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52 pages

English

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Khartoum, according to one theory, takes its name from the Beja word hartooma, meaning 'meeting place'. Geographically, culturally and historically, the Sudanese capital is certainly that: a meeting place of the Blue and White Niles, a confluence of Arabic and African histories, and a destination point for countless refugees displaced by Sudan's long, troubled history of forced migration. In the pages of this book - the first major anthology of Sudanese stories to be translated into English - the city also stands as a meeting place for ideas: where the promise and glamour of the big city meets its tough social realities; where traces of a colonial past are still visible in day-to-day life; where the dreams of a young boy, playing in his father's shop, act out a future that may one day be his. Diverse literary styles also come together here: the political satire of Ahmed al-Malik; the surrealist poetics of Bushra al-Fadil; the social realism of the first postcolonial authors; and the lyrical abstraction of the new 'Iksir' generation. As with any great city, it is from these complex tensions that the best stories begin.

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Short story

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Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	27 avril 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910974643
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0274€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Comma Press.
www.commapress.co.uk

Copyright © remains with the authors, translators and Comma Press, 2016.
All rights reserved.
‘A Boy Playing with Dolls’ was first published in Arabic by Midlight/Midlayt Publishing (1993). ‘The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away’ was first published by Al-Hadara Publishing (1990). ‘The Tank’ was first published by Dar al-Azza (2006). ‘The Void’ was first published by Dar al-Ahmadi (2003). ‘It’s Not Important, You’re From There’ was first published in Sudan-Forall.org (2009). ‘Passing’ was first published by Azmana (2009). ‘In the City’ was first published by Rose al-Yussef (1978). ‘Next Eid’ was first published by The Khartoum Organisation for Journalism and Books (2013). ‘The Butcher’s Daughter’ was first published by Dar al-Awraq (2004). Lines from the poem ‘Four Scenes from a City’ by Ali al-Makk are taken from the book City of Dust first published by Dar al-Talif (University of Khartoum, 1974), reprinted by kind permission of his widow.
The moral rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The stories in this anthology are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are entirely the work of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, organisations or localities, is entirely coincidental. Any characters that appear, or claim to be based on real ones are intended to be entirely fictional. The opinions of the authors and the editors are not those of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
This book has been selected to receive English PEN’s PEN Promotes and PEN Translates Awards, supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England as part of the Writers in Translation programme. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England.
Contents
Introduction

The Tank Ahmed al-Malik Translated by Adam Talib

In the City Ali al-Makk Translated by Sarah Irving

A Boy Playing with Dolls Isa al-Hilu Translated by Marilyn Booth

It’s Not Important, You’re From There Arthur Gabriel Yak Translated by Andrew Leber

Next Eid Bawadir Bashir Translated by Thoraya al-Rayyes

Passing Rania Mamoun Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away Bushra al-Fadil Translated by Max Shmookler

