The Road to the Impossible Cities (PDF)

Al-Tariq Ila Al-Mudn Al-Mustahila “The Road to the Impossible Cities” is a novel about the lives and fate of the dreams of a group of school boys: Awlad Girif “Husk Boys” group or ‘gang’ and another related group of school girls: Sirb Al-Asafir “The flock of the Sparrows.” The plot represents the struggle against vanity, the rigorous traditions, and the corrupted degenerating post-independent circumstances in Sudan in Africa. The theme of the novel is the deferred dreams of these youth and their fate.

The novel is structured in four building blocks each corresponds to a sub-theme and a step in the development of the story. These blocks are connected through an extraordinary love story between Jo, a member of Husk Boys group, and Noon, the daughter of the headmaster of the school, and later a member of The Flock of the Sparrows. The novel starts by The Young Play, which depicts the adventures of the two groups and their relation-ship with each others. The second block: The Dangerous Play describes the city through the adventures of Husk Boys. As a part of their development in arts work in school, the Husk Boys write plays and perform them in the school’s theatre. The plays depict how such an ‘innocent’ game can lead to fatal results: death, jail, drop-out, and forced marriage on one hand and on the other hand how it has deepened their awareness of life beyond their schools and their city. The Big Play depicts the broader scene of the country as a whole and the fates of these young boys and girls in a corrupted degenerating system. The novel is concluded by The Play of Time, in which their deferred dreams come to live in Jo’s dreams. Every night the dead come, among them Noon, to Jo’s dreams to report every thing that happened and happens which people do not know and Jo, on his part, writes this in an endless book he calls The Chronicles.

The Road to the Impossible Cities is an honest and intelligent plot of events that leave its readers in awe of its characters lives that are rarely represented through main stream novels in Africa.