Dedalus

Stella Gaitano | Edo's Souls | Dedalus Africa | 260 pages | 12,45 EUR

Stella Gaitano's Edo's Souls is a novel that does not begin, but returns. On the very first pages, a dead woman lies there, Edo, as the first woman of the village in a spectacular coffin "with a view", and yet this death is not an end, but an opening: into a world in which the dead do not disappear, but remain clinging to the walls, continue to work in bodies, return in children, speak in dreams. "The stench of decay lingered for several years on the walls and in the cracks of the room made of clay, like the breath of a person with gingivitis." Rarely has a novel made it clear so early on that memory is nothing abstract here. It smells. It sticks. It doesn't just rot away.

The fact that this novel is now being published in German, translated by Larissa Bender, after its publication in the original Arabic in 2020 and in English translation in 2024, is an event. Not only because Gaitano, born in Khartoum in 1979, grew up as the daughter of South Sudanese parents between the languages, cultures and histories of violence of the two Sudans, writes in Arabic and has been living in Germany as a Writers-in-Exile scholarship holder since 2022. But also because Edo's golden smile gains its immense power precisely from this torn affiliation. Without ever becoming autobiographically obvious, the novel is also an attempt to repair ruptures: between north and south, village and city, body and history, Arabic written language and oral tradition, ancestral world and modern statehood.

Gaitano tells of southern Sudan and Khartoum, from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, and yet the novel reads with an almost painful presence in the year 2026, in view of the catastrophic war situation in Sudan. The current war that broke out in 2023 is not in the foreground - it can't be, of course, given the first publication of the Arabic original in 2018 - but it has a prehistory that Gaitano tells here. A prehistory of militarization, mistrust, ethnic hierarchy, religious appropriation, impoverishment, internal migration, patriarchal violence and state brutality. When it says: "Fear inevitably causes chaos. Everyone sought security by instilling fear in others", then this is not just describing a past civil war. It describes a political grammar that continues to this day.

And yet Edo's Souls is anything but a thesis novel. Its complexity lies precisely in the fact that it doesn't just draw one line, but a whole network of lines. At the beginning, Edo seems to be at the center, then Lucy, then Marco, Theresa, Peter, later the children, the grandchildren, the ghosts. Perspectives change suddenly, almost playfully, as if the novel were playing an old circle game: Whoever is left without a chair is not eliminated, however, but is allowed to tell the story. The result is a polyphonic family and social panorama in which no one is just a victim, no one is just a perpetrator, no one is just a symbol. Even the archaic village order does not appear to be a lost paradise. It is brutal, patriarchal, riddled with superstition and violence. And yet it recognizes forms of balance that the modern state does not improve but destroys with prison, execution and bureaucracy and which are reminiscent of the fundamental criticism of contemporary criminal law by the philosopher and sociologist Arno Plack.

The novel is particularly strong where it treats violence against women not as a marginal motif, but as an order that inscribes itself in bodies. Martha Isai, "the woman in the village who was beaten the most by her husband", is marked by untreated fractures, scars and bruises. But Gaitano does not let her freeze in the image of suffering. In one of the most liberating, wildest scenes in the novel, Martha strikes back, beating down the man who has destroyed her for years, shouting to the bystanders: "Why didn't you come to deliver me from him when he beat me every night?" This is not a neat feminist empowerment scene, not a pedagogically sorted moral, but physical counter-violence, dirty, funny, archaic, necessary. A scene in which literature itself gasps for a moment.

In general, this is a novel of bodies: birthing bodies, beaten bodies, circumcised bodies, migrating bodies, starving, desiring, remembering bodies. The circumcision scenes are among the most unbearable in the book, precisely because Gaitano does not exhibit, but remembers: knives, incense, women's hands, screams, blood. And later, the same violence returns in marriage, when a man treats the female body as property, suspicion and evidence. Such moments show how transgenerational trauma works: not as a psychological buzzword, but as a shock of repetition. A scream "from the depths of my memory" connects childhood, sexuality, marriage, pain and social control.

And yet Edo's Souls is not a novel of darkness alone. It is full of humor, full of grotesque exaggeration, full of joie de vivre. Lucy, the central character, is one of those literary figures that cannot be "understood" without diminishing her. She is a daughter, mother, lover, village child, city stranger, madwoman, saint, animal, landscape, survivor. Marco says of her: "Lucy wasn't just Lucy. She was a ghost inhabited by a whole tribe of ghosts." This is followed by one of the most beautiful passages in the novel: Lucy as mother, dead siblings, tree, thunder, rain, wind, scent of the earth. It is an almost cosmic abundance, but never kitsch, because it is born of loss.

