In Jamal Mahjoub's Wings of Dust (1994), a Sudanese exile pauses halfway through his memoir to let his thoughts catch up with his writing: 'I must set down the pen to prevent the words colliding into one another and producing only confusion where I am searching for clarity.' Sharif arrives at Oxford in the 1950s and maps the future with other aspiring post-colonial leaders. After years of travelling round Europe with a beautiful jazz singer, he returns to build an independent Sudan; but political conflict causes him to flee to France, to a decaying hotel, from where he attempts to shape his turbulent life. Wings of Dust is itself a reshaping of a post-colonial classic published nearly thirty years earlier. In V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh, exiled from the island of Isabella and living in a shabby London hotel, also finds control in setting things down: 'Writing, for all its initial distortion, clarifies, and even becomes a process of life.'

LRB 9 March 2006 | PDF Download