Novel
وبال في كليمندو
Not translated into English
Ibrahim Ishaq · 1999
Synopsis
To Dikkat Kafa, a village in western Sudan, there comes one day from the wadi Abu Ajura a handsome, secretive and taciturn young man, Qamar wad Talha. The village girls fall for him, and he wins the heart of Azza, a cousin of the sons of Ibeirig, rivals of the Kabbashi with whom strangers find refuge. When Qamar disappears in the wadi Kalimando, four voices from the village, Kaltouma, Omar, Abdelqader and al-Bushra, take up in turn what they know of the affair.
Context
The novel first appeared as a serial in the newspaper al-Khartoum in 1999, then in book form in October 2001 from the Centre for Sudanese Studies, between Khartoum and Cairo. It belongs to the Kafa cycle, an invented village where the author sets almost all his stories around the Kabbashi family; the same character, Mansour, a child here, becomes a jurist in the short stories. The narrative moves through sixteen parts entrusted to four narrators who each speak four times, with Kaltouma opening and closing the book. The critic Abdelmajid Abderrahman reads it as an ecological novel, in which man, beast and landscape answer one another.
Who it is for
In Arabic, not translated. The narrative draws on the speech of Darfur, and Kafa, its village, is an imaginary place.
Prizes and reception
Tayeb Salih said he had learned from this author's novels many things he did not know about the western provinces of the country.
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