Women Writing Back: Decolonizing History and Cultural Memory in Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit

Abstract

This paper uses a decolonial feminist perspective to analyze how Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit (2023) recovers Sudanese cultural memory. The novel, which is set in the late 19th-century Mahdist War, emphasizes voices that are frequently left out of colonial and nationalist historiography, especially those of women and enslaved people. The study examines how Aboulela uses narrative techniques like multiple perspectives, regional idioms, and oral storytelling structures to challenge colonial language hierarchies, drawing on postcolonial theory (Spivak, Bhabha) and cultural memory studies (Assmann, Nora). In addition to addressing the silences and rifts left by imperial records, the analysis demonstrates how River Spirit subverts Western historical archives by giving indigenous epistemologies priority. This essay contends that Aboulela’s writings support a larger initiative of epistemic justice in African literature in addition to decolonizing the literary representation of Sudan’s past. In the end, River Spirit establishes itself within current decolonial discourse as a narrative act of resistance as well as a historical reclamation.