The Mauritanian writer and novelist Ahmed Ould Aslam said that there is an increasing demand from the youth of his country for new types of literature, including the story and the novel, in a country so famous for its poetry that it has become called the country of a million poets.
Ould Aslam stressed in an interview with Anatolia that this demand for new types of literature cannot be described as a liberation from meter and rhyme. Read also Outcasts.. The Mauritanian Bedouin Nostalgia Novel and the Paradox of Urban and Nomadic Ancient roads, civilizations and cities… The identity and history debate in Timbuktu Mauritanian literature in classical and colloquial .. Is it possible to separate the twins?
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He continued, “Sheikh Ahmed Ould Al-Ban, winner of the Katara Prize, also published his winning novel and did not abandon poetry, as well as the case with the poet Sheikh Ould Noah, and many other poets who may have found in the art of narration a space for visual details that poetry templates no longer support.”
According to Ould Aslam, the connection of the Mauritanian with Arabic poetry had historical and civilized reasons. “Mauritania’s geographical distance from its eastern cultural roots made it less affected, or – more correctly, slower – than others due to the weakness of Arab poetry during what historians describe as the era of decadence. That period In the Levant, the height of the flowering of poetry was in the space that would later be known as Mauritania.
He pointed out that this influence “continued to be delayed during the years following Mauritania’s independence, as its poetic literature did not keep pace with the schools that printed Oriental literature, although the eastern cultural tributaries echoed in Mauritanian literature.”
He continued, “The demand of young people for new types of literature cannot be described as a liberation from weight and rhyme. Rather, the state of Mauritanian society has become more reconciled with new patterns that keep pace with the path of urbanization, and social and cultural changes have imposed the entry of the novel, not to abolish poetry or replace it, but To accompany it in the march towards a culture responsive to the needs of the times.”
The birth of the Mauritanian novel
Ould Aslam pointed out that major factors led to the late birth of the Mauritanian novel, noting that the first novel in the country was in 1981, which is the “changing names” of the poet Ahmedou Ould Abdelkader.
He added that “this birth came as a result of the need for an expressive template that transcends the momentary poetic enthusiasm and documents the social changes accompanying the emergence of the state and the transition from an open space to a space with a central authority facing the challenges of dealing with the remnants of a long history of class and social conflict.”
He did not rule out that “this delay is a natural result of the difficulty of accessing the external cultural product to the nascent country (it became independent from France in 1960), and the limitedness of those interested in it in light of other priorities, such as building the state or the struggle for more urgent rights, as well as clinging to what the intellectual elite inherited. For this reason, interest in narrative literature has increased in recent years.
Methods and contents
Ould Aslam said that the Mauritanian novel written in Arabic can be divided into 3 literary streams, although all of them participated in the time period: “First, very realistic novels, represented primarily by the novels of the poet Ahmedou Ould Abdel Qader, the Sunni journalist Abdawa and some other less widespread novels.”
And secondly – according to Ould Aslam – “the historical exoticism novels, which are based on historical events that took place in the Mauritanian or Arab space and give them something of imaginative exoticism that brings them out of the historical minefield. The pioneer of this novelist movement was Musa Ould Abno in his novel The City of Winds.”
And the third trend is “the expatriate novels, which are few that talk about the crises of Mauritanian societies that originated in exile, or novels written by Mauritanians but whose events are not related to the local issue, and we can describe this as the novel “The Book of Apostasy” by the award-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, writer Mohamed Fadel Ould Abdel Latif.” According to the Mauritanian novelist.
summer sessions
Regarding his beginnings with writing the story and the narration, Ould Aslam indicated that the beginning was with “the children’s sessions in an isolated village near the city of Al-Nama (east), as it was customary for children to gather around an old woman who tells them excerpts from the legends of the Thousand and One Nights in its local version, and from There I imagined stories and told them to the children, without writing them down, and I had a wild imagination whose value I did not realize until many years later.”
But the written beginning was with university studies at the turn of the millennium, “where I published scattered short stories, one of which won the BBC Award and the Kuwaiti Al-Arabi magazine for short stories, and some of those stories were collected in a book entitled Waiting for the Past, published in 2015”.
Ould Islam received great attention from the media last year when the American University of Yale chose one of his stories to teach within the literature curriculum, and the British University of East Anglia chose two of his stories for translation, and the American magazine WWB chose an excerpt from his novel Al-Barani for translation in the Department of Science Fiction Literature.
The writer Ould Aslam has several publications, including “Waiting for the Past”, which includes 15 short stories, in addition to his first novel, “A Perforated Life”, which was published in 2020, and his second novel, “Al-Barani”, is expected to be published within weeks.