"The Wedding of Zein" unfolds in the same village on the upper Nile
where Tayeb Salih's tragic masterpiece Season of Migration to the
North is set. Here, however, the story that emerges through the
overlapping, sometimes contradictory voices of the villagers is comic.
Zein is the village idiot, and everyone in the village is dumbfounded
when the news goes around that he will be getting married--Zein the
freak, Zein who burst into laughter the moment he was born and has kept
women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at
six and whose face is completely hairless, Zein married at last? Zein's
particular role in the life of the village has been the peculiar one of
falling in love again and again with girls who promptly marry another
man. It would be unheard of for him to get married himself.
In Tayeb Salih's wonderfully agile telling, the story of how this
miracle came to be is one that engages the tensions that exist in the
village, or indeed in any community: tensions between the devout and the
profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional. In
the end, however, Zein's ridiculous good luck augurs an ultimate
reconciliation, opening a prospect of a world made whole.
Salih's classic novella appears here with two of his finest short
stories, "The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid" and "A Handful of Dates."
