A merciful compare and contrast post so I can slack off: "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I'm almost always running out of gas by the time I get to the end of blogging through a short story anthology, and this year's run through the 2025 O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. The Best Short Stories, is no different. I need to catch my breath. How wonderful, then, that I can do a compare and contrast post about "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih. It's the kind of post where it looks like I'm trying, but really the analysis kind of writes itself.

What am I comparing "The Three Niles" to?

I'll be comparing and contrasting it with "The Suitcase" by Meron Hadero, which was in the 2016 Best American Short Stories, the year before I started blogging all the way through it. Meron's story came to mind while reading "The Three Niles" because both were about children of immigrants to the U.S. from the Horn of Africa, and both involved trips made by those children back to the homeland of their parents. 

What's similar about them?

Both stories have children who go to the countries their parents came from, Sudan for "The Three Niles" and Ethiopia for "The Suitcase." Although I hate it when people treat all things African like they're the same and like Africa is one big country with a shared culture and heritage, in the case of Sudan and Ethiopia, there really is a lot that's shared between the two. They're both part of the Horn of Africa, which tends to have a lot of commonalities between countries. They even have their own regional quasi-UN, called IGAD. (Don't quibble about that characterization. It's close enough.) Both Ethiopia and Sudan are immensely proud of the Nile River and their country's share in the history of that cradle of civilization. This pride in the river isn't in "The Suitcase" the way it shows up in "The Three Niles," but it is a commonality between the two countries. Right now, Ethiopia is involved in Sudan's civil war, and Sudan is involved in Ethiopia's. The countries share a porous border.

Both "the boy" in "The Three Niles" and Saba, the protagonist of "The Suitcase," struggle with language. Saba isn't great at Amharic, the language of her relatives, and "the boy" is pretty bad at Sudanese Arabic. In both stories, the returnees from America are feasted and celebrated by relatives while in the homeland, but neither knows how to repay their hospitality or even to carry on much of a conversation with them. 

Both stories contain their primary image or symbol in the title.

Both protagonists feel, in different ways, that they "don't belong here." Saba thinks this explicitly, while it is simply implicit in the boy's every thought, word, and attitude. But here's about where the similarities end.

Obvious differences

Saba is twenty; the boy is thirteen. Saba wants to fit in and become more Ethiopian during her month trip to Addis Ababa; the boy just wants his three-day stint in Sudan, on the outskirts of Khartoum, to end as soon as possible. Saba, who actually did live in Ethiopia when she was very young, wants to connect with Ethiopia to be more fully herself; the boy, who has never been to Sudan before, wants to deny his Sudanese heritage, because he feels that it has nothing to do with his true self. He doesn't even want to be called by his name in Sudanese Arabic. In short, Saba is there of her own accord and wants to be there, while the boy is going purely out of what flagging sense of loyalty he has to his father. 

Photo by Humera Afrid. The boy is kind of a sacrificial lamb in this story, giving up part of himself for his father. But he doesn't give more than he has to.

Less obvious differences

While it's very easy to see not just the outward differences in age and sex between the boy and Saba but also the huge gap in dispositions toward their ancestral home, it might be harder to see the difference in how the major symbols in both stories are working. In "The Suitcase," the major symbol, according to my highly advanced ability in literary analysis, is the suitcase. Saba has brought it with her and now needs to pack to go back home to America. She has actually brought two suitcases with her, one with her clothes and the other with gifts from her family in America to all of her family in Ethiopia. Now that she is headed back, the family in Ethiopia wants to fill that second suitcase with gifts of their own for Saba to take back. They have too many gifts, though, and they are arguing about what to take out. The choice is given to Saba, who, pressed for time to make it to her return flight, decides to dump out her other suitcase, the one with all her clothes, in order to make room for all of the gifts. 

It's such a neat and apt symbol, one that serves as a metaphor for Saba's own process of identity shaping. In order to let in what Ethiopia has to give her, she literally has to empty out her own identity, in the form of the clothes she loves so much. She has brought something to them, and she leaves it there with her family. When she goes back again, it will still be there. None of her identity is lost, but it is reapportioned. The family shares not only gifts, but their core selves with one another, and so bits of who everyone is are shared across continents. I am often mystified when people talk about being moved by literary fiction stories, but this story did move me. It's about as happy a story as one of these anthologies will ever give you.

