The United Nations is calling it a “turbulent transition” to civilian rule. After an agreement, facilitated by the UN, the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, was signed in December 2022 between the military and political stakeholders in Sudan to put in place a democratic government, peace was shattered when fresh fighting broke out in mid-April. The violent clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by Lieutenant General Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, led by Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, have left hundreds dead and thousands injured. Many have had to flee Sudan’s borders — the Indian government has launched Operation Kaveri to rescue stranded citizens from capital Khartoum and elsewhere.
A history
The latest conflagration comes at the worst time possible, with Sudan facing an acute humanitarian crisis. The UN estimates that 15.8 million people, which is about a third of its total population of 48 million, requires assistance of food, water and essential medicines. Things have not run smoothly for the third largest country in Africa. It shed its colonial past in the 1950s after independence, but conflicts between its diverse populations followed as well as a long civil war. South Sudan finally broke away in 2011, but peace has been elusive.
It’s a country pulled in different directions, and its writers have tried to make sense of the past, present and prospects of a better future through their fiction. A good place to start is Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel, Season of Migration to the North, hailed as one of the finest novels to be written in modern Arabic literature. Edward Said thought Salih’s book reversed the trajectory of Joseph Conrad’s controversial novel ofEmpire, Heart of Darkness, with the main character, Mustafa Sa’eed, travelling north to the heart of colonial power, London, and witnessing first hand a British nightmare. In Conrad’s novel, the white protagonist travels south from Europe to the Congo, with dreams of civilising the people. Translated by Denys Johnson- Davies, Season of Migration begins with the narrator stating that he has returned to his village, at the bend of the Nile, after getting a doctorate in Britain. Back home, he listens intently to the wind, “which in our village possessed a merry whispering — the sound of the wind passing through palm trees is different from when it passes through fields of corn.” Things begin unravelling at home, and realisation dawns on Mustafa Sa’eed about the challenges facing his people. Introducing the novel, Wail Hassan writes, “His fictional village of Wad Hamid in northern Sudan represents the complexities of that location: situated between the fertile Nile valley and the desert, inhabited by peasants but a frequent stop for nomadic tribes, it is a meeting place for several cultures.”
Fragmented nation
In 2016, Raph Cormack and Max Shmookler edited The Book of Khartoum and put the city in perspective: “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, they write, was founded in 1821 by invading Turco-Egyptian forces. From the Mahdist rebellion that began in 1881, to the independence of Sudan in 1956, the secession of South Sudan in 2011, Khartoum “has served as a centre stage for the struggle over the identity of a fragmented nation and a volatile state.” Cormack and Shmookler picked ten short stories in which the city “emerges as a place of refuge, an object of nostalgia, a site of violence, and a muse for the literary imagination.”
Because of layers of migration, language, social and cultural clashes, Khartoum remains a site of “conflicted cosmopolitanism”. The stories in The Book of Khartoum pick up where Season of Migration left off, bringing tales of “a post-colonial world shaped by conflicting aspirations and daunting obstacles.” The disappointment of a big city experience is brought out evocatively in Ali al-Makk’s ‘In the City’, and Bawadir Bashir’s ‘Next Eid’, in which a young boy moves to Khartoum to go to university and becomes the envy of his village but only he knows that his life is not what his family imagines it to be. The first story in the collection, Ahmed al-Malik’s ‘The Tank’, translated by Adam Talib, is a dark comedy about a father who buys a tank from a middleman and parks it under the neem tree outside his home. He soon noticed that the quality of services improving markedly — the butcher sent home the best cuts; power cuts stopped; water supply wasn’t shut off. How he came to acquire the tank is another story.
A Sudanese writer who has been chronicling the inner lives of Muslim women and exploring questions of identity, migration and Islamic spirituality is Leila Aboulela, the first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She is the author of six novels, and her latest, River Spirit (2023), is the coming-of-age story of a young woman, Akuany, for whom “the river was her language”, during the Mahdist war in 19th century Sudan. In her new book, Aboulela narrates the complicated history of her country, particularly what happened in pre-colonial times when Sudan began to slip from the grasp of Ottoman rule and everyone had to pick a side.
As people of Sudan know, they are still having to choose sides.
