Exploring Sudanese History Through Fiction

Hello everyone and welcome to the latest Scots Way Hay podcast and I'm so pleased to be joined by writer Leila Abulela to talk about her latest novel River Spirit. Hello Leila. Hello, hello. Can you talk about River Spirit and why you wanted to tell these stories? Well, I grew up with the stories. I was living, of course, I grew up in Khartoum, Sudan. And so very clear, like within walking distance was the palace where General Gordon was, you know, holding on to Khartoum. while the revolutionaries were trying, were putting Khartoum under siege. And then he was, he was killed. So I kind of grew up with this story and I didn't know that Gordon was Scottish until I came to, to, to Aberdeen and it, and this, it clicked. And I saw a statue of him in, in school hill. There's a statue of him in here and here in, in, in Aberdeen. So it kind of like having the. Bringing the two countries together is something that I want to do now that I've lived in Scotland for so many years. So just to give a bit of background, this was in the late 19th century. Can you talk a bit about when it was and where it was would be great. Yeah, it's that's that Sudan in the 1880s, 1870s, 1880s. It was ruled at the time by the Ottoman. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And then but. but the Sudanese were taxed very heavily. So there was a lot of grievance against the rulers. And so they rose in revolt. They rallied around a man who, his name was Muhammad Al-Mahdi, and he said that he was the promised Mahdi, the promised savior that is told in the Islamic hadith, in the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And so he people believed him. He he was a religious person. He was a good person. They trusted him. They believed him. And he managed to defeat the government one one after the other. And so the government then hired Gordon, Charles Gordon, who was a British army officer. And they said to him, you've got experience in Sudan. You've got experience in China. He was a hero. And you can. you know, save Sudan, you could do something about this. And he went, but he couldn't, you know, despite his experience, Khartoum was put under siege, and he remained in the palace. And, you know, eventually the whole of Sudan fell, and it became like an island of independence in this great big ocean of Ottoman. empires and European empires and and and slowly slowly you know Britain took Egypt and and and parts of Africa and you know the Italians took Ethiopia and so there was a lot of European interest in Africa at the time but the Sudanese managed to remain kind of independent for a long stretch of 14 years so the novel kind of goes over this history but tries to set to tell it very much from a Sudanese point of view? Yeah, because the way that you tell it is through different individual characters who aren't on the front line necessarily. You know, this war and conflict is going on all around them and their lives are just kind of dealing with often very everyday, often not very everyday, often life-changing things. Why did you want to tell the story that way? Well, it seemed that that... that's the best way to you know fiction to kind of illuminate this time and to focus on ordinary people and to tell it from their point of view and I like the idea of I didn't want to change the historical facts I just wanted to kind of like go back in time and be there and kind of share these events with the characters so that's how I approached it. And how difficult is it writing historical fiction to get that balance between historical events and the fictional side of things? Is that the best way to do it, to create characters rather than put words in the mouth of real inverted commas characters? I think so. I think because real characters then, you know, the reader is drawn to them. I'm drawn to them as a writer and then the reader is drawn into them. And but the story has been said so many times from the point of view of the big, big characters. There was a film in the 1960s called Cartoon in which Charlton Heston played Gordon and they had the Lawrence Olivier in blackface playing the man. So this story was told, and there was another film called The Four Feathers, and there were many books written about it from that point of view. And I read these books as well. But then coming to write it, I thought, no, I need to, you know, go behind all of that and kind of dig deep and find the more, a better way of telling the story from the local point of view and the lives of ordinary people. especially the women, I was interested in that as well. So were you taught this history at school? Was this something that you kind of knew about from a young age? Yeah, I was taught this history at school and then I went to university and I was taught it again. So I kind of knew it, you know, you kind of know it, it's there. If you've heard it so many times, as you would know Mary, Queen of Scots, for example. But taking the decision to write about it, taking the decision to research it. was something completely different and fascinating, really. It was really very, very interesting to do that, yeah. I was going to ask about your research, how much you had to do, but also did you discover new things or did it change some of the stories that you'd been taught previously? Well, I went to Durham, the University of Durham, and they have the Sudan archives. And there I found a bill of sale for a woman called Zamzam. And it was just fascinating to hold this bill of sale and it's dated with these dates. And just to know that this took place and that there was slavery. I mean, I knew about it kind of like theoretically, but actually to come across it in that way. So this inspired the character of Zamzam in the story and inspired this young girl. And I followed her life since she was a child in her