In a meeting today, I looked down at my hand and realised my wedding band was missing. The indentation of the ring was still visible, the faint beige mark staring up at me accusingly. I blinked, scratching through the crowded corridors of my memory, searching for the moment I pulled it off my finger.
My heart crowded my throat as I drew blank. I could not remember when I walked through the door of my flat in London the night before. I could not remember any details of the flight from Cairo. I could remember nothing but blurry days of Ramadan and Eid, glued to the television or phone or laptop, alternating through fear, grief and cold, dark numb shock. I remembered nothing but the slap of sorrowful waters Sudanese people were plunged in on the morning of April 15, 2023.
Sudanese are no strangers to political upheaval, but the events of this Ramadan are different. Khartoum has never seen violence like this, never been held under siege like this, the people of the tri-city area have never had to flee their homes like this. Civilians have no dog in this fight: they do not support either the Rapid Support Forces or the Sudanese Armed Forces, they are simply stuck in the middle of a deadly battle for power and they are paying with their lives.
Sudanese people do not deserve this. No people deserve to be brutalised by their own leaders. Sudan is an incredibly rich nation, overflowing with natural resources, agriculture and good humour. Yet, we have been beset with such misfortune, subhanallah. The injustice tastes bitter on our tongues, between mouthfuls of kisra and mulaah, moistened by the waters of the Nile.
I can give you intellectual reasons behind the tragedies, the impact of successive waves of colonisation and foreign interference. But today, rather than a political analysis, I make a plea. Keep us in your prayers, and think of us kindly. Offer us your grace and generosity, not your pity. Ease our paths into our new realities, and refrain from shaming us for what we are unable to control. Amplify our voices, our art, our cultural contributions to the world. If you have the capacity, share your wealth, your compassion, your homes. Know that so many of us are simply surviving, but we want to live, oh do we want to live!
May Allah cover the Sudanese people in blessings, inshallah, and all of you with us.
I found my wedding ring this afternoon, Alhamdulilah. It sat quietly in a bowl, nestled between my keys and a boabab seed from my last visit to the Sahara. As I slipped the band back on, I caressed the furry surface of the desert fruit and wondered when I would next see the city of my birth. Salty tears darkened the skin of the boabab seed, and I prayed.
I wrote those passages almost a year ago, originally for GQ Middle East.
Twelve months ago, the pain and shock of the counterrevolutionary war erupting in Sudan was stubbornly at the front of my mind, at all times. I could not bear the mundanity of every day life. I found myself bursting into tears at any moment; on the tube, scrolling instagram, walking across London Bridge. I would bow my head and let the hot streams glide down my face, unable, unwilling to wipe them away. They were proof of the struggle, public evidence of internal turmoil I had no interest in quelling, if I even knew how.
Twelve months later, the sharp edge of the anguish has dulled, but the crisis has only become more urgent. I feel useless, my efforts splintered into seemingly ineffective measures: public education, media interviews, signposting to fundraisers, articles. It doesn’t feel enough. It is what I can do, and it isn’t enough.
What is enough, anyway? Enough to stop the war? Enough to end the famine? Sometimes my own arrogance makes me breathless. These are not achievable goals, and yet they are the yardstick by which I measure my efficacy. Why, I do not know. Perhaps because they feel like the only worthy aims.
i left my family in cairo after watching my home bombed on the news and now
im back in london and im crying on the tube and im grateful that the city is too big for anyone to disturb and my heart is too tight for my chest and i don’t know when my family will ever be together again and for what for what for what? my family unravels like a discarded sweater and my country crumbles like a broken promise and all the tweeting in the world wont fix it but i try, i try, i try. my pennies aren’t enough to stem the tide but I place them in the path of the tsunami anyway, so that one day, when we tell our children what happened after the revolution, at least we can tell them we tried.
No recommendations this week, friends. Keep Sudan in your prayers. May we see the end of this war in the near future, inshallah.
Until next Sunday,
Yassmin
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Praying for Sudan, this is so heartbreaking