Abstract
Development discourses praise the mobile phone as a globalizing tool, which has the effect of " liberat[ing] people from the constraints of their settings " (Katz and Aakhus, 2002) and bringing them into the modern world. Counter-arguments suggest that mobile phone uses are culturally embedded. Situating the text-message in a " small media " framework (Spitulnik, 2002), this study argues for local embeddedness, i.e. " appropriation " , in that it is used for a long-standing practice of poetry exchange. However, the effects of transferring an older practice into the SMS context, has revitalized it in a novel way, which, arguably do connect people in new ways.
Using discourse analysis, this paper addresses the widespread sending, forwarding and receiving of a genre of poems among urban university students in Sudan. While sending poetry is a long-standing practice of keeping in touch among the working class in Sudan, earlier exchanges were dyadic, private and infrequent. The mobile phone permits immediate retrieval, a format for editing and resending the same message to any number of contacts within minutes. Intertextuality, the borrowing and repeating words, phrases and themes, blurs the distinction between sender/receiver, producer/consumer and private/public. More importantly, messages are recontextualized, which, when circulated in the community, can influence the feeling of belonging, an " imagined " connectivity. For the marginalized Nuba people central in this paper, this participation is guided by inequalities in Sudan. Alessandro is from the Nuba Mountains, but a prolific sender of Arabic poetry and his story is indicative of a dominant Arab-Islamic orientation among young people in Sudan, regardless of their ethno-linguistic background. Widespread poetic texting permits people to appropriate an Arab-Islamic tradition through their use of literary style and linguistic choice.