village in South Sudan and how she came to be enslaved and came to be, you know. sold from one person to another. So that was part of the research that was interesting for me. Because I think, ignorantly, a lot of people don't think about maybe about slavery at that time within cultures and countries. You know, it's something that was maybe people were taken from their homes, but actually a lot was going on within countries as well. Yeah, well, this is what happened that after you know, Britain and America gorged themselves with the transatlantic slavery, they kind of turned around and attacked the Ottoman Empire for practicing slavery. And so this was one of, this was the reason that Gordon went to Sudan, in order to suppress slavery. So the public opinion was very much against slavery at that time. So we've reached the end of the 19th century. So you know, British public opinion was against slavery. And it became a reason to spread the empire because they were spreading these enlightened views of anti-slavery views. And so that became part of how they got people on board. You know, this is what we're fighting for. This is why we need to expand and so on. So Gordon was was part of that his aim was to suppress the slave trade in um in this area which was the the east african uh route so sudan was a as a kind of a gateway in which uh slaves were taken from the south on to egypt and on to turkey and this is where they went but it's different the the the slavery practiced in east africa um was very different from the the west coast slavery The West Coast slavery, as we know about it from the plantation culture and from the, it's associated with capitalism. The Africans were enslaved in order to produce capital, in order to grow capital. This wasn't the case with the East African slavery. The women were taken as for domestic slaves and the men were taken into the army. So there was no plantation culture. There was no... There wasn't really capitalism involved. It was more of a service kind of need. And also the assimilation was quicker. Many of the women who became domestic servants in these houses became part of the family. Their children were automatically considered free. The same with the men who went into the army. They kind of rose and they became free. And so it takes a different. shape than the transatlantic slavery. It's interesting hearing you talking about that because there's a lot of clashes of culture in the book and sometimes that comes through misunderstanding. Like you've got this interesting relationship between Robert the painter and Zamzam and he feels, I can paint you. That's absolutely. And whereas her reaction is absolutely not, you know, and that kind of clash between the two. you talk about capitalism and it made me think about myself the way that she says why do you need all these things all these things in your house around you and you're surrounded by books and things and you think yeah that is it's interesting that seems like it was very important to either have trophies not even trophies of places you've been but just reminders of places you've been whereas Zamzam it very much was she wants to more in contact with what's happening at the moment and what's happening around her and in her a and in the wild and in country as well. Yeah, yeah. I wanted Robert to be a kind of an average, a young average Scottish man at the time who was attracted to the Empire because so many young Scottish men played a part in the Empire. They were attracted to go because there they faced prejudice here in the in Britain because things were harder for them. It was hard for them to progress in Britain. And so going to the colonies became a wonderful opportunity for them. And they could then advance in their career. They could leapfrog and they could come up and return with a higher sort of status. And so he's like that as well. You know, he's there. So he wants to have all these things, the ivory sort of thing. And he has all these things at home. and he's painting and he's sending his paintings back home and he's trying to better himself. And in these conservative societies, to have access to a woman in order to paint her is very difficult. There's no models as such. So these men resorted to enslaving women. Again, he didn't want to do that. It's not something that he believed in, but he felt he had to do that in order to find someone who would, he could paint a subject that he could paint and and so she uh but she turned out to be a lot harder to to convince absolutely it's a tremendous tempestuous and you see based on any real because we should say that there was a lot of um painters who kind of made that i'm thinking about the first wave of glasgow boys and they painted overseas you know whether it was in the far east or whether it was in a other places as well that's how they made their reputation. So is he based on a particular painter? Well, I kind of based him around David Roberts, who, but David Roberts was more in the 18th century. So further back, and David Roberts never went to Sudan, he just he went to Egypt, and then he went to the Holy Land, he painted Jerusalem, and he painted all these beautiful, you know, buildings. He also came from a very poor background. And he used to see started off as painting. the background of theatres. That's how he got into... Oh, right. Yeah, he was doing... In Glasgow, he was doing that, the theatres. And then he kind of, you know, did more and more. Then he went away and he came back. But if you see his paintings now, you'd recognise them straight away because they're just like what we feel as the Orient. I mean, he just gave us that. The big... He was... he used to draw everything, the buildings huge and the people very small, very disproportionate, you know, he'd have these huge buildings. But some of the paintings he did were of women, and