The Wedding of Zein
The
Wedding of Zein (Arabic: عرس الزين) is a contemporary Arabic
novel by the late Sudanese author Tayeb
Salih. It was published in Arabic in 1962
and translated into English in 1968. Within the realm of Arab
literature, the book is considered a classic
and was republished as part of the influential Heinemann African
Writers Series.
The
story is set in the fictional village of Wad Hamid, the same setting as Salih's
famous Season of Migration
to the North.
Plot summary
The
story opens with the village hearing the news of Zein's upcoming nuptials.
Because Zein is regarded as the village idiot, the people as a whole are
greatly surprised that any family agreed to give their daughter to him.
The
rest of the story unfolds non-linearly. The first section is an account of
Zein's childhood and young adulthood, focusing on his strange ability to draw
attention to village girls by falling in love with them. After he sings their
praises, other people notice the girls, resulting in their advantageous
marriages. Because of this, the other villagers invite him over in hope of his
falling in love with their daughters. Zein is also distinguished by his
friendship with Haneen, a Sufi holy man who did not associate closely with
anyone else in the village. He is also close to many of the socially shunned,
such as Mousa the Lame, a disabled former slave.
The
turning point of the story is an encounter between Zein and Seif ad-Din, a
local man of bad character. Seif ad-Din attacks Zein while he is standing
talking to Mahjoub's gang, a group of local men who run the village. Zein
retaliates with unexpected strength, but before he can actually kill Seif
ad-Din, he is stopped by Haneen, who blesses both men and the village as a
whole. In the following year, which is referred to as Haneen's year, the
village experiences multiple miracles, which they attribute to Haneen's
blessing. The story climaxes with one of these miracles, the wedding of the
fool Zein to the most beautiful, intelligent, religious girl in the village,
Ni'ma.
Main characters
Zein: Zein is an unconventional man from the moment of his birth,
when he entered the world laughing rather than crying. He also has a
non-traditional physical appearance, which Salih describes at length: he has a
long face with prominent bones, with only one tooth on his bottom jaw and one
on the top, a long neck and long arms, which are described as resembling those
of a monkey, broad shoulders, and prodigious, unsuspected strength, which
becomes dangerous when he gets in fights. Notably, Zein is completely hairless,
lacking even eyebrows and eyelashes. He has an enormous appetite that leads him
to attend as many social events as he can, where he inevitably irritates his
hosts by eating too much. Kenneth Harrow argues that Zein's outsized appetites
are "signs or metaphors for other, higher appetites," because he is
meant to represent the perfect Sufi saint. Areeg As-Sawi Mohammed Ballag argues that Zein's
name is meaningful, because it literally refers to decoration, which is ironic,
because Zein himself is physically unattractive, although he still decorates
the village with his spiritual excellence.
Haneen: Haneen is a holy man who spends half his year in the
village and the other half living ascetically. No one in the village knows
exactly where he goes for the second half of the year. Zein is the only person
with whom Haneen is friendly. Haneen's blessing effects numerous miracles in
the village, including turning the criminal Seif ad-Din into a model citizen,
helping with harvest and prosperity, and causing Zein's marriage to Ni'ma.
Ballag writes that his name is linguistically related to the words for great
feelings and deep sincere emotions, as well as compassion and mercy,
underscoring his role as the bringer of mercy to the village.
Ni'ma: Ni'ma is the most beautiful girl in the village. She is
unusually serious and studious. As a child, she was the only girl in the
elementary school. However, although she was devoted to learning the Quran at
the elementary school, she rejects her brother's suggestion that she continue
her schooling, because she claims that non-religious education is nonsense.
Although she is approached by a number of respectable suitors, she rejects them
all, until she decides that her destiny is to marry Zein. Ballag writes that
Ni'ma's name, which means blessing, was chosen to emphasize the fact that her
marriage to Zein is the conferring of a blessing upon him.
Mahjoub's
gang: Mahjoub's gang is composed of men
between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five who rule the village. They are
farmers by vocation. They are not particularly religious, but they do
understand the importance of religion to the community, so they collect the
Imam's salary from the other villagers every month and see to repairs in the
mosque. They organize all important social functions in the community,
including weddings, burials, and funerals. They also manage irrigation of the
Nile and other important practical matters in the village.
The
Imam: the Imam is the officially
designated spiritual leader of the village; however, he does not connect well
with the other villagers, because of his lack of concern with their daily lives
and his fixation on fire and brimstone
preaching in his sermons. He is the only person in the village hated by Zein.
