New Short Fiction from Sudan: Rania Mamoun’s ‘Black & White’

Black & White

By Rania Mamoun

Translated by Nassir A-Sayeid Al-Nour

I stepped into my room. I found a young man, tensed and searching for something. He looked inside drawers, under the pillow, under the newspapers spread across a table, and he grew more and more anxious as he went to search somewhere else, and yet still didn’t find what he was looking for. His movements became frantic as he turned, his eyes out of focus. His hands flew up to his head, scratching fast, and then his left hand dropped while the right stayed where it was, gently scratching. In the messy background, music joined the young man’s movements, tension rising as he returned to searching for something, then falling in disappointment when nothing was found. It was as if the music kept time with the heartbeats that measured his dismay.

I started to draw his attention to the places he’d ignored, sending him mental messages: look under the table, between chairs, under the remote control that has been tossed so sloppily on the bed. When that failed, I helped him in the search, even though I didn’t know what he’d lost. We both lifted up the edge of the mattress, searching all the way to the middle, where we found a white small tablet. He eagerly swallowed the pill without water before he collapsed onto the bed. The rhythm of the music slowed until it kept a steady beat. I sat there, facing the TV.

I guessed that the pill was a tranquilizer, but a question mark still throbbed in my mind. I tried to work out the answer from the room’s layout. It was a single room with a TV fixed to the wall and a scattering of modest furniture. It was a hospital room, but what was wrong with him?

I left my questions and turned back to him. He was in a black-and-white image, although it looked as though it had been taken recently. The young man was at the tail end of his twenties, and I stared at a face that reflected neither poverty nor wealth, was neither handsome nor ugly. It was an ordinary face of the sort that meets us daily, to which we pay no attention. His need had impressed me. But now, he began to relax with the music. He lowered his feet and hands beside him. Those hands held his head as it shook. The camera’s motion calmed, focusing on his eyes, and he appeared to be on the threshold between this world and another.

*

-Take it and live.

Someone gave him a cigarette. They were two, he was the third, and he followed them as the cigarette changed hands. He hesitated, and the second one encouraged him, saying:

-Take it, man!

He said man as if he meant the opposite. Or as though he wanted to prove his manhood, then added, as he looked into his eyes:

-We’ve got nothing to lose, believe me.

As if he’d been awaiting a signal, he swiftly took it and stuffed it into his mouth, so as not to retreat.

In the background, music completed the scene with a sad rhythm that tugged at my heart and stained it with its sadness.

*

-Stupid!

This word exited my lips in resentment, as my sympathy transformed into disappointment.

Outside, I heard my mother calling my sister. Not me, I hoped. I wanted to reach the end of this two-toned film. I’m always attracted to films where the images play a much larger role than the dialogue.

I leapt into the camera lens and sat in its corner.

The young man who laid there, exhausted, opened his eyes. An exhausted lazy look was etched in his eyes, but it quickly shifted into lost look. The camera zoomed in, piercing the eyes and crossing into his brain. The camera searched over many drawers, ignoring some and pausing at others. A drawer was pulled out and a weed cigarette rolled. The camera ignored that, too, and then shifted away from this image, to another with a folded sheet of paper. The paper unfolded, and there were two words on it, “My Childhood,” written at the top. Then nothing but plain white. The camera quickly scanned the drawers, then paused at a certain drawer. Inside it, there was a booklet with “My Diary” written on its cover. The booklet opened, showing handwriting that was sometimes clear and neat, and sometimes unreadable. I went through the booklet from my perch in the camera’s lens, anxiously following its motion, directions, and pauses. A bold title appeared: “The Death of my Father.” Here there was only a single sentence: “He left me alone!”

The camera quickly scanned the pages, pausing at a page with title: “My Mother’s Illness,” with another weak sentence laid beside it: “You caused it!”

I followed the camera’s motions as it went through the pages. I fidgeted in my corner perch, awaiting its next pause. The page that filled the screen was different from the previous ones. It was large enough and written with clear purpose: light and darkness.

The camera on this page had paused while it was zoomed in so close, I thanked it. I read it as I remembered it had been written:

*

On that day, I wanted to be alone with a cigarette. I didn’t want any company, even if it would increase my pleasure. On the ground floor of our home, inside my room, I lit the cigarette. Leisurely, I entered into exotic labyrinths. I imagined unimaginable, eccentric things. As I smoked more, I moved along with these things. The light was off. At the last whiff, I lost the thread of what was happening. There was a ray of light leaking in from a small crack, perhaps from the hall lights, but at the moment, I didn’t think of anything like that. I focused only on the single light in midst of this darkness in which I’d locked myself. I felt my body release, my lump contracting; I felt more flexibility and then began to fade and transform into something decomposing. Maybe I became particles of air or light, I don’t know! What I knew was that I had been united with the mass I became. I wanted to slip through the same small crack at the top of the window through which the light was coming. I got up from the bed, swimming through the air toward the crack.

-Khalid.

When I heard my name, I felt that a large spot of light was drowning me. My mind was sunk. For a while, it was the only thing I could see and feel. My mind, body, and the entire room became white.

-Khalid.

As my mother called again, the whiteness faded, and I came back to myself. My mother called at a crucial moment, which drew my mind back from its unknown journey. Yes, my mother pulled me back from a weird world where I’d had one foot on its threshold. My mother is sick and couldn’t move. She asked for water, but I said nothing. I turned onto my side and went to sleep.

Then it was the next morning. It had been a long, long time since the first cigarette that I’d dropped at the university, which was why my mother got sick. I had given my entire life to her—except that cigarette. That morning, I coughed so badly, it felt as though my heart was trying to tear its way out of my ribcage. I spat; I didn’t care about my spit. I coughed again and spat a pool of slippery, thick hot material. I turned to see it again in focus.

*

Now, I’m thinking of what came out of him. The only color in the film was a photo of a handkerchief stained red.

Then the camera turned to Khalid. I leapt from the corner of the camera into the chair. He woke, went to the window, and inhaled pure air before he went back to his bed. He stretched his hand to the nearby drawer and took out a small booklet, flipping randomly through its pages. Suddenly he stopped, a wry smile engraved on his lips, and the camera flicked toward the paper. Written on it was:

-You’ve got nothing to lose… believe me!

Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese author, journalist, and activist. She has published two novels in Arabic – Green Flash (2006) and Son of the Sun (2013) – as well as a short story collection, Thirteen Months of Sunrise, which published in Lissie Jaquette’s English translation by Comma Press in 2018. Her short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies, including The Book of Khartoum (Comma Press, 2016), the first ever anthology of Sudanese short fiction in translation. She has also worked as culture page editor of Al-Thaqafi magazine, a columnist for Ad-Adwaa newspaper and presenter of the ‘Silicon Valley’ cultural programme on Sudanese TV. Currently she lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States.

Nassir A-Sayeid Al-Nour is a critic, author, and translator.