A Handful of Dates

“A Handful of Dates,” by the Sudanese author and journalist Tayeb Salih, is a classic work of modern Arabic Literature. It was first published in Arabic in 1964 as part of The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories, an eponymous novella with a collection of related short stories. The work was translated into English in 1968. The work gained significant attention in the Arab world and beyond, and has been republished numerous times and widely translated. A film of The Wedding of Zein was made in 1976, and a film short based on “A Handful of Dates” was awarded at Cannes in 2020.

Salih (1929-2009) draws much inspiration for his writings from his boyhood in rural northern Sudan. The stories in the collection, and Salih’s most famous work, Season of Migration to the North (1966), take place in Wad Hamid, a fictional realist setting in northern Sudan which draws on Salih’s own childhood, the everyday life of the Sudanese people in the mid-20th century, and the intermingling currents of traditional and modern life in North Africa. “A Handful of Dates” recounts the brief boyhood memory of an unnamed adult narrator, a moment when the boy realizes that life is full of difficult moral choices and shaped by adult tensions of which he has been unaware.