Poetry
غابة الأبنوس
Not translated into English
Salah Ahmed Ibrahim · 1958
Synopsis
غابة الأبنوس (The Ebony Forest): the poet's first collection, which combines love poems through which figures of Greek mythology pass, among them Maria, addressed to a young Greek woman, and poems on the Sudanese homeland, on Africa and on the man of the Third World. In it the poet claims a double heritage, Arab and African, and rejects the idea of a pure ancestry.
Context
The collection appeared in Beirut in 1958, then was reissued in 1968 by Dar Maktabat al-Hayat; an enlarged edition appeared in Paris in 1990 from Édifra, with a preface by Tayeb Salih and calligraphy by Osman Waqialla. Earlier than the School of the Forest and the Desert, formed in the early sixties, it anticipates its idea of a Sudan at once Arab and African. ArabLit included it in 2022 in its canon of Sudanese letters.
Who it is for
For discovering, in Arabic, the first book of a great Sudanese poet, between love, Greek myths and Africa.
Prizes and reception
ArabLit sees in its author a pioneer of Sudanese free verse, who moved from romanticism to social realism.
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