Unimaginable Community: The Failure of Nubian Nationalism in Idris Ali's Dongola

Author(s): David DiMeo

Source: Research in African Literatures , Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 72-89
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.46.1.72

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Unimaginable Community:
The Failure of Nubian Nationalism in
Idris Ali’s Dongola
DAVID DIMEO
Western Kentucky University
david.dimeo@wku.edu

ABSTRACT

The Egyptian Nubian author Idris Ali was a pioneer among modern writers
depicting the marginal position of the Nubian community and the role of
Egyptian nationalist policies in that marginalization. This article applies
Benedict Anderson’s theory of postcolonial nationalism, in particular, its
emphasis on the role of colonial institutions in shaping the grammar of
nationalism in emerging states, to Idris Ali’s Dongola: A Nubian Novel to
illustrate how the assertion of a distinctly Egyptian national identity nec-
essarily involved the ostracism of the Nubian minority. The tragedy of the
novel, however, is embodied in the semi-autobiographical protagonist’s
failed attempts to lead his countrymen in forging their own “imagined
community.” This article will examine the gap that renders the protagonist,
an example of the twentieth-century “protean man” identified by Robert Jay
Lifton, incapable of speaking for his fellow Nubians, who remain voiceless
subalterns of the type described by Gayatri Spivak.

C
ensus, Map, Museum—in Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on national-
ism—these colonial institutions provided the grammar for the “imagined
communities” of the postcolonial era. But what of those populations denied
a place in the censuses, maps, and museums of the newly imagined communities?
In Africa and the Middle East, this nationalist grammar produced its winners,
like the lavish monarchies reigning within borders that would have been unrec-
ognizable a century earlier; and its losers: the tragic and well-known “victims of
a map.”1 Among the latter, few populations were as thoroughly marginalized in
the postcolonial imagination as the Nubians of Egypt and no writer captured the
estrangement of the Nubian community as powerfully as Idris Ali, an author who

  RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring 2015). © 2015 

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 DAVID DIMEO    73

shared the alienation of this community throughout his career. Yet even Ali did
not claim his visceral expressions of angst could adequately speak for the entire
community of Nubia. Indeed, Ali’s agonized Dongola: A Nubian Novel conveys,
above all, the difficulty of anyone, even a child of Nubia like himself, speaking for a
voiceless population lacking the grammar to understand its own liminal existence
in the refashioned imagination of postcolonial Egypt.
Although Ali was awarded the state prize for best novel from Egyptian presi-
dent Husni Mubarak, he spent most of his career in poverty writing novels about
the alienation of the Nubian people, an alienation that he knew all too well from
personal experience. Born in 1940 into a Nubian society that had already been
relocated for the first Aswan Dam in 1902, Ali protested the massive resettlement
of Egyptian Nubians for the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. Like the protagonist
of Dongola, Ali attempted assimilation in the north, studying in Egypt’s oldest
and most venerated educational institution, Al-Azhar, before economic condi-
tions forced him to go abroad. Despite his attempts to mediate between the Cairo
metropole and those he left behind, Ali would later lament “I was expecting praise
and appreciation for my stance on Nubia issues, not this treatment” (Mourad).
Ali’s expression of dismay notwithstanding, his first novel, Dongola, betrays
little expectation of “praise and appreciation” for addressing Nubian issues. Ali’s
scarcely veiled fictional counterpart in the novel, Awad Shalali, follows a path
largely parallel to Ali’s and never experiences a moment of praise or appreciation
for his efforts to find a comprehensible voice to speak for his Nubian community.
Awad, like Ali, has the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of the census,
map, and museum of Egyptian nationalism. His cosmopolitan outlook enables
him to constantly reimagine his own identity, but not to speak for a people who
have yet to develop, much less comprehend, the modern grammar of national-
ism. In fact, the only time in which Awad Shalali shares the same identity as his
Nubian countrymen is in “his miserable childhood” (23), in which he assumed the
whole world lived as he did—in poverty, malnourished, and beset with disease.
After seeing Cairo, however, the young man is forever changed: “He was sure this
was the paradise the sheikh at the mosque talked about in his sermons” (23–24),
with wealth beyond anything he had ever imagined. Abandoning his barren
Nubian village, Awad becomes intoxicated with “the north”—as the Nubians call
Cairo—determined to embrace the Egyptian identity assigned him by virtue of
the modern political map. Yet his color marks him as an “other” in the imagined
community’s neat census categories, despite his embrace of Egyptianism. Thus
begins for this modern man a continual process of refashioning himself, begin-
ning with a turn to the promised utopia of Communism, which only lands him in
a brutal Egyptian prison. In reaction to northern rejection, Awad revives Nubian
nationalism, only to find his resurrected nationalist vision beyond the imagination
of Nubians in both Egypt and Sudan. Finally, he abandons with contempt Egypt,
Nubia, and Africa altogether, finding acceptance only in a post-nationalist Western
Europe. Yet even this multicultural grammar of tolerance proves incomprehensible
to the imaginations of the family he leaves behind, voiceless, in Nubia.
Awad’s failure as a presumptive spokesman for his marginalized Nubian
community can be best understood at the intersection of three theoretical perspec-
tives, each of which sheds light on a particular dimension of the tenuous position
of the Nubian community in mid-twentieth-century Egypt. First among these

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74    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 1

is Benedict Anderson’s description of the peculiar development of postcolonial

nationalism in the third world, which most clearly illuminates the logic by which
consolidation of the modern Egyptian identity dictated the marginalization of
the Nubian community. Awad Shalali’s ability to refashion himself as a Nubian
nationalist, and just as easily abandon that ideology, can be best explained in the
psychology of self-imagining and reimagining captured in Robert Jay Lifton’s
metaphor of the “protean man.” While Lifton’s theory combines well with Ander-
son’s to explain Awad’s rather flimsy transformation into a Nubian nationalist, the
failure of his nationalist project necessitates a look at the voiceless condition of
those for whom he would speak. In this regard, Gayatri Spivak’s questioning of
subaltern studies best illuminates the contradiction in Awad’s attempts to find a
comprehensible grammar to voice the sufferings of his Nubian relatives without
losing his connection to them.
In a spirit unlike that of his somewhat naïve protagonist, Ali begins his novel
by underscoring his limited ability to speak for his kinsmen. The author’s preface
to the novel begins with a desperate plea to “the people of the north”:

These are all my pages; do not tear them up

This is my voice; do not silence it
This is I; do not curse me
For I have lived among you and eaten with you,
loved your culture, and still do. I am merely
conveying to you, with the sting of truth, some of
my sorrows, and those of my people.

