A carnivalistic reading of The Wedding of Zein by Taib Salih

Abstract

ABSTRACT Reading The Wedding of Zein (1962) by Tayeb Salih from a Bakhtinian perspective can be helpful to trace the revolutionary touch that marks the novel. As the world of Rabelais celebrates the unofficial discourse of the festive life standing against the strictures of the feudal culture, the same celebration of the festive time in terms of merry moments of unbridled indulgence of feasting, joking and folk festivities in the carnival type could be mapped out in the narrative of The Wedding of Zein. The latter presents a reconciliatory vision to syncretise the social and spiritual worlds so as to materialise the delighted and optimistic world that Salih is panting for. The vision of the dream world of Salih collides with a harsh world involving an identity crisis. A facet of the ideal world that Salih heads to undertake lies in cancelling out the identity privileges that are determining in the social, economic and political life. In theory, the carnivalesque implications including the dismantling of hierarchies and the celebration of popular culture are the same principles postmodernism feeds upon. To this end, in view of postmodernism, Salih makes out of the narrative of The Wedding of Zein a carnival to suspend all the hierarchical prerogatives. Similar to Bakhtin as he disrupts the hierarchical social stratification privileging the bourgeois group through the gay time of the wedding, Salih interrogates the official discourse at the time of state building predicated upon the legacy of colonialism, excluding different groups from the Sudanese identity.