With "The Three Niles," I have to admit that the symbolism tricked me. The boy resists everything he sees while in Sudan with his father, from the Arabic language to prayers to lamb meat to even remembering who the relatives introduced to him are. At one point, the boy "hated every single person in that courtyard for what they made him do, what they reminded him of." What they remind him of is his cultural inheritance, the one the boy thinks belongs to his father but not to him. That's why when the boy once heard someone in America call his father the N word over the boy's head, he convinced "himself that word, that agony, was his father's lot and not his." This was true because of "how unlike his father he was." 

But I thought, near the end of the story, that Sudan was going to sneak into the boy in spite of himself. The boy has noted how "effortless" the "transition" from talking to killing the lamb to talking again happened, and for a moment, I thought that a similar effortless transition was going to happen to the boy, one where at least something of Sudan would get into him unawares. That moment comes on the last day in Sudan, when the Sudan-based family is taking the father and son out for a river cruise. The father is pointing out the sights of Khartoum, and he indicates to the boy the point where the White Nile and Blue Nile come together to form one river:

The boy looked to a spot where he saw, or thought he saw, a shifting band in the river where the two currents, one murky, one milky, met and intertwined. But there was no crash, no violence. No spectacle to suggest different currents fighting for dominance. The river ahead was complacent, the merging silent and unremarkable. Easy to overlook, were it not for his father’s finger showing the way.

"Aha! This is it," I thought. The boy's American self and his Sudanese self are coming together, and will form one whole, and it will happen so effortlessly, he won't even notice! But just as earlier, when the boy seemed to be sharing a moment of mutual understanding with his father, but it was interrupted, so this unnoticed mingling of two worlds is also interrupted. The family on the boat begins to sing a song in praise of wearing traditional clothing instead of Western clothing. The boy wants to "step into the center of all that dancing and singing, to silence it." He and his father almost share another moment of mutual understanding when neither can eat the sandwiches the family offers them, but then a storm comes up, the boat tosses, and the grandfather is pitched off into the river. 

When it becomes apparent that the grandfather had drowned in the Nile, the boy's main concern is for how long it will take to find him, because he still wants to get on his flight to go home. (God, I love this ending.) He is literally standing between his father and the rest of the family at the end. There is no fusion of identities, only a steadfast refusal to allow himself to be transported back into his other life, the one that might have happened if his father hadn't immigrated. 

Should we blame the boy?

For much of the story, I'd guess most readers would be fairly sympathetic to the boy. He's apparently gay and vegetarian, doesn't speak Arabic, and doesn't believe in Islam. He was so happy when his father couldn't afford to keep sending him to a private, Muslim school in America, he felt liberated, and now here he is in the heart of all that he got away from. Although we might feel the boy is wrong to deny all of his heritage, we can certainly understand it. It's not an unusual attitude for a child of immigrants raised in the U.S. to want to live like the people he knows live. 

Still, the myopia of the boy at the end is pretty startling. He's has a few moments while in Sudan of almost kind of connecting with his father. Shouldn't that have made him able to understand, even a little, how his father must feel losing his own? 

Maybe it can't be helped. Maybe for the boy to be himself, to avoid the death that comes from giving up one's own identity, he has to keep his Sudan self at a distance. He can't allow himself to become blended from two distinct flows into one, because "His" Nile--the "White" Nile, tied to his white existence through his mother--can't join the other. 

Two different experiences of geographic origins as sources of identity

In "The Suitcase," Saba is presented with a seemingly impossible choice. During her entire trip to Ethiopia, her family has gone out their way to try to make her feel welcome and loved, but she feels she hasn't measured up. Now, she is being asked to choose which tokens of their love should make it back to America. It's a real Kobiyashi Maru scenario. But much like Captain Kirk, Saba doesn't believe in a no-win situation, and she comes up with a solution where identity doesn't involve hard choices. 

The same elements are there for the taking in "The Three Niles." We have three generations of men brought together at the convergence of the three rivers. The story could have allowed for an "effortless" blending of generations and rivers and identities. It would have been as satisfying as "The Suitcase." But for the boy, there is no way to cheat the Kobiyashi Maru of identity. For the boy, his identity is so completely at odds with the boy he would have been in a life where he grew up in Sudan, that the attempt to bring together the old with the new can only result in the stormy death of the old.