Il est plus facile de faire passer un chameau par le chas d’une aiguille que de faire entrer un Janjawid au royaume de Dieu. This repeated phrase is the keynote of The Messiah of Darfur, a tragicomic novel about the ongoing war in Sudan waged by the government with the help of Janjaweed militia against the non-Arab tribes in Darfur, in which all the characters are slowly drawn into the orbit of a prophet claiming to be Christ while the authorities are preparing to crucify him and his followers.
The book records a never-ending round of violence, but is by no means grim. Abderahman, the main heroine of the book, saw her entire family killed, was repeatedly and brutally raped as a teenager in a refugee camp, and has made up her mind to take her revenge by murdering at least ten Janjaweed soldiers and eating their livers raw. On her wedding night, she breaks the news quite calmly to her dismayed new husband that she’s married him in order to get his help with this quest, and can he please start teaching her to use a machine gun. She is remarkably successful; except that she finds the taste of raw liver so disgusting that she abandons this last detail with great regret. Baraka Sakin is brilliant at drawing out black humour without trivialising the characters’ genuine suffering and trauma.
There was so much fascinating historical and cultural detail referenced: the history of slavery in Sudan and the continued stigma of being descended from slaves; the relationship between the more nomadic “Arab” tribes and the more agricultural “black” or Zourgha tribes; the UN observer missions in Darfur. I ended up looking up a lot more background on the region while I was reading as it was clear there was a lot of context I was missing, which was both enlightening and rather depressing. Likewise, the Messiah of Darfur is the first of Baraka Sakin’s works to be translated from the Arabic, and for once I did feel I was missing out from not being able to access the original text: it is often signalled that characters are speaking their own dialect, or words from their own language, and I’m sure that to anyone familiar with the dialects of Sudan and Chad the connotations would add richness to the character portrayals.
My main impression was that the book feels like a record of a genocide that is still ongoing, by someone who can only write about the true horror through the lens of black comedy. The only vaguely similar work I’ve read was Murambi, le livre des ossements, an account of the Rwandan genocide written by the Senegalese Boubacar Boris Diop, one of twelve African writers invited by the Rwandan government after the war to come to Rwanda and record what had happened in their country. That is also a powerful account of horrific violence but quite different in tone to the Messiah of Darfur, which felt in the end like a much more hopeful work.
Around the World in 180 Books 