Review of the novel The Year Of Numbers, published in The East African on June 8th, 2009.
There are some things that the Lonely Planet guide to Egypt does not prepare the traveller for, such as Cairo’s underbelly of refugees and illegal immigrants. The Year of Numbers follows Genevieve, a young Canadian documenting the stories of Dafurian refugees, as she struggles with her love for Alpha, a Sierra Leonean Muslim of mixed descent.
Writers of contemporary African fiction have drawn from the deep pool of Africa’s unending humanitarian crises even though there are not enough words to catalogue human suffering. This book which was written by Paulina Wyrzykowski, a human rights and refugee lawyer based in Kampala, is a tribute to the African refugees she worked with in Cairo.
Wyrzykowski’s book is parallel to the notable work of the English journalist Caroline Moorehead in her critically acclaimed book Human Cargo, which is about the global plight of refugees.
A disturbing aspect of the story is the role of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. It summarises refugee policy as being in a state of muddle and mess. Refugees fleeing persecution give a grim picture of life as outcasts, being arrested and tortured in Egyptian jails, humiliated in public as well as subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment.
Fadil, a refugee from Darfur, takes the reader through the controversial understanding of Islam as an ideology of conquest, depicting the exploitation of Islam in the conflict in Darfur. When a country is created out of the fragments of other people’s ideas, such as the orientalist dream of a Pharaonic north and darkest Africa beneath, people who forget who they are can be made to fight over dreams that are not their own.
There are also exciting glimpses into the rich culture of the region, from the commonplace to the exotic. A local market is described as a piece of spoiled fish overrun with ants. It smells like old sweat and crawls with people. We hear flowery descriptions of Cairo, unflattering depictions of the Pyramids thronged with tourists, and portrayals of delightful resorts. Taba is an idyllic holiday paradise where everybody gets along regardless of their ethnicities. Here young kids with dreads smoke pot openly on the beach, their surf boards stacked in lazy piles against palm trees. Women wear bikinis and let their boyfriends rub sun lotion into their backs.
There is a sense of sympathy with the characters. Wyrzykowski remarked about her book: “I wanted the readers to care about my characters when I wrote it, wanted them to be real people with all the psychological complexities and contradictions of real people.”
One of the few conflict-free features in the book is the cuisine, unifying all who live in Egypt. For the Epicurean, there are delicious narratives of exotic food and drink. Marissa the Sudanese beer, lamb and okra stews from West Africa, sheesha at Egyptian coffee houses, and even pretentions at Chinese food.
Despite the complex histories in the book, it is a page turner that is sensibly written and simple to read. The characters are blueprints for what could possibly happen to anyone in this troubled region from Chad to Cairo.
Wyrzykowski is working on another book, partly set in Uganda where she lives and works with IDPs. “Recently it’s occurred to me that I’m trying to write about hope,” she says. “The world seems to me like a mysterious place that defies purely intellectual understanding, where anything good or bad is possible. That means terrible things are possible and happen all the time, but it leaves the door open a crack for the possibility of change as well. In a less abstract sense I am writing about how big things like history, and especially violent history, affect individual lives in both obvious and subtle ways, and about the importance of acknowledging the past.”
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