LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

heather j. sharkeyand arbitrary borders following the land-grabs of the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. In the Sudanese case, these borders reconciled Britishterritorial ambitions with competing Belgian, French, Italian and Abyssinianclaims in the vicinity. Outlined clearly on international maps, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan emerged as the largest country in Africa, binding an Arabicspeakingand Muslim riverain zone to culturally and linguistically diverse regionsin the south, east and west. Before thirty years had passed, poet-nationalistswere striving to make sense of a Sudan in these borders, by conceiving of thenation as a community congruent with the colonial territory, and fortified byArabic and Islamic foundations.The Anglo-Egyptian conquest rapidly affected Arabic culture, much like theNapoleonic conquest of Egypt a century before. In 1798, the French hadintroduced the printing press in Egypt, paving the way for the birth of the firstArabic periodicals under Egyptian government auspices (Ayalon 1995). In1899, the British did much the same in the Sudan, by importing a printing press– the first in the region with moveable type – to publish official proclamationsin Khartoum. Four years later, in 1903, Greek and Lebanese entrepreneursbegan to develop Khartoum’s commercial press, publishing Arabic periodicalsfor the Egyptian and Lebanese expatriates who had come to work in the colonialadministration or military, or in private businesses. These journals, whichfeatured both poetry and news stories, soon attracted Northern Sudanese readersand contributors, some of whom went on to establish the first Sudanese-ownedand -edited newspaper in 1917 (Sharkey 1999).In the years that followed, and among the highly educated, the developmentof journalism began to affect the creative process and social function of poetryin at least two ways. First, while Sudanese poets initially recited poems in frontof friends and colleagues before submitting them for publication, some in the1920s began to compose verse in written form, assuming individual readers –not groups of listeners – as their audience. Some indeed were beginning to regardpoetry less as a social event and more as a private experience. Second, whereaspoets had conventionally composed verse for specific occasions – to mark anIslamic holiday, for example, or to elegise a friend just deceased – some poetsnow composed poems for publication and perusal at an unspecified date. In thelong run, these two developments may have contributed to a growing abstractionin the content of poems, explaining, for example, the debut in the late1920s of a ‘nature poetry’ which, unusually for this time, was more likely tocomment on cloud formations than on human affairs.Under the dual influence of colonialism and print culture, Sudanese Arabicpoets (and not only poetry) changed as well. Those contributing to journalsdiffered in their social profile from the leading poets of the generation before, inthat few were Sufi shaykhs and none were poet-professionals, like the official— 166 —www.taq.ir