The translations of Mayada Ibrahim are essential acts of cultural mediation. Moving between Arabic and English, she brings a nuanced, discerning sensitivity to champion voices from Arabophone Africa, from co-translating award-winning novels like Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin’s Samahani (Foundry Editions, 2024) to inaugurating the Anglophone debut of Najlaa Eltom. Rooted in her Sudanese heritage and diasporic experience, Ibrahim’s work has consistently centred Black subjectivity. In doing so, she has contributed to expanding the range of Arabic writings available in the Anglosphere, illustrating a resolute commitment to bringing the philosophical and political heft of voices like Eltom, Sakin, and Stella Gaitano to the forefront.
Ibrahim sees translation not as a duty to educate, but as a creative responsibility to honour the original text and its culture. ‘I try to resist the notion that educating the reader is my responsibility, as it’s harmful to treat readers as passive, disengaged consumers hungry for entertainment dressed up as instruction,’ she confesses. Thus, she navigates through difficult ethical terrains, from interpreting the Sufism in Eltom’s work for a Western gaze, to maintaining the sharp wit in Sakin’s narratives of enslavement.
In this interview, I spoke with Ibrahim on her corpus as translator, the ethical tightrope of rendering politically charged texts for an Anglophone audience, and what she envisions for an Arabophone African literary canon.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Trace Press is set to publish your book-length translation of prose and poetry by Sudanese translator and poet Najlaa Eltom. Could you tell us a little of how this book came to be? Is this selected from her earlier Arabic-language collections – منزلة الرمق (The Doctrine of Thinness, 2007), الجريمة الخالدة ذات الأقراط (The Immortal Felony with Earrings, 2019), and ألحان السرعة (Melodies of Speed, 2021)—or does it feature entirely new material?
Mayada Ibrahim (MI): In 2023, I took a free workshop offered by Trace Press, to which I brought one of Najlaa’s poems. The workshop later culminated in the anthology Arabic, between Love and War, published earlier this year, and in the process, I was fortunate enough to meet the publisher Nuzhat Abbas, who showed interest in Najlaa’s work. Later we decided to collaborate on Najlaa’s collection, her first into English, which will be the first part of an ‘active archive’ on Sudan.
As for how we selected the poems, we included some from across all three of Najlaa’s Arabic collections, as well as unpublished poems. I followed Najlaa’s lead for the most part, but personally, I was interested in showing her evolution as a poet. What undergirds much of her writing is a Sufi imaginary, which comes through in the concern with the self and the collective, and she blends biographical detail with materials gleaned from years spent studying the colonial archive in Sudan. There is mourning, there is friendship and longing. Some poems also display Najlaa’s humour and irreverence, which I think is something that the Sufi undertones of her poetry can obscure. Formally, there are elements of madih or dhikr.
We opted not to order the poems chronologically and improvised their order instead—but some are dated. Najlaa also writes prose, but in this volume, we decided only to include poetry and prose poetry for the sake of coherence.
AMMD: In a previous conversation with Eltom for 128 LIT, you characterised translating her works as a ‘baptism by fire’, not only because of its philosophical depth but also the political ramifications of rendering it into a colonial language. Could you share a moment where this tension felt most heightened, particularly when mediating the ‘peril’ of her texts for new audiences? How did you navigate that responsibility, and did it shift your relationship to English as a language of power?
MI: There is always a great tension in the act of decontextualising a work and presenting it anew. One conflict I feel acutely is in foregrounding Sufism, a traditional aspect of Najlaa’s poetry, because I fear I’m participating in the calcification of African texts within the framework of ‘tradition’. So much African art is understood exclusively through the lens of tradition and refused contemporaneity, and in that vein, I worry about the Western gaze and its fetishisation of Sufism. At the same time, I don’t want to replicate what translators have done to Rumi’s poetry—to take a different kind of example—which is to dilute it to the point where it bears no resemblance to the roots from which it emerged.
The good news is that the collection will be bilingual, and I’m very grateful to Trace Press for making that possible. This doesn’t resolve the tension completely, but it does reframe it. The Arabic will speak for itself, and Arabic readers will have access to the original alongside my interpretation.