they were really life-size women. But his, apparently his daughter censored them, censored a lot of these paintings after he died because she was prudish and she didn't want, you know, she was sort of horrified about that and that kind of influenced me as well. And As I see, there's a lot of clashes in culture in the book, but there is in your writing as well. You've tended to bring both cultures, both your Sudanese background and also where you are now in Scotland, together in a lot of your books. Is that important to you? It feels important to me. It feels like I have both countries now. I've lived in both countries and I feel I'm not only belonging to one of them. I feel that both of them are kind of mine now. And I want to kind of explore the shared history and all that, because I find it fascinating. And it's not something that we... that people talk about or know about a lot, but it's there, it has happened. Yeah, I think there's so many of what I thought when I was reading the book was, there must be so many of these untold stories where it's not just about one country's history, it's kind of, you know, it spreads out and influences many others as well. It does, it does, it does, it does. Yeah, it does. Yeah. So when you're writing such a novel, do you ever consider any parallels with what's happening today or even lessons for today or is that really that's up to the reader to read into it what would you say i think the reader would would read into it but but because the history repeats itself you will always find an echo there will always be an an echo coming up so i think that this um um this idea of people you rebelling against oppression is something that comes up in history time and again. And many of these movements start off as revolutionary. They start off as idealistic in a way, but then they turn violent. They can turn very violent. And we see this in all these revolutions that start off in a kind of a very good spirit and then they end up. turning violent and turning kind of against themselves. Yeah. Yeah. And to go back to the characters, you mentioned the Maddie and I didn't realize he'd been played by Alonzo Livi in a film. But what I would say is he is charismatic enough on the page that you can believe that people followed him and that people were against him. Yeah, yeah. People followed him because he managed to succeed in these battles. I mean, he had this limited number of men with the farmers they only had hoes they only had sticks daggers and then they were able to beat uh you know um groups of soldiers who are armed to the teeth so this kind of like made people think oh he's got magical properties he's got you know miracles he's performing miracles oh he's bulletproof oh you know so so this grew the the rumors and the um And, you know, the charisma surrounding him grew and grew and it affected people and it affected how they're wanting to believe in him. And then, of course, as the movement grows, people then start to join in because, well, everybody's joined in or so they don't really believe in him, but they're joining in because, you know, everybody else is joining him. And then he turned a threat. He then became. he forced himself on the tribes, you have to follow me or else I will fight you. So it became then, there was a lot of violence inflicted on the people who were against him. Yeah, it's that kind of, if you're not for us, you're against us, and then we're going to come for you. And so this was a real historical figure, yeah? Yes. And you're saying, but Gordon, tell us a little bit about Gordon, because I think a lot of people won't know. about this character too much. Was he sent by the British or was he employed to look after the Ottoman Empire? How did it work? Well Britain had at that time already kind of entered Egypt, already was influenced Egypt, even though the Sultan was there of Egypt. So the Sultan hired Gordon. So if you can see even in the paintings of Gordon, the photographs of Gordon, He's wearing the fez that the Ottomans wear because he was an employee. So he was getting an employee of the Ottomans, but he was getting his orders from London. So it was a kind of a situation where he's getting paid by the Turkish Ottomans. But he's definitely Britain's man on the ground and they're telling him what to do. And his loyalty is to the British Empire. And, you know, Queen Victoria sends an army to rescue him once things go very bad with the siege in Khartoum. So there was it just shows how also we also tend to think of Britain invading countries as in just just strolling in with an army. But no, there's a lot of stuff going on before. There's a lot of diplomatic things. There's a lot of. easing their way in and gaining more and more influence before the final sort of conquest, let's say. So he was part of that and when he died it was like a trauma for Victorian Britain. You know the papers wrote about it, the Queen Victoria cried and for over 14 years they built up and the need to revenge Gordon and a lot of young men. We're feeling, oh, you know, we need to go and avenge Gordon. And this led then to the invasion of Sudan in 1889. And then Sudan became part of the British Empire officially. And are those the only two real characters or the rest creations? The rest, yeah, the rest are more and more and less creations. They might refer to somebody who was real, but all the characters are fictional. And so how do you approach that? Say for instance the central character of Zamzam who originally is named Okani and I mean this is a wonderful, a really memorable creation. I just, I was quite sad to leave her you know. But you know how did she emerge? How did you develop a character like that when you're doing it from scratch? Do you take little bits? You said you found her name on a bill of sale. Was that the kind of spark? This was the spark, the