ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the alienation and identity crisis at the heart of Idris Ali’s depiction of the struggle between northern and southern Egypt in Dongola (1993). After examining the place of the Nubian novel within the Egyptian literary realm and community, this chapter examines Ali’s longing for a sense of harmony, unity, and belonging in Egypt, his conception of an integrated Arab-African cultural identity, and the challenges that face such integration. Dongola demonstrates how an extremist and an essentialist seeking of the individual’s ethnic and/or cultural roots, as a metaphoric opposition to processes of exclusion and marginalization, can lead to the loss of the individual’s inner cohesion and balance. Ali’s main character in Dongola, Awad Shalali, is mystified by an essentialized identity of a long-lost Nubia; he fails to live his everyday reality because of being entrapped in the past. Awad’s essentialist notion of identity leads not only to his loss, but the destruction of his family whom he abandons in Nubia after failing to reconcile the conflicting parts of his Arab-African identity. This chapter aims to trace this battle of belonging and alienation that Awad goes through and that ends in a fragmented identity and in losing sense of who he is.
