An Ever-so-short History of the ‘Complex, Capacious’ Sudanese Short Story

October 5, 2019

The essay “In a Sudan Where Literature is Often Smuggled, the Short Story is a Perfect Form,” by ArabLit editor M Lynx Qualey, appears on LitHub. It opens:

It was June 2, 1934, when a group of young men published the first issue of al-Fajr. This twice-monthly magazine followed the short-lived Nahda, which closed after its founder’s death in 1933. Al-Fajr’s core was formed out of study groups and friendships at Khartoum’s Gordon Memorial College in the late 1920s and early 1930s. At the time, possession of Egyptian literary magazines was an “incriminating act,” according to Sudanese scholar Yousif Omer Babiker, who wrote that the young men smuggled Arabic periodicals into the English school under their clothes.

Ninety years later, literature is still smuggled into and around Sudan. Before the Khartoum sit-in was brutally stormed at dawn on June 3, 2019, banned books were available at the protesters’ informal libraries. Before that, many could be found at the open-air book market called Mafroosh, held in Khartoum’s Etienne Square on the first Tuesday of the month.

Max Shmookler, co-editor of the short-story collection Book of Khartoum, said that when he was looking for Sudanese short stories in 2014, he found a few less controversial ones “in the dusty book shops clustered around the University of Khartoum.” But he found most in Mafroosh, where banned books were circulated by hand and where you could get a copy of the underground literary journal Elixir.

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