Culture
Courtesy Jamal Mahjoub
LONDON — Parker Bilal is an alias for Jamal Mahjoub, a Sudanese-British writer whose ambitious books defy tidy categories. His new crime novel, “The Ghost Runner,” was published in February. As Bilal, he writes genre fiction, and “The Ghost Runner” is the third of his “Makana” crime novels about a Sudanese detective exiled in Egypt. He is now working on the next two books in the series and has sketched out plans for a further five.
These sharp, witty, politically astute thrillers are set in the run-up to the 2011 Arab uprisings, and, in highlighting the desperation of many ordinary Egyptians, help to explain why the revolt of Tahrir Square took place. They also bring something new to the crime canon. Like the best literary detectives, Makana is a wisecracker, but his skepticism stems from a world-weariness that goes far beyond the cynicism characteristic of the genre. Having watched Sudan fall into religious authoritarianism and seen his family destroyed by it, Makana is now exiled in another country, Egypt, where the pattern of corruption is repeating itself. Once again, he is witness to people suffering under the rule of tyrants, zealots and thugs. However, it is precisely Makana’s place as an exile on the margins of society that makes him the perfect 21st-century detective, capable of uncovering the many guises of power.
That Mahjoub is also adept at disguise is signified in his pseudonym, which celebrates his disparate ancestry and is composed of the names of his grandfathers: Parker, a German refugee in England who Anglicized his name, and Bilal, a Nubian boatman on the Nile. Mahjoub, who writes in English, is one of an international group of writers whose interests and understanding of the world are influenced by being part of a new diaspora — people who move about the world because they can, not because they have to. Now in his 50s, Mahjoub has lived in eight different cities in the U.K., Sudan, the Netherlands, Egypt and Spain.
On a recent visit to London, he spoke of the difficulties such diversity can create for a writer: “Because you don’t have a people behind you and are not speaking from within an established voice — whether that is national or literary — you question: What tradition do I belong to? I don’t think many people would include me as a British writer. Do you include me as a Sudanese writer? Well, no, not really, because I don’t write in Arabic.”
The variety of Mahjoub’s writing makes him hard to categorize; aside from the Parker Bilal books, Mahjoub’s wanderings have given birth to seven works of literary fiction under his own name. All of them are characterized by intellectual restlessness; many explore the tension between modernity and tradition.
He first wrote a trilogy of novels about Sudan that examined the nation in the late 20th century, divided between desert people and city dwellers, trying to become part of the contemporary world. He explored hopes for a new, post-colonial politics, through the eyes of an African exiled in France and Sudan’s failed struggle for independence at the end of the 19th century. Next he wrote “The Carrier,” which draws on his training as a geologist and shifts back and forth between the present day and the Enlightenment, between Algeria, Spain and Denmark; and “Nubian Indigo,” about the raising of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s and its impact on the ancient people and culture it displaced. Finally, there were two novels about mixed-race families: “Travelling with Djinns,” in which a father and son take a road trip (“Europe is my dark continent, and I am searching for the heart of it”), and “The Drift Latitudes,” tracing one family through the 20th century, by way of a German U-boat, a Liverpool jazz club and a housewife’s garden in Sudan, surrounded by the chaos of civil war.
Perhaps one reason for the diversity of Mahjoub’s work is that the complex, politically charged subjects he’s addressing are likely to be met with preconceptions, and that finding the voice in which to express them is mired with difficulty. In “Travelling with Djinns,” the main character, Yasin, is a struggling writer who is attacked by his family and friends for misrepresenting Sudan.
“Because my first novel, about Khartoum, is quite critical,” he says, “the people who liked it were old communist friends of my father and radical political activists who had spent time in prison, but they thought it should have been more critical. Many of the middle-class, comfortable Sudanese, though, wanted a more complimentary portrait. But, for me, at that age, the purpose of writing was to change the world, to make people aware of what had happened, because I felt, strongly, that Sudan had become this wasted opportunity. There were so many things that could have gone right that had gone wrong, and blaming the British and the colonial era was just not enough anymore.”
Jamal Mahjoub
Mahjoub has been a fan of crime fiction since childhood, finding Sherlock Holmes’ estrangement and Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries more hospitable than much literary fiction: “Writers such as Ian McEwan or Martin Amis,” he wrote recently in Shots, “describe worlds that were keenly defined as places where someone like myself simply would not fit in.” Unsurprisingly, then, his own detective, Makana, is also a somewhat elusive figure, living on a Nile riverboat, which is rotten and constantly in danger of sinking.
“Ever since I’d first gone to Cairo [his family was exiled there in 1989], I had wanted to write about this fascinating place, a vast city full of amazing history and a modernity which is completely skewed. It felt then like Paris just before the revolution: You had tremendous poverty on the streets and this wealthy class [which was] almost hermetically sealed off.” Into this world Mahjoub brings Makana, a man who, like Cairo itself, is poised between the old and the new: “He is modern in his outlook, not fazed by women taking part in society and being able to move around freely. But he’s also old-fashioned in his chivalry, duty and dedication to the truth.” It is Makana’s status as an exile that makes him such an adept navigator of the city, able to fade into the background because nobody pays attention to an African migrant. But when someone is needed to investigate a problem, being an outsider makes him highly employable: The system in Egypt is so corrupt that no one trusts the authorities.
Alongside his Parker Bilal series, Mahjoub is also working on a novel about England in the 1980s. He wants to explore the alienation he felt as a young man newly arrived in the country, filled with a heady excitement for a culture that, briefly, seemed to embrace everyone, exemplified in the music of Two-Tone and Rock Against Racism, the books of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy and films such as Hanif Kureishi’s “My Beautiful Laundrette.” This moment of solidarity ended, he feels, in 1989, when the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad.
Mahjoub is also at work on a nonfiction book about Sudan, which he hopes will encapsulate many of his earlier themes in a mix of memory, reflection and philosophy: “It’s a form that I like: creative nonfiction that allows the imagination in.” His expectations for this new work may not be as world-changing as those he cherished for his first novel, but he continues to have faith that his writing can extend our understanding: “It is the presence of your voice which changes the balance of the way people see the world. Without you being there, the cultural horizon that people have will be less. It will be Martin Amis.”
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