Nūn

The deep wounds in god's dream await me holding a silver sign with my name on it

This bilingual edition, created as an active collaboration between translator Mayada Ibrahim and the celebrated Sudanese poet Najlaa Osman Eltom, gathers poems from three published volumes alongside previously untranslated work. Tracing the development of a distinctive poetic voice, it establishes Eltom's reputation as a lyricist of the visceral, the surreal, and the politically incisive.

Eltom's twenty-five-year poetic journey, divided between Sudan and Sweden, transforms the rupture of migration into a process of alienation and self-rediscovery. In this process, the immigrant's identity--so often constructed as a limiting frontier--becomes instead a sharpened sensitivity to how colonial politics are reinvented, how communities are destroyed, and why the global South remains a space of violence and disenfranchisement.

Rich with intertextual resonance, Eltom's writing draws upon vernacular poetry, song, and Sufi literary traditions. She employs the rhythmic repetition of dhikr and the mystical pursuit of irfani knowledge, weaving biographical detail from a lifetime lived under an oppressive regime with materials gleaned from the colonial archives she spent years studying. The result is a body of work that speaks simultaneously to Sudan's complex past and to urgent questions of memory, power, and resistance.