeated the large modern army deployed by Britain shocked the Western world. It heralded the turning of the colonial tide and inspired subsequent indigenous armed liberation movements. In 1883 the Sudan had become the first and, as it turned out, the only African country to have expelled a colonial power by force of arms. But after a brief interlude, the troops of a humiliated Britain, based at Wadi Halfa, a town not far from the village where Tayeb Salih was born, struck back, and in 1899 colonial rule was reinstated in the form of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium.

  The glories and disasters of the Mahdist State and the various forms of foreign rule the country endured helped cement national identity and stimulated Sudanese nationalism. On New Year’s Day 1956 the largest country in Africa gained its independence, a country that is Arab in the flat plains of the north and African in the verdant south.

  Arab and African, Muslim, animist and Christian currents have run through the Sudan for more than a thousand years. Their incomplete fusion explains the existential isolation that the Sudanese endure in relation to the Arab world: in almost every interview he ever gave, Salih found need to assert his Arabness. The geography of the Sudan adds to the complexity of the nation. It shares a border with no less than nine countries: Eritrea and Ethiopia to the East; Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the south; the Central African Republic, Chad, and Libya to the West; and to the north the country’s closest cultural neighbor, Egypt, where, after the Blue and White Niles merge in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, the one river continues.

  In the winter of 1953, three years before the Sudan gained its independence, Tayeb Salih came to London. Behind him was a “story of spectacular success at school” in his provincial northern farming village by the Nile, then university in Khartoum, where he later worked as a schoolteacher. A quiet and naturally self-deprecating manner did not foretell the luminuous talent he sheltered. The only thing that might have suggested his gifts was a vague yet persistent aloofness, as if he had decided long ago to give very little away, to live primarily within solitude’s faithful chamber.

  I wonder how that first journey to the English capital was for the twenty-four-year-old. I suspect that like the enigmatic Mustafa Sa‘eed in Salih’s masterful novel Season of Migration to the North, the young author had also traveled up from Khartoum to Egypt and then boarded a ship for Dover. He may have found the waterscape oddly familiar — just as Mustafa Sa‘eed does. To his ears the new country must have sounded crisp, dustless. And as the pitched roofs of the first houses appeared they would have reminded him of the bony backs of the Nile buffalo. England would have seemed a precise universe in which every structure, field, and tree had been allocated a specific place. Water here did not run in crooked streams but was trapped to flow politely within man-made banks. Trains sliced the landscape and when they stopped, they stopped for a measured interval, just long enough to allow passengers to hurry off and on. “No fuss,” as Sa‘eed puts it.

  No fuss is one of the advantages of being away from home. If writing is the discovery of the self, it is also its reinvention. A process aided by exile’s anonymity. In Salih’s case the life of an exile was to stretch until February 2009, when he died in the London home he shared with his English wife and their three daughters. Apart from a few years spent in Doha as director general of the Qatari Ministry of Information and ten years in Paris working for UNESCO, Salih spent the majority of the fifty-six years that followed his departure from the Sudan in London, from where he contributed weekly reviews, literary journalism, and political commentary to Al-Majalla magazine. All these “proper” jobs caused some Arab artists and intellectuals to accuse him of not being committed to his art. On the day of his death that ended. Obituaries flowed in from every corner, confirming his place in the canon. The business of how the writer got his living was no longer there to distract his readers from the greatness of his work.

  The novella “The Wedding of Zein,” published here along with two short stories, “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid” and “A Handful of Dates,” first appeared in 1962, nine years into the author’s new life in London. I cannot find fault with the exquisite English translation. The Canadian Denys Johnson-Davies lived in the Sudan as a child, which gives him an insider’s ear for the colloquial turns of phrase that are sometimes employed by Salih in dialogue.

  Unlike Salih’s better-known work, Season of Migration to the North, which was published four years later in 1966 and tells the story of an Arab African negotiating existence in the West, these three narratives show characters in their native setting. Here local life is yet to be punctured by the new postindependence central government and yet to be challenged by Westernized compatriots returning from abroad. Khartoum is as far away as London. Instead, these perfectly shaped vernacular narratives take place within the confines of a Sudanese village that is not dissimilar from Salih’s birthplace. Though the villagers know nothing of the world outside the village, and though that world has not yet sought to place its mark on village life, they know it is there, and they know that it has designs upon them. This subtle yet persistent tension between village life and the outer world that Salih evokes gives his st
ories, and “The Wedding of Zein” in particular, an anxious, nocturnal quality. It is as if every character is secretly nursing the conviction that their way of life is under threat. For example, when “the gang,” those influential men of the village, gathers late at night, an uncanny image is created:

  …light from the lamp touched them with the tip of its tongue. Sometimes, when they were plunged in laughter, the light and shadow danced above their heads as though they were immersed in a sea in which they floated and dipped.

