Poetry
العودة إلى سنار
Not translated into English
Muhammad Abdul Hai · 1973
Synopsis
In five cantos, the sea, the city, the night, the dream and the morning, a traveller returns from a long exile to Sennar, the sultanate born of the alliance between the Arab tribes of the north and the black kingdoms of the south. At the city gate, the guards question him: is he a Bedouin, does he come from the land of the Blacks? He answers that he is neither but is one of theirs, a stray who has come back, who sings in one language and prays in another.
Context
The text first appeared in 1963 in the daily al-Ra'y al-'Amm, then in the Egyptian review al-Shi'r and the Lebanese review Shi'r, which made it known throughout the Arab world; its author was about eighteen. The volume came only in 1973. The sultanate of Sennar, which the Funj founded with the Arab Abdallab at the beginning of the sixteenth century and which lasted until 1821, becomes in it the figure of a Sudan that is at once Arab and African. It is one of the first texts of the school known as the Forest and the Desert, which emerged among the students of Khartoum in the early sixties with al-Nour Osman Abkar, Youssef Aidabi and Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim.
Who it is for
In Arabic. It helps to know that the quarrel of the sixties in Sudan set those who tied the country to the Arab world against those who wanted it African.
Prizes and reception
Hailed by Arab readers from its appearance in a journal, it remains the common reference point in debates on Sudan's identity.