25 pages • 50 minutes read
A Handful of Dates
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Background
Authorial Context: Tayeb Salih
Tayeb Salih was born in 1929 in Karmakol, a village on the bank of the Nile in the rural north of Sudan. He grew up in a community shaped by religious and agricultural traditions, moving to Sudan’s capital Khartoum as a young man to study for his degree at Gordon Memorial College (later the University of Khartoum). In 1952, he traveled to London and studied at the University of London, part of a cohort of Sudanese students educated in Britain as part of the transition to Sudanese independence in 1956.
Salih intended to return to farming in Sudan but instead began a career in journalism and settled in London. In 1956, he married a British woman. He wrote a weekly literary column for the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Majalla for a decade and worked for the BBC’s Arabic Service, becoming Director General of the Ministry of Information in Qatar. Toward the end of his career, he worked for UNESCO in Paris, holding various posts including representative for the Arab States of the Persian Gulf.
In parallel to his professional career, Salih published numerous literary works to critical acclaim. His most renowned work, Season of Migration to the North (1966), was immediately well-received and made him a prominent figure in Arabic literature and cultural exchange. His works embrace ambiguity and engage with inner contradictions, uncertainties, and difficult choices, as explored by the narrator’s transitional experience in “A Handful of Dates.”
Sociohistorical Context: The Intersection of Cultures in Sudan
Tayeb Salih’s work is deeply interested in the intersection of complex cultural, religious, and social influence in Sudan and North Africa more widely, and with the rapid changes of the increasingly globalized world of the 20th century.
The complexity of Sudan’s society is the result of its history. Sudan is now a 70% Arab Islamic country, with long-established communities of Orthodox Christians. Until the expansion of Islam into North Africa in the 14th and 15th centuries, Sudan was largely Christian. Sudanese culture encompasses the traditions and beliefs of its 500+ ethnic groups, regional dialects and languages, and religious/ethnic links across the Arab world and beyond.
For centuries, Sudan was ruled by external colonial powers: the Ottoman Empire, Turco-Egyptian rule (1811-1899), and Egyptian-British rule (1899-1952), after which a transition led to Sudanese independence in 1956. The colonial and postcolonial events of the 20th century are particularly relevant to Salih’s writing, which engages with the Sudanese experience during this time. For the first part of Salih’s life, Sudan was effectively under British control. Britain sought to maintain a cultural and administrative split between North and South Sudan. From 1924 until independence, the two regions were treated separately, with the North encouraged to develop its economy much faster than the South, which retained more of its traditional and rural way of life but did not benefit from the economic growth in the North. On independence, Islamic rule was established in Sudan, further exacerbating the differences between the predominantly Arab Muslim North and the more diverse South with large Christian and Animist populations. War broke out, now called the Sudanese Civil War, lasting from 1956 until 2009.
Tayeb Salih avoids drawing simplistic moral dichotomies in his writing and engages with the multiple cultural axes of Sudanese society: North and South, colonial and postcolonial, Islamic and secular, traditional and modern. He investigates the currents of postcolonialism, religious and cultural control, and freedoms in Sudan and North Africa. Many of his ideas revolve around industrialization and urbanization, the material values of Western culture, religious and ethnic identity, and the moral boundaries of the individual, society, and the state. In his works, Salih reflects the multifaceted relationships between rural people in an increasingly urban world, highlighting the conflicts between capitalism and spiritualism. In doing so, he also connects the effects of rising Islamic fundamentalism on Sudanese culture, values, and freedoms during his lifetime.
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