I first met Fatin Abbas in 7th grade French class—September 1993, New York City. Although we were both new to the school, our places of origin were 6,000 miles apart. At the time I didn’t know what had brought her to the United States from Sudan, that her family had fled political persecution following the 1989 military coup perpetrated by former Sudanese autocrat Omar al-Bashir. She was warm, outgoing, and we got along well as we transitioned from middle school to high school, French class to Philosophy. After graduation we lost touch, only recently linking up through a shared love of fiction.
In Abbas’s thrilling debut novel, Ghost Season, Bashir looms large as an unmentioned background character. The reverberations of his coup drive the narrative, but deeper than that, the coup changed the author’s life trajectory: her father was imprisoned for speaking out against the regime. Thirty years later, in 2019, Bashir was deposed and sent to the same prison her father had been in, she told me over Zoom—“And yet the revolution hasn’t delivered.”
Set in pre-secession Sudan amid a bloody ethnic war, Ghost Season addresses western interventionism, climate strife and displacement, and the stains of colonialism, with the novel’s braided narrative showcasing Abbas’s dexterity as a storyteller. The story follows five strangers on an NGO compound in a border town; the appearance of a corpse one morning upturns the group’s hopes and passions, and portends tumultuous times ahead. Abbas depicts her homeland in vivid detail, the prismatic relationship between land and culture, the precarious hierarchies and alliances of a splintered society. It was a pleasure to reconnect with Fatin since our days in school together.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Arturo Vidich
Close to the beginning of the novel, a badly burned corpse is brought to the NGO compound where five strangers live or work. The corpse, which you describe in graphic detail, plays both a literal and figurative role in the story. Could you talk about why you chose such a grisly symbol?
Fatin Abbas
The corpse was the first thing I wrote. For a while, I was thinking, Am I writing a murder mystery? Now, looking back on it, I think the corpse is absolutely like you say—a symbol. I was thinking about this idea of the nation state, writing this novel in the aftermath of the secession of South Sudan. I grew up with an idea of the map of Sudan in my head that’s very deeply ingrained. It was the largest country, in terms of territory in Africa, before secession. It was very weird to have in my head this geography that then, in 2011, completely changes. The line going through the country.
Arturo Vidich
And that line isn’t entirely defined, even now. But secession hasn’t brought resolution, has it?
Fatin Abbas
Right, there was a civil war for almost fifty years since independence, the South finally secedes and then immediately collapses into civil war. So actually, in some sense, all of this fighting for a new nation—it was like the nation was already dead upon birth, somehow, in the same way that Sudan as a nation was already dead upon birth from colonialism, because it was inheriting all of these structures of inequality and ethnic oppression. The reason [the corpse] is burned is precisely because it’s impossible to distinguish the gender, the ethnic identity of this corpse, like, which group does it belong to? It’s reduced, and becomes difficult to classify in this place where everything is about differentiation. So it complicates that idea of belonging. It hangs over the characters as this menacing presence that’s forgotten sometimes, more present other times, but it’s always there as this visual image of the lurking danger surrounding them. Within the logic of the novel, I’m not literally answering the question, but I’m answering it nonetheless, somehow, because the book starts with this corpse and then it ends with another corpse.
Arturo Vidich
Your family left in 1990, but you’ve returned since then.
Fatin Abbas
I spent a year working in Sudan in a border town, which was sort of the inspiration for the fictionalized border town of Saraaya. This was in the mid-2000s, when the war in Darfur was really huge in the US, and I was working not in Darfur, but in this town called Abyei, which is still a contested area. I was thinking it’d be interesting to set a novel in this border zone where things are quite messy, overlapping. And I spent a summer filming, in Khartoum, these men who are, many of them, from South Sudan, some from Darfur, but mostly internally displaced men who work in this neighborhood, making these huge waterpots out of clay. And so that’s another thread that fed into the novel: documentary filmmaking. It brought up all kinds of uncomfortable questions for me about my own position, looking at my native country.
Arturo Vidich
The novel opens with Dena filming the boy, Mustafah. I took Dena to be the framing eye of the story, applying a particular lens to her homeland. She calls her artwork “observational filmmaking.” Did your experience filming those men in Khartoum help you create that character?
Fatin Abbas
She’s definitely the character closest to me in terms of background and life story. She’s Sudanese American, doesn’t belong here, doesn’t belong there. Which is something I’ve grappled with. But I think the camera, the looking, is very important because, again, one thing I struggled with when I was making that film in Sudan—and I struggle with in a different way as a writer—is this thing of, what sort of gaze am I bringing to my home country, you know? What power dynamic is implied in that looking. There’s a lot of data about the white gaze, and the Western gaze, and the colonial gaze, but what about the diasporic gaze? What position do I have as somebody coming with the privileges of the West, and access to publishing institutions and venues, able to represent Sudan in this way? Dena and the camera is one way I’m thinking about the ethics of representation. Then this assault happens, this very violent assault that involves her camera. It took me a long time to arrive at that. That looking can be a form of violence, right?