bill of sale. And then I imagined her in this as a little girl, I know, playing in the river. And then slowly, slowly, she kind of built up slowly, slowly. So that was the imagination part of it. And I didn't do my research all at one go. So I would write and then do a little research. I would write and do a little bit of research. So there was a kind of a, so that the creative part could. could keep going for me. But it was great fun. You really capture the kind of sights, sounds, tastes and heat. I've heard there was real heat coming off the novel. Is that from your own memories of growing up in Sudan and do those memories become stronger over time and maybe even over distance? They are from my memories and And kind of like, oh, it becomes the writing is also a kind of like putting the pieces together. So I'm imagining to say I'm imagining a character and I'm thinking, oh, this date, it says here that this was May. Oh, this must be really hot then. So I then put in the heat and all that. And I think, oh, this is January. Oh, that's this is a really nice time. You know, so Gordon must have got. killed at a very beautiful on a beautiful day so so i i so i kind of put these two things so i'm always like logically going and uh i also had a very good um luck with the with the islamic uh dates so the islamic dates tell me the lunar month so i could tell whether there was a full moon or a crescent on any particular date when when a particular event took place and i found that that was kind of like that's so nice to play with. Like I knew, for example, that this woman who starts off the book was running and that was a full moon because it's dated as being the middle of the lunar month. So I found things like that, like piecing together things was kind of like detective work, or it required a bit of thought, you know, putting a puzzle together, not just running away with, you know, with creative ideas. That's so lovely, that idea that you can know what the night sky was like. The night maybe a fictional character is looking over the Nile and to the reflections and all of that idea comes through. Yeah, that was great. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you about the idea of culture clashes there, which happened quite a lot. Do you think that that has improved or it's still relevant today that there's the misunderstanding often which can lead to? to you know greater problems between cultures? That's a good point. I think there's a lot of, there's more and more people of color who are Western. So there's more and more people who are part of the West. They grew up in the West. They speak perfect English. They themselves would feel uncomfortable elsewhere. So yes, they're... There is a group of people like that. And so one doesn't really, you know, you could live your whole life without meeting someone who isn't, you know, conscious of Western values or Western ways of thinking. But at the same time, now that we are more tolerant, it's interesting to go back and to look at the different cultures. It's interesting. because the world is a very rich place and there's a lot of richness in cultures and languages. And it's kind of a shame to lose all that and become all cookie cutter figures in a way. So that's the thing. So I find that also that's quite interesting and it's something that is worth sharing with readers. No, absolutely. And with that in mind, would you continue to write historical novels? Do you think there'll be some more? I'm hoping to go, I want to go ahead. I mean, there's to have more, maybe write about colonial Sudan and have a, you know, Scottish characters going there as being part of life there. That would be... that's something that does interest me but we'll we'll see I have to say I think it's a it's the way I prefer to learn about history is through fiction rather than than fact I find fact can be a little bit dry and you know dates and times and names and all that whereas something like this it really you really get involved in it as I say you start to care for the characters you really wish the well some of them well and then you know there's others you get into that whole drama of it which I think you tend not to do with factual stuff. That's 100% true and it's amazing how history can be so fascinating you know that it's such a good story that you don't really want to, you can't make it up I mean it's just such a good story and the truth is a good story. Yeah I know that's right and Before we started recording, I just checked that you're still living in Aberdeen. You've been there for a while. Do you see changes in the city in terms of its art and culture over that time? Oh, yeah, there's been a lot of changes. I mean, Aberdeen has always been sort of diverse in its own way. You know, the, you know, the old capital of Europe and all that. We've got the, we have the Word Festival, which Alan Spence set up. And now it's become wayward. We have the Granite Noir Festival and that, you know, attracts a lot of writers to Aberdeen. So there's quite a vibrant scene that's happening in the city. Yeah, I just I watched a programme on BBC Alaba the other week, which is about the new art, street art stuff that's going on in Aberdeen. And it was really exciting to see what's going on. And they. and I know they've got a kind of thriving music scene as well and I do think Aberdeen you know is really if anyone wants to visit somewhere new that they maybe haven't before there's a lot going on there is a lot going on and it's a beautiful part of Scotland it is we've got beautiful castles we've got Dan O'Toole Castle we've got really really special places yeah oh the local countryside is absolutely gorgeous Leila thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me I appreciate it so much Thank you. That was great. And we'll be back soon with someone completely different.

