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W6nnews.com ==== وطن === تاريخ النشر – 2026-07-23 12:47:00
Who has the right to tell the nation? Counter-memory in “Fashoda” and “August 9, 1924” by Ahmed Hasaballah Al-Hajj Dr. Al-Walid Adam Madibo Not all nations write their history in the same way. Some are written by the victors, some by historians. As for Sudan, its history was written, in many of its stages, by those who succeeded in monopolizing the definition of patriotism itself. This is why it was not surprising that Ali Abdel Latif, the founder of the first modern Sudanese national movement, remained outside the center of the national narrative for many decades, while other figures occupied a wider space in public memory, not because their impact was necessarily greater, but because the balance of power after the departure of the colonizer sided with them. Hence, “August 9, 1924” appears to be more than a historical novel about a revolution that failed militarily. She, along with her sister Fashoda, is an integrated narrative project to re-question Sudanese history, not by rearranging its facts, but by reconsidering the way in which those facts were written, and the voices that were granted the right to speak, and those that were excluded to the margins. It is difficult to read “The Ninth of August” as an independent novel. It is not complete unless it is read together with “Fashoda”. This is not because the two novels deal with two close eras, but rather because they form a single narrative that extends from the fall of the Mahdist state to the birth of the modern national movement. If “Fashoda” examines how Sudan entered the colonial era, then “The Ninth of August” asks how the Sudanese tried to regain their homeland, before the question itself became a matter of dispute: Who has the right to represent Sudan? Therefore, the real hero in the two novels is not Ali Javon, nor Ali Abdel Latif, nor even British colonialism, but rather the Sudanese memory itself. That memory that remembers things, forgets other things, and then presents what remains of it as all of history. From this angle, the novelistic project can be read as an example of what cultural criticism calls “counter-memory.” The two novels do not dispute the history books over the veracity of the facts, but rather they dispute over a deeper question: Why did characters remain at the heart of the national narrative, while other characters were relegated to its margins? Why were some defeats turned into margins, while some victories remained present because they were consistent with the state’s official narrative? Ahmed Hasaballah Al-Hajj does not write history from above, where the rulers and leaders stand, but from below, where those who have not long been allowed to be narrators of their experience stand. Here the organizing thread appears, which the reader will hardly see if he is satisfied with one of the two narratives without the other. In “Fashoda,” the generation of recruits from the sons of slaves emerges, men like Ali Javon, who found themselves carrying the empire’s rifle in Karari. They were not necessarily soldiers in a colonial project that they freely chose, but rather they were members of a social structure that preceded colonialism, and then colonialism came and repurposed it within its military machine. They were, in large part, victims of history rather than its creators. But the greatest paradox on which the writer builds his entire project does not appear until “The Ninth of August.” If the fathers carried the guns of the empire, then the children carried the idea of the homeland. One of the most painful ironies revealed by the novel project is that the children of slave recruits, whose fathers defeated the Mahdist state under the banner of the empire, are the same ones who, one generation later, gave birth to men who carried the idea of an independent Sudan. Fathers fought in the ranks of the invading army, while sons went out to establish the first modern national movement that transcends tribe, sect and ethnicity. It is as if history wanted to mock every social certainty; National awareness did not necessarily emerge from the homes that monopolized leadership, but it also emerged from the margins that had long been deprived of the right to speak. What makes this irony even more cruel is that some of the sons of big houses continued to view these people as “outcasts” who had no right to delve into “great affairs.” Here the description is no longer just a social insult, but rather becomes an explicit declaration of a complete perception of the nation, which makes the right to represent it an inherited privilege, not a political entitlement. How cruel is this paradox! It seemed, at that moment, that the class question was stronger than the national question, and that the battle for legitimacy within Sudanese society was, in some ways, more complex than the battle for liberation from colonialism itself. Hence, the 1924 Revolution gains its deeper meaning in the novel. It does not appear to be just a confrontation between the Sudanese and the British administration, but rather a confrontation between two different perceptions of the meaning of Sudan. It was not only colonialism that stood in the way of the revolution, but also an entire social structure that feared that its victory would lead to the redistribution of political legitimacy, not just the end of British rule. That is why the battle of 1924, in the reading suggested by the novel, was not a battle against the British alone. It was also a battle against the entire perception of who has the right to represent Sudan. From this angle, Ali Abdel Latif can be viewed as an example of what postcolonial theorists call the “subaltern.” What is meant here is not only that he is a marginalized figure, but rather a historical actor who participated in creating a pivotal moment, and then was marginalized within the official narrative of the national state. The novel does not bring back a man who was absent from history books, but rather brings back an entire historical possibility that was excluded from the national consciousness. However, Ahmed Hasaballah Al-Hajj refuses, with narrative intelligence, to turn this conflict into a moral confrontation between heroes and scoundrels. Perhaps what confuses the reader most is that the novel does not give him full heroes or full villains. Even the sectarian leaders, who appear in the novel to be far from the project of the 1924 revolution, cannot be understood outside their historical context. It saw itself as responsible for maintaining social