LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

arabic poetry, nationalism and social changeSudanese presses took them on. Boosted by government funding, book productionof all kinds increased after 1956. This trend reflected both the expansion ofhigher education (and hence the increase of reading audiences), as well as ademand for national history and literature texts that could prove the nation’scultural, and not merely political, autonomy. When the masterwork of theSudanese Arabic novel – al-Tayyib Salih’s Mawsim al-hijra ila shamal (Season ofMigration to the North) – appeared in the late 1960s, it was postcolonial in moodand substance, and not only in its timing. In other words, Season of Migration tothe North explored the kind of cultural dislocation and doubt that distinguisheswhat some critics have called the ‘postcolonial condition’ of the late twentiethcentury (Gandhi 1998: 4).In the early twentieth century, by contrast, poetry had been the mouthpiecefor the colonial condition. Living under a British regime in a period of dramaticsocial changes, educated men had turned to its familiar patterns and rituals tomake sense of the world around them. On the one hand, they used poetry tochart the local developments that occurred as the region, under Britain’simperial aegis, moved more closely into a Western-dominated global order. Onthe other hand, they used poetry to rationalise the new territorial and politicalstructure of the ‘Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’, within which a Sudan republic wasborn at independence. In this milieu, a generation of poet-statesmen flourished,using the power and beauty of words to apprehend and define a nation.notes1. The term ‘Arabic culture’ is here used as a more general term than ‘Arabicliterature’. For while the former may include oral and written genres, the latter,through its Latin etymology, implies a lettered tradition or written practice alone.2. The first locally-printed Sudanese Arabic books appeared between 1922 and 1924.3. The Gordon Memorial College at Khartoum, Reports and Accounts to 31st December,1929: 23. A copy of this report is preserved in the Sudan Archive at DurhamUniversity.4. A whole file of such praise poems is preserved in the Sudan Archive at DurhamUniversity. SAD 100/6 [AR]: F. R. Wingate Papers. File of addresses of welcome andverses in praise, in Arabic, composed in honour of the Sirdar and Governor-General, Wingate, dated 1900–6.5. According to one source from the early 1970s, Arabic speakers in the western Sudanreportedly had so much trouble understanding the fusha radio broadcasts fromgreater Khartoum that many preferred listening instead to the colloquial Arabicradio broadcasts emanating from Chad (Metz 1992).6. In 1995, a Khartoum newspaper published a tribute to Khalil Farah on the sixtythirdanniversary of his death in 1932, entitled ‘Khalil Farah: You Will RemainImmortal throughout the Passage of Time’, al-Sudan al-Hadith (Khartoum), 29Jumada al-Ula 1416/ 24 October 1995: 7.— 177 —www.taq.ir