Trojan Duck: Migration and Modernity in Sudan (1)

هذه مقالة عن كتاباتي عن نشأتي في بيئة للحداثة في مدينة عطبرة بسكك حديدها في محاولة للتعرف على حقيقة اجتماعية وسياسية جديدة هي المدينة. فنحن ما نزال في الغالب نحاكم أنفسنا ونتحاكم إلى القرية كأن المدينة طارئ بلا بصمات على خلق كثير منا. فكثيراً ما قلت لبعض أهل القرى من حولي ممن استنكروا ماركسيتي مثلاً أنهم لم يكونوا ربما في الحواضن التي نفذت لنا منها هذه النظرية ليتلقوها كما تلقيناها. ولا تخول لهم براءتهم من دمغ المدينة هذا وابتلاءاتها أن يظنوا أنهم على الهوية السودانية الحق وما عداها شغب أجنبي أدار رؤوس أمثالي. وهو السياق الذي طالبت فيه كثيراً أن يتواضع فيه هؤلاء القوم ويقبلوا ب"الحق في المدينة" عن طيب خاطر.
نشرتها في مجلة تصدر عن معهد الدراسات الأفريقية والعالمية بجامة نورثوسترن بالولايات المتحدة في شتاء 1996. وعربتها ونشرتها في جريدة "الرأي العام" وهي من قلائل ما لا احتفظ به في أرشيفي. وتزول الغمة ونبحث عنها. وأهديها لشباب المهاجر الأمريكية ممن أتقنوا الإنجليزية ولم يجدوا ربما نصاً ميسراً عنا فيها.

My inauguration as a city boy still sticks in my mind. My father had to wrench me away from my mother to take me to Atabara, where he worked in the Railway Headquarters of Sudan. The scuffle was loud and took place in the village square in front of our relatives and all who had come there to bid my father farewell.
Each of my claimants had strong reasons to think he or she was doing the right thing. At the age of five, I unquestionably belonged to my mother. Though not divorced from my father, she was maqanjira (angry) and living with her family in the village. However I was almost school age and my father, whose primary schooling was rare for his generation, had awakened to the usefulness of education for achieving social mobility within the colonial setup. He could not let this opportunity slip because of a capricious, recalcitrant wife. Represented by my mother and father, this dramatic struggle has remained with me for years.
Before my inauguration as a city boy, I dreamt of going to the city to see my father, but like most children of migrant workers we reunited only briefly during his annual vacation. The city, as my friends and I imagined it, was a land of riches where sugar took the place of sand. We would look at the hills that lay behind the village and repeat what we were told — crossing the hills and going south would take us to where our fathers lived. Missing our fathers, we would assemble and sing:
Oh moon
toss your red bread
see whether my father is coming
Later, as a youth in the city, I sensed I no longer belonged to the world of my parents, where the village was the source of memories of a time when people associated with their tribe. My generation associated with people scattered all over the country. We were being groomed to enter a new world.
Urbanization by default
I have always been intrigued by the urbanization of my parents’ generation. The decisions they made to cope with this venture must have been excruciating. Yet for most men at least, their urbanization never involved a conscious or deliberate decision. Many became urbanites by default.
Men were lured from their villages into the urban centers by a labor market opened up by the British colonial administration early in this century. They left their villages thinking they would raid this market, save some money, then return to their villages to get married and help their families by acquiring land or building a better house.
Not all families permitted their sons to migrate. The fathers of some of these young men were already losing their slaves through colonial abolitionist acts, and they did not want to lose their sons too. For many, migration was viewed as an episode of shurad (escape) from the village. Migrations were also known as tashish (losing one’s way), in recognition of both the diabolic enticement that the labor market represented and the reality of the village as the ultimate anchor.
Yet my father’s decision to migrate was welcomed by my landless grandfather. In a farming community, having no land is both a form of unemployment and an abomination. Land ownership distinguished the village people from the nomad. With his first savings, my father bought a piece of land in town, restoring respect to his family.
Landless, my father and his elder brother had time to attend the colonial government school in Korti, the northern provincial capital. Government schools had a bad name then. One village called their school “the church” to mark it as a non-Muslim, culturally-polluted space. And I still remember the pleasant-looking man who stopped my friends and me on our way to school and said slowly, “They will teach you the world is round. Don’t believe them.”
Ironically, this first urban generation was the last to realize they had taken a journey of no return. Even when they brought their families with them, they “shelved” their rites of passage until they returned to their villages for vacation. Grandmothers and grandfathers served as the erstwhile masters of ceremonies for marriage, circumcision, and birth, giving the village a ritual authority and creating a fluency with the cities. Tied to village and kinship spaces, these early migrant laborers refused to consider the urban neighborhoods in which they lived as other than temporary abodes.
The gift exchange
The generation of my father tried to make the city a “minimum settlement” where nothing festive or spiritually enhancing interfered with their utilitarian focus: work. My father would never go to the movies. Some people would even pronounce “cinema” in a classical Arabic pattern to read as “evil has grown.” Once when I missed a school movie outing, I remember my father taking my mother and me to the door of a theater, paying for the tickets, then coming back to take us home.
Nor did his generation understand the idea of having a relationship with a neighbor who was not a relative, “a guy on the block.” They wanted their sons and daughters to marry the right relatives, according to the Book of Kinship. But this plan faltered due to the attractions and desires of the guys and gals on the block.
My father’s generation, like all migrants, faced the challenge of sending “full letters,” letters in which money talked as well as words. Fathers, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and wives left behind in the village were the recipients of these “money orders,” a la Ousmane Sembane's The Money Order. A monthly flow of cash blew in the direction of the villages to satisfy newly acquired needs.
Similarly, a gift exchange ensued between village and city. Villagers sent dates, margarine, powdered okra, and wheat to the cities in drab, dirty sacks. From the city, people brought back sugar, tea, soap and new fabrics. The gift exchange was important, and you had to plan carefully for a trip back to the village counting the bundles of sugar and tea. Everyone was entitled to something. You had to think of your aunts, of cousins three times removed, of local religious and political personalities.
In a story titled The Measure (1965), I tell how this gift economy became a measure of worthiness in the village. If you spent a vacation in the village and did not buy a cigarette box for the old, childless woman, the village would be upset. If you remembered the cigarette box, you were honored as a person who cared for those outside of your kinship obligations. In the story, the woman dies and the migrants in the city, deprived of an established measure of their worth, feel lost. Then the village develops another measure — sugar for someone else — to set things right again.
The “minimum settlement” did not sit well once men started bringing their wives to live with them in the cities. My mother, an outspoken woman and not a relative of my father, was very critical of this gift economy. She thought my uncle back in the village was taking advantage of my father. He had failed to produce anything from the land bought by my father, she said, and should earn his own keep instead of waiting for money orders from my father. Instead, she complained, my uncle spent his days riding his jackass, drinking and carousing.
As the migrant families grew bigger in the cities, it became increasingly cumbersome to schedule a meaningful vacation in the village. The death of the old folks discouraged migrants from taking their rites of passage to the villages. Slowly these families began investing in the ritual economy of their urban neighborhoods, attending marriages and wakes and giving gifts. To have their symbolic and monetary credits returned, the families found it necessary to perform their own rites in the towns and cities. And as a rising number of marriages became trans-ethnic, the bride and groom related only as neighbors, a city wedding appeared as a suitable arrangement.

ibrahima@missouri.edu