Reflections on Sudanese Culture: Book Review
Sudan Events -Lemya Shammat
Abdel Goddous al-Khatim is one of the most influential literary critics who has made colossal contribution to Sudanese literature.
He has written plenty of well thought critiques that have placed him among the top critical figures in post-independence Sudan.
The 134-page book is divided into three sections. The main part includes 29 critiques of the Sudanese literary and cultural scene from the early 1930s to the present time.
Part 2 is a selection of English poems translated by the author, including works by poets like W. B.
Yeats, Karl Shapiro, Alexander Pushkin, and Vladislav Khodasevich, while the third chapter is primarily a compilation of press interviews with the author.
Al-Khatim seems bothered by the fact that literary criticism has not built a sustainable flow that can serve as a solid platform for continuous critical discourse.
In the presence of such a platform, he argues, “we would not need to prove that al-Mahjoub was the first to write a foot poem in the Arab World, and that Muawia Mohammed Nour was the first to introduce the stream of consciousness into the modern Arab story. Nor would we have trouble tracing the beginnings of cultural criticism in Sudan to the writings of Mohammed Ashri al-Siddiq.”
To al-Khatim, Mohammed Ashri al-Siddiq was a pioneer critic who started to shine as early as the 1930s. Since that time, he strongly emerged as a critic of note, who had a unique style, characterized by composure and thoughtful reflection.
Al-Khatim pays tribute to another pioneer, Mohammed Mohammed Ali, whom he describes as “a man of dialectical mentality that pierced into the heart of things”, and “a skillful swimmer against the current”.
In reference to what the author called “the phenomenon of political and literary splits that emerged strongly after independence“, he noted that the civil service gave birth to an elite class that separated itself from the public and lived in ivory towers.
The Sudanese culture, he notes, continues to suffer from a cocktail of chronic diseases such as social schizophrenia, division, exclusion, ambivalence, regionalism and tribalism.
