South Sudan has fought for independence from the Sudanese government and its militias for decades. Overshadowed by the Arab slave trade, there are centuries of pain that have to be atoned for. While the current war eclipses this possibility in the context of a Sudanese government, there is an emerging movement of Northern artists reflecting on the civil war and trying to understand why South Sudan had to secede. Fatin Abbas’s Ghost Season is an important story in this effort. The novel is not only worth reading for the human truths treasured inside the pages; it is a history lesson published at a most relevant, pressing time.
Ghost Season begins with a burned corpse. The body is brought to an NGO compound in the fictional border town of Saraaya in South Kordofan, where Alex, a white American cartographer, and Dena, a Sudanese-American filmmaker, live and where the novel is set. Alex and Dena have not seen such horror before, but twelve-year-old Mustafa, who works at the compound as a boy-for-everything, and William, the NGO’s translator, are more familiar with the region’s frequent eruptions of violence. The corpse has to be buried. But in which graveyard? With the Nilotes, indigenous people who are mostly Christians? Or with the Arab, Muslim nomads who seasonally travel to the area to graze their cattle?
Initially, the prose can be expository, and time jumps are not intuitive given the story’s slow pace of false safety. As the novel progresses, the detailed, clear language and observations become a container for terrors that must not be dramatized, nor indulged. Abbas’s gaze is careful and considerate, honest and gut-wrenching. It captures violence that is not often discussed in Sudan, as the protagonists endure heartbreak that shook me deeply to my core. At several points in the story, I feared for them and had to close the book to remind myself that it was just a book, only to reopen it after a few moments and race on.
Abbas eloquently paints a picture of a world regulated by cyclical seasons that transform the land into lush greenery nurtured by rivers during the wet season, before ‘[s]avannahs [dry] out and swamps [evaporate]’ in the dry season. We learn about the region’s complex nature through Alex, who has been sent to update outdated colonial maps for the NGO’s development projects, a task that turns out to be hilariously difficult and unlike his initial ‘vision of himself running naked through a plain’. While he may seem stereotypical and is annoying at times, Alex’s Western impatience with the local bureaucracy is absolutely understandable.
Dena, meanwhile, is filming an art documentary, trying to discover her roots and purpose. This protagonist is inspired by Abbas’s own identity as a Sudan-born, US-raised artist. I, a fellow Sudanese diasporan, strongly related to Dena’s dilemma: ‘The more she sought invisibility, the more visible she became.’ Through her camera lens, we see a place in which nothing and everything happens. We are familiarized with the different shades of light and dust, trained to feel their tremble as the story picks up. Interestingly, Abbas often chooses Mustafa’s childlike view to depict moments of violence and heartbreak. Uncomfortable as that may be, Mustafa’s experiences are burned into my memory, hitting me with the magnitude of what it means to be a child during war.
William, the pillar of the story, helps us understand the dynamics of the conflict and the choices every person has to make in the face of adversity, whether they want to or not. He has returned from Khartoum where he was hoping to pursue a career with his accounting diploma, but where he was not given a chance by the racist Northerners. Back in Saraaya, he is trying to win over Layla, a smart and ambitious nomad, despite him being a Catholic Nilot.
Like William, I am in awe of Layla’s strong-headed kindness and ‘large eyes that [settle] on things with a warm attentiveness’. Growing up in a deeply patriarchal family, her grandmother raised her to become a woman we refer to as ‘Kandaka’. A hopeful representation of what it means to be a young Sudanese woman, Layla defies patriarchy and forges a path imbued with her grandmother’s wisdom: ‘Men are weak, and because they are weak, they are my enemies.’
Abbas brilliantly narrates the pains and injustices, the small but significant unions, and the care people extend towards one another in the unlikeliest moments. She invites readers to a corner of the world many of us will never see, to immerse us into the wondrous lives of a beautifully flawed quintet cohabiting with humour, courage and hope. I may never set foot in that part of Sudan myself, but after travelling there in Ghost Season, I have been reshaped forever. I am not the same as I was before reading this novel.
