LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

arabic poetry, nationalism and social changevalue of girls’ schools (which many eminent men of the period still considered adubious enterprise). In the early 1930s, one poet even applied the traditionalpraise poem to the Swedish actress Greta Garbo, revealing the growing influenceof European and American films on young educated men in Khartoum.Others praised graduate-sponsored charities, such as the Piaster Orphanage inOmdurman, that reflected support for the ideal of national self-help asadvocated in India by Gandhi (with whose writings and deeds the graduateswere familiar, thanks to the periodical press) (al-Banna 1976, al-Nahda 1931–2,al-Fajr 1934–7).Against this context of social reform and improvement, poets coaxed thegrowth of early nationalism by discussing what it meant to be Sudanese. It was apoet, in 1927, who first suggested the idea of a ‘Sudanese’ Arabic nationalliterature – and by implication, of a ‘Sudanese’ national identity. The unlikelychampion of Sudanese Arabic was a government tax-collector named Hamza al-Malik Tambal (1897–1951), who was born in Aswan, Egypt and who spokeNubian, not Arabic, as his mother tongue. Tambal argued that poets could maketheir work distinctively or authentically ‘Sudanese’ by incorporating referencesto indigenous themes, settings and customs – an agenda he applied in a series ofinnovative nature poems that evoked mountains in Kordofan and sunsets nearDongola (Tanbal 1931, Tambal 1972, al-Shush 1971: 149–76, Sharkey 1998b).Tambal’s ideas about ‘Sudanese’ literature initially caused an uproar, buteventually caught on. For members of the educated Northern elite, who tookpride in their Arab pedigrees, the term ‘Sudanese’ or sudani implied slave originsand was conventionally applied to dark-skinned peoples from non-Muslimsouthern regions – not to noble Arabs. One of the fascinating developments inmodern Sudanese history is the transformation of the term ‘Sudanese’ from acomment on low social status to a badge of national pride (Sharkey 1998: 34–80) – a situation paralleling, in some respects, the nationalist rehabilitation of‘Turk’ – which had implied a boor or yokel – in late Ottoman Anatolia (Lewis1968: 1). Poets worked to make the term ‘Sudanese’ or sudani more palatable,though it undoubtedly helped first that it was a convenient adjectival formbased on the colony’s name (referring to a territory, not a social group), andsecond, that nationalists were able to coin a new plural form from the singular –sudaniyyin, connoting Sudan nationals, rather than sud, meaning blacks. Thisvariant plural made its way into a political slogan of the late Anglo-Egyptianperiod: ‘Sudan lil-Sudaniyyin’ – Sudan for the Sudanese.Two literary journals of the 1930s became the forum for the new literature of‘Sudanese’ national identity and social reform. These were al-Nahda (1931–2)and al-Fajr (1934–7), which by their very titles touched on common nationalistthemes. (ÆAl-Nahda’ evoked the ideal of national revival, while Æal-Fajr’ evokeda new dawn.) Their formats included poetry as well as new genres – editorial— 171 —www.taq.ir