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Hadendowa perceptions of fertility, danger, and disease encompass a set of beliefs in the evil eye (lailit), spirits (jantaib or jinn), and in mysterious diseases (tisaramt), whose explanations lie in the gendered “di-vision” (Bourdieu 1990) of body space and in cultural notions of honor (durarit), identity, and regeneration that are constantly threatened by increasing “foreignness” and displacement.1 These anxieties concerning danger and disease, I argue, project an image of the modest Hadendowa woman as an embodiment of honor, affinity, and fertility subject to violation by the unregulated morality of the foreign world. The stories and narratives of vulnerability and marginalization that women expressed through the imagery of woman-as-land project a flexible scaling of morality and honor through which discursive practices about the dangers of the evil eye, spirits, and 56 Chapter 2 Historicizing Foreignness Alterity, Disease, and Social Vulnerability Say: “I take refuge with the lord of men the king of men the God of men from the evil of the slinking whisperer who whispers in the breasts of men of jinn and men.” Qur’an 1. Most women interviewed used the terms jinn (Arabic) and jantaib (Tu-Badawie) interchangeably to refer to spirits. tisaramt reference broader concerns about the embodied spatiality under assault. Through gendered models of body space, metaphorical categories and symbolic rituals are projected internally and externally to comment on Hadendowa social order and its “governmentality”(Foucault 1991). The Hadendowa conceptualization of danger and disease defines particular external threats that are said to undermine the collective code of durarit: the integrity of the ancestral land and the pure blood of descent vested in women’s procreative power. These perceptions underscore the Hadendowa ’s ambivalent relations with others, as represented by government authority and institutions as well as foreigners in general, and stem from the notion that their land is exclusively theirs (hash hashun, balad baladun). This does not imply that the Hadendowa are isolated or lack interaction with outsiders. On the contrary, their land has for centuries been a passageway for different groups. The Hadendowa, however, always subjected these foreigners to scrutiny and suspicion. Indeed, both Western and Sudanese scholars have represented them as simultaneously aloof and warrior-like (e.g., Paul 1954; Mohamed Salih 1976). Little attention has been paid, however , to how Hadendowa cultural constructions of identity have physically and emotionally tied them, through a code of honor, to their ancestral land. From the Hadendowa perspective, repeated colonial invasions and their social consequences account for their complex framings of external danger. The danger of the outside stems from their fear of losing the very source of their social being. The Hadendowa physical landscape is a vast, dry area surrounded by mountains that open up to the Red Sea. Significantly, most Hadendowa narratives about external danger feature the sea, which is infested with immoral , deceptive spirits. The fear of the sea and its spirit inhabitants evokes the historical actualities of the foreign invasions of Beja territory, reading foreigners as supernatural transgressors of Beja indigenous space who build colonies for themselves outside Beja jurisdiction, thus undermining their power and authority and rendering them marginal. This imagination of foreignness thus cannot be read apart from the history of urban colonial development in eastern Sudan. Although there are many towns in eastern Sudan whose establishment is associated with colonialism and other historical interactions, I will focus here on Sawakin, Port Sudan, and Sinkat since they are referred to most often in the interviewed women’s stories about foreignness. The ancient port of Sawakin and the city of Port Sudan are the main entrances to eastern Sudan from the Red Sea. Sawakin’s strategic location has made it the most famous port on the Red Sea since the Sixth Dynasty of the Historicizing Foreignness 57 Pharaohs (3000 BCE). At the height of its prosperity, Sawakin was a harbor for ships from all over the world, facilitating close links with Ethiopia, Egypt, Arabia, Yemen, India, and China (Hamadi n.d.). It was successively occupied by the Ptolemies, the Romans, the Arabs, and the Turks. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the army of the first Islamic kingdom, the Funj sultanate, which originated in central Sudan, had invaded Sawakin . During the sultanate’s reign, the town grew from a small trading center to a leading port (see Hamadi n.d.). The Beja resisted the Funj fiercely but were ultimately defeated. Following the demise of the Funj kingdom, Sawakin fell under TurcoEgyptian rule (1821–85...

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