Jean Sévry: Often, African writers are confronted with a linguistic choice. André Brink, for example, keeps shifting from Afrikaans to English, Kunene from Zulu to English and Boudjedra from French to Arabic. So far, all your works have been published in English. Did you ever think of writing in Arabic ?

Jamal Mahjoub: I have often thought about it. But I think there’s a great difference between being able to think and speak a language and to write in a creative way. All my fiction has been in English. I did consider, a few years ago, writing a novel set in Cairo, about Sudanese exiles living in that city; I thought it should be in Arabic. The idea was there. I would like to try this for myself, but it is a different project, I mean, all of my education is in English.

JS: But you acted as a translator for a while?

JM: Yes, but my Arabic is probably at the stage of a secondary school level. All of my understanding and reading of literature at university and, on the whole, since then, all has been in English, although strangely enough the first book that I recall was a book in Arabic which my father used to read to me as a child, a book of stories.

JS: You studied geology while in Sheffield. This is of great importance in The Carrier, but also, though in a less direct manner, in Navigation of a Rainmaker. In the case of The Carrier, it remains central, as it forces the reader to move from one layer of narration to another. What could geology teach you, on a realistic level, or on a symbolic level?

JM: Unfortunately, I don’t think that I was a particularly good student. The problem was that my idea of geology when I went into it was inspired by the whole idea of this enormous span of time, the millions of years, of the earth being transformed and I think that in some way that stems from an experience when I was young. The father of a friend of mine was a geologist, and he would take us with him sometimes and drive out of Khartoum and it is rather flat there, not a desert though as one might imagine, but flat and hard and littered with small stones, and he would say: these stones prove that this was once an ocean. For me this was almost a religious experience, the transformation of the landscape. It was a revelation. The earth being capable of such a metamorphosis! I think that idea stayed with me when I first went to university. I was good at writing essays, but I was very bad at doing the practical work. You pick up a rock and you know immediately what it means: some of the others knew instinctively, but I could not see it. Originally, my idea was to work in the Sudan. When that was not possible, I decided to write something about somebody who did the job that I would have liked to have done. That’s what Navigation of a Rainmaker is about, at least that is how it began.

JS: And it goes on with The Carrier. It has much to do, I surmise, with a manipulation of time. In this novel we move from Denmark in modern times to the Renaissance and the Arab world. Also, in In the Hour of Signs, you act as a kind of historical chronicler with the story of the Mahdi, from 1881 to 1897. As a reader, I perceive that beyond the time of man you sense a much wider time, a cosmic one, which religions (Christian or Muslim) don’t seem to appreciate, and where motion is perpetual, where the earth is no longer the centre of the universe. A time that is Beyond, a time men cannot reach. What are your expectations regarding that time of beyond? Has it anything to do with Fate?

JM: I suppose there is a timelessness there, somehow, in all of this, in the sense that the experiences which have brought us to this time and space that we live in have to coincide somewhere; it is difficult to define what is the relationship between these two times. I often think that a novel like In the Hour of Signs is about the conflict between the perception of a higher order, a cosmic order if you like, and the real world, the tangible facts of life on earth. And in this case, actually, the one overcame the other. The Mahdi’s supporters were really poor, they had no training, no weapons, they had nothing, really, and yet they managed to overcome this, this huge empire looming over them.

JS: Isn’t there, too, a confrontation in this novel between the time of the West, which is very factual, and that of the Mahdi, which is more prophetic?

JM: Yes, the Mahdi’s movement was very much based, as far as I understood it, on invention; it was a re-invention, and many of the stories about the Mahdi were almost like folktales. He became a legend before he became a military leader, or a head of state, because that’s what he was. But he became a popular myth, history re-told. There is a section in the novel where the stories of the Mahdi begin to proliferate and spread in a kind of oral storytelling tradition, and this is the way it is absorbed. History often comes to us the way we’d like it or expect it to come.

JS: Yes, but don’t you think the Mahdi’s manipulation of time is wrong? After all, he leaves his people in total disarray...