Arturo Vidich
Yes, and she doesn’t realize it until that moment.
Fatin Abbas
Right, she has this idealistic notion that she can watch things without her own presence changing everything. I’m only making sense of this in retrospect, but there’s something about her internalization of a certain exoticizing, fetishizing gaze on her own place of origin. She roams around very freely with the camera, not really worried about her safety, naive about her own position as not just a woman, but a woman who’s transgressing because she’s taking on these freedoms that aren’t so easily granted, if you’re a woman.
Arturo Vidich
A woman who’s transgressing certain norms in America, too. How did you arrive at Dena as a queer character?
Fatin Abbas
When I started writing Dena she was androgynous. The queerness came out of the writing of the character. She’s pushing against the limits of conventional normative womanhood in all kinds of ways. In Sudan, as a woman, your body’s so heavily policed in Khartoum, which is the center of, let’s say, political power. Khartoum is the mouth that gobbles up the rest of the country. Part of the reason I really liked being outside of Khartoum, in this border town, is because on the periphery, you’re far from the regime and the Islamists.
Arturo Vidich
The morality police aren’t as present in the small provinces?
Fatin Abbas
Yeah, when you go out to the peripheries, they’re much less so, and you get this cultural ambiguity where there are all kinds of religions and ethnicities and different cultural practices. It’s not as controlled as it is in the center—yet, still you’re dealing with gender restrictions. In a way, I have my issues with Dena, but she’s also a role model. By transgressing, she makes things possible. I think there’s something very bold and courageous about this rejection of limitations.
Arturo Vidich
The translator, William, accepts Dena’s queer identity, citing his grandmother’s stories of pre-colonial Nilot women marrying each other, exchanging the bride wealth. Could you talk about that research?
Fatin Abbas
I was reading about these indigenous cultures in Sudan, the Nuer and the Dinka, which are Nilotic groups from the area, who had these basically same-sex marriages. One woman would have the child of the kinsman of the other woman, but they would raise the child together. Queer constructs have entirely been erased in the discussion of these cultures. Part of the journey of the last ten years for me has been that, you know, queerness is not something that’s marginal. In fact, it’s very central to so many cultures everywhere, and this idea of it as marginal serves certain interests. There’s a lot of buckling down, making gender and sexuality as normative and conservative as possible. That happens in any right-wing context, right? In terms of myself, I’m pretty straight, but my sense of family is quite queer and doesn’t fit into normative frameworks.
Arturo Vidich
How did you approach race and ethnicity in the novel?
Fatin Abbas
It’s very complicated. On the one hand, there’s this obsession with trying to belong somewhere, and at the same time a certain complex that northern Sudanese have about wanting to be Arab or Middle Eastern, by being extremely racist towards South Sudanese, partly to feel better about themselves, even though everyone’s black. It was something I struggled with in the novel because there’s a certain Western narrative about Sudan, which re-emerged during the war in Darfur, within the context of the War on Terror, right, like the Bad Muslims, African Victims. In the novel, I used “Nilot” and “nomad” as terms that suggest ethnic identity but aren’t boiled down to notions of race in this very simplistic way. On the other hand, you have to be careful when you’re writing a book in English that’s going to be published in the US when there are certainly discourses around Islam and Muslims and Arabs.
Arturo Vidich
If this novel were to make its way into the two Sudans, how do you think it would be received?
Fatin Abbas
I’m really curious! The North is a very conservative, patriarchal, normative, conformist culture. I’m hoping that Sudanese readers will take it as, this is a north Sudanese writer who is trying to take account of the south as this absolutely essential part of the country, even though now it’s separate. There’s this huge divide between the center and the periphery: Khartoum being the center where everything’s decided; the exploitation taking place in the peripheries. I like to think of it as a novel that’s centering the periphery in a way.
Arturo Vidich
Who would you say this book is for?
Fatin Abbas
That’s a good question. If I have to reduce it, it’s a story I’m telling myself about Sudan. And I feel this might be the last time I write about it. There’s something about being this diasporic Sudanese American who left as a child—there’s always this place of origin that’s charged in so many ways. And in that sense, the book is very much my own fantasy or projection of Sudan, not at all an authentic kind of thing, and that’s why it’s fictionalized. It’s a process I had to go through: making up a story about my place of origin.
FICTION
Ghost Season
By Fatin Abbas
W.W. Norton & Company
Published January 10, 2023