In his humble aspirations, Ali claims only to present his voice, through which the
reader may appreciate “some” of his sorrows and, by extension, some of those of
his people. He further sets himself apart from the rest of his countrymen as one
who has lived in and still loves the north. Presciently, Ali does not presume that
his pages will ever be read or his voice heard; a valid concern, for while Dongola
was not banned, one of Ali’s later novels (The Leader Having His Hair Cut) would
be (Ezzat).2
From the outset, Ali has little choice but to adopt a vocabulary that reinforces
the very marginality he opposes. “The north,” used here and throughout the novel
to indicate all of Egypt that is not Nubia, is a reference that would be meaningless
to “the people of north”—the very readers to whom Ali addresses himself. The
city of Cairo, in fact, is so central to Egyptian consciousness that the colloquial
term for the city—misr—is synonymous with the entire country. To label the
heart of the imagined nation as an extremity is to position oneself as outside the
mainstream of the Egyptian nation, yet Ali has little choice but to adopt the only
understood term in his native community for the rest of Egypt. The stark choice
that forces the author to alienate himself from one of the two populations between
whom he seeks to mediate is dictated by a nationalist grammar that contains no
mechanism for expression of the Nubian identity. Appreciating the development
of that grammar, and its consequent exclusion of the Nubians, requires a turn to
Anderson’s Imagined Communities.

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 DAVID DIMEO    75

REVIVING THE PHARAOHS AND

SUBMERGING THEIR NUBIAN RIVALS
Benedict Anderson notes that for all their rejection of imperialist domination, the
nationalist movements of the postcolonial era were largely shaped by the colonial
imagining of the world. Anderson further observes that “in the ‘nation-building’
policies of the new states one sees both a genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm
and a systematic, even Machiavellian, instilling of nationalist ideology through
the mass media, the educational system, administrative regulations, and so forth”
(113–14). Few modern states experienced this combination of populist enthusi-
asm and the systematic imposition of nationalism more fully than Gamal ‘Abd
al-Nasser’s Egypt in the 1950s. No matter how heavy handedly the massive state
media and political apparatus imposed its conception of a new Egypt, millions
still poured into the streets in genuine support of this defiant vision of an Egypt
freed from its old European masters. In the process, though, demographic groups
that did not fit into the narrative of this imagined community—like the once proud
Nubians—were relegated to “the weird subcategory . . . of ‘Others’ ” (Ibid. 166) to
become casualties of Egypt’s new census, map, and museum.
The attractive power of an imagined community can be measured by how
eagerly a member of the “others” category desires inclusion in the mainstream
of state nationalism. Dongola’s protagonist, Awad Shalali, witnesses the revival
of Egyptian pride with approval, as the new president “with his pharaonic nose”
(12) erects monuments to Pharaoh Ramses II in central Cairo: “They brought his
colossal statue and set it up in the square in front of the railway station so that
every passenger arriving and leaving could see him” (6). Despite the obviously
centralized imposition of this revived nationalism, and the fact that it celebrates
dynasties that once battled his Nubian ancestors, Awad experiences the “genuine
enthusiasm” Anderson describes. During the uprising against the British, “he had
been with them. He had demanded evacuation or certain death. He cursed the
King and the English. He enthusiastically applauded the soldiers of the revolution”
(5). According to the new political map, Awad reasons, he is an Egyptian and the
revolution promises freedom for all Egyptians. Unfortunately for Awad, the new
postcolonial nationalism is not open to all. Ernest Gellner warned that national-
ism cannot be unilaterally adopted: “Two men are of the same nation if and only
if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation” (6–7). Awad will
discover, unfortunately, that his desire to join the Egyptian nationalist movement
is not reciprocated.
While Egypt’s revolutionary leaders would scarcely have admitted it, “this
blend of popular and official nationalism has been the product of anomalies cre-
ated by European imperialism,” anomalies that “profoundly shaped the way in
which the colonial state imagined its dominion,” according to Anderson (114, 164).
Anderson acknowledges the paradox in this logic: “At first sight, this conclusion
may seem surprising, since colonial states were typically anti-nationalist, and
often violently so” (163). What the emerging nationalists inherited from their
former masters, then, was not the goal of nationalism, but something deeper
and more insidious—the “grammar” that would determine how they could
express their national identity, a grammar that limits how the new state can
imagine its geographical, demographic, and historical identity (Ibid. 163). Awad’s

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76    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 1

understandable desire to join the wave of nationalist enthusiasm sweeping Egypt

would be confounded by census categories constructed by the British colonial
administration during the nineteenth century largely to control rebellious popu-
lations like his Nubian ancestors and by a selective national history that relegates
Nubia to the role of a vanquished opponent of the mighty Egypt.
Few emerging states adopted the colonial grammar as fully as Egypt. Edward
Said once deemed Egypt an “excellent case in point” of “the unbroken, all-embrac-
ing Western tutelage of an Oriental country” (Orientalism 35). In fact, Said placed
Egypt in its own, somewhat ignoble category in this regard: “Egypt was not just
another colony: it was the vindication of Western imperialism; it was, until its
annexation by England, an almost academic example of Oriental backwardness;
it was to become the triumph of English knowledge and power” (Ibid. 35). As
Anderson noted, such colonial tutelage would later shape the vehement anticolo-
nialism of independent Egypt, even if the intent of the colonial tutors was quite
the opposite. Lord Cromer, the Englishman most responsible for raising Egypt to
a position “among Oriental nations . . . absolutely alone in its prosperity, financial,
and moral,” in the words of Arthur Balfour (Ibid. 35), warned “the real future
of Egypt . . . lies not in the direction of a narrow nationalism, which will only
embrace native Egyptians” (Ibid. 37). Cromer, of course, was speaking not for the
protection of the rights of Nubians, or any other native minority, but rather the
continued privilege of Englishmen in Egypt, but his words captured a palpable
fear of a narrow xenophobia built on Egypt’s illustrious past, a fear borne out
by the occasion for outright annexation, the 1882 ‘Urabi revolt, with its slogan of
“Egypt for the Egyptians,” a motto unthinkable when Europeans had first landed
in Egypt a century earlier. Yet the apparatus of control that Cromer built, firmly
dictating the inferior position of the Egyptians, could be turned against the very
purpose for which it was established, merely by substituting a local elite for the
colonial elite. In the process, however unwittingly, Egyptian nationalism retained
the grammar imparted by colonial tutelage.
The first, and most essential, element in Anderson’s nationalist grammar is
embodied in the modern map, which graphically confirms that “in the modern
conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square
centimetre [sic] of a legally demarcated territory” (19). In “the older imagining,”
however, “states were defined by centres, [sic] borders were porous and indistinct,
and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another” (Ibid. 19). Even the Arab
conquerors of the 7th century, who brought much of the known world under their
dominion, accommodated the idea of isolated power centers. In the historical
anecdote that opens the novel, Nubian “bowmen of the glance,” so known for
their deadly aim, held off several Arab attempts at conquest, eventually forging a
treaty with Arab forces to the north that held for six centuries (1). More than any
other historical memory, these warriors and their capital at Dongola haunt Awad
Shalali’s consciousness. For him, they represent not merely a time when Nubian
men were strong enough to fight for their independence, but also a time when a
power center like Dongola could be allowed to exist beside the mightiest empire
of the day in a relationship of mutual respect. Such a conception would not do
for the colonial powers, as any one of those “square centimeters,” whether in
the remotest jungle or desert, might hold valuable mineral resources. Therefore,
straight borderlines would permanently cut through the regions south of Aswan,