Seif
ad-Din: Seif ad-Din, at the beginning of
the story, is an unrepentant sinner who gets drunk frequently, visits
prostitutes, disobeys and disrespects his parents and uncles, and is suspected
of living a life of crime in the city when he isn't in the village. Ahmad Nasr
claims that Seif ad-Din represents all the negative values associated with
modern city life. Harrow argues that Seif ad-Din is a foil for Zein, because,
unlike Zein, his outward appearance, with his beard and ever present traveler's
bag, resembles that of a traditional Sufi saint, yet his interior is perfectly
rotten at the start of the story. Additionally, both men are ruled by love:
Seif ad-Din's final break with his father is caused by his desire to marry a
prostitute, while Zein is defined by his ability to draw attention to the
village girls through his love of them. After his encounter with Zein and
Haneen, Seif ad-Din turns his life around. He treats his father's former slaves
kindly, where before he had neglected them. He abstains from drinking. He
settles down and marries his cousin. He even calls the adhan at the mosque.
Setting
The
Wedding of Zein, like many of Salih's works, takes
place in the village of Wad Hamid
in northern Sudan.
The literary critic Ami Elad-Boulaski writes that the shared setting, in
addition to the repeated themes and recurring characters, allows Salih's works
to be viewed as part of one coherent world. Elad-Boulaski believes that this world
is more fully realized because a reader can track the development of characters
throughout multiple novels and short stories.
Constance
Berkeley and Osman Ahmed, in their introduction to a translation of four
interviews with Salih, argue that he focuses on the village, as opposed to the
city, because the village represents pre-colonial culture. Salih himself
explains that Wad Hamid "represents the center of civilization in
Sudan." He also attempts to achieve a pan-Arab universality through his description of the village; as he
puts it: "the atmosphere depicted of the Sudanese village in The
Wedding of Zein resembles to a great degree the same atmosphere in the
Syrian, Algerian, and Egyptian village. The people in the Arab homeland
resemble each other more than they realize. The day will soon come in which all
Arabs will discover, for us, unity is a question of life or death."
Despite
the fictional nature of the work, the account of Sudanese village life depicted
therein is considered accurate enough to be an anthropological record. For
example, Sondra Hale writes that by reading the novella, "one can learn as
much about Sudanese village life as from most ethnographic studies." Wail
Hassan differs from Hale, in that he does not make the argument that the
village as depicted functions as an academic source for understanding real
Sudanese village life. However, he does note that the narrator seems to view
the village at a distance, through an ethnographic lens: "the
quasi-anthropological gaze of the third-person narrator, who is clearly an
outsider, serves to undercut the villagers' worldview...The narrator reports
the beliefs of the villagers, neither vouching for nor discrediting those
beliefs, but insisting nevertheless on their peculiarity."
The
world of Wad Hamid, as depicted in the novella, is a utopia. Salih himself explains that the world of The Wedding of
Zein, unlike the same village in his other writing, represents the world as
it should be, because of the happiness and stability that is so easy to come
by. Salih goes on to say that this utopia is best symbolized through the coming
together of the entire village at Zein's wedding, which is possible only
because Zein is the perfect representation of a unifying Sufi element.
Hassan
presents the publication date as one possible reason for the novella's
depiction of a utopia, because, in his opinion, the novella "expressed the
boundless optimism generally characteristic of the early years of independence." However, he also does not believe that the novella's
utopia is stable, because the climax of the story is Zein's wedding, and people
traditionally come together at weddings and funerals and then return to their
divisions afterwards. Therefore, even though the coming together is more
dramatic at Zein's wedding than at other weddings, Hassan believes that the
novella implies it will fall apart afterwards, just like any other temporary
unity.
Literary Criticism
Popular
Islam
Scholars
see one of the central tensions in the novel as that between popular Islam,
represented by the holy man Haneen and his disciple Zein, and orthodox Islam,
represented by the figure of the Imam. Some view the division between the two
camps as absolute. For example, Ali Abdalla Abbas argues that institutionalized
religion, as represented by the Imam, contains no holiness or blessedness
whatsoever, because it is overly concerned with dogma. Similarly Ahmad Nasr
writes that popular Islam is glorified over institutionalized Islam because,
"Salih seems to equate mysticism with happiness."
