The Expansive Literary Output of Sudan and South Sudan, on Display

Sudan / South Sudan Literature Week features extracts from Kandake, a graphic novel by the writer Mohamed Yahia about an African queen resisting invasion by the Roman Empire in order to protect her land and people. Documentary photographs show the setting of the Madarek Publishing House and the Abdel Karim Merghani Cultural Center. A video work shows a dramatic recital of the narrative poem “Uncle Abdur Raheem” by the late poet M.E. Salim, translated from colloquial Sudanese Arabic. A clothing rack displays traditional Sudanese garb, alongside a new publication called Regional Folk Costumes of the Sudan by Griselda El-Tayib, a British woman who has lived in Sudan for almost sixty years.

Sudan and South Sudan have an undeniable and long history of conflict and political turbulence. Between 1896 and 1955, Sudan was under joint British and Egyptian control. Since gaining independence in 1956, the country has been ruled by a series of unstable parliamentary governments and military regimes. In 2011, South Sudan was established as an independent state^[2] after a referendum in which 99% of the population voted in favor of secession. Since 2013, the country has been engaged in civil war, which has cost an estimated 383,000 lives^[3], either from ethnic violence or from disease and starvation.

These post-colonial crises largely account for why literary texts from Sudan and South Sudan have not made their way to an English-speaking public. Cifuentes explained to me that Sudanese writers are often isolated because of the restrictions on freedom of expression and movement across borders, which result in censorship and a lack of access to the international literary scene. Most works written in Sudanese Arabic, or local languages such as Beja and Dinka, are not typically translated or distributed abroad.

Certain diasporic Sudanese writers have gained recognition in the English-speaking world, one example being Leila Aboulela, who was born in Cairo, grew up in Khartoum, and now lives between Abu Dhabi and Aberdeen. She has published several novels and collections of short stories in English; a review in The Observer of her latest work, Elsewhere, Home, spoke of her “quiet brilliance.” Amsterdam-based novelist Jamal Mahjoub has won several international prizes for his works of historical fiction and is acclaimed for his crime novels published under the pseudonym, Parker Bilal.