JM: What I wanted to do was to try to catch the feeling of the time. I was trying to capture the way in which it happened, something that had not been tackled. And on the question of whether he was right or wrong, if you read me carefully, excuse me, you must realize which side I was on. I also included in the novel, again, a character who is called Hawi, and who is based upon Mahmud Mohammed Taha, a Sudanese religious scholar whose religious message was concerned with detaching reason from faith. In other words he was questioning the orthodox interpretation of Islam. He became very popular in the Sudan and was an outspoken critic of Numeiri’s government which arrested him, tried him for apostasy and hanged him in January 1985. In Sudan, Islam has always been heavily influenced by the Sufi movement. There’s always been a conflict in Sudan with this Sufi interpretation of Islam, which has much more in common with this disconnection, this cosmic vision of the world, as you put it and the individual. The orthodox vision of Islam has much to do with the established order, the ways of interpreting the text, control, rules, and so forth. There’s always been a conflict between these two kinds of Islam. This is what the character in this novel is questioning, the real value of his faith, of the principles. Most of the people I spoke to about the Mahdi also felt that he was above everything else an intelligent and shrewd man. He knew what he was doing.

JS: Going though this ‘timelessness’, as you call it, hasn’t it something to do with the notion of Fate?

JM: There’s always been a conflict about this idea, which is possibly reflected in the conflict between West and East, whether one is the master of one’s destiny, or whether one’s desire is being led and I suppose I very much fall on the other side, on the side of believing in Fate. But at the same time it is different – and this is paradoxical – because many of the things that I write are influenced by the idea of social change.

JS: Besides, in some cases, you seem to reject that notion of a possible Fate. Remember Rachid in The Carrier: ‘He has been chasing a sarab, a mirage – science cannot lead us anywhere, but back to ourselves’. This is the time of science, which he seems to discard. Why?

J.M. In his case, I think he is trying to understand something which involves a complete break with what he has believed in up until this point. At the end of the novel he opts for life, and this means leaving behind the evidence he has collected, the books and scrolls he has strapped to his body, the discovery he has made. He is on the verge of collapse, of mental collapse, because he is unable to encompass all the contrasting elements at the same time, on the one hand his faith, and on the other his commitment to science which leads him to accept that the earth is not at the centre of the universe.

JS: What struck me very much in your works is the description of death, always seen as violent, desperate, and solitary. There is nobody holding out a helping hand. Think of The Carrier, with Rachid and Heinesen, or In the Hour of Signs, where Hawi’s death has much to do with that of Rachid, as a victimized person: ‘They needed someone to judge their case’. and he is hanged while praying La illaha il allah. Again, in Navigation of a Rainmaker, with the putrid atmosphere, the mud around a rotten ship, and Tanner, wounded, waiting for death. Why are there such violent visions of death?

JM: I do not know. I think it has to do with the idea that we are limited, that ultimately, whatever we do, whatever we think we can do – again, this is probably related to my understanding of geology – is insignificant against the vast canvas of time. I don’t see it as being tragic, but it is very poignant, very poetic, in certain ways. But it means that most of my characters are in a situation where inspiration, the drive they have inside them, tells them that they must do this despite the futility of their act. In all these places – think of Tanner in Navigation of the Rainmaker –, or of In the Hour of Signs, or also Rachid in The Carrier. They are all driven by a dream, something that is connected with that truth beyond. Their own lives, and ultimately their failure, reflect in a way the possibility of what they were striving for, what they were dreaming of: a transformation of the society they are living in, or of themselves. In the case of Tanner in Navigation of a Rainmaker, the transformation he is looking for is in himself, but it becomes in the second part of the novel a transformation of the country. He wants to heal the country besides healing himself. And this is what makes them tragic heroes in the sense that they are going against the grain. They are complete non-conformists although Hawi tries to go along, he is pushed further and further out by this belief in an ultimate truth, in justice.

JS: Now, regarding the death of Rachid in The Carrier. It is a very beautiful end, but also a mysterious and ambiguous one: the reader has to choose between redemption, martyrdom or a mystical vision. Which would you choose?