AMMD: You’ve collaborated with your father, the illustrious Sudanese scholar and translator Adil Babikir, on two texts rooted in the Zanzibar archipelago: Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin’s English PEN Translates award-winning novel Samahani (2024) and the nineteenth-century travelogue Barghash Discovers Europe & Egypt (Africa Institute, 2022), written by a Zanzibari sultan. What aspects of these texts resonated with you most deeply as you worked to honour their distinct historical and cultural roots?
MI: I have taken on non-literary translations, such as the Barghash book, when the topic seems interesting; last year, I translated a history of Amazigh literature in Morocco from the 1960s until present. Barghash Discovers Europe & Egypt turned out to be a dry chronicle of state visits by the Sultan of Zanzibar during a stately trip to Europe, but the book became more interesting in hindsight when the opportunity to translate Samahani came about. My dad, Adil Babikir, asked if I wanted to work with him on it, and it became a shared pandemic project, with him working from the UAE and I from New York.
One of the reasons I was drawn to translating Samahani is that it’s one of the first Arabic novels about the experience of the enslaved. I knew surprisingly little about the history of slavery in the region, and had no idea Zanzibar was part of the Omani Sultanate. I was shocked to discover that slavery wasn’t banned until 1970. For those interested in knowing more, the scholar Mona Kareem addresses some of these gaps in her essay ‘Arabic literature and the African other’.
AMMD: Your encounter with Samahani clearly began with a personal reckoning over these historical gaps, particularly the scarcity of Black voices in the Arabic literary canon. How did that shape your practical and ethical approach to co-translating the novel? What responsibility did you feel as a co-translator to give voice to historically underrepresented and strategically undervalued voices?
MI: It feels tiresome to still be talking about representation, but it remains relevant. Black voices remain scarce in both the Arabic and English literary canons, so it intrigued me to encounter a book that confronts this absence directly, one that so self-consciously deploys tropes to poke fun at and pose uncomfortable questions about the mechanics of race. We gave considerable attention to how the satire would read across languages, as it felt really important to strike a good balance; we needed to preserve the novel’s sharp critique while ensuring that its humour and provocation would land for English-language readers. Reading scholar Kaiama L. Glover’s work, which addressed similar complexities in translating Haitian literature, was especially helpful.
AMMD: How does your approach adapt when translating other Arabophone African writers, such as Noor Naga from Egypt, Tahir Annour from Chad, or Stella Gaitano from South Sudan? What are the distinct challenges and joys in making the unique voices of these writers accessible to a new readership?
MI: I’m guided by what speaks to me, and am drawn to works that do something different. I’m interested in showcasing the diversity of contemporary Arabophone African writing, but that’s not my primary consideration; political motivations exist, but they come second to the quality of the work. I’m interested in Black subjectivity, in works that challenge and problematise the hegemony of Arabic, but ultimately, I try to choose books I want to be immersed in.
The process is fairly organic. I read widely, ask friends for recommendations, and try to attend book fairs when I can. I like reading anthologies. I often encounter new writing on social media. When something resonates, I reach out to the author to pursue translating it. I usually start by trying to place excerpts or shorter works in online or print publications before approaching book publishers about a full translation.
The challenges are significant. There’s receptivity to the work in the Anglophone market, but it’s deeply underfunded. I want translation to be a gateway for authors to sustain their writing, but this grows less tenable with time, especially given political shifts: cuts in the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funding in the US, Arts Council funding drying up in the UK. Arabic literature desperately needs grant-providing bodies for translation.
AMMD: Congratulations on winning the English PEN and International Booker Prize Foundation grant for your co-translation of writer-activist Stella Gaitano’s family saga Ireme with Eltom! Given your earlier point about being drawn to works that challenge Arabic hegemony, Stella Gaitano’s volition to write in Arabic (perceived in South Sudan as a ‘colonialist tool’) is compelling. How did you and your co-translator approach rendering Gaitano’s voice and Ireme’s ethnopolitical milieu for an English-speaking audience largely uninformed about conflict-ridden histories of the two Sudans?
MI: I try to resist the notion that educating the reader is my responsibility, as it’s harmful to treat readers as passive, disengaged consumers hungry for entertainment dressed up as instruction. Instead, I want to honour Stella Gaitano’s meticulous work—her interviews with firsthand witnesses to the civil war, her extensive research into the turbulent 1980s that brought the failure of the 1985 revolution, the catastrophic 1988 floods, and the lingering wounds of the 1987 Dhein Massacre.
