LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

118Arabic Poetry, Nationalism andSocial Change: Sudanese Colonialand Postcolonial PerspectivesHeather J. SharkeyIn an essay published in Khartoum in 1934, Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub, acolonial government-employed engineer, spare-time poet and future PrimeMinister of Sudan, lamented the lack of national sentiment around him.Declaring that nationalism required active construction, Mahjub urged hisArabic-speaking peers to create a national poetry (Mahjub 1970: 113–16).Living in a political context shaped by European colonialism, Sudanese Arabicpoets were not unique in pressing their art into the service of nationalism. Bythe time Mahjub wrote, poets in Egypt, such as Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi,Ahmad Shawqi and Hafiz Ibrahim, had been presiding over a nationalist literarynahda, or ‘awakening’, for more than half a century (Khouri 1971, Badawi1993). Meanwhile, in India during the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, Bengali poets in Calcutta were conscious of their own literaryawakening, or nabajagaran (Sarkar 1997: 160), with luminaries like RabindranathTagore composing verse on behalf of the nation. Poet-nationalists emerged laterin sub-Saharan Africa, after World War II. The Swahili poet Shaaban Robert,for example, helped to foster Tanganyikan (later Tanzanian) nationalism, whilethe French-language poet, Leopold Sedar Senghor, did much the same inSenegal (Iliffe 1979: 379; Ba 1973). These commonalities were not accidental.In the Middle East, South Asia and Africa alike, poetry was conducive andimportant to nationalist expression in this period, for at least four reasons.First, in its oral forms, poetry had traditionally served political and educationalfunctions, transmitting information and opinion in addition to entertainingor morally edifying. Before the mass literacy of the mid to late twentieth century,this remained equally true in societies that had low rates of literacy (forexample, the Arabic- or Bengali-speaking world), as in communities that hadlacked writing systems entirely (for example, parts of pre-colonial sub-SaharanAfrica). Recited in rhymed prose or set to music as song, poetry was a potentiallypopular medium, capable of spreading messages, such as nationalism, widely.Poetry was also memorable, with its rhyme, rhythm and (in the case of song)melody serving as mnemonic aids (Finnegan 1977, Ong 1991, Goody 2000).— 162 —www.taq.ir