balance, protecting its influence, or waiting for a more appropriate political moment. But the novel leaves a lingering question that the reader cannot escape: Was this legitimate political caution, or did it contribute, intentionally or unintentionally, to aborting the first comprehensive national project? Hence, the competition between the two masters to show loyalty to the British Crown does not appear to be just a historical detail, but rather a sign that the relationship with the colonizer was not always managed by the logic of direct resistance, but also by the logic of negotiation, calculating interests, and differing bets. The novel pushes the reader to contemplate this paradox when it places it in a broader context, where some positions on issues such as slavery or the relationship with the British administration appear to be part of a complex network of political and social calculations, and not just purely principled positions. Here the reader discovers that the history of the national movement is more ambiguous than the comfortable binary image that we inherited. This picture becomes more complicated when the novel hints that the division was never a dividing line between “collaborators” and “patriots.” Many of those who supported the 1924 revolution came from families that had close ties to the colonial administration, and many of those who carried the banner of patriotism in subsequent decades were members of classes that benefited, to varying degrees, from modern education or from the economic structure that arose under colonial rule. It is as if Sudan, generation after generation, has been redistributing sites, while the social structure itself remains capable of producing endless paradoxes. One of the ironies that calls for contemplation, not as a moral judgment, but as an indication of the complexity of Sudanese history, is that the Sudanese officer Abdullah Khalil, whose name was associated with the military role in suppressing the 1924 revolution, would, after more than three decades, become the leader of the Umma Party, and then prime minister in the period that followed the formation of the first national government after independence, specifically from July 1956 until November 1958. This irony is not read only as a contradiction in the biography of one man, but rather as An expression of how Sudanese history reproduced its elites and their roles. The same people, or members of the same generation, moved from working within the institutions of colonial rule to leading the national state after the departure of the colonizer, which makes the boundaries between the “colonial” and the “national” less clear than simplistic narratives suggest. Abdullah Khalil is not an isolated case, but rather an extensive example of a path that Sudan has witnessed more than once. The transition from institutions of colonial rule to institutions of the national state was not an exception, but rather one of the paths through which the political elite was formed after independence. On the other hand, many of those who carried the patriotism project in its first moments remained outside the center of official memory, as if history had not only excluded them politically, but also re-excluded them symbolically. Thus, Sudan, as depicted in the novel, appears to be a society whose children do not inherit political positions as much as they inherit positions within a complex social network. Children may turn against these sites, or reproduce them in a new form, but they are rarely able to escape them completely. As I read the two novels together, one question kept haunting me: Who are the free people at this hour? Who are the slaves? The question here is not about the legal status, as slavery as an institution has ended. Rather, it is about freedom as a moral and political position. Is he the one who was born free, but remained a prisoner of the privilege he inherited? Or the one who was born in the margins, then rebelled against the legacy that wanted him to remain a follower? Sudan is perhaps one of the few countries where the legacy of slavery remains present in social consciousness even after the disappearance of its legal institution. The painful irony is that some people are ashamed of lineages they had no hand in, while others see nothing wrong with being proud of social positions formed within unjust systems. This observation is not intended to distribute innocence and condemnation, but rather to point out that social history does not leave societies once laws change, but rather remains present in memory, language, and politics. Therefore, the greatest value of Ahmed Hasaballah Al-Hajj’s project is not that it narrates another history, but rather that it teaches us how to read history in another way. The novel does not ask: Who betrayed and who resisted? Do not ask: Who won and who was defeated? Rather, it asks a deeper question: Who, after every historical turning point, monopolized the right to narrate the homeland? Here lies the uniqueness of the novel project. It does not belong to the traditional historical novel that takes the past as the scene of events, but rather to the novel that makes history itself a subject of criticism. The history in “Fashoda” and “The Ninth of August” is not a finished past, but rather a present disguised as a past, and therefore the reader closes the two novels less certain of the narrative he inherited from his homeland, and more ready to rethink it. Perhaps this is what makes the novelist project of Ahmed Hasaballah Al-Hajj worthy of being read alongside the major narrative projects in Sudanese literature. If Tayeb Salih made the question of identity – who are we? As the focus of his major works, Ahmed Hasaballah Al-Hajj moves the discussion to a question no less dangerous: Who has the right to represent “we”? It is a shift from the question of identity to the question of legitimacy. From research into the formation of the Sudanese personality to research into how the national memory was formulated, and who has the authority to define it and exclude others from it. Hence, “Fashoda” and “August 9, 1924” do not appear to be mere novels about the past, but rather a literary project that re-questions the foundations on which the national state itself was founded. This, in my estimation, is the true achievement of Ahmed Hasaballah Al-Hajj: that he does not push his reader to memorize the facts of history, but rather to doubt the single narrative of history, and to believe that the homeland, like literature, is only complete with the multiplicity of voices that narrate it. auwaab@gmail.com Author