What happens to a book once it’s out in the world is beyond my control. More and more, this depends on the amount of press it receives, whether it wins awards, whether the author is invited to festivals, and so on. Still, I harbour hope that Stella’s work might find its place alongside writers like Tsitsi Dangarembga, Maryse Condé, and others—and that it will enter into dialogue with others engaged in similar projects.
AMMD: In the wake of devastating and ongoing genocides, how have Sudanese, Chadian, and South Sudanese writers shed light on the human toll of such crises? What difficulties do translators face in imparting the cultural and emotional gravity of such narratives?
MI: The magnitude of loss is too great for one to over-emphasise the concept of writing as a response to war and genocide. Many of the Sudanese authors I know are among the thirteen million people displaced from Sudan since 2023, and many have either stayed behind or returned to Khartoum, enduring unsafe conditions with virtually no infrastructure—to say nothing of Darfur and Kordofan, where the situation is far more dire and obscured from media attention. Even among those in the diaspora, most of their efforts have been directed toward mutual aid initiatives and urgent attempts to help people escape immediate danger. In such conditions, the space for literary creation narrows drastically.
AMMD: As a writer and translator, who are the scholars and authors from the Global Majority, particularly those from Africa and the Arab world, you’ve been engaging with lately?
MI: This is outside the sphere of literary translation, though not unrelated: I’ve been reading Okwui Enwezor’s Selected Writings, just published by Duke University Press. He was a revered curator, originally from Nigeria, who reshaped perceptions of African art and problematised how it was discussed and treated in the West. In one essay he explores how the binaries of center/periphery and self/other are among many frameworks that entered the lexicon through French poststructuralism and the Frankfurt School. Reading this made me reflect on how deeply embedded that kind of binary thinking has become in the way I approach translation, and how maybe it’s worthwhile to resist its logic.
Many other texts and authors come to mind, including Violent Phenomena, Kitchen Table Translation, river in an ocean, Line Monzer, Abelfattah Kilito, Sargon Boulos’s translations of the Beat poets, and Taha Mahmoud Taha’s translation of Ulysses by James Joyce.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on Arabophone Africa in translation, which books, works, or writers would you wish to include?
MI: That’s fun to think about. Not all of these books have been translated into English, but I’ll pretend they have been and include them anyway.
We would begin with The Arabophone African Novel. The course would include the works of Stella Gaitano, Leila Aboulela, and Reem Gaafar, among other engagements with the historical novel, tracing how Sudanese writers negotiate collective memory through narrative form. Chadian novelist Tahir Annour’s work would challenge assumptions about where ‘Arabic literature’ happens. Sonallah Ibrahim’s formally inventive work would be central, demonstrating experimental technique as political gesture. I’d pair Tayeb Salih with newer novels that reimagine his formal innovations, such as Waqqas al-Sadig’s work. Gabriel Yak’s fiction would be essential for thinking about South Sudanese literature in Arabic.
The poetry syllabus would feature Iman Mersal, Haytham el-Wardany, the poets of the 1990s generation, the poets behind Iksir magazine in Sudan, Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame (Hadraawi) writing in Somalia, and Taban Lo Liyong, among others.
Finally, we would delve into Afro-Arab Fiction through the works of Fathiya Dabsh, Mahmoud Trawri, Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, among others.
Mayada Ibrahim is an editor and translator based in New York and has roots in Khartoum and London. Working across Arabic and English, her translations have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in American Chordata, Circumference Magazine, 128 LIT, Banipal, The Common, Dolce Stil Criollo, and the anthologies Modern Sudanese Poetry (University of Nebraska Press), Imagine Africa (Archipelago Books), Arabic, between Love and War (Trace Press), and Abdelazziz Baraka Sakin’s Birth: Selected Stories (Willows House). She is an adjunct lecturer of Arabic at Hunter College – City University of New York. She received her BA in Comparative Literature from Queen Mary, University of London. Formerly an editor at Tilted Axis Press, she is currently the managing editor of 52 Walker.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of three books of prose poetry and lyric essays including M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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