Griselda had moved to Sudan in the 1950s accompanying her husband Abdullah El Tayib. She published her research in 2017 in the illustrated book ‘Regional Folk Costumes of the Sudan’.
Yousif Ibrahim Abubaker
Sudan is the place that a former British artist and teacher Griselda Al Tayib had chosen as her home for more than seven decades, and had once said in an interview that she would rather love to die here. Griselda Al Tayib, who moved to Sudan in 1950 before the Anglo-Egyptian Colony gained independence and has lived there ever since, remained committed and breathed her last in Sudan on May 20, 2022 at the age of 97.
She once had told to an interviewer in Khartoum that her affection for Sudan grew from her love for her husband, a Sudanese academic, Abdallah Al Tayib, who was known as the Godfather of Arabic.
Griselda Al Tayib was born on 15 March 1925 in England and was educated at Chelsea College of Art and Design.
Griselda El Tayib was visual artist and cultural anthropologist, who was mainly known for her pioneering research on the traditional costumes, as they reflect the culture and society of Sudan, since the 1970s. She published her research in 2017 in the illustrated book Regional Folk Costumes of the Sudan.
Having lived in Sudan and other African countries for most of her life with her Sudanese husband, she published ethnographic studies and water-colour paintings on such fields as folk literature, music, folk costumes and women’s education in Sudan and has been called “a Sudanese artist of British origin”.
She moved to Sudan in the 1950s, when she accompanied her husband Abdullah El Tayib after his studies at the University of London. Referring to her long-standing contributions to the arts in Sudan, the authors of the article “Modern Art in Sudan” called her “a Sudanese artist of British origin”. Beside her own work as an artist, she initiated courses for art education in schools and colleges of the Sudan, as well as at the Arts Department of the Abdullahi Bayero College (later University of Kano), Nigeria. Her preferred artistic genre was watercolor painting, and her personal style has been called a kind of “realistic impressionism”, where she “often succeeds in capturing the essence of life itself.”
As the first student of folklore studies at the Institute of African and Asian Studies of the University of Khartoum, she undertook research based on her field work about the regional costumes of several ethnic groups in northern and eastern Sudan, leading to her M.A. thesis in 1976. Some forty years later, she published a revised and updated version of her earlier material in the book Regional Folk Costumes of the Sudan. Apart from these studies in her main field of expertise, she also published articles on the Sudanese folk instrument kissar and on women’s education in Sudan.
For her contributions to British-Sudanese relations, she was distinguished as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2002.
In 1971, Griselda El Tayib co-wrote an article in the journal African Arts on the life and work of the Sudanese painter Omer Kheiry. For her husband’s translated collections of folk stories from Sudan and Africa, she illustrated the books Heroes of Arabia and Stories from the sands of Africa. As a commentator on contemporary visual arts of Sudan, she wrote the introduction to the 2015 book on Contemporary artists of the Sudan: art in times of adversity.
In 1976, she published her illustrated record of Sudanese national costumes. In this study of 320 pages, she described “details of indigenous costumes worn by Sudanese, in North, East and Central Riverine Sudan, during the first half of this century before radical political and social changes introduced an irreversible trend towards westernization.”
“The plan was to start with those ethnic groups in Northern Sudan where rapidly increasing urbanization, major mass media influence and the population movements due to resettlement were threatening the extinction of certain distinct forms of dress. The need to record all this in the 1970s was very urgent, for already within two-and-a-half decades I had personally witnessed the disappearance of the bullama face veil, the gurgab, a waist wrapper, the women’s markub, flat open shoes, and karkab wooden clogs, and increasingly also of the crescent shaped earrings called fidayat and the zumam, nose ornament, all of which were quite common in the early 1950s,” she had stated.
For the 1987 collective publication The Sudanese Woman, she contributed a chapter on Women’s dress in the Northern Sudan.
The illustrated book Regional Folk Costumes of the Sudan is based on her sociocultural and anthropological research and presents her descriptions and paintings of selected Sudanese folk costumes. The scope of this book is limited to specific parts of the country, where the author could undertake field visits, using questionnaires and informal interviews during her research in the 1970s. As the lifestyles of Sudanese in different urban and rural areas vary considerably between traditional and modern forms, the book presents both local and traditional forms of dress as well as contemporary clothes and fashion in urban societies. This applies especially to the final chapter, written in 2016, that describes changes in Sudanese dress since her earlier research. Among other reasons, El Tayib attributed the modern changes in dress and related personal tastes to international influences by television, Arab fashion magazines and the dress codes adopted by the international Sudanese diaspora.
“Whereas nowadays fashion changes, innovations, modifications, hairstyles, trends in gold and other jewelry often emanate from the capital outward, this was not always the case in the past. Each of the regions studied here was subjected to different internal and external influences which affect clothing: trade and availability of various items, or imitation of conquerors, leaders and other high prestige groups,” she had said.
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Yousif Ibrahim Abubaker is a poet and writer from Omdurman Umbda -Sudan. He works as an English Instructor, Trainer and Freelance Interpreter. He also has been working as a debate leader discussing various topics in many English Institutes, Centers, Academy and schools.
