LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

heather j. sharkeyover half the population was illiterate in the 1990s (CIA 2000). 7 From thissituation, a difficult question arises: Can the high culture of the literary languageor fusha, revered as it is, ever be truly popular in Arabic-speaking regions wheredialects vary and where literacy remains such a privilege?In his seminal work on nationalism, Benedict Anderson upheld novels andnewspapers – not poems – as the literary forms that most strengthened nationalistperceptions. By linking individuals across distances of time and space, he argued,both prose genres fostered ‘imagined communities’ of readers (Anderson 1991:22–36). Successive critics have continued to hail the novel, in particular, as ‘asort of proxy for the nation’ (Gandhi 1998: 151) – representing its communalideals, physical settings and mundane concerns within a single narrative frame.The novel, however, came late to the Arabic-speaking world, as a Europeanimport, whereas Arabic poetry was heir to a venerable and vibrant tradition thatstretched back to pre-Islamic times (Badawi 1993, Allen 1995). Throughout theArabic-speaking world in the early twentieth century, poetry was still the goldstandard for verbal and intellectual skill, so that poetry – not the novel – wasthe nation’s early proxy.In the Northern Sudan, poetry had solid credentials for serving the cause ofnationalism. It had a ceremonial and dignifying force, a strong following and areputation for social commitment. Endowed with these strengths, poetry made asmooth transition into print in the early twentieth century, as the periodicalpress first developed. At a time when periodicals were only a few pages long,poems fitted easily into the journal format along with short news articles oressays. Poetry was so all-embracing as a vehicle for expression that even someearly newspaper advertisements took rhymed, poetic form (Salih 1971: 44).When the first Sudanese-owned press faced the challenge of publishing wholebooks in the early 1920s, poets and poetry provided the natural subject for theseventures. In short, poetry was an idiom in which educated men were fluent.And yet, as Sudanese Arabic print culture developed, prose achieved increasingprominence. Nurtured by the periodical press, short essays proliferated inthe form of news articles, editorials, critical essays (on cultural and social topics),and book and film reviews. Many years passed, however, before periodicalsaccommodated narrative fiction. The credit for this development goes to al-Nahda, which began its short run in 1931. With twenty-four-page issues thatwere six times as long as the Arabic periodicals published before World War I,and four times as long as the major Khartoum paper of the 1920s, al-Nahda wasable to encourage writers to experiment with the short story genre and,moreover, to publish the results. It helped that many contributors had readEnglish-language fiction, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, at GordonCollege, 8 so that models for emulation were available (Babiker 1979: 54–98).Arabic novels, however, had to wait until the postcolonial period before— 176 —www.taq.ir