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 DAVID DIMEO    77

where the sovereignties of ancient Nubia and pharaonic Egypt had flowed back
and forth over the centuries.
The cartographic amputation of Nubia, a land traditionally falling along the
Nile between the first and sixth cataracts, that is, roughly south of the Egyptian
city of Aswan and north of Khartoum, was decreed by the needs of British secu-
rity. Britain had occupied Egypt in 1882 and the Sudan in 1898, in both cases in
response to local revolts, effectively controlling each country until the 1950s. The
border it set up in 1899 was designed to facilitate control over desert populations
by delineating policing responsibilities for the puppet regimes in Cairo and Khar-
toum. Unmarked for most of its length, the border runs along the 22nd parallel,
an all-too-neat decision made possible by the game-changing system of longitude
cited by Anderson that began in 1761 (173). The eastern section of the border, how-
ever, deviates from this straight-line pattern, applying a no-less arbitrary division
of tribal lands between the Sudanese and Egyptian authorities, based on the loca-
tion of wells used by the migrating Arab Bedouin tribes who were the primary
security concern at the time (Office of the Geographer 2–3).
The division of power along the border served the needs of the newly inde-
pendent Cairo and Khartoum regimes as well as their colonial era predecessors.
A 1959 agreement between Sudan and the United Arab Republic (the state created
by Egypt’s 1958–1961 union with Syria) ambitiously announced, “The River Nile
needs projects, for its full control and for increasing its yield for the full utilization
of its waters by the Republic of the Sudan and the United Arab Republic” (“United
Arab Republic”). The two governments, now sole arbiters of “every square cen-
timeter” of their territories, agreed in the document to build at least two dams,
one the mighty Aswan High Dam in Egypt already on the drawing board at the
time of the treaty and other the Roseires Dam in Sudan. In an amazingly brief
seven-page document arbitrating the redrawing of the physical geography of the
Nile basin, the two sovereign states, preoccupied with water rights and payments,
offer only a one sentence aside to address “the final transfer of the population of
Halfa and all other Sudanese inhabitants whose lands shall be submerged by the
stored water” (Ibid.), counterparts to the 50,000 Egyptian Nubians already fated
for resettlement as a result of the Aswan Dam construction. The sole arbiter of
“every square centimeter” of Egyptian territory, President ‘Abd al-Nasser, was not
the least bit shy about putting his personal stamp on the erasure of Nubia from the
map, leaving in its place a massive lake with his name on it. The former inhabitants
of the area faced stark choices:

The people of Nubia opened their eyes one day and the river was before them,
their villages in its belly, and the mountain behind them. They sat and counted
the compensation money and sighed. Those who despaired emigrated north.
The strong and the steadfast were determined to stay. . . . When they took the
compensation money, the land became state property, and by sowing in the
summer they had committed an infraction. They had no right to do that. Most
of the men left, looking for work. (64–65)

Even the physical environment now bent to the will of the political map, as
Awad Shalali’s grandfather, one of the “steadfast” who defied the government
mandate, continued to dare the advancing waters of the reservoir by fishing and
farming. He was punished not by the hand of the state, but rather the revised

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78    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 1

natural environment, swallowed by the mud of the receding river that the Nubians
had once “loved,” “sung to,” and “deified” (64). When Awad finally glances at the
mighty border that gutted his community, he is dumbfounded that this contrived
line holds such power: “They looked ahead expectantly but saw no dwellings
or any sign of life. This was merely the imaginary borderline which he knew by
landmarks” (59). Imaginary—yes; but as Anderson notes, a national identity once
imagined within such lines can be extremely powerful.

A LIVING CONTRADICTION
TO THE NARRATIVE OF EGYPTIAN IDENTITY
The map Egypt inherited from its colonial overseers seemed far less artificial than
the purely arbitrary lines that created new states in Africa and the Middle East.
Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir famously claimed, “Egypt is the only nation-
state in the Arab world; the rest are just tribes with flags” (MacFarquhar 11). Yet
the stronger the nation’s claim to geographic legitimacy, the weaker the position
of the relatively few minority populations whose existence contradict the legiti-
macy of the map. Indeed, unlike other “victims of the map,” such as the Kurds or
Maasai, Nubia’s predicament was to fall within the geographic borders of a state
with relatively strong bases for centralized nationalism. A full appreciation of the
strength of Egyptian nationalism comes best through Eric Hobsbawm’s concept
of proto-nationalism. Hobsbawm, accepting Anderson’s concept of imagined
communities, nonetheless asks “why and how could a concept so remote from
the real experience of most human beings as ‘national patriotism’ become such a
powerful force so quickly?” (46). After all, when Napoleon landed in Egypt, most
of the pharaonic monuments lay forgotten under the sand, yet by 1955 Nasser was
resurrecting a stone pharaoh to symbolize his defiance of the West. Hobsbawm
attributes the success of state nationalism to the fact that “in many parts of the
world, states and national movements could mobilize certain variants of feelings
of collective belonging which already existed and which could operate, as it were,
potentially on the macro-political scale which could fit in with modern states and
nations. I shall call these bonds ‘proto-national’ ” (46).
Egyptian nationalism had a leg up on other new Arab states, with several
ready-made bases of identity among Hobsbawm’s proto-nationalisms, most of
which worked, however, to the disadvantage of the Nubian minority. Language
“was to become central to the modern definition of nationality, and therefore also
to the popular perception of it,” particularly if “an elite literary or administrative
language exists” (Hobsbawm 59). No language better fit the description of an elite,
literary language than Arabic, yet the presence of a distinctive Nubian language
within the borders of Egypt disturbed this straightforward definition of Egypt as
an Arabic-speaking nation. Egyptian nationalists could thus find more to bind
them linguistically to fellow Arabs in Morocco or Yemen than with some of the
people within their own borders. Awad Shalali and his companions, in their desire
to assimilate, stick to Arabic in their interactions with the northerners, yet when
tensions arise, they revert to cursing in their Nubian dialect (47), thus acknowl-
edging the alienation they wish to deny. In this case, it is not the ability to use
the official language of the nation that makes one a member of that community,
but rather the ability to switch to a language not understood by the majority that

