LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

arabic poetry, nationalism and social changepraise-singers who had served the Mahdist state. On the contrary, almost all ofthese new poets were employees of the Anglo-Egyptian state – schoolteachers,clerks, engineers, accountants, and even qadis in the reformed Islamic judiciary(El-Shoush n.d., Mikha’il n.d.). Moreover, of those who came of age after 1900,nearly all were graduates of colonial government schools that taught newsubjects, such as English and world geography, in addition to Arabic and Islam.Many attended one school in particular – Khartoum’s Gordon College – whichfavoured candidates from elite Muslim, Arabic-speaking families and groomedthem for the highest bureaucratic jobs available to Sudanese. These governmentschoolgraduates or khirrijin, as they often called themselves proudly in Englishor Arabic, went on to lead the Sudanese nationalist movement and to takecontrol of the country upon decolonisation in 1956 (Sharkey 1998a).The modern educated classes, from whose ranks poet-nationalists emerged,were also exclusively male. Since only men had access to advanced literacybasededucations throughout the colonial period, only men could participate inprint culture and the budding nationalist movement it stimulated. By contrast,in rural areas where oral traditions prevailed and where literacy was irrelevantto performance, women had often emerged as formidable poets and social critics(ÆAbidin 1967: 188–9). Advances in girls’ education in the late 1940s laid thefoundations for wider female participation in print culture in the postcolonialperiod, so that at independence in 1956, an estimated 4 per cent of theSudanese female population could read and write to some degree – a significantadvance from a generation before (Sanderson 1968: 120–1). In any case, sinceliteracy rates for both men and women were minute in the first half of thetwentieth century, the writing, publication and reading of poetry was perforcean elite endeavour.However inadvertently, government employment facilitated the Arabicliterary output and nationalist imagination of the educated Northern Sudanese.Scattered in postings far from Khartoum, and kept on the move through frequenttransfers, these men contributed and subscribed to journals from afar. Instead ofconstraining their nationalist thought, the obligation to communicate longdistance, from ever-changing posts, helped them to conceive of the colonialterritory as a spatial, national whole (Sharkey 1998a).The isolation of many government job posts also fostered literary activity.Often living in remote district centres where boredom posed a challenge,Northern Sudanese employees tended to focus on literary pastimes for pleasureand solace. Gathering in groups after hours, they composed and shared poems aspart of daily routine. The most serious poets sent poems by mail to Khartoum,for publication in a journal; a few even wired poems to friends by telegram,affirming in the process their grasp of new technologies and their power to cutacross physical distances (Sharkey 1998a).— 167 —www.taq.ir