In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad Shalali, a Nubian worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola—the capital of medieval Nubia, now lost to the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam. In Dongola, the Nubians reached their zenith. They defeated and dominated Upper Egypt, and their archers, deadly accurate in battle, were renowned as “the bowmen of the glance.” Halima, Awad’s wife, must deal with the reality of today’s Nubia, a poverty-stricken bottomland. Men like Awad now work in Cairo for good wages while the women remain at home in squalor, ignorant of the glory now covered by the Nile’s water. Left to tend Awad’s sick mother and his dying country, Halima grows despondent and learns the truth behind the Upper Egyptian lyric: “Time, you are a traitor—what have you done with my love?” Through his characters’ pain and suffering, Idris Ali paints in vibrant detail, with wit and a keen sense of history’s absurdities, the story of cultures and hearts divided, of lost lands, impossible dreams, and abandoned loves. Dongola received the University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation in 1997.
Dongola
A Novel of Nubia
In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad Shalali, a Nubian worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola—the capital of medieval Nubia, now
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Idris Ali, one of Egypt’s leading Nubian writers, is the author of three short story collections and six novels, including Dongola (AUC Press, 2006). Selftaught in literature, he attended the Religious Institute of al-Azhar and currently lives in Cairo. He passed away in 2010. Elliott Colla teaches comparative literature at Brown University. He is the author of Conflicted Antiquities and the translator of The Heron by Ibrahim Aslan (AUC Press, 2005) and Gold Dust (AUC Press, 2008). He was runner up in the 2009 Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of Gold Dust.
