{"id":6291,"date":"2016-05-17T10:15:30","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T09:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6291"},"modified":"2016-06-22T14:53:36","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T13:53:36","slug":"the-book-of-khartoum-a-city-in-short-fiction-eds-raph-cormack-max-shmookler-comma-press-9-99-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6291","title":{"rendered":"<em>The Book of Khartoum: a city in short fiction<\/em>, eds. Raph Cormack &#038; Max Shmookler (Comma Press) \u00a39.99, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/commapress.co.uk\/books\/the-book-of-khartoum\/the-book-of-khartoum-high-resolution.jpg\/image%2Fspan3\"><\/p>\n<p>The Khartoum I knew in the early \u201880s, was a dry, sprawling low-rise city, where the dominant mode of transport was still the horse and cart.\u00a0 The Hilux pick-up bus, known locally as a \u2018box\u2019 had started to become more commonplace, bouncing over the vaguely tarmacked, sandy roads that ran even in the city centre.\u00a0 The sense of Khartoum\u2019s history, and place on the African continent was etiolated behind the overwhelming sense of culture clash that I and other \u2018hawajas\u2019 felt, under the unremitting sun;\u00a0 a culture clash further exacerbated by the division between the Arab and African populations of Sudan.<\/p>\n<p>But even under that disorientating sun, there were indications of a rich and complicating life lived by those who stayed there.\u00a0 Returning to the house we had been lent in our final days there, we saw a man and a woman leaving the house together.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t seem to be married in this increasingly Islamic society, and we tended to assume that they\u2019d used the empty house, to which clearly they had keys, as a trysting place. \u00a0In the provincial town of El Obeid, where we lived, the Sudan Club was forced to destroy its supplies of Kronenberg, when the then-President, Jafar Numeiri, moved the country into Islamic Sharia law.<\/p>\n<p>Khartoum was always a magnet to the many ethnic groupings that have comprised the population of Sudan.\u00a0 And Comma\u2019s <em>The Book of Khartoum<\/em> contains stories written by writers from Kassala in the east to Argo in the north, and Kosti in the south, and Arthur Gabriel Yak, who works as a journalist in the capital of South Sudan, Juba.\u00a0 Some of these writers are now based outside Sudan, in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and even Austria.<\/p>\n<p>The provenance of the writing is matched by the range of styles in this book.\u00a0 Ali al-Makk\u2019s seemingly slight story appears at first glance to be a story about the initiation of an innocent from the north, Hassan, into the ways of the big bad city.\u00a0 The story focusses on the inner braggadocio of Hassan as he is taken by a friend to drink at a local brothel. The outcome of this visit is as low-key and bathetic as might have been predicted.\u00a0 But what al-Makk seems ultimately to show is that, in a society where certain behaviours are heavily proscribed, inner identity may often be weak and ill-formed.<\/p>\n<p>Other stories move within a kind of Sudanese magic realism.\u00a0 The first story, Ahmed al-Malik\u2019s \u2018The Tank\u2019 is a particularly fine version of this.\u00a0 It begins very simply, \u2018It\u2019s been a week since I took delivery of the tank, which I bought from a middleman who lives nearby.\u2019\u00a0 Initially, it being Sudan, I thought this must be a water tank.\u00a0 But, the tank is, actually, a military tank. The story renders, quite exquisitely, the reactions of those around the unnamed narrator and his family.\u00a0 Including \u2018the strongman who pulled carts with his teeth and broke boards with a single bare hand [who] fled before me.\u2019 And other stories are still more surreal, as in Bushra al-Fadil\u2019s \u2018The Story of the Girl whose Birds Flew Away\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>The final story in this fine collection is the almost Tolstoyan \u2018The Void\u2019 by Hammour Zaida.\u00a0 It recreates the final days of the so-called Mahdist war culminating in the vast defeat of the Mahdi\u2019s army in Omdurman.\u00a0 The story is Tolstoyan in its focus on the pain, suffering and fantasies of the wounded and dying.\u00a0 Its central protagonist is the wounded soldier, Hadija, and the unnamed woman who tends to him.\u00a0 Their relationship is depicted as a delicate dance of nursing, rumour and facts about the war.<\/p>\n<p>Sudanese literature has had little exposure in English.\u00a0 El-tayib Saleh\u2019s <em>Season of Migration to the North<\/em> is often the only Sudanese book that gets read.\u00a0 However, Leila Aboulela\u2019s fine novels, written in English, are also opening British eyes to Africa\u2019s largest country.\u00a0 This collection of deeply affecting stories, often exquisitely translated, can only be a welcome addition to that continuing exposure.<\/p>\n<p>Ian Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Khartoum I knew in the early \u201880s, was a dry, sprawling low-rise city, where the dominant mode of transport was still the horse and cart.\u00a0 The Hilux pick-up bus, known locally as a \u2018box\u2019 had started to become more commonplace, bouncing over the vaguely tarmacked, sandy roads that ran even in the city centre.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Book of Khartoum: a city in short fiction, eds. 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