Nights of Musk: Stories from Old Nubia, Haggag Hassan Odoul

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language: Arabic (English tr. Anthony Calderbank)
country: Egypt
year: 2005
form: short fiction
genre(s): literary
dates read: 6.3.19-9.3.19

finished Nights of Musk (Haggag Hassan Oddoul, tr. Anthony Calderbank). considering that I picked it up pretty much entirely on spec (I skimmed an article about the “Nile bride myth” in Nubian fiction and noticed that this was available in translation), I’m pleased with how it went.

it’s four short stories (or three short stories and one long story, almost fifty pages). Anthony Calderbank’s extremely patronizing translator’s note about how “[t]he Nubian people will be forever dislocated, their language is in danger of dextinction, their culture and customs may fade away” but thanks to Oddoul “the Nubians will not go uncelebrated, for he has documented his people’s demise” was a bad framing for the stories, but it’s true that the predominant emotion in all of them is something between “nostalgia”, “regret”, “anguish”, and “anger”.

contra Calderbank, though, the first story, “Adila, Grandmother”, while marked by grief and frustration in the aftermath of the construction of the Aswan dam, ends on a bittersweet note — death, but also an engagement and the possibility of a renewed Nubian future, or at least of continued survival.

They’ve pulled us up by our roots, and we’ve become like brushwood. Our sons went off all over the place to work as servants in the land of plenty. They freed our grandchildren leftovers from foreigners and beys. And we here, they have thrown us into the valley of the demons. They gave us this land. Nothing grows on it but evil plants with bitter fruit that even the animals loathe. They’ve killed us, my son. The gorbatis have killed us.

(from “Adila, Grandmother”)

the second story, “Nights of Musk”, disappointed me. it’s short, and it’s just a man reflecting on his relationship with his wife from childhood on, ending with the birth of their child. I would have probably been just meh about it if it hadn’t ended with him telling his literally three-year-old nephew how to (eventually in the future) flirt with his newborn daughter. I understand the concern with families and futures, but. no thanks.

the third story, “Zeinab Uburty”, is almost fifty pages long. it’s a long oral narrative about a witch (the eponymous character) contained within a present-day frame where an old man tells the younger generation about something that happened in his youth (almost a century before). it was fine, but kind of boring somehow? also, as witch stories are wont to be, kind of sexist. moments of humor, but predominantly just kind of sad, for everyone involved.

Dam piled high, you are the same age as me. You split up lovers. They dumped you into the way of the mighty river. You have blocked the life-flow of water. Behind you it has built up and drowned half our land. The river is good like its people, but the dam confined the water in a huge lake. The water swelled up like boiling milk, and as it rose it swallowed up half the green valley and destroyed it. It drowned lines of palm trees and polluted the sweet water. It ruined the time of peace and purity. We moved out, leaving behind our cool spacious houses for cramped sweltering ones that hung on the side of the mountain like carbuncles. We crowded in on the scorpions, and they crowded in on us. We chased away the snakes, and they came back and surrounded us. The wolf’s howl echoed deep in our ears. “Beware, you are too close to my territory.” We drowned in the murky yellow of the mountain and our hearts longed for the bright yellow sand of our own land, for the higher sands were barren and brought forth neither a stalk of corn nor a clump of green. They bred only scorpions and kept the rattlesnakes and vipers warm.

(from “The River People”)

the last story, though. “The River People” was initially a little confusing re temporality, but once it got going I figured it out, and it’s lovely (and also sad). the main character (a woman this time, Asha Ashry — “Beautiful Asha”) is waiting for the man she loves, Siyam, who’s traveled north to the coast (given the reference to Greeks I assume Alexandria) for work, to return to the village so they can get married. looming over the story is the Aswan dam, the reason Siyam had to go north; when, finally, he’s about to return, the dam consumes him. the last paragraph had me shivering.


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