-Essay-
ALEXANDRIA — As I sit behind the glass window of my art gallery, I see dozens of Sudanese families who have recently settled in Alexandria, Egypt after fleeing the civil war that has raged in their home country for more than a year and forced millions from their homes.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
According to the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR), some 11 million have been displaced within the country, and more than 2 million have fled abroad. The figures are difficult to ignore.
Every day, crowds of people stream in and out of the UNHCR office at the end of the street. Each person carries a folder of papers that constitute his or her new identity. They hold their folders with deliberate indifference, just as students roll their homework into a cylindrical shape, to convince themselves that this is a temporary phase that will end.
Diversity is a driving force for life
As I watch them, I try to image the story of each individual; the way they were snatched from their beds, empty houses, the ordinary life they left behind them, the land, the sun, the cattle, the stones, the memories.
Their massive displacement has been created by circumstances that are difficult to repair in a world that has lost its mind and existential purpose.
Diversity has turned into a point of weakness.
We are all sitting on top of the crater of a volcano, which may have exploded in some places, but not yet exploded in others. The explosions are currently taking multiple forms, depending on the weak point of each individual country.
Sudan is a country with a population of more than 45 million people, and about 570 tribes divided into 57 racial and ethnic groups, speaking 114 written and spoken languages. Diversity was the driving force for life, enriching the scene with all its contradictions, affinities and branches. Yet that diversity has turned into a point of weakness.
Many factors led to this, including slavery, colonialism, totalitarian regimes that ruled and managed this diversity, discrimination and racism. The emergence of the concept of the central state in its modern sense may also have contributed to these wars. It maintained boundaries between these races, ethnicities and languages; and it prevented harmony.
With this diversity, Sudan have needed creative administration, collective sacrifices to establish a new concept for the state and the community.
Jesus of Darfur
Some of the crowds stop in front of my gallery’s window; they stop to rest under the sun heat. They seem to be attracted by handmade textiles, pottery and leather crafts. Perhaps the feeling of handmade is the closest thing they can find to the lives they left behind.
We exchange a few words. But despite the shortness of our conversations, they transform these crowds into individuals.
Prophethood is but a dream.
I recently started reading Jesus of Darfur, a 2012 novel by Sudanese author Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin. I was attracted to the title, and I had read his novel The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth. I enjoyed its elegance, spontaneity and characters from the marginalised periphery. I like the simplicity of Sakin’s language, its deep poetic images, as well as his sense of satire.
The novel exposes the diversity of Sudan’s society, languages, dialects, myths and races. Through Sakin’s writings, I became familiar with Sudan and the complexities of the people of the periphery, who later rebel against the central government due to discrimination, governed by the tribal customs and regulations.
The novel — like stories in the Torah — uses the icon of the family tree, the strong, uninterrupted and living chain of fateful continuity and repetition. History does not forget where you come from even if you changed your name or your origin — unlike modern cities, which hide our origins.
The family tree in the novel swallows up any individuality. Even the person who claimed prophethood, is not an individual in the end, but a dream or collective imagination, and is not a hero in the known sense.
Janjaweed and crucifixion
In Jesus of Darfur, Sakin chronicles the beginning of the civil war in Darfur in 2003, when rebel groups took up arms against the central government in Khartoum because of the political and economic marginalization of the sprawling region. The novel tells the story of the Rapid Support Forces, or the Janjaweed, which were made up of the Arab tribes in Darfur. It was formed by the central government to fight against the rebel groups.
The novel tells the story troops assigned by the central government to arrest a person claiming to be a prophet in Darfur. A team of carpenters accompanies the force to crucify this antichrist and his followers. The commander of the force, Ibrahim Khidr Ibrahim, whose ancestors were slaves before being freed, tries to convince this prophet to abandon his call, or face crucifixion.
The novel also chronicles the atrocities, rapes and ethnic cleansing committed by the RSF and the Janjaweed against the citizens, who are novel’s main characters, and who developed a burning desire for revenge. In the end, Ibrahim is convinced by the prophet and becomes one of his followers.
The people who pass by my gallery window in Alexandria are living the future of that conflict — which began before some of them were born.