  We wonder what it signifies. Modernity, perhaps, with its foreign illuminations? Or something else? But before our questions can be resolved, Salih moves on: “where does the lamplight end? how does the darkness begin?”

  Salih believed symbolism in fiction ought to be like “something buried, reflecting dark rays that are at times contradictory.” His ability to do this, to create a work that is both realist and magical, allegorical and endlessly elusive, is one of his achievements and why perhaps Salih has had more than his fair share of critics bent on subjecting his work to reductive readings. Though his work has inspired some nuanced and illuminating studies, it has also, perhaps more than the work of any other Arab novelist, suffered at the hands of readers less interested in the author’s art than in finding support for their opinions.

  Although these stories are a happy reflection on what the author once described as “a world [that] was fast disappearing,” they are also a lament. They mark the point just before the author surrendered altogether to loss, before he dropped the flint and took only to pondering “how does the darkness begin.” These early stories, with their undertones of satire and hints of Beckettian absurdity, are in no sense sentimental or satisfied. “The Wedding of Zein” is narrated with a nearly cruel detachment. But even that is a kind of trick, Salih’s way of leaving us to our own conclusions. This is an author who always knows how and when to get out of the way. Salih’s nostalgia is most powerful when he writes about nature, which inspires passages of raw pastoral beauty. Guided in the dark by distant sounds of merriment, Zein comes to the river:

  The Nile’s breast, like that of a man in anger, swells up, and the water flows over its banks.

  And,

  The land is motionless and moist, yet you feel that its belly encases a great secret, as though it were a woman of boundless passion preparing to meet her mate.

  In “The Wedding of Zein,” nature is both matter-of-fact and full of amoral determination. The earth throbs with sexual desire and mystery. It exists primarily for itself, continuously working toward its own ends. It is by no means a pretty backdrop but a psychological force. And if we see Zein, what with his wild abandon and wily ability to elude many of society’s rules, as an expression of nature’s will, then “The Wedding of Zein” can be read as a chronicle of nature’s quiet victory: how the village fool triumphs, without seeming to try, in winning the heart of “the most beautiful of them all,” the lovely, independent-minded, intelligent Ni‘ma, the cousin who, in her Koranic studies, pictured mercy as a woman, and wished she had been named Mercy instead. In marrying Zein she is sacrificing herself to nature, as perhaps everything of worth in the young Sudan must lie at the mercy of the unknowable future.

  Right from the start of “The Wedding of Zein” we know we are dealing with an unusual hero, one who came out of his mother’s womb and immediately “burst out laughing.” He is deformed, even grotesque, has only two teeth, one on top, the other on the bottom, but when people mock him he giggles. This even though he has a Herculean strength. He loves parties, detects a distant wedding the way an animal sniffs out a prey. He threatens divorce even though he is not married. He is struck on the head with an ax, but when the wound heals it improves his looks.

  Since independence, Arab societies have been plagued by the intoxicating hope that a great national savior will come and fix everything. Salih touches on this futile and absurd dream when Zein’s kindness and heroism cause the villagers to wonder if he “was the legendary Leader, the Prophet…sent down by God.” But when Zein returns to his tomfoolery this fantasy is “destroyed and replaced” by one “to which people were accustomed and which they preferred.”

  Zein’s dervish status makes him as inoffensive as a child, allowing him to pinch the ladies’ behinds without incurring too much reproach, while elevating him to the role of a spiritual weather-vane. However, Zein’s most important function in the eyes of the villagers is to serve “as a trumpet by which attention was drawn to their daughters.” His love blesses. No sooner does he yell his comical “O people, she has slain me” than his tormenting beloved turns into the most eligible bride in the village.