JM: I absolutely left it ambiguous because I wanted to keep him from being dead. I don’t think he’s dead. He is almost dead. But to my mind, he survives. And actually I could have written another end, but I didn’t want him to die. I wanted him to be very close to this. He has to decide at some stage whether to carry the knowledge he has got, or to leave. He knows all the stuff, and it is impossible for him to return, it is impossible for him to transmit this knowledge. It is related to the fact that the ideas of the Renaissance in Europe did not spread in the Islamic world... this division between reason and faith. And today, now, you still have this situation in the Middle East, this conflict between science on the one hand, proficient scientists of tremendous international repute, and at the same time this adherence to religious tenets that is unquestionable. There is a mainstream that is conservative.

JS: ... or fanatical. There is a constant denunciation of this in The Carrier as well as In the Hour of Signs or in Navigation of a Rainmaker. It is often associated with racialism, in Wings of Dust for example, with the character of Tommy Trenter, the paternalist Christian. Obviously, you can’t bear this, especially the refusal of cultural differences, in terms of time and space, between North and South (Europe and the Arab world in The Carrier), or within Sudan (North and South in In the Hour of Signs. Is it personal? Does it correspond to something in your own life?

JM: No. Because of my upbringing, and my parents, who were actually very liberal. But I think you are referring to the West seeking to impose conditions of acceptance, especially for people of my father’s generation, which is partly why I wanted to write about it in Wings of Dust. They were brought up by the West to be trained in order to take over the rule of the country. Their acceptance by the British was conditional. Tommy Trenter is of course an exaggeration. But in order to be accepted, you had to conform to a certain ideal. This still exists today. And if you look at the way African art is being represented in the West, the way African art is being interpreted, you can see there are expectations and if you confirm those expectations, you are accepted. This exists in literature. If you look at the huge wave of literature that is emerging from the ‘outside’, much of it carries an exaggerated exoticism. Now, if you don’t follow that, you become radicalized. This was what happened with Islam. Political aspirations in the Middle East as well as in Africa became radicalized largely because of the inability of the West to absorb ideas that are separate, specific to these countries. So that these countries will never be able to develop, politically or economically, in a way that will allow them to maintain their balance. Today, if you read the papers, if you look at Ethiopia, you have the outcome of this constant tendency in famine, civil war, devastation which are ultimately the result of all of those years of denial, the refusal to accept them developing on their own terms. And this polarization leads to erosion or radicalization. In the Islamic world there has been an extremism we have seen over the last twenty years, and is due to the fact that there is no suitable alternative available. If you reduce everybody else’s capability of providing another answer, a new answer, then you are on the road to fanaticism.

JS: Then comes possibly the problem of an identity given by authority, by the father, which can be seen through Rachid in The Carrier or through Tanner and Gilmour in Navigation of a Rainmaker, this ‘need to belong’, this desire for roots. We could also think of Sharif in Wings of Dust who is denied his identity by receiving the wrong name, Sharry. But this can also be seen on a collective level in the same novel: ‘Our country we loved so much was struggling to find a place in the world. And in forging its new identity it had to melt all that had gone before. We no longer existed. We were thrown into madness or exile if we were lucky, and into the grave if we were not’ (p. 155). This is a very pessimistic quote: do you still agree with that sort of statement?

JM: Sharif Turab is in an extremely pessimistic situation. This is the end of his life. He represents the hopes of that generation who thought that they could somehow find a way of marrying their own cultural background (which they have) with the new knowledge, and the emotional learning they acquired when they were in the West, to bring these two together to create a consistency out of this mess that they had been left with. But the map of the independent state pushed together people who had no relationship with one another whatsoever, and who in many cases did not know each other. So, you have this huge collection of people and somehow you are supposed to resolve the conflicts and to get balance and fairness out of this. But at the same time you have an elite which the British of course created as leaders to keep everything in order. So you have an impossible, no-win situation. This is how life is: it’s looking back and saying: where did we go wrong?

JS: Maybe this is why your characters are looking for an ideal father, but it seems to me, a difficult, or an impossible father ?