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 DAVID DIMEO    79

marks one as an outsider. Thus even when speaking in Arabic, Awad’s utterances
are deemed to be alien. In one of his many encounters with the police, Awad pleads,
“I wasn’t speaking Nubian, I was speaking Arabic,” only to be told “that was not
Arabic, boy . . . [that was] the language of lunatics, fools and clowns” (32).
Ethnicity and race feature prominently in Hobsbawm’s bases of proto-nation-
alism, especially where “visible differences in physique are too obvious to be
overlooked.” In these cases, such visible differences “have too often been used
to mark or reinforce distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ including national
ones.” Generalizing across history, Hobsbawm observes a tendency to give “a
higher social position to lighter colors” (65). Hobsbawm might well be speaking
of Awad Shalali, whose education and embrace of Nasserism can mask much of
his background, but whose color constitutes a “visible difference in physique” he
cannot disguise. On the Cairo streets, where he has come to cheer for the Egyp-
tian revolution, he is called a “stupid black” and a “savage” (19, 13). Worse, as the
map’s southern borderline neatly divides Egypt from Sudan, with no “Nubia” in
between, Cairenes assume Awad to be Sudanese, rather than Egyptian (7). Even
those in his southern village who have never been to Cairo recognize the folly of
Awad’s attempts to fit into northern society: “Do you think the women of Cairo
and foreign women love your blackness? If you were to go bankrupt, they’d throw
you to the dogs in the street,” the village mayor rails (78).
The instrument for codifying this racial and ethnic proto-nationalism into an
operative component of the “grammar” of postcolonial nationalism is the census.
The key features of this colonially inspired census in Anderson’s description are its
comprehensive and essentializing nature: “It tried carefully to count the objects of
its feverish imagining,” in a manner in which every person, “including the women
and children (whom the ancient rulers had always ignored),” must be counted as
“one digit in an aggregable series” (Anderson 168–69). “The fiction of the census
is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely
clear place. No fractions” (Ibid. 166). The census solidifies and legitimizes what
Edward Said called “the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the
core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism,” affecting both “imperialist
cultures as well as those trying to resist the encroachments of Europe” (Culture
and Imperialism xxv). The new Egyptian nationalism is not built on a racial identi-
fication per se, but “visible differences in physique” that Awad’s love for northern
Egypt cannot disguise, which nonetheless mark him as a member of a census
category that undermines Egypt’s claim to a homogenous identity. Awad himself
recognizes this inescapable reality, at one point of great frustration cursing “but
we’re still here. . . . We have our language and our own color” (75).
Awad’s color places him on the wrong side of the most powerful source
of proto-nationalism in Hobsbawm’s calculations: membership in a “historical
nation” (73). Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, observes that “appeals to the
past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretation of the present” (3).
John Di Stefano, whose work has often focused on the representation of identity
among displaced persons, further clarifies:

For a nation to perpetuate itself within the minds of its constituents, it requires
a type of ongoing narration—a narrative that provides a context within which
such enactments of belonging may be positioned. Indeed, what makes the

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80    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 1

concept of the nation so resonant is that it locates belonging as an identity within

a narrative—and consequently within an image—of home. (38)

Not only the past greatness of the nation, but its pursuit of characteristic
values and wounds from past wrongs are all selectively woven into a narrative
that neatly provides imperatives to help navigate the present. Anderson credits
the colonial passion for archeology and antiquities with solidifying this narrative,
most visibly in the institution of the museum. Nowhere was the colonial fascina-
tion with unearthing the past more evident than in Egypt, where the archeological
effort of categorizing, interpreting, and fetishizing an imagined Egypt for Euro-
pean visitors amounted to what Said called “the very model of a truly scientific
appropriation of one culture by another” (Orientalism 42). While this archeological
project was intended to serve European, rather than Egyptian, interests, when
the revolution inherited the museums, it inherited with them a visible heritage of
Egyptian immortality and triumphalism, with Nasser’s installation of the colos-
sus of Ramses II in downtown Cairo but one of countless examples of a revival of
the past as inspiration for the future (Ali, Dongola 6). Di Stefano adds, “narratives,
however, are fluid, able to mutate and reconfigure themselves as required and
desired by the subjectivities of those who are narrating” (38), a convenient quality
that allows the revival of Egypt’s pharaonic history to omit the prominent role of
Nubian competition and cooperation in that narrative.
Historical Nubia was not only about to be excised from the history books,
but from the ground as well, as it sat squarely in the path of the most ambitious
piece of Egypt’s revival effort: the building of the Aswan Dam, the envisioned
key to Egypt’s future, bathed in comparisons to the building projects of the great
pharaohs. The “new Egyptian pyramid” erased most of Egyptian Nubia from the
map, leaving a grandly titled “Lake Nasser” in its place, lest anyone mistake the
act of conquest. The resettlement of the Nubian population, however, received
scant media attention compared to the rescue of the pharaonic monuments from
the rising reservoir. Among the relocation efforts, none was more internationally
celebrated than the moving of Ramses II’s mighty temple at Abu Simbel, an enor-
mous structure built, not coincidentally, at the gateway of ancient Egypt facing
south, to warn off potential Nubian incursions. Now, having honored Ramses with
a colossus in Cairo, Nasser carried the deed further, moving Ramses’s warning
sign to guard the southern end of his self-named lake.3
None of this is lost on Awad Shalali as he tours the landscape on a boat, sur-
veying the two massive monuments to the continuity of Egypt’s power—Ramses’s
temple and the Aswan Dam—and contrasts these with the “desolate villages
on both banks, with all the doors torn off,” including his own, which had been
relocated three times “until it was gradually submerged by the waters of the dam”
(36). Upon the recollection, “he felt a violent nostalgia for the sight of Nubia before
its final immersion” (36). Yet at the same time, Awad clearly gets the message of
power wrapped up in the transformation of the landscape: “he was disappearing,
too, and vanishing from existence” (38). While Awad understands the deliberate
process of historical erasure, most of his countrymen submit unknowingly to a
redrawn history: “When another generation had passed, archeologists and oth-
ers would come and write lies,” Awad concedes (38). He further recognizes the
exigencies that cause this submission to a rescripted history:

