The Wedding of Zein (2 page)

Right from the start of “The Wedding of Zein” we know we are dealing with an unusual hero, one who came out of his mother's womb and immediately “burst out laughing.” He is deformed, even grotesque, has only two teeth, one on top, the other on the bottom, but when people mock him he giggles. This even though he has a Herculean strength. He loves parties, detects a distant wedding the way an animal sniffs out a prey. He threatens divorce even though he is not married. He is struck on the head with an ax, but when the wound heals it improves his looks.

Since independence, Arab societies have been plagued by the intoxicating hope that a great national savior will come and fix everything. Salih touches on this futile and absurd dream when Zein's kindness and heroism cause the villagers to wonder if he “was the legendary Leader, the Prophet…sent down by God.” But when Zein returns to his tomfoolery this fantasy is “destroyed and replaced” by one “to which people were accustomed and which they preferred.”

Zein's dervish status makes him as inoffensive as a child, allowing him to pinch the ladies' behinds without incurring too much reproach, while elevating him to the role of a spiritual weather-vane. However, Zein's most important function in the eyes of the villagers is to serve “as a trumpet by which attention was drawn to their daughters.” His love blesses. No sooner does he yell his comical “O people, she has slain me” than his tormenting beloved turns into the most eligible bride in the village.

The shamelessness of Zein's loves, and the way his fiery passions fade the minute his beloved is married off, hint at a Sufi theme: that all earthly longing is but a metaphor for the boundless love of the divine. Salih took an interest in Sufi mysticism. Sufism places great emphasis on the sacredness of the present moment, in which, it is believed, the world is remade entire. We never witness Zein regretting the past or worrying about the future. Salih links Sufi logic with a pastoral vision of nature that is no less preoccupied with the present. The only time Zein is nudged out of the present is when his own love is at last satisfied. He leaves his wedding party to go weep by the grave of his friend, the holy mystic Haneen, who had “perceived in [Zein] a glimmering of spiritual light.” After he has reminded himself of his true longing, he returns to dance with complete abandon.

For many Arab writers of the mid-twentieth century Sufism, with its familiar philosophical terrain, served as a helpful way to engage the new secular modernism without severing ties to premodern homelands and traditions.

The narrative in “The Wedding of Zein” circles around itself: an incident is hinted at and later the picture is filled in; then we return to the incident again, but now seeing it under a different light or from a another perspective. These retellings make the fictional world at once more familiar and yet less solid and predictable. Thanks to this technique, and thanks to his distilled prose, Salih's work establishes a peculiar tension between the limited nature of human experience and its infinite depth.

Salih's style, unlike that of so many Arab novelists of his generation, is neither verbose nor lush. All his sentences are cut short with a thin wire of grief. Perhaps every writer who wants to write unsentimentally, to write deeply, about his country needs what Mustafa Sa‘eed described as his sole weapon: “that sharp knife inside my skull, while within my breast was a cold, hard feeling.” Tayeb Salih offered to the Arab novel a new language in which restraint and precision took precedence over exuberance. His prose moves with the cunning and inevitability of a great river searching for the sea.

— H
ISHAM
M
ATAR

To Julie & Zainab

Were you to come to our village as a tourist, it is likely, my son, that you would not stay long. If it were in winter time, when the palm trees are pollinated, you would find that a dark cloud had descended over the village. This, my son, would not be dust, nor yet that mist which rises up after rainfall. It would be a swarm of those sand-flies which obstruct all paths to those who wish to enter our village. Maybe you have seen this pest before, but I swear that you have never seen this particular species. Take this gauze netting, my son, and put it over your head. While it won't protect you against these devils, it will at least help you to bear them. I remember a friend of my son's, a fellow student at school, whom my son invited to stay with us a year ago at this time of the year. His people come from the town. He stayed one night with us and got up next day, feverish, with a running nose and swollen face; he swore that he wouldn't spend another night with us.

If you were to come to us in summer you would find the horse-flies with us — enormous flies the size of young sheep, as we say. In comparison to these the sand-flies are a thousand times more bearable. They are savage flies, my son: they bite, sting, buzz, and whirr. They have a special love for man and no sooner smell him out than they attach themselves to him. Wave them off you, my son — God curse all sand-flies.

And were you to come at a time which was neither summer nor winter you would find nothing at all. No doubt, my son, you read the papers daily, listen to the radio, and go to the cinema once or twice a week. Should you become ill you have the right to be treated in hospital, and if you have a son he is entitled to receive education at a school. I know, my son, that you hate dark streets and like to see electric light shining out into the night. I know, too, that you are not enamoured of walking and that riding donkeys gives you a bruise on your backside. Oh, I wish, my son, I wish — the asphalted roads of the towns — the modern means of transport — the fine comfortable buses. We have none of all this — we are people who live on what God sees fit to give us.

Tomorrow you will depart from our village, of this I am sure, and you will be right to do so. What have you to do with such hardship? We are thick-skinned people and in this we differ from others. We have become used to this hard life, in fact we like it, but we ask no one to subject himself to the difficulties of our life. Tomorrow you will depart, my son — I know that. Before you leave, though, let me show you one thing — something which, in a manner of speaking, we are proud of. In the towns you have museums, places in which the local history and the great deeds of the past are preserved. This thing that I want to show you can be said to be a museum. It is one thing we insist our visitors should see.

