The Trojan Duck (3-3)

هذه مقالة عن كتاباتي عن نشأتي في بيئة للحداثة في مدينة عطبرة بسكك حديدها في محاولة للتعرف على حقيقة اجتماعية وسياسية جديدة هي المدينة. فنحن ما نزال في الغالب نحاكم أنفسنا ونتحاكم إلى القرية كأن المدينة طارئ بلا بصمات على خلق كثير منا. فكثيراً ما قلت لبعض أهل القرى من حولي ممن استنكروا ماركسيتي مثلاً أنهم لم يكونوا ربما في الحواضن التي نفذت لنا منها هذه النظرية ليتلقوها كما تلقيناها.

ولا تخول لهم براءتهم من دمغ المدينة هذا وابتلاءاتها أن يظنوا أنهم على الهوية السودانية الحق وما عداها شغب أجنبي أدار رؤوس أمثالي. وهو السياق الذي طالبت فيه كثيراً أن يتواضع فيه هؤلاء القوم ويقبلوا ب"الحق في المدينة" عن طيب خاطر.
نشرت المقالة في مجلة تصدر عن معهد الدراسات الأفريقية والعالمية بجامة نورثوسترن بالولايات المتحدة في شتاء 1996. وعربتها ونشرتها في جريدة "الرأي العام" وهي من قلائل ما لا احتفظ به في أرشيفي. وتزول الغمة ونبحث عنها. وأهديها لشباب المهاجر الأمريكية ممن أتقنوا الإنجليزية ولم يجدوا ربما نصاً ميسراً عنا فيها.


Temptations
People were very apprehensive about the changes brought by migration and modernity. They had a sense that they had lost control, that things were going the wrong way. To avoid being taken completely by surprise, people fell back on tradition.
Using the telephone was a destabilizing experience, so they told a story of one old sage. “There will come a time when we speak on wires,” he said, “And when we approach the end of the world, we will travel in houses” (trains). These ex post facto predications soothed fears of being overwhelmed by the British — the infidels — by setting modern practices in the past.
As people lived a split life between village and city, trains gained practical as well as symbolic importance as bridges between the two worlds.
Love songs of separation sprouted. A decision by a migrant father to bring his family to the town could smother his daughter’s budding village romance. In one song, a lover curses the train, asking God that the train be destroyed and its wheels shattered because, “He took my loved one.”
For railway workers living in Atbara, the national railway headquarters, the train took on additional significance. They returned to their villages on a special train provided by the railway service, which took them home on Thursdays and brought them back on Friday evening. The train became invested with sexual symbolism, nicknamed “The Thing” (sexual intercourse).

Letters
Letters too assumed prominence in the life of the people. In The Wound and the Crown-Crane, my women’s village chorus says, “Men who were previously a taste, a touch, and a sentiment turned into a signature on a letter.” In the play, a proverb circulates in the village, announcing, “A letter is half a person.” But if half can be accepted as better than nothing with some items, it does not hold in the affairs of women and men. They are either together or nothing at all: either the total fusion of flesh, blood and storms; or ghosts, memories and bitterness.
Letters, an emerging genre, consisted of three parts. (1) a greeting expressed in cliché language, such as “I am in good health, thanks to God. Hoping that you are enjoying your health. I am lacking nothing but the precious opportunity to see you.” (2) detailing the amount of money sent and how to distribute it. (3) general greetings mentioning several relatives by name, such as Aunt X and her sons, Uncle Y and his daughters, Grandfather Z and his sons. This was known as “being included in the greetings.” Those included would then ask the father or mother to “include us in the greetings” in the reply to the migrant son.
Letters then signaled the measure of success achieved by the migrant. In 1984 I spoke with a villager of Rubatab who made two unsuccessful attempts at shurad, before making it on the third try. I asked him why he repeatedly tried to escape from the village to go work in the town. He said, “Why should I spend all my life tied to those cows, milking and herding? Those of my age who migrated started sending letters to their families. I thought I could have migrated and sent a letter myself.”

The Seduction of Taking a Bath
In the village people went to the Nile for religious absolutions, when they prayed, and when they slept with their spouses. But having a bath right there where you lived, taking a piece of soap and lathering — this was new.
There is a jingle about city life, in which praise is given to civilization for bringing soap and the concept of “taking a bath.” According to the jingle:
The most important thing
is taking a bath
and cleaning one’s body
and putting a smile on your face.
It sounds like a commercial, but this was a song on the radio and close to the popular way of thinking. The workers and their families admired the new things in the cities. They didn’t argue with the gifts of civilization, but had the generosity of mind to admit these things were new to them.
The nationalist elite, meanwhile, argued with modernity and would accept its practices only if evidence of a continuing tradition. They would concede the worth of taking a bath only if they could prove that “soap and water were in our tradition.”

