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Edo's Souls

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
Englisch
Dedalus Africaerschienen am11.11.2023
Edo's Souls is a compelling, multi-generational epic that sees the three main characters trapped in a nation gripped by the terrors of civil war, forcing each one to confront their past selves, and to resolve what is most important to them - love, family, or country. When a young Lucy-Eghino, who is coming of age in a 1970s village in southern Sudan, is beset by rumours of approaching violence, she has no choice but to flee - first to Juba, then northwards to Khartoum. Marco, a gentle young father, wages a daily battle to keep his family together while avoiding friction with any northerners. Peter, a soldier unsure of where his loyalties lie, is forced to carry out night raids searching for bands of rebels. Both The Literary Hub and Words without Borders list Edo's Souls as one of the forthcoming books that they are most looking forward to reading. https://lithub.com/what-books-are-you-most-looking-forward-to-this-year/ wordswithoutborders.org/read/a ... d-by-women-wwb/mehr
Verfügbare Formate
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR14,50
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR11,99

Produkt

KlappentextEdo's Souls is a compelling, multi-generational epic that sees the three main characters trapped in a nation gripped by the terrors of civil war, forcing each one to confront their past selves, and to resolve what is most important to them - love, family, or country. When a young Lucy-Eghino, who is coming of age in a 1970s village in southern Sudan, is beset by rumours of approaching violence, she has no choice but to flee - first to Juba, then northwards to Khartoum. Marco, a gentle young father, wages a daily battle to keep his family together while avoiding friction with any northerners. Peter, a soldier unsure of where his loyalties lie, is forced to carry out night raids searching for bands of rebels. Both The Literary Hub and Words without Borders list Edo's Souls as one of the forthcoming books that they are most looking forward to reading. https://lithub.com/what-books-are-you-most-looking-forward-to-this-year/ wordswithoutborders.org/read/a ... d-by-women-wwb/
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781915568519
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum11.11.2023
ReiheDedalus Africa
Reihen-Nr.8
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse514 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.15245837
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

2

When her mother died and was placed in that shining wooden box with her glittering smile nearly leaping out through the glass window, Edo´s two closest friends sat next to the body and shooed away flies from the coffin´s exceptionally clean exterior as salty tears streaked their cheeks. The priest said a solemn prayer, fitting for a woman like Edo who was a devoted follower of the religion´s tenets - she hardly ever set foot out­side the church building, which she cleaned herself. She was devoted in her prayers, and rattled a hollowed-out gourd in time to the beat of the hymns, her soul sometimes soaring whilst her eyes were closed as she rocked back and forth declaring, Amen, amen, amen!´ All this without the priest knowing her true intentions, a little secret she only shared with her daughter.

During the funeral service, a young man approached Lucy. Like a ripe piece of fruit, her body had filled out, skin lustrous as polished ebony: undoubtedly she was a beautiful woman. Once close enough, he knelt and whispered, Marry me?´

She glanced at him briefly through her tears. His face didn´t look familiar - he wasn´t one of her many brothers in the village. Having been raised in so many different households meant everyone was her brother, and so she couldn´t run away with any of them. Unlike the rest of her peers, she didn´t have a boyfriend because they all thought of her as a sister; no romantic attentions were ever cast her way. But this was different. He hadn´t been brought up in the village, so he must have come from far away. Well-dressed, clean, fierce eyes, artfully carved lips, thick coiffed hair, a shirt with a large collar the hue of the dark smoky thickets drifting up above.

Without a word, she squeezed his hand and pulled him outside of the church towards her hut, with the heavens about to burst open. Once inside, she stripped and they explored each other´s bodies until sunlight seeped through the hole in the hut´s wall, announcing sunset. When she went to open the door, she found it barricaded with a large branch from a thorny tree, an accepted sign that those inside were no longer of this world. Her mother´s grave - now in the dirt yard before the hut, in between the smaller graves of Lucy´s siblings - was a mound of dirt atop the buried coffin, like a hill that had fallen asleep mid-step. There was no one else in sight; the bereaved were at the square dancing at the funeral that was fitting for a woman like her mother. She heard the drums beating, the sad songs that glorified death, yet at the same time reprimanded it for stealing loved ones away, dirges that emphasised the insignificance of man. The young man´s arms wrapped round Lucy´s waist from behind, and they both cried together silently. My friends, they put this thorny branch here so that no one would come in here wailing,´ he said.

She wrapped a tanned hide around her waist, and rubbed herself from head to toe with ash from the cold hearth. Removing the thorny branch from the entrance, she spoke roughly, There´s no need to bar this door - it´s hardly the end of my family line.´ She went on more tenderly, I´m still here and you are too, of course. Together we´ll create, and make all of those in the graves breathe again.´

Like a stone from a slingshot, her protruding breasts covered by a delicate layer of ash, she shot into the middle of the square, snatching up the solemn death song being sung:

Youuu, youu youu ayyyy

iroghoyeh yo yooooo

With spears nearly twice their height, the men swiftly circled round the drums like a whirlpool, an intimidating forest of spears that pointed every so often aslant in the air, creating a dome that blocked out the sky. Lucy was inside the circle, the men´s rumbling voices enveloping her, the women´s heartrending cries breaking through; she was spinning between rumblings and nostalgia. Breathless, she saw her mother in the crowd, wearing her coffin and smiling through the glass panel, waving at her. Lucy´s eyes strayed from Edo, and she retched, but she kept on dancing and dancing.

