{"id":11838,"date":"2024-01-19T11:32:12","date_gmt":"2024-01-19T11:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/?p=11838"},"modified":"2024-01-19T11:32:12","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T11:32:12","slug":"critical-reviews-on-novel-river-spirit-2-by-leila-abouela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/2024\/01\/19\/critical-reviews-on-novel-river-spirit-2-by-leila-abouela\/","title":{"rendered":"Critical Reviews on Novel River Spirit (2): By Leila Abouela"},"content":{"rendered":"

Agencies – Sudan Events<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cInevitable\u201d is author Leila Aboulela\u2019s favourite word, according to an interview on the podcast\u00a0First Draft. She says, \u201cI like fiction because of that, because it shows so strongly how everything you see is not just random. There is a lot behind it that has built up to this particular moment.\u201d
\nIndeed, a sense of inevitability pervades\u00a0River Spirit\u00a0as seven narrators negotiate the personal, political and religious challenges of Sudan in the late nineteenth century.
\nThe novel\u00a0follows the life of Akuany from age 11 into slavery and adulthood and it is her story that binds the seven male and female narrators together while families are torn apart by the rise of a revolutionary leader and self-pro-claimed Mahdi.
\nHis rise to power forces characters to choose different allegiances and prioritise different parts of their own identities.
\nWhen Zamzam learns from Touma that\u00a0\u201cOne was not meant to ask questions, narrating the past did not erase it\u2026It was the worst of manners to ask,\u00a0Where did you get that scar?\u00a0What was your name before? Where is your first child?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0the weight of colonialism begins to be felt and it too emerges as a central theme that Aboulela handles deftly.
\nThe Mahdi\u2019s uprising leads to the liberation of Sudan from Ottoman rule, the author conveying the complexity of the situation through the naming of a child.
\nHowever, rivers crucially facilitate colonialism and war and throughout the novel, ships are tools of the oppressors.
\nThe author also explores the role of General Gordon in Sudan, examining how he is perceived by the Sudanese and portrayed in Britain.
\nWhilst he may be forgotten by many British people ignorant of their colonial past and uninterested in old statues, the stories told about his death in Britain had a direct effect on the future of Sudan.
\nThis is perhaps why Aboulela ends the novel not with Sudan\u2019s liberation and Zamzam\u2019s return to her village, but fourteen years later with the conquest of Sudan by the British. Indeed, in the final chapter, Salha asks, \u201cBritain is now sovereign over all Ottoman lands that had been under Mahdist rule.
\nAboulela was born in Cairo, grew up in Khartoum and moved to Scotland in her twenties and has described how the move to a more secular country shaped her views of her own identity and faith.
\nShe has been nominated three times for the Orange Prize, now the Women\u2019s Prize for Fiction, was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and has won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Whether it was inevitable that Aboulela would come to write\u00a0River Spirit\u00a0or not is a question for her.
\nThe novel does, however, offer an interesting insight into Muslim lives in Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s.
\nThese fictional lives raise questions about how our history determines what may be perceived as \u201cinevitable\u201d today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Agencies – Sudan Events \u201cInevitable\u201d is author Leila Aboulela\u2019s favourite word, according to an interview on the podcast\u00a0First Draft. She says, \u201cI like fiction because of that, because it shows so strongly how everything you see is not just random. There is a lot behind it that has built up to this particular moment.\u201d Indeed, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11839,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11838"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11840,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11838\/revisions\/11840"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}