  The shamelessness of Zein’s loves, and the way his fiery passions fade the minute his beloved is married off, hint at a Sufi theme: that all earthly longing is but a metaphor for the boundless love of the divine. Salih took an interest in Sufi mysticism. Sufism places great emphasis on the sacredness of the present moment, in which, it is believed, the world is remade entire. We never witness Zein regretting the past or worrying about the future. Salih links Sufi logic with a pastoral vision of nature that is no less preoccupied with the present. The only time Zein is nudged out of the present is when his own love is at last satisfied. He leaves his wedding party to go weep by the grave of his friend, the holy mystic Haneen, who had “perceived in [Zein] a glimmering of spiritual light.” After he has reminded himself of his true longing, he returns to dance with complete abandon.

  For many Arab writers of the mid-twentieth century Sufism, with its familiar philosophical terrain, served as a helpful way to engage the new secular modernism without severing ties to premodern homelands and traditions.

  The narrative in “The Wedding of Zein” circles around itself: an incident is hinted at and later the picture is filled in; then we return to the incident again, but now seeing it under a different light or from a another perspective. These retellings make the fictional world at once more familiar and yet less solid and predictable. Thanks to this technique, and thanks to his distilled prose, Salih’s work establishes a peculiar tension between the limited nature of human experience and its infinite depth.

  Salih’s style, unlike that of so many Arab novelists of his generation, is neither verbose nor lush. All his sentences are cut short with a thin wire of grief. Perhaps every writer who wants to write unsentimentally, to write deeply, about his country needs what Mustafa Sa‘eed described as his sole weapon: “that sharp knife inside my skull, while within my breast was a cold, hard feeling.” Tayeb Salih offered to the Arab novel a new language in which restraint and precision took precedence over exuberance. His prose moves with the cunning and inevitability of a great river searching for the sea.

  — HISHAM MATAR

  THE WEDDING OF ZEIN

  To Julie & Zainab

  The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid

  Were you to come to our village as a tourist, it is likely, my son, that you would not stay long. If it were in winter time, when the palm trees are pollinated, you would find that a dark cloud had descended over the village. This, my son, would not be dust, nor yet that mist which rises up after rainfall. It would be a swarm of those sand-flies which obstruct all paths to those who wish to enter our village. Maybe you have seen this pest before, but I swear that you have never seen this particular species. Take this gauze netting, my son, and put it over your head. While it won’t protect you against these devils, it will at least help you to bear them. I remember a friend of my son’s, a fellow student at school, whom my son invited to stay with us a year ago at this time of the year. His people come from the town. He stayed one night with us and got up next day, feverish, with a running nose and swollen face; he swore that he wouldn’t spend another night with us.

  If you were to come to us in summer you would find the horse-flies with us — enormous flies the size of young sheep, as we say. In comparison to these the sand-flies are a thousand times more bearable. They are savage flies, my son: they bite, sting, buzz, and wh
irr. They have a special love for man and no sooner smell him out than they attach themselves to him. Wave them off you, my son — God curse all sand-flies.

  And were you to come at a time which was neither summer nor winter you would find nothing at all. No doubt, my son, you read the papers daily, listen to the radio, and go to the cinema once or twice a week. Should you become ill you have the right to be treated in hospital, and if you have a son he is entitled to receive education at a school. I know, my son, that you hate dark streets and like to see electric light shining out into the night. I know, too, that you are not enamoured of walking and that riding donkeys gives you a bruise on your backside. Oh, I wish, my son, I wish — the asphalted roads of the towns — the modern means of transport — the fine comfortable buses. We have none of all this — we are people who live on what God sees fit to give us.

  Tomorrow you will depart from our village, of this I am sure, and you will be right to do so. What have you to do with such hardship? We are thick-skinned people and in this we differ from others. We have become used to this hard life, in fact we like it, but we ask no one to subject himself to the difficulties of our life. Tomorrow you will depart, my son — I know that. Before you leave, though, let me show you one thing — something which, in a manner of speaking, we are proud of. In the towns you have museums, places in which the local history and the great deeds of the past are preserved. This thing that I want to show you can be said to be a museum. It is one thing we insist our visitors should see.

  Once a preacher, sent by the government, came to us to stay for a month. He arrived at a time when the horse-flies had never been fatter. On the very first day the man’s face swelled up. He bore this manfully and joined us in evening prayers on the second night, and after prayers he talked to us of the delights of the primitive life. On the third day he was down with malaria, he contracted dysentery, and his eyes were completely gummed up. I visited him at noon and found him prostrate in bed, with a boy standing at his head waving away the flies.