On 14 May 1964, president Gamal Abdel-Nasser watched while engineers who had been working on the construction of the High Dam since 1960 diverted the watercourse of the River Nile to complete the first phase of the barrage. That day remains deeply significant in Nubian history because it is the day that brought about the end of Nubia as it had been since it came into being around 2300 BC. Unlike the Aswan Dam, constructed in the early years of the 20th century and subsequently expanded, by flooding numerous villages and population centres, the High Dam ended much life on the banks of the Nile, together with the culture associated with it.
Transformed into a New Nubia after it was relocated to a place much further from the water, the Nubian homeland would never be the same again, and for decades and generations Nubians lived to mourn their history and lament a new reality that hampered their traditions.
Since the construction of the Aswan Dam, successive generations of Nubian writers have written fiction telling the Nubian tale with nostalgia and melancholy, in a solemn spirit of remembrance. These include Mohamed Khalil Qassem’s novel Al-Shamandoura (Light Bouy), Yehya Moukhtar’s collection of short stories Indo-Mando (Here and There), and Hassan Nour’s novel Madarat Al-Ganoub (Orbits of the South).
Born in Cairo in 1977 to second-generation Nubian Cairenes, the journalist and novelist Samar Nour experienced things differently. This “weight of the lost Nubian dream was not at all present” when she wrote her most recent and evidently most successful work Asha: Al-Gu’ran wal Qamar (Asha: The Scarab and the Moon).
“No, I was not searching for the lost Nubia; I was searching for a childhood story that I often heard from an elder parental relative about the marriage of my ninth great-grandmother to a Bosnian man who was part of the Ottoman army in the early years of the 19th century,” Nour says.
The interest that she had in the story, she added, was about her own family rather than about her somewhat distant Nubian origin. “My grandparents came to Cairo in the 1940s, and I grew up in a regular Cairo household with very few Nubian influences, and while I was always aware of my Nubian origins, I never actually subscribed to the collective Nubian pain over the flooding of the villages on the construction of the High Dam.
“It was after the decline of the dream of the January 2011 Revolution, which gave me a great sense of belonging to Tahrir Square, that I wanted to push myself away from the sense of defeat and to find a new thing that I could belong to; so I went to New Nubia in pursuit of the story I heard and I had no confirmation for,” Nour said.
Published by Al-Diwan during this year’s Cairo International Book Fair, Asha is actually a story in the realm of magical realism – the genre that Nour had tried her hand at in her third and previous novel Tamathil Al-Djinn (Statues of the Jinn), published by Al-Mahroussa three years ago.
It is the story of a girl born to a father whose curse had interrupted the birth of boys for years and whose marriage with a non-Nubian brought about the end of the curse – but with so much sorrow and so much bewilderment for Asha and others in the village.
The events unfold in a mystical Nubian atmosphere where dreams and nightmares combat; where reality is heavily overshadowed by the prophecy of a century-old fortune teller; and where humans intersect with supernatural beings on the banks of and in the depths of the Nile. Asha also mirrors the Nubian traditions of a matriarchal society that was still dominant in the early 19th century, with a strict class system and an anguished apprehension towards all strangers – including a “stranger who is no longer a stranger” like Karam, the half-Nubian and half-Bosnian man Asha falls in love with and marries against all odds.
“Yes, Nubia is there; for sure, Nubian culture is there with all its weight and Nubian history too,” Nour said. “Queen Amanirenas who fought and defeated the Romans is a real character in history,” she added.
A Meroitic queen, Kandake, Amanirenas led a Kushite army of 30,000 Nubian warriors armed with arrows and swords to push away the Romans in a war that lasted three years. She ruled at the time that Cleopatra ruled in Egypt and Mark Anthony ruled in Rome. And unlike Cleopatra she pushed back the Roman army. When the tide turned, the Romans had to make concessions – and as Nour writes in her novel, in the end Meroitic sovereignty was not compromised.
“The mystic Nubian association with the Nile; the co-existence of the heritage of all religions and faiths in Nubia; and the Nubian affinity with the Sufi orders are all there as part of a Nubian story – except for the fact that it is not the otherwise predictable saga of drowned villages, displaced villagers and paradise lost,” Nour said. She added that her novel “was not designed to be associated with or disassociated from the Nubian narrative; it just ended up being a narrative of rather than about Nubia,” she stated. “Again, I don’t carry the same pain of displacement and I don’t carry the elusive dream of return to a Nubia that is no longer there.”
When Nour went to New Nubia a few years back, she was just trying to confirm and find out about the story of her ninth great grandmother, whose name is never mentioned. There, she found so many Nubian tales, including folk tales, all overshadowed by the overriding story of a Nubia lost.
Asha, she said, unintentionally contributed to giving a new lease of life to some of these tales, including the one of the ever-challenging endeavor of a scarab to win the love of the moon and the perpetual failure that comes with every attempt.
“So many tales have survived due to the power of oral history but I think there is room for much more to be done to give new life to each of these tales,” Nour said. This, she added, is as a significant of a task as that of giving new dimensions to the Nubian story as it has been told so far.
While doing her research for the novel, Nour said she found so much that she never knew about and would like to tackle in some future works, including a second part of Asha that she is currently working on. She added that she was fascinated by the many similarities between elements of Nubian history and that of ancient Egypt – the latter being an issue she is well-versed on due to her degree in Egyptology from Cairo University.
In her epilogue to Asha, Nour expresses gratitude to several writers and researchers who helped her with accentuating facts, history and language related to Nubian culture. “I really benefited from their help in scrutinising every little detail that I included in the manuscript,” she wrote.
Prior to Asha, Nour published three volumes of short stories, two of which successively won the Naguib Mahfouz and the Sawiris Culture awards. She also published three novels.
According to Nour, Asha was a venture into the world of Nubian mysticism but not a shift to that world. She has no plans at all, she said, to confine herself to the Nubian world even she has decided to wander there for a longer while than originally planned.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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