by Ahmed Abdel Aal
Translated by Noah Salomon
Translator’s Note
The following is a translation of a short fable from the 2006 book Elements: Happenings from the Presence of the Imagination (Amshāj: Waqā’i‘ min ḥaḍrat al-khayāl), written and illustrated by the Sudanese painter and writer, Dr. Ahmed Abdel Aal (1946–2008). The book was published at the end of Sudan’s longest civil war (1983–2005) between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army, based in the country’s South, and the government in the North. That war, which was once known as The Second Sudanese Civil War (before the violence proliferated and fragmented and people stopped counting), led to great and tragic losses. Nevertheless, though the interim period following the end of that civil war and prior to the separation of the South in 2011 did not lead to unity and was marred by the apocalyptic destruction of Darfur in the early 2000s that continues until today, it was a time when intellectuals were cautiously imagining what a new beginning might look like.
Abdel Aal wrote in the introduction to Amshāj that the stories therein would tell of “Men and women of noble souls but imprisoned within bloody bodies.” Ones for whom “Poetry moves in circles in their eyes,” thus clearly situating his book as a project of retrieval, wherein such poetry could finally be released. In almost every story that Abdel Aal tells in this book (there are forty-nine of them) there is a merging of the most ordinary details of Sudanese life (an anonymous government office, city traffic, the lilting tunes of a radio broadcast) and a discussion of most profound elements of existence (the ultimate forms, the eruption of miracle, the arrival of the eschaton). Awe and intimacy thus blend almost seamlessly in these curious fables, as the very much relatable characters—human, animal, and sometimes more-than-human- or-animal—grapple with the most consequential and terrifying moments of their lives. In each story too there is a mournful tone, often lingering just below the surface, a passing reference to loss, or a deep sense of sadness or longing in the mien of the main characters.
“Mountains Don’t Joke Around!!” is one of the most moving stories in this book, a meditation on calamity, on waking up to a world where everything one thought stable has been disturbed, and where no refuge in the usual answers, people, or solutions is possible to explain it away. It is also, however, a story about renewal, about coming to terms with a new reality, a story in which a mountain offers reflection on the human condition, and in which humans come to embrace an opportunity to start again. Perhaps because Abdel Aal had a complicated political itinerary, one that put his work in tension with others in the artistic com- munity, a topic I’ve written on elsewhere, his work has not received the attention it deserves. In the current context in which so much of Sudanese literature and culture has been buried beneath the rubble of war, my hope is to draw attention to at least one of its treasures through the means of translation. I thank Dr. Ahmed Abdel Aal’s family for the privilege of allowing me to engage this work here.
—Noah Salomon, May 1, 2025
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Mountains Don’t Joke Around!!
The people came and went, clapping their hands together in confusion. Some repeated the invocation “there is no power and no strength except with God.” Some muttered to themselves. But most people took refuge in silence.
In the beginning, the matter seemed to them like a joke of the kind that the witty people of the city create. A joke like this would fly from shop to coffeehouse. Along its way, it would meet someone who would add to its humor, at its core or its margins, and it would settle finally in one of the town’s evening gatherings, where those present would compete to guess who wrote it, for each writer of jokes had a known style.
Yet, in this early morning hour, the matter was quite different. In all senses, and by all standard measurements, there was no joke present. Indeed, the scene was clear before everyone’s eyes. Yes, the mountain they had known had departed its position west of the city. Until yesterday evening, it was just where it had always been, a place about which there had been no doubt for generations and generations. Yet here it was this morning, settled loftily east of the city with its fields and all its rocks, which are inclined in such a way that they should roll down, but don’t. People came and went and no explanation emerged for this strange transformation. In these initial shocking moments, the people of the city had no idea that everything there was about to change suddenly. Things seemed as if they were from a sorceress’ hand, which had produced this change before them in the wee hours of the previous night. A deep transformation of memories and feelings took place, complications ensued in expressions and in fixing orientations, all evidence that the person, however vast his soul and wide his chest, cannot stand the shock of a change like this, that a mountain has moved from west to east. Perhaps some will seek to be saved with tens of justifications and excuses for this occurrence, but he knows in the depth of his self that the explanation of this scene that presents itself is otherwise to all of that.
The tumult was increasing on the roads and in the houses and markets. All eyes hung in suspense between east and west. In truth, the biggest problem was the wise men among them. The wise men were people’s refuge when big calamities befell them. But this calamity put the wise men of the town in the circle of accusation for their repeated calls for the people to be patient and calm and to return to their homes until the shadow of this crude joke goes away.
