Hammour Ziada “Human beings are creative even in shaping and diversifying oppression”

Over the past decade, Hammour Ziada has become one of the more widely recognized voices in contemporary Sudanese literature. Born in Omdurman in 1977, he worked in journalism and civil society research before moving to Cairo, where he wrote for several Sudanese newspapers and later served as culture editor at Al-Akhbar.

He gained international recognition with his 2014 novel The Longing of the Dervish, a historical novel set during the collapse of the Mahdist state in nineteenth-century Sudan. The book won the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, making him the first Sudanese writer to receive the prize, and was later shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His writing often returns to themes of power, slavery, violence, religion, and the hidden structures of Sudanese society, combining historical depth with lyrical prose and psychological tension.

Alongside The Longing of the Dervish, which was translated into English, his novel The Drowning was also translated into English and French. The book, shortlisted for the Prix de Littérature Arabe, drew praise for its portrayal of servitude and repression in rural Sudan. One of Ziada’s short stories also inspired the internationally acclaimed Sudanese film You Will Die at Twenty by Amjad Abu Alala.

In this interview, Hammour Ziada reflects on literature’s relationship to war, repression, fear, symbolism, and the political burdens placed on Arab writers today.

Musab Mohammed Ali: How do you see the transformation of everyday and cultural language in Sudan under the pressure of war? Are we witnessing the militarization of imagination, not just language?

Hammour Ziada: We face the danger of words becoming bullets, not merely writers becoming part of mobilizing rhetoric. Anyone who stops at propaganda has already escaped the worst of it. More dangerous, perhaps, is when the writer slips into glorifying killing and romanticizing repression.

Sudanese society is facing an unprecedented moment in its consciousness. We have no real experience dealing with a collapse like the one unfolding in the country. People rush toward what they think will save them, and they become deeply savage if you try to stop them or even speak to them. It is difficult to convince someone engulfed in flames not to throw themselves from the tenth floor. They will see you as an enemy.

What war poses to imagination and language is a question whose answer will emerge in the literary production of Sudanese writers in the coming years.

MM: You warn against words becoming “bullets,” but isn’t literature itself built on emotional influence and provocation?

HZ: By becoming bullets, I mean serving death and recording domination. This is a dilemma literature faces, just as religion, science, and everything else do. Power, not merely political authority but power in the absolute sense, always seeks to bend things into its service. That is how genocide, displacement, racism, and wars have found their justifications. I defend literature and the attempt to preserve it from such manipulation, but I do not claim literature alone can confront this threat.

MM: You’ve said that authoritarian systems teach people to stay away from politics. Do you think the most dangerous thing dictatorships leave behind is repression itself, or the reshaping of people’s consciousness regarding participation?

HZ: Repression can criminalize the very idea of participation among citizens. It pushes people to abandon their right to manage their own affairs, and it achieves this through fear.

I do not think totalitarianism even needs repression today – it is living through its golden age through the spread of fear. Fear is what governs human beings now. That is why people cling to the strongman, the protector, the tyrant. They willingly surrender everything in exchange for a sense of safety, for the belief that someone knows what they are doing in this chaotic world.

MM: In one interview, you described writing as “a painful but enjoyable game.” Is that duality what allows literature to say what politics cannot?

HZ: Art is a process of symbolism. The play of meanings, concealment, and saying things not as they are but as the artist imagines them is intrinsic to art. Art can survive as long as the artist believes they are capable of saying whatever they wish through it, as long as they do not surrender. The moment adaptation and submission take over, the artist may no longer be able to say what they truly want, and perhaps survival itself becomes impossible then. I do not think it is easy for a writer to reconcile themselves with being deprived of the right to expression.

MM: You speak of opposites coexisting within the text, but doesn’t that sometimes lead to intellectual evasiveness rather than taking a clear position? Can imagination become a tool for escaping truth rather than confronting it? And when contradictions remain unresolved, is there not a danger that readers leave with no position at all, or worse, with justification for everything?

HZ: Symbolism has always been accused of evasiveness, of trying to avoid saying things clearly. That is an old opinion, perhaps as old as art itself. But there are already vast spaces for saying things directly and explicitly. I do not think we need to debate the importance of literature joining the camp of directness. Let literature keep its symbolism, which many regard as contradiction or escape, and let us say what we wish through other means.

Yes, imagination can become a tool for escape. Human beings are capable of corrupting anything. Religions are used to escape truth. Philosophy is used to escape truth. Sports are used to escape truth. But we cannot condemn religion, philosophy, or sports simply because some people were afraid of confrontation and hid behind them.

Yes, that danger exists. But I do not think it is the writer’s role to worry about it. The writer’s role ends with producing the work. The reader’s position is not their responsibility. Otherwise, Shakespeare would have spent decades suffering from humanity’s endless reinterpretations of his plays.

Do readers impose such expectations on literature? Perhaps human beings are more varied and complex than that assumption allows. I do not think readers throughout history have always burdened literature with these functions. Yet literature is undeniably a repository of judgments and experiences, so it is natural for certain texts to gain stature because of the meanings they carry. The Shahnameh was never merely a literary text, and the Mu‘allaqa of Amr ibn Kulthum among the Taghlib tribe was never just a poem.