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 DAVID DIMEO    81

This was not the time to dig up history which required close study . . . the people
of Nubia were so decent and forgetful that all they asked of the world was shelter
and a good death. . . . Not one of them knew any of their forgotten history or
had any enthusiasm for it. (39)

Unlike them, Awad laments hopelessly to a northerner: “My homeland is the

land of Nubia, which has been consumed by the pages of history. We were, but
you made us not be” (31). Having been awoken to the power of collective identity,
Awad will never be satisfied with “shelter and a good death.”
Rejected as an Egyptian nationalist, Awad falls under the sway of a cousin,
Bahr Jazuli, who once dreamed of serving the Egyptian government, only to be
driven by police harassment to seek refuge in his Nubian identity. “The day they
arrested him he was Egyptian, but he died a Nubian,” Awad recalls (25). Bahr’s
“extreme secessionist ideas had germinated in his prison cells and bloomed fully
under the whiplash and daily insults” (25). Bahr dies in prison, determined to
repay insults with insults, but Awad’s initial assertions of his Nubian heritage seek
respect, rather than confrontation, from his captors. In one of his early appear-
ances before the police, Awad invokes the memory of the Nubian king who became
a great Egyptian pharaoh: “Write this down. My historical name is Taharqah”
(31). Awad names himself not after the Napatan king who conquered Egypt, but
rather his descendant, the pharaoh of Nubian ancestry of the 25th dynasty who
spent most of his reign defending Egypt from the Assyrians. Awad’s reference
asserts the equality and shared heritage of the Nubians and Egyptians as much
as it refuses to submit as an inferior. In any case, the reference is lost on the officer,
who again sees only Awad’s color: “I do not care about your red past. What bothers
me is your black present” (35).
The people of Cairo see not Awad’s lineage to the pharaoh Taharqah, but
rather to the thousands of southern blacks sold into slavery over the centuries.
Slavery was so synonymous with Nubia in historical memory that the author, in
his preface, cites a historical anecdote in which Nubian slaves were once so plenti-
ful that slave owners paid for a haircut with a slave. This low point of history, not
surprisingly, has been retained in Egypt’s revived historical narrative, rather than
the memory of Nubian pharaohs defending Egypt (2). When Awad dares to visit a
Cairo police station to complain about the death of a relative, a “criminal” there for
detention takes umbrage at the Nubian’s hubris: “I never thought I’d see this,” he
curses, “My grandfather had ten of these people, apart from the ones he gave their
freedom to please God. I never thought I’d see the day they would turn on their
masters.” Yet Awad knows too much history for his own good and retorts, “Which
grandfather do you mean? . . . The one who used to lick the boots of the Mamlukes?
[sic] Or the one who pimped women for Napoleon’s soldiers?” (18). The Nubians
and Egyptians have a shared history of servitude, as ironically, the names for
both Arab Egypt’s most powerful empire—the Mamluks—and the word Nubian
both derive from words for “slaves,” which, indeed, the mighty Mamluk warriors
once were. Awad also invokes the more recent servitude of Egyptians to European
imperialists. To him, the criminal’s insult is ludicrous, an image of “slaves own-
ing slaves!” (19). Awad’s digressions into historical fact, however, merely strike
the authorities as a regrettable side effect of education. A police officer hearing
Awad’s argument simply answers, “The government was wrong to give you people

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82    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 1

schools. If we had left you savages, you’d still be our waiters and doormen. Take
this man away and teach him some manners” (16). The threat has a sense of irony
to it; the officer commands that Awad be “taught manners”—the Arabic term used
here,’addaba, clearly implying “to punish” or “chastise,” but also meaning to impart
the manners and education of a cultured person, or adib, the very source of Awad’s
disobedient nature, according to the police officer (Ali, Dunqula 26).4

FASHIONING ONESELF INTO A NUBIAN NATIONALIST

Awad’s northern antagonists may have failed to teach him the “manners” expected
of a subaltern servant in the new order, but they succeeded, unwittingly, in impart-
ing another lesson, the art of reimagining one’s identity for one’s own advantage.
Having watched the rather selective and artificial process by which revolution-
ary Egyptians developed their new national character, a precocious intellect like
Awad’s would never be satisfied with a disadvantaged, hand-me-down identity.
His time in the north has rendered Awad a new man, a distinctly mid-twentieth-
century type that Robert Jay Lifton, in his work in psychohistory, described as the
“protean man.” Lifton coined the term after the Greek myth of Proteus, a character
who could change his shape at will. Lifton’s modern protean man could put on
and discard identities as easily as he did garments. Twenty-first century multi-
culturalism would render Lifton’s “protean man” a rather outdated paradigm for
human identity formation, but the model remains an apt descriptor of the time
in which Awad Shalali lived. Awad’s misfortune is to live with a tireless imagina-
tion during a moment of narrow, postcolonial nationalism, while his ideological
descendants would find a more welcome place for expressions of Nubian identity
in the 2011 revolution.
Lifton’s protean man was driven by the modern forces of “historical (or
psyhcohistorical) dislocation” into “an interminable series of experiments and
explorations—some shallow, some profound—each of which may be readily aban-
doned in favor of still new psychological quests” (7–8). This historical dislocation,
a “break in the sense of connection which men have long felt with the vital and
nourishing symbols of their cultural tradition—symbols revolving around family,
idea systems, religions, and the life cycle in general” (Lifton 7), in no small part
resembles the break with the past necessary for modern nationalism to develop.
Among the symbol systems he lists as once having shaped traditional identity,
Lifton conspicuously does not mention nationalism, politics, or historical destiny.
Rather, the premodern person found comfort in the cyclical, spiritual, and moral
bases of traditional community life. Lifton’s description of the premodern commu-
nity shares more than a little with Anderson’s picture of the “older imagining” that
preceded colonialism. The radical changes in perception brought on by industrial
age colonialism, which would give rise to both postcolonial nationalism and the
protean man, replace the old, familiar cyclical patterns with something altogether
different: a linear, purpose-driven historical progression and a clear-cut spatial
division of every inch of the world, topped with precise political identifications.
Lifton identifies two diverging responses to this dislocation, the first of which
overlays very well with Anderson’s identification with an “imagined” national
community: the “mode of restoration,” which Lifton describes as “longing for
a ‘Golden Age’ of absolute oneness,” the “image of a mythical past of perfect

