Adored in the Arab world, censored in his country because of his denunciation of the dictatorship in his stories, the Sudanese Abdelzaziz Baraka Sakin asserts himself as a major voice in African literature. Author of a dozen novels and collections of short stories, he lives in exile between Austria and France. The Princess of Zanzibar is the third title from the pen of this novelist-storyteller which has just been published in French, by Zulma editions.
” When I started writing, I was 13 years old. My first motivation was to write crazy stories like Edgar Allan Poe. Then I grew up. When I was 23-24 years old, when I started to write a little more seriously, I wanted to write to tell the stories of the people I lived with and in particular the people who were not educated and who could not have tell their story because they couldn’t afford it. So I wanted to be that voice of the people I was living with, those Jango workers. It has become a kind of committed writing. »
There is something very Caesarian in this beautiful profession of faith from the Sudanese Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin. ” My mouth will be the mouth of misfortunes that have no mouth, my voice, the freedom of those who collapse in the dungeon of despair… proclaimed Aimé Césaire nearly nine decades ago, laying the foundations for a resolutely committed African postcolonial literature. As part of this founding position, the novelist from Khartoum has produced a protest and powerfully subversive work.
Baraka Sakin’s work is made up of around ten novels and collections of short stories. Halfway between traditional tale and modernist fiction, sailing between tragedy and parody, this work depicts dark destinies, against a backdrop of civil war and political and social turbulence, as in The Messiah of Darfur And The Jangostwo of the writer’s novels translated into French a few years ago.
Luxury, violence and pleasure
The Princess of Zanzibar is the third book to appear in French, from the pen of this talented novelist. Inspired by the colonial history of East Africa, its action takes place largely in the eponymous island, at the time of Omani colonization. One could speak of luxury, violence and voluptuousness to describe the island under the domination of the Omani occupants, who succeeded the Portuguese there. They reign with an iron fist, despoiling the African population of the territory and reducing them to slavery, while the colonists lead a life of luxury in their gilded palaces, wallowing in outrageous pomp. At their head, slave and brutal sultans, including the emblematic Suleiman bin Salim, who is the central character of Baraka Sakin’s novel. Here is how the narrator talks about him and his feats of arms:
” As everyone knows, the Sultan lived long […] Throughout his life, without being able to determine the duration with certainty, he killed 883 Africans, 7 Omani Arabs and 20 Yemenis. It decimated all the large animals that still lived in Unguja, including giraffes, elephants, tigers and lions. He sold 2,779,670 slaves, men, women and children. He copulated with 300 slaves […] He annihilated 805 African villages whose inhabitants he captured. He enslaved 90% of the population of Unguja. »
Sultan bin Salim is a Rabelaisian character. The story of his horrible and dreadful deeds and feats » is told at length of the pages in a truculent language, all in exuberance and parody. However, this parodic bias does not prevent the author from imagining at the same time a passionate love story between the sultan’s daughter and Sundus, her eunuch slave, a playmate who has become a lover. This extraordinary love between a Juliet and a transgender Romeo inspired some of the most beautiful pages of this novel. Pages as beautiful as they are poignant, with both Shakespearean and modernist resonances.
Uhuru
We will also follow in these pages the trajectory of the fascinating Uhuru. Singer, dancer, prostitute with a big heart, a bit of a witch too, she is a free woman, feared by the colonizers. She embodies the counterpoint of the tyrannical and oppressive sultan. No one is surprised that “Uhuru”, which means freedom in Swahili, is becoming the rallying slogan of revolutionary movements fighting for their independence in many countries of East Africa.
The Princess of Zanzibar is the work of a novelist at the height of his art. Combining history and myth, the author stages a universe inspired by history, but whose narration draws towards magic and fantasy. ” The novel is not interested in history, it is interested in the human Sakin writes. It is this alliance of reality, sometimes the most abject, or the most intimate, and magical realism, inherited from Arab narrative traditions, is undoubtedly the secret of the success of this novel.
” This storytelling system that we have in magic realism is something very old in Sudanrecalls Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin. It comes from everyday life experience because in Sudan, you can believe that the Sheikh can fly, be in two places at the same time, that the dead speak, that the dead wake up seven days after their death. So, all these are beliefs that are part of the daily life of the Sudanese. It’s very consistent with the stories my mother and grandmother used to tell in the evenings. Every evening, they gathered all the children and sometimes they even asked them to have a role in the story and to tell the end of the story themselves. “.
This is how listeners become storytellers in turn. This epistemological break in the narration is somewhat like what happens in Baraka Sakin’s novel where it is no longer the hunter who tells the story, but the slave who takes over, after having been deprived of speech for a long time. There is something revolutionary about the voices of the losers and the marginalized of history, because behind the resonance of past sufferings it makes the promise of renewal heard.
A revival that apparently goes badly among the island’s former Omani colonizers who banned the marketing of The Princess of Zanzibar in their country.
The Princess of Zanzibar, by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin. Translation from Arabic by Xavie Luffin. Zulma, 352 pages, 22.90 euros.