Stranger Intimacy

The Sun on My Head, Geovani Martins, Faber and Faber, 2019, 128pp (paperback)

Thirteen Months of Sunrise, Rania Manoun, Comma Press, 2019, 80pp (paperback)

Mark Gevisser’s Dispatcher (Granta, 2014) – a consummate piece of creative non-fiction that looks at urban planning and entrenched violence in Johannesburg – demonstrates the complexities of walking through a city beset by ghettoisation. The edges he treads testify to the ways race, class, and a host of intersecting segregations manifest in jarring ways: he writes that Johannesburg ‘draws its energy precisely from its atomisation and its edge, its stacking of boundaries against each other’; herein, he writes what Loren Kruger calls ‘the edgy city’. These stacked boundaries mean oppositional forces come into contact; they mean that, in the same breath, domestic calm and violent crime are bespoken.

There’s another excellent, much slimmer book that walks through Johannesburg: Phaswane Mpe’s novella Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Ohio University Press, 2011). Mpe’s sketches of Hillbrow – an inner-Jo’burg district with high population density, poverty and crime – are both poetic and matter-of-fact as they deal with sex work, AIDS, death and communality. Borrowing from Lauren Berlant, Neville Hoad insightfully calls these sketches examples of ‘stranger intimacy’ – a paradoxical closedistance that gets at the ways in which poverty and wealth, peace and crime, domesticity and violence complexly touch one another.

Stranger intimacy captures something of what Geovani Martins, in The Sun on My Head, and Rania Manoun, in Thirteen Months of Sunrise, reveal of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and Khartoum and Wad Madani’s streets.

Mamoun’s collection – and Elizabeth Jacquette’s deft translation of it – isn’t exclusively about spatial boundaries and urban experience in contemporary Sudan; it’s a tonally varied survey of, more broadly, human experience and relationships and interiorities. But its most successful stories are indeed those in which stacked boundaries and stranger intimacy abound. ‘A Woman Asleep on Her Bundle’, a piece about an elderly homeless woman who rests on the walls of a mosque, is rendered with weightiness and lightness, severity and levity – this is Mamoun at her best. The piece might read, on its surface, as a story of sorrow. But, read closer, the woman is revealed in positive terms, often with a numinous quality that Mamoun deploys across the collection: the woman has ‘rhythm, harmony’; walks ‘in syncopated steps’; ‘often glisten[s] from the way she oil[s] her legs and hands’. The narrative voice feels a pull towards this woman and her enigmatic bundle – a pull, we sense, across divides. Whereas the narrator’s friends fear the woman, who is rumoured to throw stones at people ‘just because they said hello’, the narrator ‘carried on greeting her every day, and she never threw a stone at me’. As the story turns to close, she longs to sit with the woman, ‘to have our morning coffee together and hear her stories, headless of the dust kicked up by cars and inquiring looks from passersby’. But this longing remains precisely that – an unfulfilled hope of crossing dusty divides of wealth and class and age:

I longed for her, and thought about helping her or inviting her to come home with me, but always feared how she might respond. I feared the stones that lay buried in my memory, because just like all villains, I too had fears.

It’s a prime example of how, in rendering the consternations of human boundaries, Mamoun also renders the spatial and structural boundaries which underlie them.

The title story, ‘Thirteen Months of Sunrise’ – perhaps the finest piece in the collection – also finds its virtue in asymptotic comings-together. The Sudanese narrator, Rania, and her Ethiopian friend, Kidane/a, meet in an internet café – something of an ancestral home for stranger intimacy.

The linguistic, ethnic and cultural borders this relationship presents (the characters discuss the gendering of the names Kidane and Kidana in their respective dialects; the cultural markers of clothing; Eritrea’s conflicts with Ethiopia; the extraordinary story of why Ethiopia has thirteen months) aren’t quite bridged: as Kidane/a leaves, Rania asks a stranger, ‘Will I see him again someday, somewhere?’, before announcing, in her dialect, in the past tense, that ‘Kidane Kiros was his name’.

‘Thirteen Months of Sunrise’ also sets the path for Elisabeth Jaquette’s excellent translation. One of Mamoun’s abilities is in her light-touch, textured combination of varying tones and themes. Jaquette’s translation captures simultaneous humour, despair, and tenderness in fittingly unobtrusive ways. Such tonal richness is on show in passages such as ‘Mum, are you gonna eat us when you get hungry?’ asks the boy of four, and she smiles, tells him no, hugs him, and sadly considers his need to ask I have no doubt that this line’s success, as we receive it in English, owes much to Jaquette.

Lurking, throughout the collection and behind these confluences of language, tone and peoples, is the confluence of the Nile – the point in Khartoum where the ‘unruly Blue Nile’ and the ‘wide, calm White Nile’ touch. Where Gevisser traces how Johannesburg is spatially planned according to human imperatives, Mamoun reveals the regional planningwork done by the river. Throughout the Thirteen Months of Sunrise, the contact of differing forces structures how relationships, narratives and spaces interact. The closing story, ‘Stray Steps’, most clearly depicts such contact between ghettoised spaces. Like Gevisser and Mpe, Mamoun’s character walks the edges of the city:

I hadn’t intended to push myself to the edge of my ability, a full two streets from home. I had planned to go beg at the bakery on the next street over.

My crippling hunger set me in motion.

