LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

heather j. sharkeywords, had been practically paperless, aside from the Koran. For the generationof nationalists, however, trained in modern schools, poetry increasingly lost itsmnemonic functions – cheap books were theirs for reference.Finally, other communications media began to compete with poetry as asource of entertainment and edification. In the mid-1930s, commercial cinemascame to Khartoum showing Egyptian, Anglo-American, and later Indian films,and offering visual, as well as aural stimulation (Sharkey 1998a: 347–51). Radiofollowed a few years later, in 1940, when the Sudan Intelligence Department,fearing a wartime threat from Italy via Abyssinia or Libya, set up ‘RadioOmdurman’ – initially to broadcast war propaganda, later to broadcast generalnews (Boyd 1993). Given the competition from cinema and radio, no wonderpoetry lost ground in the late colonial period; it was no longer the only sourcefor news, analysis and entertainment rolled together.Without a doubt, poetry played a critical role in the development of earlySudanese nationalism. And yet, its appeal had limits, even though its influenceendured to reach new generations of literate Arabic speakers.For a start, Arabic nationalist poetry did not appeal to non-Arabic speakers,who have collectively accounted for a majority of the Sudanese population.According to various estimates, ‘Arabised’ peoples made up only 40 per cent ofthe country’s population in the late twentieth century (Lesch 1998: 17, Metz1992, CIA 2000). As the Sudanese civil war (1955–72, 1983–present) hasshown, the nationalism of the educated Northern Sudanese, and not only theirnationalist poetry, has had ethnic limitations too. The Sudan’s early nationalistswere generally high-status, Arabic-speaking Muslims of the country’s riverainNorth, whom the British groomed to serve in government jobs. Rising to powerat independence in 1956, they claimed leadership over a country that containedspeakers of scores, or by some estimates, hundreds, of different languages (withthe South accounting for much of this diversity). Emphasising Arabic and Islamas platforms of national culture, their nationalism failed to attract many non-Arabic speaking and non-Muslim peoples – however universally ‘Sudanese’ ithad purported to be.Rooted in literary Arabic (fusha) with its formal vocabulary and syntax, someof the poetry of the early nationalists may have been little understood, even inthe riverain North. With only 13 per cent of the population literate to any extentat independence in 1956, and with literacy remaining low in years thereafter (ElBeshir 1967: 71; International Migration Project 1978: 3–7), few were able toread the periodicals or books where this poetry had first been printed. Evenwhen recited, the fusha poetry may have eluded many Arabic-speaking listeners,because of its literary language. 5 Yet, despite its difficulty for the illiterate, fushapoetry had prestige. The mere agreement that it stood at the apex of Arabiclearning and accomplishment would have helped to unite its listeners.— 174 —www.taq.ir