Cry, Beloved Nubia: M.K. Qassim’s "Al-Shamandūra" (The buoy) and the Emergence of the Nubian Novel

It has become a commonplace to discuss Nubian Literature as a kind of literature that is deeply entrenched in struggles for recognition and furnished by tropes of belonging and land claiming. In their attempts to possess the power of definition within the national space and the ensuing anxieties of non-belonging, Nubian writers have constantly attempted to reshape and reinforce their own story of the nation. Thus, the corpus of literature by Nubian fiction writers has traditionally constituted a major act of claiming national space, in its capture of life in Nubia through the representation of the history and geography of the region. However, the voice of Nubian writers can by no means be considered monolithic and the present chapter serves to disprove any view of Nubian literature as simply a celebration of the lives of the Nubians as early as 1902 and through the 1950s and 1960s, which witnessed the notorious massive displacement of the Nubian population.

Taking as a point of departure Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of land appropriation through the process of what they call, “territorialization," “deterritorialization,” and “rederritorialization”, the present paper examines Muhammad Khalil Qassim’s novel, Al-Shamandūra (The buoy, 1968) as an early expression of the violent dynamics of uprootedness and displacement experienced by the Nubians in southern Egypt. The chapter, however, is critical of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of nomadism as a strategic tool of resistance to cultural and political hegemony of the state institutions. Instead of celebrating nomadism and migration as examples of the most productive forms of cultural identity, this study highlights the material effects of landlessness and the continuing plight of the Nubian refugee problem as represented in Qassim’s novel.