A review by katie_greenwinginmymouth
Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas

emotional medium-paced

4.0

Ghost Season assembles a cast of five main characters whose interaction tells the story of life in a contested town on the border between north and south Sudan - Alex a naive, white American NGO employee working on mapping the area; William a Nilot local working for him as a translator; Layla a nomad local working at the NGO compound as a cook; Mustafa a young nomad boy working at the compound doing odd jobs; and Dena a diasporic Sudanese-American woman staying at the compound making a film.

 

The first half of this book was great - the way Dena’s filmaking and Alex’s mapmaking are used as metaphors for the ways in which both see and are seen by the local community was really well done. Dena’s position as filmmaker illuminates and illustrates her unease as a diasporic returnee to her parents’ country, wanting to blend in but inevitably sticking out. Alex sees his mapping as important, valuable and useful work and dismisses Dena’s work as just art with less practical application. He attracts attention in the village as a white person, frequently disrupting Dena’s attempts to blend in and film everyone. But Dena herself is a curiosity too - a woman who dresses like a man and carries a camera, her gender is a mystery to many. Alex of course tries it on with her completely oblivious to the fact that she’s queer and not at all interested in him which only serves to worsen their relationship.

 

What Alex doesn’t bank on is how difficult it proves to map contested land. The landscape is constantly changing both due to climate change and conflict, the traditional patterns of nomad communities disrupted by shrinking water sources and disappearing grazing lands. Even before climate change the rivers were not permanent so the map needs to represent the different landmarks in and out of the rainy season. Climate change and conflict are inextricably linked, not only for these reasons but also through fighting for control of the oil fields in the area, oil fields that extract the fossil fuels that are the reason for the climate collapse in the first place.

William, Layla and Mustafa’s stories are also tenderly told, with a gentle romance developing between William and Layla, despite the difficulties of coming from different communities, Nilot and nomad. At the start of the book things are relatively peaceful but in the second half fighting picks up again and the area becomes increasingly unsafe. Ultimately (as you might have guessed from the neat selection of main characters) I felt that the book played things out in a way that was a bit too obvious and lacked some of the nuance and complexity of the first half. The ending is brutally sad and left me feeling a bit hollow.