Authors: Amir Tag Elsir
The Southerner turned toward me. Here was the man who had been a vagrant in the Aisha Market and the jinni Daldona's lover, the man I had hired as Nishan's caretaker, but who had never performed that duty. His eyes were red and his lips were swollen with exanthema. His hands seemed to have been part of some argument, because they were bandaged in rags.
“Ifranji!”
He did not seem to know me, even though he had caught his name when I lobbed it toward him. His face remained expressionless, and he showed no reaction. Clearly Joseph Ifranji was in some predicament over and beyond being
held in a detention center for undocumented aliens, where he had been interned as the authorities prepared to expel him to his new homeland of South Sudan. He had most likely assaulted someone in that camp or had perhaps pretended to be schizophrenic in order to remain in the country longer, while he thought up some new ploy to leave the detention center and resume his life as a vagrant in the Aisha Market. I had forgotten Ifranji â or my affairs had distracted me from him â and I hadn't attempted to secure his release from the internment camp. Now I was confronted by a genuinely insane person or an actor who was capable of realistically portraying insanity.
I rushed toward Joseph Ifranji but found I couldn't move. I almost fell, forgetting that my feet were also shackled with rude iron chains.
AMIR TAG ELSIR, who was born in the north of Sudan in 1960, currently lives in Doha, Qatar. He has published two biographies, a poetry collection, and fifteen novels. He studied medicine in Egypt and Great Britain and worked for many years in Sudan as a gynecologist before moving his practice to Qatar. He began by writing poetry but shifted to novels in 1987. Among his novels are
Ebola '76
,
The Yelling Dowry
,
The Copt's Worries
,
French Perfume
, and
Crawling Ants
. His novel
Sa'id al-Yaraqat
was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010 and published by Pearson in the African Writers Series as
The Grub Hunter
in 2012. His novel
366
was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014, and he works as a mentor for creative writing students. English translations of his novels
French Perfume
(Antibookclub) and
Ebola '76
(Darf Publishing) are scheduled for release in 2015. Tag Elsir is the nephew of the beloved and distinguished Sudanese author Tayeb Salih.
WILLIAM MAYNARD HUTCHINS is an American translator of contemporary Arabic literature. Hutchins's best-known translation is
The
Cairo Trilogy
by Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz. He has also translated Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ibrahim âAbd al-Qadir al-Mazini, al-Jahiz, Muhammad Khudayyir, Ibrahim al-Koni, Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Hassan Nasr, and Mahmoud Saeed. Hutchins has received two US National Endowment for the Arts grants in literary translation. His translations have appeared in
Banipal
magazine and online at wordswithoutborders.org and brooklynrail.org.
Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing
P O Box 5825
Doha, Qatar
BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Arabic in 2015 as
Taqs
by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing
Copyright © Amir Tag Elsir, 2015
Translation © William Maynard Hutchins, 2015
Amir Tag Elsir has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: PB:Â Â Â 978-9-9271-0189-2
     eBook: 978-9-9271-1806-7
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