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COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
Jamal Mahjoub's two historical novels reveal intense engagement with various forms of transculturation, ranging from the power-driven imposition of a new culture, to a willing absorption of the knowledge offered by another culture, or a reciprocal sharing of understanding between two cultures. In the first, In the Hour of Signs, Mahjoub sets up a central tension between the antitranscultural mission of the Muslim prophetic figure, the Mahdi, and the philosopher, Hawi, who more sincerely values the downtrodden whom the Mahdi claims to represent, and who is open to transcultural influence. Avoiding generalizations about the two opposed sides in the Sudanese war, Mahjoub distinguishes between the receptivity of military leaders on both sides in terms of transcultural awareness. A similarly penetrating portrayal of the more ordinary people's lives reveals startling differences, in relation to transcultural potential, between two young dispossessed people, the woman Noon, and the youth, Kadaro. In the second novel, The Carrier, Mahjoub highlights the forces of prejudice and fear as major obstacles to transcultural developments. To those who have managed to rise above such insidious influences--Rashid, the dispossessed young Arab whom fate has brought to Denmark, as well as Danish farmer-astronomer, Heinesen and his sister, Sigrid--transculturation, chiefly here through historical research, is a fervently desired goal. As in the first novel, however, the forces of resistance prove more powerful and one is left in suspense as to the possibility of any lasting transcultural achievement.
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Jamal Mahjoub was born in London in 1960 to an English mother and Sudanese father. His life has been full of transcultural journeys. When the family moved to the Sudan, Mahjoub went to school in Khartoum at the Comboni College. Awarded a scholarship to attend Atlantic College in Wales, he completed the International Baccalaureat there, and went on to read Geology at Sheffield University. He wrote his first novel, Navigation of a Rainmaker, in Khartoum during a temporary return from Britain. Completed in 1986, the novel was published only in 1989. Denmark was his home from 1988 to 1998, in which year he relocated to Barcelona in Spain. Determined to earn his living through writing, Mahjoub has at various times been employed as a motorcycle courier, sales manager, furniture maker, chef, driver, librarian, translator, and radio journalist. In 2002, he was welcomed back to Denmark for a semester as first creative writer-in-residence at the University of Kolding. His second novel, Wings of Dust (1994), was followed by two that are to be discussed in this paper, In the Hour of Signs (1996) and The Carrier (1998). Next came Travelling with Djinns (2003), and then his most recent novel, The Drift Latitudes (2006).
Navigation of a Rainmaker involves the journey in the Sudan of a young man, Tanner, who, like Mahjoub himself, is half British, half Sudanese. Although his Sudanese father (living in Scotland) advises him to forget about the part of him that feels a bond with the Sudan, Tanner is determined to re-establish contact with his roots. His employment with an oil-exploration company leads him on a disastrous field trip to the Western Sudan. He discovers that his companion, Gilmore, an American oil expert, is intent on fueling the conflict between rebel forces so that the interests he represents can ultimately retain their hold on the Sudan s oil resources. The final, violent clash between Tanner and Gilmore results in the death of both. In contrast, Wings of Dust deals with the problems of a Sudanese expatriate narrator, Sharif, who has tried to establish a new life in Britain and then France. His eventual return in disillusionment to the Sudan, despite some initial success as an administrator, proves to be a failure also since he finds it impossible to overcome the forces of political corruption. Travelling with Djinns is narrated by the half Sudanese, half English Yasin who is about to be divorced from his English wife. Encouraged by her, he takes their son, Leo, on a journey across Western Europe in order to establish a bond before the split. The journey turns out, however, to be more of a search on Yasin s part for personal identity and understanding of how to deal with his feeling of being not only incompletely English, but incompletely anything else. Mahjoub's latest novel, The Drift Latitudes, concerns the lives of Ernst Frager, a German refugee immigrant to Britain, and Jade and Rachel, his two daughters by different mothers. Jade is intent on coming to understand how her father became involved with her mother, the child of Trinidadian immigrants. Rachel moves with her husband and son to the Sudan where the two men become caught up in a radical Islamic movement. It will be seen that each of these nonhistorical novels hinges on issues and crises of identity for protagonists who have been exposed to intensive transcultural experiences. On the other hand, the two historical novels that I have chosen to discuss seem to have enabled Mahjoub to focus more on the potential benefits of transculturation, even though these may not be adequately perceived or valued by particular characters.
The reviewer Taina Tervonen notes how "diversity and travelling are constant features in all [Mahjoub's] novels" ("Interview with Jamal Mahjoub" 1). Mahjoub himself does not refer specifically to the theme of journeys in his essays and speeches but has much to say about diversity and transculturalism. In a 1997 talk entitled "The Writer and Globalism," he comments:
[Literature] provides a means of reflective expression and communication which requires our vital support, and can link the diverse cultures which are now, for better or worse, stuck with one another, and whose encounter now defines the world we live in." (5)
For Mahjoub, however, literature that has taken a transcultural direction "does not have the support of those cheering waving crowds who would like you to be European or Third World, Black, or African or Arab. I can only rely on that thin crack of light which lies between the spheres of reader and writer" (4). An important part of the challenge of involvement in this "thin crack of light" would seem the need to give "a voice to the dispossessed, the silenced, the forgotten" as he puts it in a 2002 public lecture entitled, "Fiction, Reality and the Fear of Flying" (10). It is the conjunction of this need with transcultural concerns in Mahjoub's fictional work that I wish to explore in this paper.
First it will be necessary to explain what I understand by transculturation. The term originates from Fernando Ortiz's work Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar where he uses the term to express "the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another," a process that "also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture" as well as "carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena" (102-03). However, Fernando Coronil, in his introduction to the Duke University edition of Ortiz's book, uses the term...
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