Edo’s Souls, Stella Gaitano

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language: Arabic (English tr. Sawad Hussain)
country: South Sudan
year: 2018
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 8.9.24-19.9.24

the South Sudanese writer Stella Gaitano’s novel Edo’s Souls (translated from Arabic by Sawad Hussain) is not a perfect book. that said: I’d been looking forward to it since it was first announced that a translation was in the works in ca. 2019, and when it finally released last year I was worried that I had overhyped it for myself, so I put off reading it until this month.

I did not overhype it, it turns out: it really is that good, in spite of its flaws.

the novel moves between multiple perspectives. the first 5 chapters (out of 13) are in what appears to be third person, describing the childhood and early adulthood of a woman named Lucy-Eghino, born in a village in southern Sudan in ca. the late ’50s. Lucy (who is mostly referred to by her Christian name) is the daughter of a woman named Maria-Edo, a willful unmarried woman who has buried nine of her children before their first birthday and has become a devout Christian so that when she goes to heaven she can take god to task for their deaths in person. after her mother‘s death, Lucy marries a young man named Marco who has been educated in a northern school. as the violence of the First Sudanese Civil War approaches their village, Lucy and Marco flee north to Khartoum, where Marco’s best friend Peter lives, and settle there. before Maria-Edo died, she enjoined-blessed-cursed Lucy to bear many children, to reincarnate the souls of her siblings, and much of the novel is interested in the question of motherhood and the construction of womanhood.

the rest of the novel is narrated from a range of first-person perspectives: Marco, Peter (an army officer torn between his loyalty to the nation as a whole and his awareness of the many injustices the state perpetuates), Peter’s wife Theresa (who first takes advantage of Lucy’s naïveté but ultimately comes to respect and even love her), Peter’s adopted sister Jalaa (a feminist activist and lawyer in love with a revolutionary communist), and, finally, the perspective that narrated the first few chapters of the book, which is revealed to have been a heretofore silent first person all along.

once Lucy and Marco arrive in Khartoum, the bulk of the novel is focused on the rapidly changing and unstable politics and social circumstances of 1970s Sudan, punctuated by coup attempts and disappearances (and other forms of state repression), but also by moments of possibility and even of joy, perhaps most notably Jalaa’s description of the celebration of Christmas in 1975 (only for this joy to be shattered by the 1976 coup attempt and the repressive violence that followed it). as it continues, it grows darker: there is torture (or its aftermath), there is sexual violence, and there is an unsettling and ambivalent meditation on Peter’s complicity in state violence as his attempt to hold onto a neutrality that would let him serve all the people of Sudan grows more and more untenable. both Marco’s and Peter’s families are torn apart by these circumstances — and yet, in spite of its many disappointments and its many ambivalences, the novel and its characters never give up hope that change is possible, that this country could become something better.

I say “this country” because this is truly both a novel about Sudan in the 1970s and a crushing disappointment at the way the fragile possibility of a genuinely multicultural, plural Sudan was destroyed by the government in Khartoum — and also, I think, a novel about the the disappointments of the post-independence reality of civil war that has obstructed the possibility of a genuinely multicultural, plural South Sudan. it is also deeply striking to read this in 2024, against the backdrop, once again, of civil war in (north) Sudan. though this cannot have been what Gaitano had in mind, given that the novel was first published in 2018, it is difficult to read it and not think of the hopes raised by the 2019 revolution and now thwarted by the beneficiaries of the palace coup that ousted al-Bashir. while Lucy is less obviously the focus of these sections, she remains in some ways at the heart of the novel, as both The Mother of the Lucy-Marco-Peter-Theresa household (since she takes over many of the childcare tasks even for Theresa’s children, with Theresa taking on more housework) and as a kind of emblem of the people of Sudan writ large, caught up in events they do not fully understand and grieving for the ways their lives, families, and friendships have been torn apart. in a way, the ghostly and then incarnate souls of the novel’s title are not only Lucy’s siblings and then children but also all of the children of Sudan.

relatedly, if the novel has one flaw, I would say it is its strong linking of womanhood with reproduction and child-rearing — thrown into relief by moments of transmisogyny where male characters are accused of not being “real” men (and indeed referred to with a transmisogynist slur) for their perceived proximity to “women’s” work. its final moments, however, strongly push back against this linkage, suggesting a radical reframing of the novel’s whole attitude towards motherhood — so dramatically that I put the book down and said, “holy shit!” aloud. in its final pages, Gaitano reminds us that Lucy’s motherhood is not a blessing but a curse, a burden placed upon her shoulders by her dying mother, leaving us to wonder: will she, or will her children, be able to break this curse and, finally, be free, or are they doomed to repeat the cycle, over and over again?

Sawad Hussain’s translation is for the most part quite good, though there are some occasional weird phrasings (including one very weird, tangled relative clause that I’m still thinking about) and some confusion about quotation marks when a character is speaking for a long time. despite this and its other flaws, I would highly recommend it.

moods: dark, hopeful, reflective


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