Desert rose
A novel of changing times 
LEILA ABOULELA’S “Lyrics Alley”, which has been shortlisted for the 2011 Orange prize for fiction, is set in Sudan, as it sloughs off British and Egyptian rule and prepares for its new liberty. Mahmoud, the urbane patriarch, straddles two worlds, embodied in his two wives. The first, Waheeba, is Sudanese; her bulk swathed in a traditional tobe, the tribal scars on her face like “cracks on a French loaf”. Spoilt Nabilah, his younger second wife, is an Egyptian glamourpuss, who sulkily divides her time between Egypt and Sudan, infuriated at the “primitiveness” of her new home, sullen at the heat and squalor of her husband’s “untamed land”. Dismissive of Waheeba, she scorns the very idea that this lump of a woman, “obese, menopausal, illiterate”, could be her rival in anything.
Different as they are, Mahmoud “glides gracefully” between his two worlds, enjoying both Cairo’s avenues and the alleys of Umdurman. But when Nur, his beloved son, is paralysed after a diving accident on holiday in Alexandria, the balance is upset. Their lives falter. The once stable trio of Waheeba, Nabilah and Mahmoud is rocked.
Lying in bed, Nur’s paralysis crushes him like a giant thumb, “meaty and human, grotesque with a brittle purple nail”, pinning him down. He is consumed by anger, “solid and opaque”. But then, amid the turmoil, Nur finds solace writing poetry: odes to his homeland and his lost love. He hones his skill like a fisherman, learning to cast his net “into a river of dreams and catch a splendid array of words.”
Politics inevitably steals into Nur’s verses, mixed with his own suffering: “In you, Egypt, are the causes of my injury. And in Sudan, my burden and solace.” Ms Aboulela paints the history that unfolds behind the family upheaval with a delicate hand. There are moments of drama—a demonstration at the university, a parade—but these are rare. Instead she offers characters that absorb and fascinate. None is without redeeming features; Nabilah’s gentle love for her grandmother tempers her petulance; boozed-up Nassir, Nur’s brother, buys glasses for Soraya, his bookish but myopic cousin, in defiance of his elders.
Particularly well-drawn is the battle over whether to circumcise the family’s daughters. Mahmoud, supported by Nabilah, is implacably opposed. Waheeba, desperate for her daughter to fit in to Sudanese society and anxious that no man will want to marry her, circumcises her in secret. Resentful of her rival, she has Nabilah’s daughter circumcised too. There are metaphors in this episode for Sudan’s struggle to find its new identity, the tug between the old ways and the new. But its power lies in its depiction of humanity; the anguished rage of a mother at what has been done to her daughter, the vindictive envy of the old wife passed over for the new, a child’s bewildered pain and fear