JM: Yes, the Father Figure. In many of my characters, the father figure is a problem and I suppose in some psychological ways, it has to do with myself and my relationship with my father, and what that relationship means to him and to me. I suppose also it has something to do with the fact that in order to write, you have to abstain from certain responsibilities and in this sense this is what I did for the line he wanted me to take, which was to stay and work there. I didn’t do that. So there’s always a conflict between being able to speak and my loyalty to an idea that was my father’s idea. That conflict somehow exists in me and is to be found in most of my characters. Rachid has a problem with his father, because his father is not his father. And in Navigation of a Rainmaker, Tanner is looking for a father, but actually the father has ceased to be; you see him in a house in Scotland, watching cartoons on television. In other words, he has no longer access to the culture that he represents to the boy, and the boy goes to get that back.

JS: I am also struck by the importance of travel in your works. Perhaps travels give you a certain distance. By shifting from one culture to another, don’t you maintain distances?

JM: I do not know. I suppose it does so probably with most people. But I think that certainly I am not conscious when travelling of trying to create distances. I travel mostly by accident, due to circumstances. There is a lot of romanticism involved with the idea about being nomadic whereas, in fact, nomadic people live at home, they just have a large radius, when they move, it is to the same places, circular. People today have to travel, that’s very much the modern condition. Most people have a relative or somebody they know who is living in a foreign country. Exile nowadays has become an overused term, in many ways, but people are often living in an alien place, and they have to deal with this. But I don’t think it has much to do with the practical matter of writing. Distance helps, it gives you the possibility to see more clearly, and it gives you freedom. This is one of the reasons why I set The Carrier in the past. I couldn’t write about the present, because I couldn’t see anything in the present that could inspire me in any way, and I was also very much aware and conscious of the idea of people arriving in Denmark or Europe as migrants or as exiles, and as they enter they lose their past, I mean everything about them ceases to exist. Of course, people in the host country know nothing about them, and they also believe they hardly need to know anything about these people, that they’ll never need to know about these people, and that their own history and culture have always been pure and unadulterated by outside forces. It is not true, but every nation has its own popular misunderstanding of its own history. This is very much one of the reasons why I wanted to write this in the past, because of that misconception. Again, it is a question of creating a distance between myself and the subject… writing about the past and history.

J.S. It seems you have much respect for initiation, as a gate to wisdom (Rachid). A writer is always a man with predecessors, and with a memory. Reading your works, I often thought of Naguib Mahfouz (The Search), or of Amin Maalouf and his perception of the crusades as a sign of the arrogance of the West. Have you any models?

J.M. No. The idea of credentials… I don’t have them, I am an autodidact, in the sense that I never studied literature. I didn’t even study English as a subject. All the choices we had at school were very much aimed at science, biology, to become a doctor, or engineering. And beginning to write, I was blissfully unaware of a lack of qualification and I realize that the same is true of many of my fellow writers; our reading, or our knowledge of literature is incomplete. Certain things we have read, but very often, with more than one source to draw on our knowledge is partial. We have gaps in our memory, that is why I stress this idea of credentials. I had to keep striving to prove that I have the credentials to write. At the same time I think the people who inspired me most directly are the people close to my background. I remember my father was a storyteller, not a qualified man, but still a man who had a talent to tell stories. I don’t know where he got this from, but it was true. It was something which he had. He had the talent for telling stories of his life. The other person was a Sudanese who was the first writer I actually ever met. When I was a child, I remember walking into his room, which was full of books and papers, and there was this man in a white djellabah, behind his desk. And you know, he was so like us. He was a good friend of ours. And that brought what was distant near. This was a man who could do it.

JS: You just said you were a kind of autodidact. You seem to move very easily from one literary genre to another, from the travelogue to the novel of adventures, the historical novel, the epic, the poetic, with great liberty. Maybe that’s why?

JM: There is a fundamental belief that I can write a story, and that I have a right to tell that story, and probably this comes from the dynamic between two things: my father being able to tell a story, and the sense of this body of literature and the need to insert my own life into this. The genre I feel comes from the writing itself. It’s a question of temperament. Everybody writes according to their heart.

JS: What are you working on, at the moment?

JM: At the moment, I am working on a story about the Aswan Dam, in Nubia, with the uprooting, the migration of 50,000 people…