I was living, of course, I grew up in Khartoum, Sudan. And so very clear, like within walking distance was the palace where General Gordon was, you know, holding on to Khartoum. while the revolutionaries were trying, were putting Khartoum under siege. And then he was, he was killed. So I kind of grew up with this story and I didn't know that Gordon was Scottish until I came to, to, to Aberdeen and it, and this, it clicked.

And I saw a statue of him in, in school hill. There's a statue of him in here and here in, in, in Aberdeen. So it kind of like having the.

Bringing the two countries together is something that I want to do now that I've lived in Scotland for so many years. So just to give a bit of background, this was in the late 19th century. Can you talk a bit about when it was and where it was would be great. Yeah, it's that's that Sudan in the 1880s, 1870s, 1880s.

It was ruled at the time by the Ottoman. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And then but.

but the Sudanese were taxed very heavily. So there was a lot of grievance against the rulers. And so they rose in revolt.

They rallied around a man who, his name was Muhammad Al-Mahdi, and he said that he was the promised Mahdi, the promised savior that is told in the Islamic hadith, in the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And so he people believed him. He he was a religious person. He was a good person. They trusted him.

They believed him. And he managed to defeat the government one one after the other. And so the government then hired Gordon, Charles Gordon, who was a British army officer. And they said to him, you've got experience in Sudan.

You've got experience in China. He was a hero. And you can.

you know, save Sudan, you could do something about this. And he went, but he couldn't, you know, despite his experience, Khartoum was put under siege, and he remained in the palace. And, you know, eventually the whole of Sudan fell, and it became like an island of independence in this great big ocean of Ottoman. empires and European empires and and and slowly slowly you know Britain took Egypt and and and parts of Africa and you know the Italians took Ethiopia and so there was a lot of European interest in Africa at the time but the Sudanese managed to remain kind of independent for a long stretch of 14 years so the novel kind of goes over this history but tries to set to tell it very much from a Sudanese point of view? Yeah, because the way that you tell it is through different individual characters who aren't on the front line necessarily.

You know, this war and conflict is going on all around them and their lives are just kind of dealing with often very everyday, often not very everyday, often life-changing things. Why did you want to tell the story that way? Well, it seemed that that... that's the best way to you know fiction to kind of illuminate this time and to focus on ordinary people and to tell it from their point of view and I like the idea of I didn't want to change the historical facts I just wanted to kind of like go back in time and be there and kind of share these events with the characters so that's how I approached it.

And how difficult is it writing historical fiction to get that balance between historical events and the fictional side of things? Is that the best way to do it, to create characters rather than put words in the mouth of real inverted commas characters? I think so.

I think because real characters then, you know, the reader is drawn to them. I'm drawn to them as a writer and then the reader is drawn into them. And but the story has been said so many times from the point of view of the big, big characters.

There was a film in the 1960s called Cartoon in which Charlton Heston played Gordon and they had the Lawrence Olivier in blackface playing the man. So this story was told, and there was another film called The Four Feathers, and there were many books written about it from that point of view. And I read these books as well.

But then coming to write it, I thought, no, I need to, you know, go behind all of that and kind of dig deep and find the more, a better way of telling the story from the local point of view and the lives of ordinary people. especially the women, I was interested in that as well. So were you taught this history at school? Was this something that you kind of knew about from a young age? Yeah, I was taught this history at school and then I went to university and I was taught it again.

So I kind of knew it, you know, you kind of know it, it's there. If you've heard it so many times, as you would know Mary, Queen of Scots, for example. But taking the decision to write about it, taking the decision to research it.

was something completely different and fascinating, really. It was really very, very interesting to do that, yeah. I was going to ask about your research, how much you had to do, but also did you discover new things or did it change some of the stories that you'd been taught previously?

Well, I went to Durham, the University of Durham, and they have the Sudan archives. And there I found a bill of sale for a woman called Zamzam. And it was just fascinating to hold this bill of sale and it's dated with these dates. And just to know that this took place and that there was slavery. I mean, I knew about it kind of like theoretically, but actually to come across it in that way.

So this inspired the character of Zamzam in the story and inspired this young girl. And I followed her life since she was a child in her village in South Sudan and how she came to be enslaved and came to be, you know. sold from one person to another.

