Novel
الفراغ العريض
Not translated into English
Malkat al-Dar Mohammad · 1970
Synopsis
In the years of the Second World War, the young Muna follows her mother and her grandfather to Omdurman, to her father's family: the house of an uncle, his sons and daughters, and the wife of another uncle, abandoned by her husband, who has married another woman because she had no children. Muna and her cousins Sara and Suad live there under the rule of Sayyid, a seventeen-year-old boy to whom the family grants everything. When he discovers that Sara loves one of his friends, he beats her and forbids her the teacher training college she had dreamed of.
Context
Written in the first half of the fifties, the novel remained in manuscript for a long time; it appeared only in 1970, from the publishing house of the National Council for Letters and the Arts, in Khartoum. It shows how the hardship of families opened school and the work of teacher or nurse to poor girls, an English inspector coming to recruit them from town to town. The critic Nahid Mohammed al-Hassan reads in it an exposure of male domination, which gives way as soon as money needs demand it; Eiman El-Nour sees in it the first true Sudanese novel of social realism.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred pages, in Arabic, not translated. It assumes some familiarity with the society of Omdurman under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first novel written by a Sudanese woman, it long awaited critical attention, which came with recent feminist readings.