Others
view the pairing as more complementary. While Kenneth Harrow agrees that they
both represent different approaches to religion, he couches the difference not
in terms of the presence or absence of holiness, but rather as the Imam
representing the written word, while Haneen represents the oral, both necessary
in their own way. Wail Hassan makes a similar point explicitly when he writes,
"Haneen and the imam are not antagonists, the one nourishing the spiritual
life of the villagers, the one impoverishing it, respectively, which is how the
two religious figures have often been represented by commentators on the
novella." He supports his point by highlighting the fact that the Imam is
reading a particularly blessed verse from the Quran at the same time that
Haneen is blessing the village, implying that they are working in concert with
one another.
The
supernatural versus the secular
Salih
says that he "accept[s] the world of magic" and that the world
depicted in this novella is deliberately "not secular and things do not go
according to scientific rules." He chose to write the world in this manner
as a deliberate argument against socialist
realism, which Sondra Hale identifies as
the dominant artistic style in mid-century Sudan. Thus, this novella may be
considered part of the tradition of magical
realism.
The
role of women in a traditional Sudanese society
Eiman
El Nour writes that all of Salih's works feature "forceful female
characters who in their own way rebel against the age-old traditions of a
taboo-laden, rural, male-dominated society" of which Ni'ma is just one
typical example because of her early participation in the school system and her
insistence of choosing her own husband. Ami Elad-Bouskila concurs with this
assessment of Ni'ma as one iteration of the headstrong village girl that
appears elsewhere in Salih's works. However, she adds that Ni'ma and her
sisters in the other novels and short stories are not realistic depictions of
Sudanese women. Rather, they symbolize Salih's hope for societal change.
Not
all scholars agree that Ni'ma represents an unconventional figure. Wail Hassan
argues that she "breaches only the outward aspect of tradition,"
because her rebellion is still based in Islam, the accepted religion of all the
villagers. Additionally, her convictions ironically lead her to marry her
cousin, the most conventional choice in a traditional Sudanese society. Hassan
argues that Ni'ma ultimately "affirms social convention over vanity,"
because she marries her cousin despite the fact that he is the village idiot.
The
impact of modernization on village life
Ami
Elad-Bouskali describes the changing view of Wad Hamid's inhabitants towards
modernization as depicted in the various stories set in the village. She writes
that modernization has begun in The Wedding of Zein, in that new
technology has been introduced into the village, but no voices of opposition
have yet been discovered.
Some
scholars have tied the theme of modernization to another central theme of the
novel, popular Islam. Ahmad Nasr writes that the novella ultimately argues that
"modernization could be achieved under the auspices of popular
Islam," because Haneen's blessing of the village encompasses the addition
of new technology.
Film
Main article: The Wedding of Zein (film)
Ali
Mahdi (Zein) and Tahiya Zaroug (Ni'mi) starred in the film. It was first
released in 1976 and directed by Kuwaiti director Khalid Alsiddig.
References
· Salih, Tayeb (1968). The Wedding of Zein
and Other Stories. London: Heinemann Education.
· · Harrow, Kenneth
(1987). "The Power and the Word: L'Aventure Ambigue and The Wedding of
Zein". African Studies Review. 30 (1): 63–77. doi:10.2307/524504. JSTOR 524504.
· · Ballag, Areeg
As-Sawi Mohammed (2007). The Semantic Implication of Names in The Wedding of
Zein. Khartoum: University of Khartoum.
· · Nasr, Ahmad
(1980). "Popular Islam in Al-Tayyib Salih". Journal of Arabic Literature.
11: 88–104. doi:10.1163/157006480x00108.
· · Elad-Bouskila,
Ami (1998). "Shaping the Cast of Characters: The Case of Al-Tayyib
Salih". Journal of Arabic Literature. 29 (2): 59–84. doi:10.1163/157006498x00118.
· · Salih, Tayeb;
Berkeley, Constance; Osman, Ahmed (1982). Tayeb Salih Speaks: Four Interviews
with the Sudanese Novelist. Washington, D.C.: Embassy of the Democratic
Republic of the Sudan.
· · Hale, Sondra
(1970). "Sudan's Literary Renaissance". Africa Report. 15 (9):
29–31.
· · Hassan, Wail
(2003). Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction. Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press. pp. 50–81.
· · Abbas, Ali
Abdalla (1974). "Notes on Tayeb Salih: Season of Migration to the North
and The Wedding of Zein". Sudan Notes and Records. 55: 46–60.
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