So that was part of the research that was interesting for me. Because I think, ignorantly, a lot of people don't think about maybe about slavery at that time within cultures and countries. You know, it's something that was maybe people were taken from their homes, but actually a lot was going on within countries as well. Yeah, well, this is what happened that after you know, Britain and America gorged themselves with the transatlantic slavery, they kind of turned around and attacked the Ottoman Empire for practicing slavery.

And so this was one of, this was the reason that Gordon went to Sudan, in order to suppress slavery. So the public opinion was very much against slavery at that time. So we've reached the end of the 19th century.

So you know, British public opinion was against slavery. And it became a reason to spread the empire because they were spreading these enlightened views of anti-slavery views. And so that became part of how they got people on board.

You know, this is what we're fighting for. This is why we need to expand and so on. So Gordon was was part of that his aim was to suppress the slave trade in um in this area which was the the east african uh route so sudan was a as a kind of a gateway in which uh slaves were taken from the south on to egypt and on to turkey and this is where they went but it's different the the the slavery practiced in east africa um was very different from the the west coast slavery The West Coast slavery, as we know about it from the plantation culture and from the, it's associated with capitalism.

The Africans were enslaved in order to produce capital, in order to grow capital. This wasn't the case with the East African slavery. The women were taken as for domestic slaves and the men were taken into the army. So there was no plantation culture.

There was no... There wasn't really capitalism involved. It was more of a service kind of need. And also the assimilation was quicker. Many of the women who became domestic servants in these houses became part of the family.

Their children were automatically considered free. The same with the men who went into the army. They kind of rose and they became free.

And so it takes a different. shape than the transatlantic slavery. It's interesting hearing you talking about that because there's a lot of clashes of culture in the book and sometimes that comes through misunderstanding. Like you've got this interesting relationship between Robert the painter and Zamzam and he feels, I can paint you. That's absolutely.

And whereas her reaction is absolutely not, you know, and that kind of clash between the two. you talk about capitalism and it made me think about myself the way that she says why do you need all these things all these things in your house around you and you're surrounded by books and things and you think yeah that is it's interesting that seems like it was very important to either have trophies not even trophies of places you've been but just reminders of places you've been whereas Zamzam it very much was she wants to more in contact with what's happening at the moment and what's happening around her and in her a and in the wild and in country as well. Yeah, yeah.

I wanted Robert to be a kind of an average, a young average Scottish man at the time who was attracted to the Empire because so many young Scottish men played a part in the Empire. They were attracted to go because there they faced prejudice here in the in Britain because things were harder for them. It was hard for them to progress in Britain. And so going to the colonies became a wonderful opportunity for them.

And they could then advance in their career. They could leapfrog and they could come up and return with a higher sort of status. And so he's like that as well. You know, he's there. So he wants to have all these things, the ivory sort of thing.

And he has all these things at home. and he's painting and he's sending his paintings back home and he's trying to better himself. And in these conservative societies, to have access to a woman in order to paint her is very difficult.

There's no models as such. So these men resorted to enslaving women. Again, he didn't want to do that.

It's not something that he believed in, but he felt he had to do that in order to find someone who would, he could paint a subject that he could paint and and so she uh but she turned out to be a lot harder to to convince absolutely it's a tremendous tempestuous and you see based on any real because we should say that there was a lot of um painters who kind of made that i'm thinking about the first wave of glasgow boys and they painted overseas you know whether it was in the far east or whether it was in a other places as well that's how they made their reputation. So is he based on a particular painter? Well, I kind of based him around David Roberts, who, but David Roberts was more in the 18th century.

So further back, and David Roberts never went to Sudan, he just he went to Egypt, and then he went to the Holy Land, he painted Jerusalem, and he painted all these beautiful, you know, buildings. He also came from a very poor background. And he used to see started off as painting. the background of theatres. That's how he got into...

Oh, right. Yeah, he was doing... In Glasgow, he was doing that, the theatres.

And then he kind of, you know, did more and more. Then he went away and he came back. But if you see his paintings now, you'd recognise them straight away because they're just like what we feel as the Orient. I mean, he just gave us that. The big...

He was... he used to draw everything, the buildings huge and the people very small, very disproportionate, you know, he'd have these huge buildings. But some of the paintings he did were of women, and they were really life-size women. But his, apparently his daughter censored them, censored a lot of these paintings after he died because she was prudish and she didn't want, you know, she was sort of horrified about that and that kind of influenced me as well. And As I see, there's a lot of clashes in culture in the book, but there is in your writing as well.

