The Wedding of Zein (New York Review Books (Paperback))
Tayeb Salih
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 1590173422
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“The Wedding of Zein” unfolds in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salih’s tragic masterpiece Season of Migration to the North is set. Here, however, the story that emerges through the overlapping, sometimes contradictory voices of the villagers is comic. Zein is the village idiot, and everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that he will be getting married—Zein the freak, Zein who burst into laughter the moment he was born and has kept women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at six and whose face is completely hairless, Zein married at last? Zein’s particular role in the life of the village has been the peculiar one of falling in love again and again with girls who promptly marry another man. It would be unheard of for him to get married himself.
In Tayeb Salih’s wonderfully agile telling, the story of how this miracle came to be is one that engages the tensions that exist in the village, or indeed in any community: tensions between the devout and the profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional. In the end, however, Zein’s ridiculous good luck augurs an ultimate reconciliation, opening a prospect of a world made whole.
Salih’s classic novella appears here with two of his finest short stories, “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid” and “A Handful of Dates.”
neighbouring fields tens of people momentarily stop digging as they listen to Zein’s cry. While the young men laugh, some of the older men, who are occasionally irritated by Zein’s tomfoolery, mumble with annoyance, ‘What’s that crazy boy gabbling about now?’ When at sunset work in the field comes to an end and the people take themselves off to their houses, Zein walks home from the field amidst a large crowd of young men, boys and girls, all laughing merrily around him, as he struts about among
a green arm,’ who touched nothing without it turning to money. In less than twenty years he had built up a fortune from scratch, partly in lands and estates, partly in goods distributed along the length of the Nile from Kareema to Karma, partly in the form of boats loaded with dates and merchandise plying up and down the river; partly in the shape of the great mass of gold worn by his wife and daughters in the way of jewellery covering their necks and arms. Seif ad-Din was brought up an only son
slightly alarmed when he heard Abdul Samad say to him: ‘Your honour shouldn’t be in any way annoyed. If you want to marry, the village is full of women who are spinsters or divorced, or whose husbands have died—the most beautiful of women, I swear to you.’ At this the Headmaster really flared up. All his inner resentment was poured out on Abdul Samad. ‘Fellow, are you mad? Don’t you know the difference between being serious and joking? Haven’t you got an atom of brain? What concerns me is the
happiness at seeing the astonishment and admiration that showed upon their faces. He reminded them of the story of Kuthayyir with whom Azza fell in love despite his being short and ugly, also the story of the bedouin woman who, asked why she had married an ugly and uncouth man, said: ‘By God, had you but ….’ The Headmaster and Abdul Samad almost fell on to their backs with laughter when they heard what the bedouin woman had said. He then referred to the Ibrahimab tribe who were all descended
understanding a thing of what was going on around us except that our arms were aching with all the handshakes we had been receiving from those Presidents and Members of Parliament. Then they took us off in a great mass to the place where the doum tree and the tomb stand. The Prime Minister laid the foundation stone for the monument you’ve seen, and for the dome you’ve seen, and for the railing you’ve seen. Like a tornado blowing up for a while and then passing over, so that mighty host