Decolonizing George William Joy’s General Gordon’s Last Stand in Aboulela’s River Spirit

Abstract

In Leeds City Art Gallery, visitors can see George William Joy’s painting General Gordon’s Last Stand (1893). The painting, which depicts the last moments of the life of General Charles George Gordon, the Governor-General of Sudan who was killed during the Mahdist Revolution in 1885, stirred the British public’s and government’s sense of vengeance because it depicts the “savagery” of the crawling native and the “heroic” end of one of the carriers of the ‘White Man’s Burden.’ It represents a perfect example of how pro-colonial art and artists helped mobilize the Empire’s colonial project. Hence, the aim of this paper is to examine how Leila Aboulela’s historical novel River Spirit (2023) interpolates the grand narrative that Joy’s painting perpetuates. We argue that the novel decolonizes what pro-colonial art tells about the “heroism” of the colonizer and the “backwardness” of the colonized in overseas colonies. On the one hand, Aboulela creates a fictional artist whom she models on Joy’s character and vividly depicts his aspirations of garnering fortune and fame while in Sudan. On the other hand, Aboulela’s fictionalization of Gordon’s assassin, a Sudanese man named Musa, is meant to deconstruct the historical narrative of the dominant culture by giving the natives a space to tell their versions of the story. By doing so, Aboulela encourages readers to view the same pivotal historical event with fresh eyes, and consequently, re-interpret historical colonial accounts.