Soma Nami’s Books in Review

By Wendy Njoroge

Wendy Njoroge reviews A Mouth Full of Salt by Reem Gaafar

On the banks of the Nile—ancient, dependable, yet unforgiving—a Sudanese village carries on with rhythms that have pulsed for generations. Life here unfolds as it always has, shaped by the desert’s harsh beauty and the river’s quiet tyranny. Isolated deep in the Sahara, many days’ camel ride from the capital Khartoum, the village receives news of the outside world only in fragments. Of these, the most significant is often the fluctuating price of gasoline.

In A Mouth Full of Salt by Reem Gaafar, we meet Fatima, a teenage girl teetering between duty and desire. Betrothed to her cousin and anxiously awaiting her school exam results, Fatima dreams of escape. She yearns for Khartoum, a city she knows only through second- hand glimpses in newspapers—a place of glitz and possibility, unburdened by the traditions that tether her to village life. For Fatima, Khartoum is more than a city; it is a symbol of freedom.

Then, a boy goes missing—no ordinary boy, but the only son of the wealthiest family in the village. Feared drowned in the Nile, the search for his body becomes a communal rite. Young men take shifts diving into the river; women prepare platters of food; elders offer prayers, memories, and advice. Soon after, calamity compounds: animals succumb to a strange illness, and the precious date gardens erupt in flames. As whispers of a sorceress at the foot of the mountains spread, the village begins to unravel.

Sudanese novelist Reem Gaafar (Photo credit: Ahmed O. Gaafar)

In a parallel thread, a single mother in Khartoum grapples with the pressures of raising a child in a patriarchal society—and as Sudan’s civil war edges closer, making her place in the capital untenable, she is forced to return to the village she thought she had left behind. Set against the backdrop of 1980s Sudan, a time of political upheaval and shifting social norms, Gaafar weaves a story that is as much about communal grief as it is about individual longing. The weight of patriarchy bears heavily on the women, who carry not just the burdens of tradition, but also the toll of a society in flux.

Reem Gaafar delivers a powerful, tender narrative—anchored in place, yet reaching far beyond. This is a story of a village, a girl, and a river—but also of a nation on the brink, and of the timeless tension between the known and the possible.

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A Mouth Full of Salt is available at Nairobi’s Pan-African bookshop Soma Nami – with 2 locations: at Greenhouse Mall in Ngong Rd. and in Ngara, also online at www.somanami.co.ke

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