MM: If you reject assigning literature the task of healing pain, why do you also insist that it seeks to “rearrange the world”? Isn’t that implicitly an attempt to intervene in human suffering? Can literature remain neutral toward pain while drawing its material from it?

HZ: When I say literature does not heal pain, I mean it does not do so directly, nor is that its function. But engagement with literature may make one forget pain. It may help you, in a butterfly effect, discover the path toward treating pain. I think this frees literature from the schoolmasterly and moral obligations that insist all literature must carry ethical or enlightening messages. In my view, literature is ethical and enlightening in itself. A poem does not need to veil its gazelles, nor must a novel adopt a progressive discourse.

This is a question whose answer exceeds my abilities. I wish I knew what salvation truly is, so I could know whether understanding the world can save us. We seek salvation, but we do not really know what we are seeking. Still, we have what we believe in, and that is enough for human beings: to believe.

MM: Does writing from outside one’s homeland offer greater freedom, or does it create another kind of censorship, the censorship of nostalgia or representation?

HZ: It grants a different kind of freedom. The restrictions inside the country are certainly different from those of exile. As for nostalgia, I see it as a motivation for writing and creation, not the opposite.

MM: You described writers inside Sudan as “resisting a damaged reality,” while saying writers abroad chose “the shorter path.” Is that a moral judgment or a practical description?

HZ: It is a practical description, not a judgment, nor are these opposing categories. The shorter path to publishing abroad is not opportunistic or cowardly. But it is undoubtedly shorter and faster than publishing within Sudan and trying to change the realities of the publishing industry there.

MM: When you say you write the novelistic sentence with poetry in mind, do you fear language might seduce the reader at the expense of the idea? Do you think the Arabic novel today owes too much to poetry?

HZ: Some novels have indeed been seduced by poetry and the sweetness of language at the expense of the work itself. It was a dominant style for a time, perhaps because Sudanese taste, as I would claim, is fundamentally poetic. As much as I value poetry and believe we owe much to it, I do not like seeing it overwhelm the novelistic text.

MM: You warn against poetry dominating the novel, yet you admit to writing with a poetic spirit. Isn’t that contradictory?

HZ: Poetry preceded the novel as an art form. The novel is, in some sense, a rebellion against poetry. But it is a rebellion that does not deny poetry’s importance or influence. It acknowledges poetry’s place while carving its own path. So I do not see poetic spirit as contradictory to rejecting poetry’s dominance over that path.

MM: How do you ensure that the “sweetness of language” you criticize does not become part of your own style?

HZ: There are no guarantees. It is entirely possible. Language has its magic.

MM: In your works, history seems almost alive, breathing within characters and reshaping their destinies. Do you write to understand history, or to survive it?

HZ: Understanding is the beginning of the road toward survival, if survival is even possible. Literature’s attempt is to rearrange the whole world, not merely to understand history. It is an attempt to make this chaotic world comprehensible. Perhaps that might also make it safer.

MM: You once said you cannot detach yourself from politics, unlike major writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Tayeb Salih. Do you think the era of the “neutral writer” has ended in the Arab world?

HZ: I lean toward what Elif Shafak once said: that we come from a part of the world where it is difficult for novelists to separate themselves from public and political conflicts. Perhaps writers in other countries can afford that luxury. In our region today, it seems difficult.

MM: The Arabic novel is often accused of becoming trapped by “the political subject” at the expense of artistic innovation. Is that criticism accurate, or does it oversimplify more complex literary experiences?

HZ: Perhaps we are living through a political moment, which is why politics occupies the minds of many writers and readers. The symbolism of literature also becomes tempting under repression and restrictions on free expression. But I cannot definitively say the accusation is correct. Such accusations do not concern me much because they have existed since the first mother sang a lullaby to her child in some cave. This is a battle that will never be resolved. Literature will continue to evolve, and accusations will continue to follow it. They will not harm it, but may instead help it develop.

MM: You survived an assassination attempt and a raid on your home, moments that marked a turning point in your life. How did that experience change your relationship with writing? Did it make you bolder, or more cautious about what you say?

HZ: I do not think it changed my writing as much as it made me more aware of the effect of words. It is an effect the writer may not fully grasp, but must believe exists, and that others perceive it. Awareness of the power of words makes you respect them more. Perhaps that respect produces caution, and perhaps it does not.

MM: In your novel The Drowning, the act of drowning becomes something that exceeds the body and extends into an entire social structure, where oppression continues even after the abolition of slavery and the changing of names. Do you think Arab societies have never truly left systems of servitude behind, but merely reproduced them in more concealed forms?

HZ: I do not think the world as a whole has moved beyond the stages of servitude, because slavery is one manifestation of oppression. Human beings are complex creatures, both in how they perceive themselves and in how they relate to others. Oppression accompanies humanity, individuals and societies alike. Even those who revolt against it are not free from it. Slavery is one form of oppression, but not its only form. Owning human beings is not limited to slave raids and traditional slave markets. Human beings are creative even in shaping and diversifying oppression.