Returning to a Fantasy
With the sheer passage of time, migrants began to realize the long-awaited return to their villages was chimerical.
They invested the savings from the best half of their lives to make their villages livable places on their return. The savings of the other half they invested in the towns, towns they earlier thought they would simply raid and then retreat from.
Many engaged in a make-believe about village life to avoid looking at the irony of their urbanized lives. My father and uncles were oblivious to the city soccer tournaments. Movies were just too evil to attend and were shown at a time of night when they had prepared to go to bed. And I never heard them discuss the powerful national or trade union politics emerging at the time.
But I do remember their loud meetings about village matters that could arise at any time and for any reason, whether due to a visit from a village relative or even to dispel boredom.
Nothing galvanized my folk as a lawsuit with the village mayor over a piece of reclaimed river land. After seeing uncle Y draw a sketch of the contested land in the sand, I said to my brother, “I admire Uncle Y for his thorough knowledge on the village terrain.” My brother replied, “You would be impressed more to know that Uncle Y hasn’t been to our village in 20 years.” Uncle Y’s forceful argumentation struck me as an exercise in residual knowledge, in a fantasy that is very real.
Not all the migrants resigned themselves to their fate as urbanite by default. A few returned to the villages on retirement.
For many, return was not as triumphant as they had hoped. While the migrants’ fixed pensions could not keep pace with inflation, many villagers who stayed behind had enjoyed a rural economic boom due to the mounting needs for food in the mushrooming towns. In one village I studied in the 1980s the villagers mocked the misery of their kinsmen who had retired from government service and returned to the village, assigning them to an imaginary club of losers, “The Club of the People Who Walk Backwards.”
Others had difficulty convincing their wives to go back with them to the hard life of the villages. One of my uncles threatened his children, “If your mother does not go back with me, I will divorce her. I need someone to hold my head. I will marry a woman from the village.” True to his word, he did. He shed one life to begin another, in Hobbes phrase, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The migrants’ realization that they were in the city to stay is still under-researched. Sociologists gloss over the agonies and trials of this relocation under the heading of “urbanization,” a forward-looking process. The hearts this process has broken have hardly been documented.

Postscript: searching for buda
Elite African discourses of authenticity distrust popular engagement with colonial modernity, where hybridity replaces African purity. As the product of a wrong history — a history that should not have happened — these colonial experiences, as nationalists see it, are amenable to correction before the colonized resume their indigenous parade down the wholesome annals of history.
Yet the average people I researched showed a remarkable competence in debating colonial modernity. Unlike the elite, they saw traditions like J.D.Y. Peel, as definitions that are shaped and modified by new contexts, rather than disembodied emanations of original ideals.
In these redefinitions, some folk became completely disenchanted with tradition, or rather with the elite veneration of tradition. This disenchantment reaches an apex when the elite flunk the test of national leadership. They fail to deliver the goods of modernity, such as electricity and improved transportation, then dismiss these needs as colonial relics.
In 1984, I documented the impatience with the past of Rubatab men, in what I called “ancestor dumping.” An angry, diligent farmer, who did not like my “folkloric” inquisitiveness into their culture, took me to task:
“What good do these ways of old people contain to deserve your attention?” he said.
Laughing, I said, “I want their buda (amusement).”
“These discourses are worthless in this time of ours. What really matters are today’s discourses,” said the farmer. “Past people’s discourses are futile. They are like someone narrating a folktale. I just cannot stomach such narration because it is like waking from a dream. These discourses have no zubdah (butter).”
“Pardon?” I said.
“Milk produces butter when it curdles — Nay, the stuff of old days.”
He turned to those around him who were having the best time of their lives, watching an encounter in which a representative of the “authentic” national elite was unceremoniously grilled and contradicted. It struck me later that those villagers were using this research situation to protest their image as a stockpile of the cherished past — a sentimentalization, in Anthony Appiah’s words, required by the urban elites to legitimate their present authority.
I felt injured by this veiled and unveiled aggression when the man continued saying, “Discourses of the past are nonsense! Or isn’t that so?”
I asked with a suppressed anger, “But where do you think the zubdah lies now?”
“In the discourses of today which are sound, pointed, and pragmatic. Past discourses lack acumen, shrewdness, discernment. You will find even the average person today adept, pragmatic, and discriminating.”
Folktales lament those who came to comfort the weepers but returned weeping. Who laments those who went to study the people and came back studied?

ibrahima@missouri.edu

 

المصدر: سودانايل