You've tended to bring both cultures, both your Sudanese background and also where you are now in Scotland, together in a lot of your books. Is that important to you? It feels important to me. It feels like I have both countries now. I've lived in both countries and I feel I'm not only belonging to one of them.

I feel that both of them are kind of mine now. And I want to kind of explore the shared history and all that, because I find it fascinating. And it's not something that we...

that people talk about or know about a lot, but it's there, it has happened. Yeah, I think there's so many of what I thought when I was reading the book was, there must be so many of these untold stories where it's not just about one country's history, it's kind of, you know, it spreads out and influences many others as well. It does, it does, it does, it does.

Yeah, it does. Yeah. So when you're writing such a novel, do you ever consider any parallels with what's happening today or even lessons for today or is that really that's up to the reader to read into it what would you say i think the reader would would read into it but but because the history repeats itself you will always find an echo there will always be an an echo coming up so i think that this um um this idea of people you rebelling against oppression is something that comes up in history time and again. And many of these movements start off as revolutionary.

They start off as idealistic in a way, but then they turn violent. They can turn very violent. And we see this in all these revolutions that start off in a kind of a very good spirit and then they end up.

turning violent and turning kind of against themselves. Yeah. Yeah. And to go back to the characters, you mentioned the Maddie and I didn't realize he'd been played by Alonzo Livi in a film. But what I would say is he is charismatic enough on the page that you can believe that people followed him and that people were against him.

Yeah, yeah. People followed him because he managed to succeed in these battles. I mean, he had this limited number of men with the farmers they only had hoes they only had sticks daggers and then they were able to beat uh you know um groups of soldiers who are armed to the teeth so this kind of like made people think oh he's got magical properties he's got you know miracles he's performing miracles oh he's bulletproof oh you know so so this grew the the rumors and the um And, you know, the charisma surrounding him grew and grew and it affected people and it affected how they're wanting to believe in him.

And then, of course, as the movement grows, people then start to join in because, well, everybody's joined in or so they don't really believe in him, but they're joining in because, you know, everybody else is joining him. And then he turned a threat. He then became. he forced himself on the tribes, you have to follow me or else I will fight you.

So it became then, there was a lot of violence inflicted on the people who were against him. Yeah, it's that kind of, if you're not for us, you're against us, and then we're going to come for you. And so this was a real historical figure, yeah?

Yes. And you're saying, but Gordon, tell us a little bit about Gordon, because I think a lot of people won't know. about this character too much. Was he sent by the British or was he employed to look after the Ottoman Empire?

How did it work? Well Britain had at that time already kind of entered Egypt, already was influenced Egypt, even though the Sultan was there of Egypt. So the Sultan hired Gordon. So if you can see even in the paintings of Gordon, the photographs of Gordon, He's wearing the fez that the Ottomans wear because he was an employee. So he was getting an employee of the Ottomans, but he was getting his orders from London.

So it was a kind of a situation where he's getting paid by the Turkish Ottomans. But he's definitely Britain's man on the ground and they're telling him what to do. And his loyalty is to the British Empire. And, you know, Queen Victoria sends an army to rescue him once things go very bad with the siege in Khartoum. So there was it just shows how also we also tend to think of Britain invading countries as in just just strolling in with an army.

But no, there's a lot of stuff going on before. There's a lot of diplomatic things. There's a lot of.

easing their way in and gaining more and more influence before the final sort of conquest, let's say. So he was part of that and when he died it was like a trauma for Victorian Britain. You know the papers wrote about it, the Queen Victoria cried and for over 14 years they built up and the need to revenge Gordon and a lot of young men. We're feeling, oh, you know, we need to go and avenge Gordon. And this led then to the invasion of Sudan in 1889. And then Sudan became part of the British Empire officially.

And are those the only two real characters or the rest creations? The rest, yeah, the rest are more and more and less creations. They might refer to somebody who was real, but all the characters are fictional. And so how do you approach that? Say for instance the central character of Zamzam who originally is named Okani and I mean this is a wonderful, a really memorable creation.

I just, I was quite sad to leave her you know. But you know how did she emerge? How did you develop a character like that when you're doing it from scratch? Do you take little bits?

You said you found her name on a bill of sale. Was that the kind of spark? This was the spark, the bill of sale.

And then I imagined her in this as a little girl, I know, playing in the river. And then slowly, slowly, she kind of built up slowly, slowly. So that was the imagination part of it. And I didn't do my research all at one go.

