This novel 'Memory of a Villain' by the Sudanese novelist 'Mansour El Souaiem' won the Tayeb Salih Award for Novel in 2005. Mansour El Souaiem paints a vivid and expansive portrait of contemporary Sudan without embellishment. The work is characterized by a narrative structure that reveals a high level of skill in the use of narrative techniques. It encompasses a storytelling content addressing critical and humanitarian issues with historical, geographical, and cultural dimensions that symbolize the era of post-openness. The novel stands as a powerful argument advocating justice, the right to live, and equality among humans as a supreme human value. The novelist excelled, through an enthralling narrative technique relying on the flow of thoughts and manipulation of time by advancing and delaying it smoothly and without complication, in taking us into the world of the marginalized to explore it in depth. A world that holds both 'extreme wealth' and 'abject poverty'. The story begins with 'Adam' or 'Adamo' who loses his mother as a child. Beggar women take him in to care for him and use him as a more effective begging tool. Here, Adam's memory spins as a child's top before getting lost in the maze of the memories of others as they pass him around as if he were a purchased possession. Adam belongs neither here nor there, as his memory moves him from woman to woman, with his first memory of women being his mother 'Maryam Al Karatiya', a beautiful and alluring woman, the object of soldiers' and men's desires across various places, his first cradle. In her lap, he was nurtured, but the cruel days spat her out to the street, where she met her demise, leaving Adam on the back of Wahidah, his surrogate and also a beggar. Here, the protagonist's memory relaxes, forming slowly to the chatter of other women who trained him in the 'arts of begging' and the most effective methods to extract money, melt hearts with compassion and pity. The boy mastered this art quickly, and fate threw him into the hands of the House of the Wise or the 'Grand Mosque', with its doors open day and night to welcome worshippers, wanderers, and those seeking shelter for the night. Various issues emerged throughout this novel, wherein the narrator presents critical readings of the social, economic, and political realities, highlighting the drawbacks of openness that resulted in belts of poverty, drought, economic decline, disintegration, and loss for the small, young, women, disabled, thirsty, and hungry; the war handicapped a miserable class found like this without provider, without state.. An entire world living under the open sky, without education or health, their bed is the ground, and their blanket the sky. The novel from start to finish is a true tragedy and drama, where the narrator lifts the curtain to uncover before us a devastating truth, emitting pain from an unseen and unspoken scene.

Publishing house: Arab Scientific Publishers/Lebanon

Number of Pages: 181

Year of publication: 2011