My name is Hanan Abdalla Abdel-Karim, aka Hanan Bulu-Bulu. My beginning was in 1983…[when I] recorded my first album Alamy wu Shagaya (My Pain and Misery)…During those years in the eighties, the Sharia law was in effect and because of it I ran into many problems with the authorities and had to answer for summons in different parts of the country and was subject to several arrests. I was fed up and had to leave the country.
-from the liner notes interview with Vik Sohonie in Two Niles: The Violins and Synths of Sudan, Ostinato Records
It was February 1984, the next to last year of Ja’afar al-Nimery’s dictatorship and his last gasp attempt to survive by imposing Sharia law on the whole country. The western provinces did not take kindly to this, being a place where merissa (millet beer) and aragi (date wine) drinking are commonplace. David and I were on the trail with KhairAllah at the head of the herd, and the other trail boss accompanying our camels once got so drunk that he fell off his mount. A long way down, but unhurt.
I had a small cassette player and some tapes that I played mostly for myself. I remember playing Ella Fitzgerald for a Southern Sudanese man named John- unlike another Southerner I once met, Bau from Wau, John was from Kadugli- who was Bashir abu Jaib’s buying agent Abd al-Wahab’s driver, sitting on the hood of the jeep, me trying to explain about the blues and scat. And once I played the Talking Heads’ Take Me to the River (“Take me to the river, drop me in the water, Push me in the river, dip me in the water”) over and over through the night after we jumped into a passing lorry upon reaching the Nile at Khilewa and tried to get to Dongola asap. It didn’t work, because we broke down long before reaching town.
But mostly I remember playing Hanan Bulu-Bulu’s Zurni Marra, Visit Me Sometime, much to the delight of the drovers while sitting at the night fire, running down my batteries, and now, only much later, do I learn that Hanan faced the same Sharia troubles as did we when drinking our merissa and playing- in a reworking of the Christian gospel-infused Reverend Al Green version- the heathen Talking Heads. If we had known, no doubt the drovers Mas’ood and Muhammad would have convinced KhairAllah to take her with us up the trail to safety in Cairo, where she ended up on her own anyway.