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 DAVID DIMEO    83

harmony” as modern man’s defense against “the extraordinarily rapid change

surrounding his own life” (15). Not surprisingly, Lifton, who has little taste for this
reactionary view, warns that it “can be one of his most explosive and dangerous
emotions,” giving us “emperor-worshipping assassins in Japan . . . and Ku Klux
Klanners in this country” (15). The fanaticisms that Lifton identifies—however
repulsive—are but extreme versions of the successful movements of reconstructed
identity that can revive millennia-old histories to celebrate the restoration of the
path toward future glory. Lifton greatly underestimates how many people would
be content to remain in these resurrected fantasies—even Awad, “lost in his
love for the north” (66), would throw himself wholeheartedly into the illusion of
Egypt’s “absolute oneness,” not setting out on Lifton’s second path until he had
been thoroughly rejected for membership in the first.
Lifton, unlike Anderson, focuses on those who do not find a comfortable
niche in an imagined community. They, instead, continue to search and rein-
vent themselves, sometimes completely, in an attempt to find a place. This is the
second of Lifton’s “modes” of dealing with historical dislocation: “The mode of
transformation” (15). Awad, as a living exemplar of the protean man, manages to
transform himself thoroughly after each experience of rejection. Lifton’s descrip-
tion is quite an accurate picture of the rejection Awad Shalali feels: “Often feeling
himself uncared for, even abandoned, protean man responds with diffuse fear and
anger” (Lifton 15). Abandonment, indeed, is the dominant motif of Awad Shalali’s
consciousness, experienced first at the hands of the northern Egyptians, then from
the Communist party. His attempts to stir Nubian nationalism will only lead to
further feelings of abandonment, from the people of his village and finally even
from the Nubians of the Sudan, after a desperate infiltration mission to the heart-
land of Sudanese Nubia. Lifton could well be describing Awad Shalali when he
notes that the protean man’s anger often proves easier to manage than his fear: “He
nonetheless cultivates his anger because he finds it more serviceable than anxiety,
because there are plenty of targets of one kind or another beckoning” (15). Awad’s
tireless intellect, marked by his passion for history and politics, provides him with
no shortage of targets for his anger: in every encounter with the northern authori-
ties, he sees Mamluks, slave traders, pharaonic or Arab invaders as he continually
refashions himself to fight wars of past decades, centuries, or millennia.
Awad’s incisive mind often enables him to see the artificiality in this process
of identity construction and even occasionally promises to set him free from his
self-destructive imaginings. After his release from prison, Awad has a momentary
epiphany in which he clears his mental slate: “He saw things with a clarity that
lifted fog around simple truths: those marching figures were not invading soldiers,
but weary northerners going home after a hard day, and they were not hostile or
hateful” (21). Cairenes were, in fact, “full of goodness and tolerance,” he realized.
“The murderers were a terrible minority who made no distinction between north-
erners and southerners” (21). Awad goes as far as absolving the current population
of Cairo for the ancient invasion of Nubia, then rushes off to catch his train back
down south “with a heart brimming with restored love” (22). Unfortunately, this
newfound clarity will be short-lived. On the third-class train car, the miserable,
bickering collection of marginalized minorities like “Upper Egyptians, Nubians,
and Sudanese”—all populations typically the butt of jokes in the north—fighting
from the heat and crowding, combined with the passing sights of impoverished

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84    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 1

villages of the south, causing Awad’s “restored love” to wear off. “Once he had
dreamed of a train with all the classes united, in a country in which no one was
fanatical about color or religion” (22–23), but this assortment from the lowest rung
of society, perpetually divided by tribe, color, clan, and family, shocks him back to
reality. Unless they can shake off their internal divisions and reinvent themselves
as a cohesive lot, like the northern majority has done, they will remain on the
margins of society. Boarding the southbound train, an evangelist of toleration and
harmony, Awad disembarks in his village as a mobilizer for Nubian nationalism.

A MODERN NATIONALIST GRAMMAR

FOR A SUBALTERN POPULATION
Unfortunately, Awad is the wrong messenger for his intended audience, a twenti-
eth-century protean man in a society still mired in its precolonial traditions. The
wise man of the village, Haj Ahmad Abbas, from whom Awad hopes for support,
concludes instead that Awad’s “brain had been corrupted by his visits to the north”
(66). Awad’s insights into the power of identity formation to unify a population
prompt only the reaction that he “has chosen to follow a dangerous road” (66–67).
Indeed, while Awad’s talk of Nubian nationalism quickly attracts the attention
of the police, the villagers hastily dissociate themselves from him. Unlike the
cheering masses of Nasser’s Cairo, the people left behind in Awad’s impoverished
village have no appetite for simplistic, essentialized messages of unity. Nasser’s
illusion of resurrected pharaonic glory may be no less artificial than Awad’s plan
to revive the memory of Nubian Dongola, but Nasser’s audience has been schooled
throughout its colonial tutelage to conceive of a distinct, unifying “Egyptian”
identity. Awad, unfortunately, is, by virtue of his northern education, an outsider
in his home community, preaching a message incomprehensible to his audience.
Gayatri Spivak, in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, addresses the essential-
ist logic adopted by well-intentioned intellectuals, like Awad, in their attempts to
speak for the “subaltern classes.” Spivak offers little hope that the truly marginal-
ized can be given a voice without reinforcing this essentialism at the same time.
Spivak describes this dilemma as observed in India, but her description of the
subaltern fits the residents left behind in Awad’s village: “The illiterate peasantry,
Aboriginals, and the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat” (269), while Awad
Shalali well fits the mold of the those trying to speak for the subaltern, “Certain
members of the Indian elite are of course native informants for first-world intel-
lectuals interested in the voice of the Other. But one must nevertheless insist that
the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous” (270). Awad Shalali
has become such an intellectual elite, spending nearly all his adult life outside of
the south, his vision of Nubia crafted first in illicit gatherings of Marxist exiles in
Cairo and later with his leftist girlfriend in Paris. Awad is aware of the heterogene-
ity of his native population, yet considers it a political liability to be suppressed in
order to compete with the unity of the northerners. In the grammar of the village,
far from the nationalist fervor of the north, this heterogeneity provides the essen-
tial logic with which to map local society. In the south, Awad’s concept of “Nubia”
is far too broad and vague a classification to serve as an identity. His encounter
with a disturbingly sympathetic police sergeant reveals the inadequacy of Awad’s
census categories, as the sergeant asks:

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 DAVID DIMEO    85

“Where is my brother from?”