So I would write and then do a little research. I would write and do a little bit of research. So there was a kind of a, so that the creative part could. could keep going for me. But it was great fun.

You really capture the kind of sights, sounds, tastes and heat. I've heard there was real heat coming off the novel. Is that from your own memories of growing up in Sudan and do those memories become stronger over time and maybe even over distance?

They are from my memories and And kind of like, oh, it becomes the writing is also a kind of like putting the pieces together. So I'm imagining to say I'm imagining a character and I'm thinking, oh, this date, it says here that this was May. Oh, this must be really hot then. So I then put in the heat and all that.

And I think, oh, this is January. Oh, that's this is a really nice time. You know, so Gordon must have got.

killed at a very beautiful on a beautiful day so so i i so i kind of put these two things so i'm always like logically going and uh i also had a very good um luck with the with the islamic uh dates so the islamic dates tell me the lunar month so i could tell whether there was a full moon or a crescent on any particular date when when a particular event took place and i found that that was kind of like that's so nice to play with. Like I knew, for example, that this woman who starts off the book was running and that was a full moon because it's dated as being the middle of the lunar month. So I found things like that, like piecing together things was kind of like detective work, or it required a bit of thought, you know, putting a puzzle together, not just running away with, you know, with creative ideas.

That's so lovely, that idea that you can know what the night sky was like. The night maybe a fictional character is looking over the Nile and to the reflections and all of that idea comes through. Yeah, that was great. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you about the idea of culture clashes there, which happened quite a lot.

Do you think that that has improved or it's still relevant today that there's the misunderstanding often which can lead to? to you know greater problems between cultures? That's a good point.

I think there's a lot of, there's more and more people of color who are Western. So there's more and more people who are part of the West. They grew up in the West.

They speak perfect English. They themselves would feel uncomfortable elsewhere. So yes, they're... There is a group of people like that.

And so one doesn't really, you know, you could live your whole life without meeting someone who isn't, you know, conscious of Western values or Western ways of thinking. But at the same time, now that we are more tolerant, it's interesting to go back and to look at the different cultures. It's interesting.

because the world is a very rich place and there's a lot of richness in cultures and languages. And it's kind of a shame to lose all that and become all cookie cutter figures in a way. So that's the thing.

So I find that also that's quite interesting and it's something that is worth sharing with readers. No, absolutely. And with that in mind, would you continue to write historical novels? Do you think there'll be some more?

I'm hoping to go, I want to go ahead. I mean, there's to have more, maybe write about colonial Sudan and have a, you know, Scottish characters going there as being part of life there. That would be...

that's something that does interest me but we'll we'll see I have to say I think it's a it's the way I prefer to learn about history is through fiction rather than than fact I find fact can be a little bit dry and you know dates and times and names and all that whereas something like this it really you really get involved in it as I say you start to care for the characters you really wish the well some of them well and then you know there's others you get into that whole drama of it which I think you tend not to do with factual stuff. That's 100% true and it's amazing how history can be so fascinating you know that it's such a good story that you don't really want to, you can't make it up I mean it's just such a good story and the truth is a good story. Yeah I know that's right and Before we started recording, I just checked that you're still living in Aberdeen.

You've been there for a while. Do you see changes in the city in terms of its art and culture over that time? Oh, yeah, there's been a lot of changes.

I mean, Aberdeen has always been sort of diverse in its own way. You know, the, you know, the old capital of Europe and all that. We've got the, we have the Word Festival, which Alan Spence set up. And now it's become wayward.

We have the Granite Noir Festival and that, you know, attracts a lot of writers to Aberdeen. So there's quite a vibrant scene that's happening in the city. Yeah, I just I watched a programme on BBC Alaba the other week, which is about the new art, street art stuff that's going on in Aberdeen. And it was really exciting to see what's going on.

And they. and I know they've got a kind of thriving music scene as well and I do think Aberdeen you know is really if anyone wants to visit somewhere new that they maybe haven't before there's a lot going on there is a lot going on and it's a beautiful part of Scotland it is we've got beautiful castles we've got Dan O'Toole Castle we've got really really special places yeah oh the local countryside is absolutely gorgeous Leila thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me I appreciate it so much Thank you. That was great.

And we'll be back soon with someone completely different.

Transcript for:Exploring Sudanese History Through Fiction

Transcript for:
Exploring Sudanese History Through Fiction