As much as infrastructure has been dilapidated, artists and cultural lives have been the most impacted by the Inqaz regime. Seen in Madani and captured by Andariya

Ibrahim Abdeen Abdel Raheem Mohamed Salih is a writer, critic, journalist, and teacher. He was born in 1960 in the northern state of Sudan, in the Al-Ghaba region. His personality was shaped during the first seven years of his life by the charming nature of the northern state, and he dreamed that he would continue to be a herder as he admired the environment and the shepherds who discovered different worlds in the desert and along the strip of the Nile.

He was a child with a different vision and later moved to study in Omdurman for primary school level and general secondary school at Bakkar School in the Al-Thawra district in Omdurman.

Throughout his teenage years, Abdeen’s hobby was reading and his first writing at the young age of 20 was a critical article on the song of Noura by the artist Jubara and poet Mohamed al-Hassan Salim Humaid. He sent his piece to Issa Al-Helou, a journalist who was at the time working as the cultural attaché for al-Ayyam newspaper. The article was published, and this was the beginning of his work as a critic. 

Alongside being a song critic and writing his opinions, he also engaged in writing poetry and short stories. His neatly written content and cultural programs of fictional societies were broadcast in the cultural supplement of the radio and television magazine.

Abdeen studied literature and philosophy at 'Almarai', sans-serif !important University, Khartoum Branch, currently known as Al-Neelain, where he with some colleagues founded the Arab Heritage and Culture Association, whose focus was cultural affairs.

He had a socialist Arab Baathist orientation and also participated in the cultural work of the Irhas Cultural Association of the Democratic Front. He worked with the association until his third year at university when he received political orientation and later joined the Arab Baath Party, whose ideology resonated with the book and novels about Arab unity that fascinated him.

One of the most important experiences in his life was during the Iran-Iraq war in 1983, and the then twenty-three years old Abdeen joined the war fighting alongside the People's Army in Baghdad. Armed with his belief in the cause, he attended military training and later, moved and fought on the frontline for six months.

Abdeen later returned to Sudan in order to complete his final academic year at the university. He became significantly involved in political work which reduced his interest in cultural work and affected his concentration as a poet, story writer, and critic.

The popular uprising against the President of Sudan, Gaafar Nimeiry in April 1985 led to Abdeen’s arrest and detention for fifteen days but he was released after the ousting of the regime. As the Baath Party began preparing for the 1986 elections, he was one of the active party members.

The Ba'ath party did not win a seat during the elections, and it was then that Abdeen started asking the tough question. Is the problem of Sudan and other third world countries political or cultural? He concluded that the problem is primarily cultural and not political.

He submitted his resignation from the Party and paused his political work- though his convictions as an Arab nationalist remained intact, and his political experience added to his knowledge as an intellectual and writer.

After graduating from the university, Abdeen worked as a journalist and supervised the cultural affairs editorial in the al-Badeel al-Siyasi newspaper. He later, together with a group of journalists and intellectuals, established the al-Balad magazine in 1987 where he was in charge of the cultural editorial and they managed to publish seven issues only for their journey to be cut short by the 1989 coup. He was a member of the Syndicate of Journalists before the arrival of the National Congress party to power in 1989.

With the arrival of the National Congress Party in 1989, all of Abdeen and his colleagues’ concepts for cultural supplements were stolen by the Inqaz government, which established cultural annexes in the papers just the same way that they were previously published but later stopped. A request was submitted to Ibrahim Abdeen to continue working under Inqaz, but he refused to work with the totalitarian dictatorial coup regime, which he believed was against his cause. The regime considered this a snub and a violation of their values, and harshly responded by blocking his journalistic work.

Between 1989 and 1991, Abdeen worked with Al-Amal Organization which catered for children without families until its operations were also halted by the government. He relocated to the city of Wad Madani where he joined the teaching profession that is similar to his earlier calling of spreading cultural awareness.

He gradually progressed in the teaching profession up to the level of school principal. He later became the director of private education at the Ministry of Education in the state of Gezira after the glorious December 2018 revolution in Sudan.

He was a member of Al-Gezira Association for Literature and Arts since the early 80s, a founder and a member of the Canar Cultural Association in 1996, and a member of the Cultural Forum in the Alumni Club and among its founders as well.

Abdeen never stopped critical writing and his articles were published in many newspapers and cultural attachments such as al-Adwaa, Al-Ayyam, Al-Sahafa newspapers, Sudanese Culture Magazine, Khartoum Magazine, and some electronic magazines. He was invited to many cultural platforms as a critic and presented papers at the Writers Union, Al-Tayeb Salih Award at Abdul Karim Mirghani Center, Al-Tayeb Salih Prize for novelistic creativity, the Coffee Scent group at Gezira University, and many platforms in the various states of Sudan.

Abdeen presented many broadcast episodes about his writing and criticism on Wad Madani Radio in the orbits of cultural programming. He was the main critic in all the programs during the launch of books in the city of Wad Madani, and most writers use him as a visionary critic for their work.

He was banned by the government of Inqaz from many platforms, especially seminars, under flimsy and fabricated excuses- such as not obtaining approval to conduct seminars and other programs. He attributes his delay in publishing his critique, poetry, and fictional books to many reasons, including material and political reasons, and the lack of available means for publication at that time.

Abdeen has three ready books, namely Studies in the Short Story, Studies in the Novel, a Short Story Collection, and a book on fictional criticism, with which he participated in al Tayeb Salih Prize. He has also produced manuscripts for other books and critiques, such as a manuscript on women's writing.

Abdeen believes that the critique movement in Sudan is far behind in writing. He in turn made his critical and cultural projects parallel in order to spread culture and awareness. One of his dreams is to establish an international cultural center in Wad Madani, to enliven it as a cultural city and a destination for intellectuals and thinkers from all over the world.

**

This piece is part of a series on art, resistance and revolution, created with the support of a grant received through the “Research on the Arts Program” Second Cycle (2020-2021), from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The views expressed in this production are those of its makers and interviewees and do not necessarily represent those of the ACSS.