“Nubia”
The sergeant laughed and spat out some juice.
“Do you think I took you for English? I mean, what place are you from?”
“I am Kanzi.”
“I know that, my boy. I’m asking about your village, not your background.”
“Qirshah.”
“Son of whom?”
“Do you know everyone in my village?”
“I come from the Arabs of your country. We lived in the last village in old Nubia,
and now our houses are mingled with those of the resettlement.”
“Welcome.”
“We may turn out to be related.”
“I’m the son of Shalali of Naj al-Alyab.” (55)

The sergeant, who will later save Awad from prison, nonetheless destroys
his neat nationalist taxonomy through his familiarity with the heterogeneity of
Nubian society. In the brief conversation, this outsider isolates five levels of demo-
graphic identification, of which “Nubia” is the second most general, so vague as
to merit only laughter. Awad identifies himself to the Arab interloper as a Kanzi,
indicating the northernmost of the five major tribes of historical Nubia. It is an
admission he makes reluctantly, as such tribal divisions undermine the concept of
Nubian unity that he has come south to promote. Even this level of generalization
amuses the sergeant, who requires two further subdivisions to reach a meaning-
ful census categorization, certainly a bad sign for the prospects of a homogenous
Nubian nationalist narrative. Worse, when Awad chooses to “welcome” this
Arab into the resettled Nubian community, he is confronted with the reality that
they may be related through intermarriage, thus puncturing Awad’s pure census
categories. Despite the mercy of the sergeant, Awad assumes the worst about this
“dirty Arab,” applying centuries-old categorizations that few of his kin would
remember: “There was no way this sergeant wished him well. He was from an
isolated Arab hamlet, far from the villages of Qirshah, one of the descendants of
the Rubi’a tribes which had invaded northern Nubia” (55). For once, Awad keeps
his thoughts to himself, and at least manages to avoid another trip to prison, but
the encounter provides disturbing evidence that his essentializing historical and
demographic categories have little traction in the real environment in which he
lives.
Back in the village, Awad’s Nubian countrymen identify more strongly with
the sergeant’s census categories than Awad’s, so much so that shortly after return-
ing to the village, Awad finds himself confronted by the elders in an unofficial
tribunal to demand an end to his Nubian nationalist talk. The assembly of the vil-
lage’s most respected figures is filled with the kind of narrow tribal subdivisions
against which Awad fights, led by “the new mayor, Muhammad Hasan Khalil
from the Miknab tribe” (77), known to be “biased in favor of his tribe” (82), with
little doubt that “he wanted to insult the Alyab now that he had taken the mayor’s
job away from one of them” (78). Indeed, the mayor’s address is firmly directed at
Awad’s subclan—“you people of the Alyab”—imploring them to stop their way-
ward son’s talk of “the state of Nubia, and other such nonsense” (79). The mayor
alternates his talk of tribal subdivisions with appeals to identify with the national

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86    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 1

government: “All our lives we have been cared for by Egypt and lived under its
protection” (79). For Awad, the public condemnation is doubly shaming: not only
do the local leaders reject his nationalist appeal, but their conceptions of identity
operate at levels either broader or narrower than that to which Awad has affixed
his mission in life. When they are not busy being Alyab or Miknab, they are Egyp-
tian, Arab, or Muslim. “Nubian” is a level on the sliding scale of categorizations at
which their consciousness rarely rests; instead being pure “nonsense” in the words
of the mayor. A flop in the south, Awad’s Nubian identity resonates little better
after he flees to Europe. Even a generous Greek merchant familiar with Egypt asks:

“You’re from Aswan?”

“Yes.”
“Nubian, of course.”
“People in Cairo sometimes mistake me for a Sudanese.”
“Matoki or Fadja?”
Awad Shalali laughed in surprise at this precise knowledge of Nubian tribal
areas. (72)

With Cairenes conflating Nubia and the independent state of Sudan and
Europeans categorizing by tribes, Awad’s attempt to forge a neat “Nubian” cen-
sus category can engender only ridicule. With little alternative, Awad stakes his
hopes for Nubian nationalism on the third and final of Anderson’s instruments
of nationalist grammar—the museum. Denied by the census and map, historical
Nubia’s greatness cannot be erased from memory, he reasons. Yet even to a wise
man like the revered Haj Ahmad Abbas, Awad’s revivalism is “all nonsense, like
the state of Nubia, and the ‘bowmen of the glance’ and Kashta and Taharka and
Dongola, and names and subjects that would make your head spin,” such that Haj
Ahmad believes he “was in the presence of a lunatic” after hearing it (43). Indeed,
Awad’s retelling of the glorious story of Dongola, the ancient city that forced a
truce on the Arabs to the north, rather than a rallying cry, serves only to confuse
the villagers. Having long forgotten the story, the audience seems to pick up on
only one detail—the fact that Dongola was at the time a Christian kingdom:

“Oh, no! Were we Christians, too?”

“That’s what he says.”
“God help us.”
“We have always been Muslims and believed in only one God.”
“That infidel!” (43)

The objection is a sign of how far Awad’s audience is from accepting a simplified
national narrative. Northerners, swept up in the fever of nationalism, are able to
rally around ancient pagan icons, despite the universal condemnation for phara-
onic Egypt in the Qur’an; meanwhile, Awad’s audience is tripped up by what is
essentially a technicality.
With the physical monuments submerged beneath the water, there can be
no “museum,” as memories prove regrettably short without visible reminders to
jog them. It is little wonder, then, that Awad gives up on Egyptian Nubians and
crosses the border illegally into Sudan, where great sites like Dongola remain
aboveground. Much to his chagrin, however, “the people of Dongola and Halfa

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 DAVID DIMEO    87

knew nothing of their ancient history, just like the people of Egyptian Nubia” (71).
Adding insult to injury, the Nubians he came to rally reject him, fearing that he
“had come to subvert the unity of Sudan” (71).

