The Sudanese Novel in Sixty Years
27 March, 2016KHARTOUM (SUDANOW) -In his book entitled ”The Sudanese Novel in Sixty Years”, Professor Mohammad al-Mahdi Bushra of the university of Khartoum, has traced the history of the Sudanese novel from the country’s independence in 1956 and after, giving a technical analysis of this narrative old and modern.
Bushra gives an insight in the themes of this narrative and the social themes it discusses in a manner that documents the country’s social and cultural development.
The 265-page medium –size book contains eleven studies and critiques. Excerpts:
The author has first devoted an entire section to feminine creation.”Women had a noteworthy contribution to the Sudanese novel. It could be enough to say that one of the country’s most outstanding novels was written by a woman half a century ago. That was Malkataddar Mohammad’s novel “Al-Farag al-Areed" or The Wide Emptiness' which was at a certain point in time shot into a radio series.
It could also be enough to say that two other outstanding Sudanese novels were written by women also: "Ougniat alnnar (The Fire Lyric)" by Buthyayna Khidir Makki and"Dahhka min glub aljanoub (Laughter from the Heart of the South)" by Ayda Abdel-Wahhab, adds Prof. Bushra.
Layal Abul-Ela, living and writing in England, has written excellent novels, namely “The Translator”, “The Minarat’’, “Lyricsl Alleys’’ and others had qualified her for big literary awards in the West.
However, the author after a review of some female writings, concludes that the creations of Sudanese women was just an exposition of female writers’ own selves, explaining that those novelists were obsessed with women worries and frustrations in a largely masculine society as ours’. Women novelists could not speak for the whole society or bypass women concerns, save in very rare cases.
In the second section of his book , Prof. Bushra tackles the issue of self- consciousness and consciousness about the other in Sudanese novels in which the writers monitor and depict the developments in the society.An example of this was Malkataddar’s novel referred to above that portrayed the conditions of women and the social suppression inflicted upon them.
Some other novelists had tackled the problems of racial discrimination and social injustice: Shawgi Badri in his novel ‘’ Al-Hanaq (Wrath)’’ and the image of Southern Sudanese in the Northern collective mind in Marwan Hamid’s novel (The Mundukuru) in which the writer has sided with the Southerners and portrayed them as victims of Northern oppression. Irrespectively, the novel envisions a unison between the Southern and Northern communities.
Prof. Bushra says that Mua’awya Nur (1909-1941) was a pioneer of the Sudanese novel who studied English, French, German and Russian literature at an early stage and wrote about it.
Nur had a preference for Russian narrative, predicting that it would become the literature of the future.
Nur’s studies , however, did not resonate well in the writings of the other pioneers of the Sudanese novel until the publication of Ibrahim Ishaq’s (Happened in the Village) and Tayeb Salih’s (The Season of The Migration to The North) that, Prof. Bushra says, ‘’ had opened new avenues for the Sudanese novel to the outside World.’’
The former (Ishaq) had graduated from the Higher Teachers’ Training Institute as a teacher of English, while the latter had travelled to England as a young man. Both men had mastered English and absorbed the techniques of the modern Western novel.
The works of these two men had bridged the gap between Nur’s writings on the Russian novelists and those of the Sudanese early novelists, as Ishaq’s and Salih’s writings had departed from the stereotype themes of Sudanese and Arab writers of the 1940s and 1950s.
Ishaq and Salih had also creatively employed time, especially Salih whose employment of time is considered quite masterly and distinguishes him from what we could see in other Arab novels. Salih had also paid attention to’ place’ and other advanced techniques of the novel.
The author has also reviewed a number of interviews conducted with Salih on his literary perspectives and his newspaper articles with a view to probing his thoughts on the country’s political and cultural state of affairs.
The Author had, by reviewing those articles and interviews, meant to decipher obscurities that occurred in Salih’s writings. That is because some of Salih’s critics had entertained the belief that he had picked his characters from real life. Salih had often been confronted by the question whether Mustafa Saeed, hero of the Season of Migration to the North, was Salih himself. Salih had used to deny any link between himself and the characters of his fiction.
Prof. Bushra then reviewed critiques published about Salih’s art. He said most of Salih’s non-Sudanese critics had forgotten to note the Sudanese cultural background of Salih’s characters and the impact of this background on his creation, foremost the Sufi (Mystic) background. He said those critics had also focused on the Season of Migration to the North, ignoring Salih’s other works.
Accounting for the creation of Ibrahim Ishaq, the author said Ishaq had produced 10 novels in 50 years, relying on a lofty creative talent that propelled him to the forefront of Sudanese novelists. Ishaq was different from other Sudanese novelists in that he employed Darfur colloquial Arabic.
Bushra agrees with critic Mjthoub Aydarous that Ishaq had employed his vast stock of folktales and, at the same time, mixed this stock with the achievements of the modern European novel. By that mixture, Ishaq had strived to reach the peak of the international novel as reflected in the works of William Falkner, Sokolov and James Joyce.
The book has been criticized as ignoring some of the well-known Sudanese novelists such as Iesa al-Hilo (born 1944) who is also a short story writer and a critic. The book has failed to review the new generation of novelists including Amir Taj al-Sir though it was published in 2015.
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