Name: Ghost Season
ISBN: 9781324001744

Fatin Abbas

A Novel

Ghost Season

Lea Hi

And he wanted love. He'd given up on wealth, on success, and was disillusioned enough to understand that not everything was within his grasp. That life treated you differently based on where you were born and who you were born to, and there was nothing you could do about it. And so with age (he felt not exactly old, but too old and too young all at once), he had readjusted his expectations. He was intelligent, educated, likable, handsome, even, but a Southerner nonetheless. All he wanted, all he hoped for now, was a wife, children, a home.

A few years ago I met and became friends with a Sudanese man from my cycling group. I immediately asked if he was ‘

’ This was very eye opening for me— many people that left pre-secession Sudan aren’t bound to the new borders, they still speak both Arabic and Nilotic languages refusing to acknowledge the split perhaps as a form of resistance and also because that is the Sudan they know and remember.

This book is very important for that reason. It is set in pre-secession Sudan in a border town where Nilotic people now considered South Sudanese and the Arabic speaking people (though from what I’ve learned a lot of Nilotic people spoke Arabic too and Arabic speaking people also spoke Nilotic languages) live together. It is a book about war in Sudan, a war that was purported to end all wars but as we now know Sudan is now a country where various forms of oppression seem to succeed each other from ottoman occupation, slavery to divide and rule colonial logics responsible for the more contemporary conflicts.

I liked the exploration of cartography in this book and the brilliant cover with a map showing the division of South Sudan and Sudan. The novel’s protagonists are also a quite interesting choice — white NGO worker, diasporan film maker and the site of the novel that is an NGO compound. This is a war novel and not an easy read but I really enjoyed it.

Marion

A few years ago I met and became friends with a Sudanese man from my cycling group. I immediately asked if he was ‘South Sudanese’ he looked at me and said ‘Sudan’ This was very eye opening for me— many people that left pre-secession Sudan aren’t bound to the new borders, they still speak both Arabic and Nilotic languages refusing to acknowledge the split perhaps as a form of resistance and also because that is the Sudan they know and remember.

This book is very important for that reason. It is set in pre-secession Sudan in a border town where Nilotic people now considered South Sudanese and the Arabic speaking people (though from what I’ve learned a lot of Nilotic people spoke Arabic too and Arabic speaking people also spoke Nilotic languages) live together. It is a book about war in Sudan, a war that was purported to end all wars but as we now know Sudan is now a country where various forms of oppression seem to succeed each other from ottoman occupation, slavery to divide and rule colonial logics responsible for the more contemporary conflicts.

I liked the exploration of cartography in this book and the brilliant cover with a map showing the division of South Sudan and Sudan. The novel’s protagonists are also a quite interesting choice — white NGO worker, diasporan film maker and the site of the novel that is an NGO compound. This is a war novel and not an easy read but I really enjoyed it.

Sudanese literature to the world

Fatin Abbas tells the story of five residents on an NGO compound in a border town in Southern Sudan over roughly a year in the early 2000s. Starting as strangers in the face and horrors of civil war their lives fast become intertwined. She sheds light on the subject of borders - national, ethnic and religious - and the impact they have on life as individual and as part of a society.

While the first half of the book was kind of a slow read the second half became more intense. For me it was the first time I ever read a novel about life in Sudan and I think it's very powerful and at times heartbreaking. 

Fatin Abbas tells the story of five residents on an NGO compound in a border town in Southern Sudan over roughly a year in the early 2000s. Starting as strangers in the face and horrors of civil war their lives fast become intertwined. She sheds light on the subject of borders - national, ethnic and religious - and the impact they have on life as individual and as part of a society.

While the first half of the book was kind of a slow read the second half became more intense. For me it was the first time I ever read a novel about life in Sudan and I think it's very powerful and at times heartbreaking. 

Ghost Season A Novel

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