Lucy's motherhood in particular is ambivalent. It is both caring and imprisoning. She gives birth to child after child, as if she has to give birth to her mother's dead. She watches over the children with a fear that is both love and curse. This fear is later named by Theresa: Lucy locks herself "in the cage of strict motherhood" out of honor to the mother whose own motherhood has been left incomplete. This is great literature because Gaitano does not sentimentalize motherhood. She shows it as a cosmic force, a social task, a physical exhaustion, a psychological burden and a historical fantasy of repair.

Just as impressive is the movement from the village to the city. Khartoum does not appear as progress, but as another foreign country. Lucy's first shower is like drowning while standing up. The city is water from pipes, alcohol in colorful bottles, men's laughter, narrowness, dependence. "I was just someone who had fled with her from the darkness of war to throw her into the darkness of foreignness," she later says. This is one of the sentences in which the novel unfolds its full harshness: Migration does not simply save. It can also break, shatter, tear people from the earth in which their dead, names and senses lie.

Gaitano interweaves great political history with seemingly small scenes. The government first arrives in the village with a mosque and military trucks. Names are changed. Religion becomes a power technique. Soldiers, insurgents, spies, torture, curfews: everything penetrates everyday life, marriages, friendships, births, school decisions. When the novel finally mentions the year 1984, it is almost a shock, because what we have read up to that point has long been located in a mythically extended time. Suddenly history becomes datable: Sharia law, shortages, inflation, alcohol bottles being smashed on Nile Street, "a mixture of explosions and the hissing of snakes". The political is never a commentary here. It is weather.

The fact that Larissa Bender's translation finds such a viable German language for this cannot be overestimated. She strikes a balance between poetic compression and analytical clarity, between oral narrative movement and literary composition. Some images seem as if they were made of clay, blood, rain and mockery. Others suddenly cut brightly through the text. This language does not explain, it suspends. It makes the reader laugh in one sentence and shudder in the next. This is precisely why the novel remains true to its subject matter: it tells of a world in which beauty and cruelty are not neatly separated.

Perhaps this is the greatest achievement of this novel: it refuses reassuring order. It deals with war, but not just war; with women, but not just women; with Sudan, but not just Sudan; with tradition, but not nostalgically; with modernity, but without a belief in progress; with religion, but without cheap accusation; with family, but without idyll. He touches on criminal law, revenge, slavery, circumcision, education, colonial and military history, animism, Christianity, Islam, migration, poverty, desire, forgiveness, betrayal and the question of whether a family can be created when no one comes from the same womb. "The world is like a big belly in which we are all brothers and sisters," says one character. One could easily romanticize this sentence or attribute it to the Ubuntu philosophy of southern Africa. The novel does not. It knows that this belly also gives birth to war.

Edo's Souls is therefore an overwhelming novel, but it is not an easy novel. It demands concentration, dedication and a willingness to be irritated. Its narrative style is circular, not linear; its characters are larger than psychological profiles; its images are sometimes almost too much, because the story they have to carry is also too much. But it is precisely this too much that is his truth. Stella Gaitano writes against disappearance: against the disappearance of the villages, the names, the women's bodies, the dead, the southern voices in the Arab-influenced north, the past in the explanations of the present.

In the end, what remains of this book is not just a story. What remains is a smell, a rhythm, a chorus. The dead are not dead, the living are not unharmed, the children are not free from what happened before them. And yet this smile remains - golden not despite the wounds, but precisely through them. Not as a sign of healing, but as something that outlasts decay, war, guilt and birth. A smile like the crack through which the light falls - just as Leonard Cohen conjures up in his song Anthem: "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."

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Further reading on Sudan on Literatur.Review:

Imaginary Lives in Sudan’s War Zone
Recent Sudanese novels highlight the lives of those caught up in Sudan’s internal wars. Literature reflects the resilience of the Sudanese people and provides a background to the horrific fighting and consequences unfolding - by Leila Aboulela

The cat outside the rest room
Even before the 2019 revolution and the current civil war, the Sudanese were fighting against their ruling elite - a literary reportage by Mamoun Eltlib

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