The Passage Mamoun Eltlib Translated by Mohamed Ghalaeiny

The Butcher’s Daughter Abdel Aziz Baraka Sakin Translated by Raph Cormack

The Void Hammour Ziada Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

About the Authors
About the Translators
Special Thanks

Also Available In This Series…
Introduction
Khartoum sits across the three banks of the river, where the White Nile meets the Blue. Its geography serves as an apt metaphor for its complex, at times contradictory, significance to many generations of modern Sudanese authors. The city was founded in 1821 by invading Turco-Egyptian forces. From the Mahdist rebellion that began in 1881, to the independence of Sudan in 1956, to the succession of South Sudan in 2011, Khartoum has served as centre stage for the struggle over the identity of a fragmented nation and a volatile state. In the ten short stories collected here, the city emerges as a place of refuge, an object of nostalgia, a site of violence, and a muse for the literary imagination. The city’s name itself is rich with competing origin stories and etymologies. Some say that it comes from the Arabic word for an elephant’s trunk; others that the Dinka gave the city its name, calling it ‘the meeting point of two rivers’ in their language, or that it came from the local Beja word hartooma , meaning ‘meeting place’. Others still say that none of these are true and that the word Khartoum means a drink that leads to swift intoxication. The city’s architecture, as well as its literature, reflects the layers of its history and many cultural influences. In Khartoum’s old colonial centre, the deep orange of British and Ottoman buildings is set against the reflective blue glass of modern skyscrapers, products of the oil boom of the last two decades.
By the Nile, the old Anglican cathedral, now a national Museum, competes for attention with the Chinese-built Presidential Palace. People sit under wide canopied trees sipping tea or ginger-spiced coffee made by the city’s ‘Tea Ladies’, many of whom are themselves migrants from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Across the river to the west, the greying dome of al-Nilayn Mosque welcomes you to Omdurman, which the literary critic Muawiya Nur called ‘the City of Longing and Illusion.’ Past the fish market, the dusty streets of Omdurman, once the Mahdi’s city of resistance, feel far away from Governor Gordon’s old palace, where the stern but eccentric British general made his last stand against the Mahdi’s troops in 1885. Distant, too, feel the industrial neighbourhood of Khartoum Bahri and the agricultural lands of Tuti Island. Yet the labyrinthine minibus system connects these neighbourhoods to one another and the far-flung peripheries that lie beyond.
This conurbation contains many of the beginnings to the story of modern Sudanese literature. There is the history that begins with the Maxim machine gun, a peripheral character in Hammour Ziada’s evocative work of historical fiction, ‘The Void’. Ziada, who won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for his recent novel Longing of the Dervish , here tells the story of a soldier returned from the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. Alive but wounded, he must come to terms with defeat and the shame of survival against the backdrop of the new British occupation.
This new occupation not only brought the machine gun, but also the printing press, still a novelty in fin de siècle Khartoum, where Arabic poetry primarily circulated in oral or manuscript form. The press enabled the proliferation of literary and intellectual journals in the 1920s and 30s, in which educated young Sudanese writers experimented with new literary forms, formulated ideas of national identity, and debated controversial questions of political independence (from both England and Egypt). It was in the pages of these journals that the Sudanese short story emerged as a distinct genre. Journal editors organised competitions for budding short story writers, especially encouraging exploration of contemporary issues facing the Sudanese people. Arafat Mohammed Abdallah, who died in 1936, was editor of one such journal, al-Fajr , as well as the author of a number of his own short stories. It is in the increasingly familiar public space of the journal, as well as the academic halls of the University of Khartoum (then called Gordon College) and the literary salons of Omdurman, that Sudanese national literature – and the short story – emerged.
A number of short story writers also began to gain prominence. One was Muawiya Nur (d. 1941), the young man from Omdurman, who was seldom seen without a book in his hand. Eschewing a lucrative career as a doctor, he went to Beirut to study literature and, after graduating, moved back and forth between his home in Sudan and a bohemian existence in Cairo, writing stories and literary criticism and producing a huge body of work in his 32 years of life. Another important contributor to the beginnings of the genre was a woman from Kordofan named Malikat al-Dar Mohammed (d. 1969), who began writing short stories and went on to become one of the first Sudanese novelists.
Yet even as the idea of a modern national literature gained legitimacy, other influences made themselves felt as authors infused European genres with distinctly Sudanese themes, styles, and stories. For instance, the traditional Eastern-Sudanese story of Tajouj and her tragic lover Muhallaq was reworked into one of the first Sudanese plays, by Khaled Abu al-Russ. In 1948, Tajouj’s story was published as a novel in the style of a French romance. Moving into newer genres, the first Sudanese feature film, likewise entitled Tajouj , by Gadallah Gubara, tells yet another version of this folk tale.
In the wake of political independence in 1956, tensions between North and South grew, as did debates over Sudanese identity. Known as the debates between ‘the jungle and the desert,’ in reference to the verdant south and the arid north, they involved major Sudanese intellectual figures, from Mohammed al-Makki Ibrahim to Francis Deng. In this period, the application of words like ‘African’, ‘Arabic’ and ‘Islamic’ to the Sudanese state and its diverse people was discussed and argued over in great detail. Yet these terms could never capture the demographic realities of Sudanese history: from the nomadic tribes that were forcibly settled in Omdurman in the nineteenth century to the waves of Sudanese displaced by wars across the country, particularly in Darfur and what is now South Sudan, Khartoum remains a site of conflicted cosmopolitanism.
Following wider trends in the Arabic-speaking world, some writers in the 1960s turned to social realism to depict the realities of the post-colonial period. Tayeb Salih’s famous novel Season of Migration to the North, published in 1966, expresses much of the ambivalence and muted optimism of the first decade of political independence. Salih remains possibly the only Sudanese author writing in Arabic who enjoys wide recognition and acclaim in the English-speaking world, although a number of authors writing in English, such as Leila Aboulela, have made important contributions to the national literature.
The stories in