NO POST-NATIONALIST UTOPIA FOR THE VOICELESS

With the failure of his brief Nubian nationalist project, Awad reacts as Lifton’s
protean man typically does, by reinventing himself again. For Awad, the action is
as natural and liberating as all his previous refashionings, yet to the countrymen
he leaves behind, it merely validates him as an outsider, an elite who once tried to
speak for them in a language they could neither recognize nor comprehend. This
time, he flees to Europe—still carrying the Sudanese citizenship he adopted in
his fleeting attempt to liberate Sudanese Nubia. “He cursed the north, the south,
Nubia, Dongola, and his comrades, and departed, fleeing the fire of the sun and the
whole dark continent” (71). Under the tutelage of his new lover, a French professor,
he learns that “history was just the dusty past and that to be obsessed with it just
meant illness and death. What he had been was gone, and his dreams of a Nubian
state were naïve, and just an injury of history” (74–75). Awad’s idealistic view of the
West is as selectively imagined as his previous fantasies: he glosses over the many
years he spends as an illegal refugee, running from the police, choosing instead to
identify with a vision of the West that exists largely in the mind of his philosopher
girlfriend. In Awad’s picture of Europe, “everyone believed in what he wanted:
communists, existentialists, atheists, Christians and Jews—even homosexuals and
prostitutes had a voice” (72). Having stumbled on no less than his fourth version
of ultimate truth, this protean man returns yet again to enlighten his Nubian vil-
lage, little suspecting that they will see only the continual reinvention that marks
him as an outsider.
The subaltern mother and wife Awad left behind are hardly prepared to
understand his attempts to speak for them in his new, Western grammar. Awad’s
mother, in fact, knows so little of the world outside the village that she assumes
that “foreign country” is a single location and thus interrogates every Nubian
worker returning from abroad as to her lost son’s welfare, little understanding
that Kuwait is not the same place as Paris or Rome. “The foreign countries,” one
man attempts to explain, “are not like our old lands, where everyone is related by
family and language and religion. . . . It is a vast land, Lady Hushia, very large, and
occupies the three continents,” to which she can merely answer “my boy, I swear
by God I didn’t understand one word you said” (62).5 Likewise, Halima, Awad’s
Nubian wife through an arranged marriage, attempts to send a telegram to her lost
husband using the address “a foreign country” and is puzzled when told such an
address is not specific enough (101). Not understanding the vastness of the world
outside their community, they can hardly imagine the importance of adopting a
cohesive identity necessary to give them a voice in that world.
Awad’s latest return to enlighten his village is yet more evidence of his
lifelong faith in a central tenet that Spivak encapsulates as the belief that “the
oppressed, if given the chance (the problem of representation cannot be bypassed
here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic
is at work here) can speak and know their conditions” (269). Hushia and Halima’s
baffled reception of Awad’s missionary efforts, however, validate Spivak’s doubts

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88    RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 46 NUMBER 1

about this comforting illusion. Not only do they lack the vocabulary and gram-
mar to speak about their conditions, they hardly understand those conditions in
any sense that would enable their entry into a serious discussion about a possible
remedy. Indeed, despite having her entire life shaped by the inundation of her land,
Hushia has grown up in a community that views the flooding as a spiritual, rather
than man-made, event. Awad’s new leftist ideology merely strikes the villagers
as atheism and indecency, stripping the few remaining foundations of their old
identity, rather than offering anything new. Little surprise, then, that Awad will
disappear yet again after this latest missionary effort, his whereabouts completely
unknown and largely irrelevant for the final years depicted in the novel. Instead,
the closing section is a rather stagnant picture of the misery of Halima and Hushia,
further rendered pariahs by their association with this flighty man and his rotat-
ing collection of subversive ideologies. In introducing his project in the novel, Idris
Ali had only claimed to present his own voice and had merely “hoped” that “some
of the suffering” (n. pag.) of his people could come through. Appropriately enough,
although his novel ends with two characters immersed in that suffering, the
author puts no words in their mouths to attempt to give voice to their conditions.
Halima and Hushia remain voiceless subalterns, while Ali, unlike his fictional
counterpart, does not presume to be able to translate their suffering into words.
Ali’s novel’s title captures the futility of its protagonist’s quest to speak for his
people in its cutting irony. Dongola: A Nubian Novel sounds at first like a label of
which Awad Shalali would have once been proud: a bold declaration of Nubianism,
emblematized in the proudest symbol of Nubian history, the glorious kingdom
centered at Dongola. One might have expected such a title to adorn a historical
romance of ancient Nubian glory. Yet this novel is distinctly “Nubian” not because
of the legendary “bowmen of the glance,” who prove irrelevant in the systematic
submerging of the Nubian homeland in the economic interests of the new Egypt,
but rather as the expression of a distinctly “Nubian” state of marginality expe-
rienced by subalterns like Hushia and Halima. The “Dongola” of the title is an
imagined community created to speak for them, but which only plunges them
deeper into their misery. Dongola is the wrong bit of history at the wrong time,
a revived proto-nationalism for which the new map has no place; the disastrous
project of one who understood too much of the mechanics of postcolonial nation-
alism and too little of the distribution of raw power bequeathed by the colonial
system. Most of all, Dongola is the shout of a voice that these subalterns neither
recognize nor understand, intended to assert their independence and dignity in
a word and symbol that means nothing to them.

NOTES
1. This phrase is best known as the title of a poetry anthology by Adonis, Mahmud
Darwish, and Samih al-Qasim, but is also a general expression of the often arbitrary
national boundaries established in the Middle East in the early twentieth century. See
Adonis, Darwish, and al-Qasim.
2. Ali’s novella, Al-Za‘im Yahliqu Sha‘rah [The Leader Having His Haircut], was
banned from the Cairo Book Fair by the Egyptian government. See Ezzat.
3. The equation of Nasser with Ramses was an intentional propaganda theme.
The Metro station at Ramses Square, where the colossus sits, for example, is named
“Nasser.”

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 DAVID DIMEO    89

4. See the original Arabic version of the novel: Ali, Dunqula: Riwaya Nubiyya 26.
5. The colloquial term for “foreign” used by Hushia and Halima is a more generic
term for “outside,” referring to everything not in their familiar world, lacking the
specifically political or nationalistic tone of “foreign.” See the original Arabic version
of the novel: Ali, Dunqula: Riwaya Nubiyya 80, 125.

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