Once a preacher, sent by the government, came to us to stay for a month. He arrived at a time when the horse-flies had never been fatter. On the very first day the man's face swelled up. He bore this manfully and joined us in evening prayers on the second night, and after prayers he talked to us of the delights of the primitive life. On the third day he was down with malaria, he contracted dysentery, and his eyes were completely gummed up. I visited him at noon and found him prostrate in bed, with a boy standing at his head waving away the flies.

‘O Sheikh,' I said to him, ‘there is nothing in our village to show you, though I would like you to see the doum tree of Wad Hamid.' He didn't ask me what Wad Hamid's doum tree was, but I presumed that he had heard of it, for who has not? He raised his face which was like the lung of a slaughtered cow; his eyes (as I said) were firmly closed; though I knew that behind the lashes there lurked a certain bitterness.

‘By God,' he said to me, ‘if this were the doum tree of Jandal, and you the Moslems who fought with Ali and Mu' awiya, and I the arbitrator between you, holding your fate in these two hands of mine, I would not stir an inch!' and he spat upon the ground as though to curse me and turned his face away. After that we heard that the Sheikh had cabled to those who had sent him, saying: ‘The horse-flies have eaten into my neck, malaria has burnt up my skin, and dysentery has lodged itself in my bowels. Come to my rescue, may God bless you — these are people who are in no need of me or of any other preacher.' And so the man departed and the government sent us no preacher after him.

But, my son, our village actually witnessed many great men of power and influence, people with names that rang through the country like drums, whom we never even dreamed would ever come here — they came, by God, in droves.

We have arrived. Have patience, my son; in a little while there will be the noonday breeze to lighten the agony of this pest upon your face.

Here it is: the doum tree of Wad Hamid. Look how it holds its head aloft to the skies; look how its roots strike down into the earth; look at its full, sturdy trunk, like the form of a comely woman, at the branches on high resembling the mane of a frolicsome steed! In the afternoon, when the sun is low, the doum tree casts its shadow from this high mound right across the river so that someone sitting on the far bank can rest in its shade. At dawn, when the sun rises, the shadow of the tree stretches across the cultivated land and houses right up to the cemetery. Don't you think it is like some mythical eagle spreading its wings over the village and everyone in it? Once the government, wanting to put through an agricultural scheme, decided to cut it down: they said that the best place for setting up the pump was where the doum tree stood. As you can see, the people of our village are concerned solely with their everyday needs and I cannot remember their ever having rebelled against anything. However, when they heard about cutting down the doum tree they all rose up as one man and barred the district commissioner's way. That was in the time of foreign rule. The flies assisted them too — the horse-flies. The man was surrounded by the clamouring people shouting that if the doum tree were cut down they would fight the government to the last man, while the flies played havoc with the man's face. As his papers were scattered in the water we heard him cry out: ‘All right — doum tree stay — scheme no stay!' And so neither the pump nor the scheme came about and we kept our doum tree.

Let us go home, my son, for this is no time for talking in the open. This hour just before sunset is a time when the army of sand-flies becomes particularly active before going to sleep. At such a time no one who isn't well-accustomed to them and has become as thick-skinned as we are can bear their stings. Look at it, my son, look at the doum tree: lofty, proud, and haughty as though — as though it were some ancient idol. Wherever you happen to be in the village you can see it; in fact, you can even see it from four villages away.

Tomorrow you will depart from our village, of that there is no doubt, the mementoes of the short walk we have taken visible upon your face, neck and hands. But before you leave I shall finish the story of the tree, the doum tree of Wad Hamid. Come in, my son, treat this house as your own.

You ask who planted the doum tree?

No one planted it, my son. Is the ground in which it grows arable land? Do you not see that it is stony and appreciably higher than the river bank, like the pedestal of a statue, while the river twists and turns below it like a sacred snake, one of the ancient gods of the Egyptians? My son, no one planted it. Drink your tea, for you must be in need of it after the trying experience you have undergone. Most probably it grew up by itself, though no one remembers having known it other than as you now find it. Our sons opened their eyes to find it commanding the village. And we, when we take ourselves back to childhood memories, to that dividing line beyond which you remember nothing, see in our minds a giant doum tree standing on a river bank; everything beyond it is as cryptic as talismans, like the boundary between day and night, like that fading light which is not the dawn but the light directly preceding the break of day. My son, do you find that you can follow what I say? Are you aware of this feeling I have within me but which I am powerless to express? Every new generation finds the doum tree as though it had been born at the time of their birth and would grow up with them. Go and sit with the people of this village and listen to them recounting their dreams. A man awakens from sleep and tells his neighbour how he found himself in a vast sandy tract of land, the sand as white as pure silver; how his feet sank in as he walked so that he could only draw them out again with difficulty; how he walked and walked until he was overcome with thirst and stricken with hunger, while the sands stretched endlessly around him; how he climbed a hill and on reaching the top espied a dense forest of doum trees with a single tall tree in the centre which in comparison with the others looked like a camel amid a herd of goats; how the man went down the hill to find that the earth seemed to be rolled up before him so that it was but a few steps before he found himself under the doum tree of Wad Hamid; how he then discovered a vessel containing milk, its surface still fresh with froth, and how the milk did not go down though he drank until he had quenched his thirst. At which his neighbour says to him, ‘Rejoice at release from your troubles.'