When no useful news appeared to the people by seven in the morn- ing, they got in their vehicles and mounted their animals and hurried by foot to the old site where the mountain had been. They imagined that they would find a deep groove that would prove to them that the mountain had moved during the night and cleaved its path to the eastern side of the city. But when they arrived there, the ground appeared to them level, the wind busy blowing grains of sand and dry leaves. Their vision and their minds were confused and disturbed: there was nothing there that indicated the former presence of the mountain.
They began to blame themselves. The wise men among them surmised that a great superstition had roved about at night and corrupted their minds and vision. The words froze on their tongues and no one could look in the face of his brother. No one was exempt to this except the children and the elderly. The children began happily to clamor about, shouting that it seemed fate had decreed that they witness this strange transformation that the ancestors of the city had not had the luck to see. As for the old people, they competed with the children in their happiness at this transformation, since the years of their lives had almost passed without them seeing something like this in the natural or human world . . .
The situation was like this. The people hurried heading eastward towards the new location of the mountain. The mountain met them with its famous silence, marveling at these people who, since it had known them as neighbors, had remained distracted from it by their work and other things that kept them busy. Indeed no one had lent it sincere attention until now. No matter if it had been covered in clouds or plaited in pure gold, there had been no living connection between it and them. Even those versifying poets said about it what they said about any mountain of the world, without any intimate personal details at all. So, what was it that brought these crowds this morning?!! This is what the mountain said to itself.
Midday came and the telegraph and telephone lines shook. News spread and rumors began to hatch. People of the neighboring towns and villages began to flock to the town. The roads of the town got very crowded with strangers, curiosity-seekers, and enthusiastic disaster tourists.
The news agencies found endless material in this forgotten town. Hundreds of cameras and cars and recording devices appeared. There was no one left whom they did not ask about the obvious matter before them. Was it true that this mountain had moved from the west to the east?! How did that happen?! And what is your explanation for this? What food is usually eaten in this city? Did you eat or drink something yesterday different from usual?
These were journalistic questions that lacked decorum: reckoning that the people of the town had eaten something yesterday that had destroyed the regions of their brains that determine direction! The people of the town were confused by it all and went away.
In the late afternoon, the geological scientists, geologists, and geophysicists who study the gravitational weight of solids and liquids arrived. They broke off into two groups. The first was a group that put up its tents and spread out its devices on the foot of the mountain in the new site, and they began to cut from the stone of the mountain so as to prepare for the preliminary investigation. And among them were those who went and put their ears on the boulders hoping to hear a vibration that was left over from the vibrations of that historic journey. But the mountain remained silent, surprised at all of this behavior.
When evening came and the setting sun cast its golden rays on the mountain, all present—locals and strangers—witnessed a scene so rare and beautiful that the poets and illustrators hid in shyness, knowing that they could never reproduce it. It was clear to the people of the town that the mountains were not joking with any of them and that this mountain before them had actually given up its old place. There was no way to dispute it. So they let life take its new course, and all of them looked for a way get used to what had happened.
When night came, the majestic mountain began to talk to itself in the dark about the past day’s strange events.
The night’s veil offered the wise men of the town the opportunity to return to their houses, each carrying the burden of his despair at the weakness of his interpretations. They split into three groups.
The first group was one that mixed things up in a way that was not supported by reason or observation. The people of this group surrendered themselves to phantom visions and they thought the mountain was not a mountain but instead one of the old giants who had moved from west to east.
As for the second group, philosophy invaded their beds, and they got lost in the sea of primordial matter and the meeting of the four elements, relying on the dictum, “you never see the same mountain twice.”
As for the third group, wisdom knocked at the doors of their rooms with abundant manners. They knew that the geography of minds and souls have appointed times in which such minds and souls are replaced by others and that a new cycle in people’s lives had come.
But this quiet did not last long. Everyone’s sleep was interrupted that night. They went out to the squares of the town silently, each talking to the soul that lay between his sides. Each went out in his nocturnal form, whose ravines no one knows except him alone. When their quorum was complete, they got to know one another anew. They renewed the language in which they spoke. They renewed the system of gestures and expressive signs . . . they reconciled . . . and they recovered. They remembered the deepest proverbs which their ancestors had entrusted to them. And it appeared to them how heavy the losses had been in the past years.
And when the light of dawn broke, all elements of the new scene had been completed. The mountain was in its new location and the rest of the members of the wild family—the river and the forest, and the turtles, and the squirrels, and the cranes, and the starlings, and the rabbits—had all completed their migration to where the new site of the mountain lay. The people of the town in the main square were engrossed in their new friendships and acquaintances, like a dense handful of iron filings exposed to the field of a strong magnetic pole.
All of them were leaning without any doubt towards the east where the mountain had settled.
The mountain had come to understand on the second day all that had happened there. As for those strangers, the curious representatives of the news agencies and those enamored by disaster tourism, they are still confused, for they did not reach a deep understanding of what had happened there.