BY USMAN MAMA

Prolific Sudanese-born writer Amr Muneer Dahab has a new book: Facing Troublemakers, Notes on Dealing with Conflict. The book, the author’s first one written in English, was published last month by Bloomington, Indiana-based AuthorHouse. This can be considered as a turning point in the career of an author credited with more than two dozen books, all written in Arabic. His previous book, Damn the Novel: When a Privileged Genre Prevails Over All Forms of Creative Writing, was the first one translated into English and published by the same American publisher, AuthorHouse.

Written in the clear, engaging and pleasant style the author is known for, Facing Troublemakers—in just 41 pages—can be devoured in a couple of hours even by a slow reader.

“This book was not written with the purpose of waving a magic wand and crowning you with victory in every single conflict,” Dahab writes. “Facing Troublemakers was written to provide you with ideas that inspire you not only with business conflicts but in dealing with life’s problems overall.” The author adds: “The book is not only a result of my own experiences but also my observations of conflicts around me, whether at work or in day-to-day life.”

Different readers can make different uses of the content of this book which, the author stresses, “is intended to be your gateway to creating your own philosophy for confronting conflicts, discovering your strengths, and overcoming obstacles.”

Facing Troublemakers, Notes on Dealing with Conflict, is broken up in 18 chapters:

1. Before We Start
2. Why Conflicts Exist
3. Conflict Exciters and Favorite Places
4. Allies
5. Negotiations
6. Before Falling into the Conflict Trap
7. Understanding Conflicts
8. Prioritizing Your Conflicts
9. It Is Always Your Own Way
10. Rewarding Your Opponent
11. In the Middle of the Conflict
12. To Attack or Not to Attack?
13. Face-to-Face with Troublemakers
14. Becoming a Troublemaker
15. Ethics Challenges
16. Recurrence of Conflicts
17. Dealing with Betrayal
18. Do Happy Endings Exist in Conflicts?

As we all have experienced, conflicts are part of life in all of life’s facets. So the author’s prescriptions for conflict management come like good tools to deal with situations that spare none of us. Even “if creating conflicts is one of your techniques in life or business,” Dahab writes, “you will still find this book useful when facing an expert conflict creator.”

It must be emphasized that Facing Troublemakers is Dahab’s first book written in English, after more than two dozen previous books in Arabic covering a wide scope of writing such as literary criticism, poetry, social and political issues, psychological and humanitarian subjects, national character studies, and intellectual issues. So this is a milestone in the writing career of the prolific writer who told The African Magazine in an exclusive interview, with regard to his first writing in English: “… it was an interesting experience, and it went easier than I thought.” Coming barely a year after the English version of his previous book, “Damn the Novel—which received great reviews in the United States, Facing Troublemakers underscores the author’s interest in the English-speaking world. He tells The African Magazine that his decision to have Damn the Novel translated into English “…paid off in every aspect except money, and luckily I am not doing writing primarily for living.” (The Sudanese-born writer is an electrical engineer who juggles writing and full-time employment away from his place of birth, in the United Arab Emirates.)

He says he has the intention to translate all his books into English and other languages, but adds “…apparently this is a huge project that needs much time and effort.” He points to “the need to be supported by sponsors who have solid experiences in these languages’ readers and markets.”