“I believe that words can cause material change inside your mind, inside your body, inside your soul. Words were the beginning of the whole world.”

So says Mamoun Eltlib, leaning back in his chair and breaking into a smile. Sitting on his sunny balcony overlooking the bustling streets of his native Khartoum, the poet, journalist and self-described cultural activist takes an uncharacteristic pause.

Eltlib’s professional and personal life – intimately intertwined with his passion for advocating the written word – has made him one of the most prominent literary figures in Sudan today. He recently edited The Citizen, a startup English newspaper, and restarted and managed the Sudanese Writers Union, which in January was banned by Omar al-Bashir’s government. He also founded the arts and culture collective Work Culture Group, co-ran the Barana Initiative (a publishing house for young writers), and is an active political critic and columnist.

Considering his list of endeavours, it comes as quite a surprise that Eltlib – who has, to put it mildly, dedicated his life to reigniting and nurturing literary culture in Sudan – grew up without ever being able to put his hands on a real book.

Precious pages

The childhood that 33-year old Eltlib remembers is one of a country in political and social transition, where, in the early 1990s, all of the city’s libraries were shut down and the books inside destroyed. Sudan became an authoritarian, single-party Islamic state following Bashir’s military coup in 1989, and censorship ruled.

When Bashir came to power, the writers’ union was one of the first organisations he banned. “They don’t want gatherings, that’s all. They don’t want the people to meet,” he says.

Arabic grammar and mathematics textbooks were the only pages Eltlib and his peers had access to. There wasn’t a school in the entire country that had a library for its students, he says.

“No one talked about it or wrote about it,” Eltlib explains. “But when you go to university, you start to realise a lot of things. You start asking yourself, ‘where are the libraries?’”

Not all of the city’s books were destroyed, Eltlib discovered. Along the back alleys of Sudan’s biggest cities, Khartoum and Omdurman, and in the dark corners of bookstores or underneath dusty floorboards an underground market of used books resiliently persisted; the precious pages of beloved authors like Tayeb Salih, Abbas El-Aqqad and Nizar Qabbani were bought and sold amongst only those who knew where to go and what to ask for. It was a stark contrast, says Eltlib, with the Khartoum that once had the Arab world’s largest bookstore and inspired a literary renaissance in the early-to-mid 20th century.

“The saviour was the used book market,” Eltlib says. “They couldn’t stop them. They did many things, like make them move from place to place or force them to pay higher taxes, but nothing they did could stop them.”

Booksellers risked a lot for the hardcovers and paperbacks that they kept safe. Eltlib’s “relationship with books” began when he was 18 years-old: an older student gave him a book of banned Egyptian poetry, and the young Eltlib wanted more. After finding out an address, he hunted down a bookseller in Omdurman. One of the booksellers (“I don’t know how he trusted me”) asked him what he did for work.

“I told him I was a poet. He said to me, ‘Okay, which writer do you love?’ And I said, Dostoyevsky, even though I’d never read anything by him in my life,” Eltlib laughs. “He gave me a collection of Dostoyevsky’s works – five of his novels, including Notes from the Underground. It changed my life.” He has been a loyal customer ever since.

‘Already dead’

It was during his time at Sudan’s University of Science and Technology that Eltlib became fiercely active in the city’s cultural life while developing his love for literature and writing. His group of close friends – like him, many of them engineering students – came together to write, discuss and share their work.

Today, nearly all of the group are still writing and publishing. And though Eltlib is known more for his work as a journalist and columnist, his first and original love was for poetry.

“It’s a very magical thing, when you start writing,” he says. “But studying Arabic in Sudan when I was growing up – they wanted you to hate it. Can you imagine studying a language without studying its literature? My worst grades were in Arabic class.” In fact, he failed nearly every year. The language he learned at school, he says, was “already dead.”

However, something extraordinary happened when Eltlib wrote his first poem, which he only shared with his mother. As she read it, Eltlib describes, her eyes widened with astonishment. “She said, ‘There are no mistakes in the language. How did you do that? You don’t know anything about Arabic!’” he laughs.

“I started feeling the language and writing it without even knowing or understanding the grammar,” Eltlib says. “I believe that it’s a very old relationship – the one you have with your language. It’s something buried deep in your soul, and it stays there.”

A powerful voice

Today, Eltlib’s voice is a powerful one. The writer was recently detained for a year due to his radical cultural work and his ability to rouse his peers through his poetry. In January, the writers’ union was banned once again, alongside the prominent literary gathering that Eltlib spearheaded, Mafroosh.

The first wave of civil society crackdowns came in 1989 when Bashir took power in a bloodless coup, the second came in 2009 after the president’s indictment for war crimes by the International Criminal court, and the third in 2013, where the security services shut down the Cultural Forum for Literary Criticism, a network of Sudanese writers.

“Sure, it’s scary. But when you’re young, and a student, you feel that this is something you have to do,” he says.

Now, looking back at the many projects he’s been a part of over the years, he says it’s the monthly used book sale Mafroosh – meaning “spread out” or “display” – that is “like seeing your dream come true every month.”

A celebration of the booksellers who ignited Eltlib many years ago, Mafroosh attracts nearly 2,000 people to Eteni Square every first Tuesday of the month. Most of the 30 vendors say they sell more in one day at the market than they do in a month in their stores. It’s a place where Sudanese writers can launch their new books, too. The gathering is credited for reviving and nurturing Sudan’s literary scene.

For the first Mafroosh, Eltlib invited writers to bring their hidden libraries to the square – but not to sell. “All of us brought our beloved books, but only to display,” he says. The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk, Dog Years by Günter Grass and every book by Hermann Hesse were, and still are, the most precious books on Eltlib’s shelves, and he proudly showcased them on Mafroosh’s inaugural day. Sudanese writers like Tayeb Salih, Mohamed Alsadig Alhag and Naglaa Osman Altoum are also among his favourites.

“It was very shocking, because everyone thought that young Sudanese people had stopped reading. But most of the people who come every month to Mafroosh are students and young people,” Eltlib says, leaning back again in his balcony chair. “It’s really beautiful.”

This article first appeared in Brownbook’s January/February 2015 issue. Brownbook is an essential guide to the Middle East and North Africa.