Round

and

round.

As she jumped up and down, her breasts bounced, pointing straight ahead, perfectly round and firm. With her elbows folded inwards at her ribcage and her hands curled like a bird ready to take flight, she would jump, but her feet stayed firmly stuck to the ground, her soles crawling to a rhythm that would make every member of the group howl in their own way, to free themselves from grief, for the severity of what death had brought upon her in life, every leap of that death dance was in honour of Edo, until she rejoiced in it and accepted it peacefully. Lucy was shedding tears that refused to cease, remembering her mother´s voice, her features, her secret opinions about everything; singing the special song that had belonged only to her beloved mother since birth.

All the village folk took part in the funeral, which lasted for three nights. The final night turned into a sort of celebration where everyone felt a lightness of spirit, having banished their grief through vigorous movement and rhythmical beats.

The indigo skies poured down for long hours, the tears of those mourning washed with the ash and soil that caked their bodies. Cold seeped into their bones but everyone felt that the earth was exhaling a warmth that spread little by little, like a mirage. The entire village slept in the square, while Lucy and her newfound companion Marco were in a private dance behind the door barricaded with the thorny branch. Everyone dreamt of Maria-Edo wearing her coffin, waving, only to then disappear into a disc of the sun that had opened up like a hole in the sky, a hole that started to cough out child after child, each of them floating down to earth like soft baby-bird feathers.

At dawn, the grave was moist and cold, allowing its dirt surface to be swiftly smoothed down. As Edo´s closest surviving relative, Lucy´s head was shaved by an old grandmother. Soon enough Marco arrived and respectfully sat to have his head shaved too, in commiseration with Lucy. A queue of girls, who went by Lucy-Eghino as her name-sisters, formed and many a grandmother sat shaving the heads of those in line till midday. Hair floated in every direction for several days until the villagers began to find tufts swimming in their food and drink, and when it got too much, the young men swept up all the hair and burnt it next to a nearby bush, filling the air with something like burnt feathers. The funeral, as with weddings, ended with a feast.

The priest arrived and the villagers built an enormous cross on the grave with burnt red clay bricks, sealing it with cement, on which was written, with a dried tree branch, the inscription:

Maria-Edo

Beloved Holy Mother

The grave of Maria-Edo the saint became a village landmark on which children would play, sheep would frolic and women would spread out their sprouting maize alongside other vegetables that required drying. Sometimes, on moonlit nights, teenage boys and girls would sit there flirting, agreeing to run away with one another, the common way for couples in the village to announce their engagement, and get married afterwards.

Three moons had passed since Edo´s demise. The village had found out that during the funeral Lucy had run away and slept with Marco, thereby announcing their engagement, whilst Edo´s body had lain still warm as if asleep in her coffin on the table in the sanctuary towards the front of the church. Out of deep love for her, the village turned a blind eye to Lucy´s timing, though they secretly envied Marco for singlehandedly comforting her on that fateful night. Many of them knew that Lucy had her moments of eccentricity, which were at times quite pronounced, granting her an unusual sort of freedom that prevented society from questioning her actions or criticising her at all.

Little by little, her belly swelled. As she was everyone´s daughter, Marco asked the whole village for her hand. Given Rebecca was one of her mothers, he gifted her two goats as gratitude for nursing Lucy, and gave a goat to every other woman because they had all looked after and raised her.

Marco hadn´t spent much time in the village - he, too, was alone, an orphan now. His father had enrolled him in a school far away from the village, distancing Marco from any danger as much as he could. Fearful of the treachery of the river and that of the forest, his father had been relieved to have Marco under a teacher´s supervision. His son progressed steadily in his studies until he made his way to the big city to keep learning, only coming back to the village on days off and during the Christmas holidays. Marco inherited a large number of livestock and farmland plots but he had ambitions other than burying his prime years in the village, which would involve spending his life tilling the land and shouldering the worries of how to breed animals, or taking part in wars against governments eerily similar in their stupidity. Nor did he have any political drive to lead a pitiful population who knew no better to their death. The military didn´t suit him because he was a gentle, faint-hearted fellow, who would cry aloud, his heart pounding at the slightest hardship. This was all aside from him being an only child, charged with preserving the family name.

He knew of the far-off news stirring beyond the mountain, and after the rumours really started to fly, he grew aware that a war would break out in the not-too-distant future. A rumour precedes every war until it ends in a bloodbath. Young men started to disappear, having been...
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