It’s a taught, subtle depiction of the movements we will see in Rio’s

favelas: the repercussions of segregation, pushed to their edge, bringing about the very transgression of such segregations. The narrator’s hunger, thirst and poverty push them further, until their strength fails moments from a mazeera holding three urns of water. Moneyed partygoers from a nearby house walk past, unnoticing. It is a group of stray dogs – strangers – who show the narrator care, tossing them raw meat and mouldering bread. Two dogs have sex, undeterred by its publicness, as the collection closes with the narrator’s crushing reflection: ‘I might’ve eaten a cat, or a mouse, or a lizards, I might’ve swallowed a one, but did it matter?’. The scene is the book’s clearest pronouncement of stranger intimacy, and the spatial, special and situational boundaries that breed it; it’s also another moment in which Jaquette’s translation, through its syntax and phraseology, captures the complexity.

There are weaker pieces, particularly towards the centre of the book. ‘In the Muck of the Soul’, despite some affective passages, is overwrought in borrowing form from cinematic production. ‘A Week of Love’, immediately before it, is a fleeting, unoriginal account of passing romance – again not helped by its formal artifice. (Artifice, I think, not play.) These stories feel thinner because their accounts of emotions and interiorities lack the thickening force of the urban contexts, cultural touchstones and social structures that Mamoun depicts elsewhere with craft. Nevertheless, this collection – the first major work by a Sudanese woman translated into English – is a valuable and rich offering, an enigmatic bundle of stories. Mamoun is a significant writer. She’s also a journalist and activist, a positionality that throws up a final point: just as Martins’s writing is not about Bolsonaro, but about a history of disenfranchisement and inequality in which Bolsonaro is a particularly twisted but recent turn, Thirteen Months of Sunrise, whilst it inspects some of the firelighters underneath Sudan’s current social unrest, is not about these conflicts. It is about more than that; its lens is wider, and the better for it.

If some stories in Mamoun’s collection are thin for want of more layered canvases, a moment does not pass in Martins’s The Sun on My Head without such layered contexts and structures running thickly through them – thickly,

though not cloggingly. Martins’s collection, in its scorching depiction of inequality, youth and violence in Rio de Janeiro, is an unalloyed success. It is remarkable in part because, whilst unerring in addressing drug culture, police brutality, racism and destitution, it also captures the joy and richness of its young favela boys’ (and they are always boys) lives.

Martins was scouted at FLUP, a literary festival held annually in the favelas in which he grew up. His renderings of these spaces come with concomitant intimacy. Intimacy, yes, but a stranger one. ‘Spiral’, the second story in the collection, is a stunning capture of human interaction: the narrator starts following a private-school kid, then stalking an elderly woman, and later a stranger called Mario. He becomes fanatical about these near-encounters with unfamiliar people, revelling in their reacting at, but not interacting with, him. All the while, he ‘felt myself drifting away from the people who mattered to me most’. Behind this narrative – and its collision of the domestic and public, internal and external – is the relationship between social context and human affect. Take the instance with the old woman:

I felt disgusted for taking it so far, thinking of my grandma and of how this old woman probably had grandkids, too. But my guilt was short-lived. Soon, I remembered how that same woman who’d trembled with fear before I’d given her reason to certainly hadn’t given thought to how I probably also had a grandma. […]

Then came the loneliness.

It’s a fertile picture of the emotional warring underlying seemingly cruel actions; it’s also a fertile picture of how inequality, difference and prejudice drive such actions. After all, the spiral starts because of the uncatalysed preconceptions – preconceptions which, we realise, it deepens and deepens and deepens.

These social and spatial boundaries are clear from the opening story, ‘Lil Spin’. Julia Sanches’s deliverance of Martins’s Portuguese into US English is dialectally complex throughout the collection, but nowhere is it more prodigious than in the slang vocabulary, tone and grammar of ‘Lil

Spin’. ‘That’s when shit went nonlinear’ is a world-beating line. Sanches’s integration of standard English, vernacular, and maintained Portuguese idiom is a masterclass in translating a space and its community: ‘Laughed our asses off, the menós and me. Jokers split with only their sarongs in hand’ is a phrase that serves Martins’s world dutifully.

Sanches’s sensitivity is vital in the quieter stories, too. ‘The Blind Man’ is a short , unassuming piece about Matias, a blind man who refuses to beg and instead elicits charity by sharing the sad story of his life, and Doodle, a boy who teams up with Matias as his counterfeit son, doubling his income and providing him with company – family, almost. The full emotional richness of life is brought to bear at the close: Doodle, ‘who they all assumed would grow up to be a thug’, outgrows the charity-scheme and starts a mototaxi; Matias, with charity-inducing age, earns more; Doodle, after work, takes Matias’s earnings and picks up drugs at excellent value; and then they sit together, at the boca, ‘smoking and snorting the night away […] throughout which their eyes never meet’. Such strangely intimate lives cannot be readily dissected.

‘Crossing’, the final piece in The Sun on My Head, is a magnificent depiction of hope, senselessness, power, communality, violence – all those things that Martins renders insightfully – and the inequalities and segregations that weigh on them. It is full of death, injustice, and the abject; above all, it is an utterance of the endurance of desperation, destitution, division. There is value in coming face-to-face with the moment of dénouement, as in ‘Crossing’. But, despite the power of the stories in which Martins delivers a climactic end, the most enduring pieces are those in which the cataclysm doesn’t arrive – those in which, in Crying-of-Lot-49 fashion, the lot is never cried. Because favela life does not finish, and the stories which also refuse to are therein absolute. The still-to-be-opened door of ‘Russian Roulette’ – the anticipation of Paulo’s father walking out of the shower to face him – will stay with me.

These collections, at their best, figure the whole gamut of human life whilst painting the social landscapes they touch and that touch them. These aren’t

just stories from underrepresented voices and spaces, they are narratives which write these margins and segregations with nuance. At their best, they draw their energy precisely from the ways tenderness and violence meet.