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Abstract
This study shows how the contemporary novel Slaves’ Peanuts (2016) by the Jordanian novelist Samiha Khrais presents slavery as a dilemma in the late twentieth century in Sudan. The novel provides a fairly grim and evocative depiction of the enslavement of women in a non-slavery era, bringing to mind the notorious involvement of Portugal in the slave trade during colonial times, and the implications of that colonial involvement on modern-day “Third World” peoples. The study presents Khrais’s novel through postcolonial feminist writings, investigating negative stereotypes and making use of notions such as “double colonization,” “counterstory,” and “the subaltern” while emphasizing a close reading of the text. The Arabic novel displays with great realism repeated cycles of oppression against African people to emphasize the global impact of colonial rule and the need for former colonial countries to take responsibility and heal the wounds of the past. Finally, the essay shows how Khrais attempts a contrapuntal rebirth of the oppressed female protagonist who defiantly sends her daughter away from Portugal to prevent her from becoming a slave for ethnocentric European families still locked in colonial traditions.
Notes
1 Al-Salih (Citation2005) presents a collection of critical reviews and literary essays about seven of Khrais’s novels published before 2005. The essays are by distinguished literary Arab critics including Nabil Haddad, Rifqa Dodeen, Mustafa Al-Kilani, Trad Al-Kubisis, and Samir Qatami.
2 Khrais’s novel دفاتر الطوفان (Notebooks of the Flood Citation2005) was translated into Spanish by Pablo García Suárez as Cuadernos del diluvio and was published in 2005. The same novel was also translated into German as Bücher der Flut: Roman in Citation2010a by Fouad el- Auwad. Another novel, الصحن , was translated into German by Marei Grundhöfer as Deine Augen, mein Duft: Roman, and was published in Citation2011. Only one novel, القرمية (The Tree Stump Citation2019a), was translated into English, by Nesreen Akhtarkhavari, and was published in 2018.
3 Translations of all excerpts from the Arabic novel are the authors’. Lack of studies on the novel in English makes our intervention timely, relevant, and original.
4 This is an annual literary award given to a selected number of distinguished Arab novelists from the four different regions of the Arab world – the Gulf area, Iraq and the Mediterranean Arab countries, Egypt and Sudan, and the Maghreb (west) region of North Africa.
5 The Sudanese civil wars lasted over four decades. The first was from 1955 to 1972 and the second from 1983 to 2005. It “was the first in postcolonial Africa” and “began with the Torit Muntiny,” when southern Sudanese soldiers mutinied in Torit against the Sudanese army in the North shortly before independence (Johnson Citation2011, 21).
6 Darfur in western Sudan has a complex mix of ethnic groups. It has been declared in a state of humanitarian emergency since 2003 because of continuing political unrest and violations of human rights. See Jackson (Citation2011).
7 “Sudan’s post-independence history has been dominated by political and civil strife. Most commentators have attributed the country’s recurring civil war either to an age-old racial divide between Arabs and Africans, or to recent colonially constructed inequalities” (Johnson Citation2011, 237).
8 The novels show how international and local laws were unable to prevent the selling and buying of African men and women even towards the end of the twentieth century. Khrais says her two novels about slavery were inspired by the abduction of 103 African children aged between 1 and 5 by nine workers from a French charity called Zoe’s Ark who claimed the children were orphans from “war-torn Darfur” and were taken from an orphanage in Chad by plane to “foster families in France.” The French aid workers were later charged with kidnapping and extortion. Chad’s Interior Minister condemned the incident and said aid workers are taking advantage of the troubled situation in Darfur (CNN Article Citationn.d.). He said they were paid by French families to smuggle children, and “even dressed the children in bandages and fake drips to make them look more like refugees.” The Chadian President said the children “would have been sold in France to be sexually abused or killed to steal their organs.”
9 Khrais further complicates her story of Rahma (narrated in the first person) by employing more than one genre. The historical novel becomes a combination of picaresque novel and neo-slave narrative, with the young woman as an outsider seeking justice and with stories narrated by major characters about their enslavement.
10 Jok (Citation2001) maintains it was difficult to speak out against slavery in the late 1980s from within the country: “The most systematic and instrumental journalistic writing on slavery in Sudan has been that by Sudanese journalist and former government minister Bona Malwal. He pioneered the campaign to expose this tragic practice in the 1980s as editor of the Sudan Times, the only English language newspaper in Khartoum at the time. When he went into exile in England, Malwal started publishing a newsletter the Sudan Democratic Gazette which focused on the slavery issue” (x). He also mentions two northern Sudanese university professors who risked their lives by traveling to Darfur after reading reports about slavery in the Sudan Times and wrote a book in 1987. Jok mentions they “were classed as traitors” for defaming their government and country (ix).
11 The Beqqara or Baggara is an “ethnic group of Arab descent living in Darfur and Kordofan regions of Sudan” (Olson and Meur Citation1996, 55).
12 This essay uses Nelson’s conception of the counterstory “as a narrative that takes up shared but repressive understanding of who someone is and sets out to shift it.” “It contributes to the person’s freedom to act” and to “reidentification” of self to encounter the “assimilation” by “benign master narratives” (Citation2001, 69, 161).
13 For an investigation of the anticolonial movement in São Tomé and Príncipe islands, see Saunders and Saunders (Citation1982).