AL TAYR AL MUHAAJIR PRESENTS
THE OTHERNESS ISSUE
INSIDE: SEEDS OF SUDANESE IDENTITY LEENA HABIBALLA RECOVERING SUAKIN LEENA HABIBALLA ASYLUM SEEKER AALA SHARFI SEARCHING FOR SELF IN A CHESS BOARD RUND ALARABI MOTHER AT THE AIRPORT NADA NASERELDIN “DON’T WORRY, SHE’LL HATE SUDAN” ARWA ELSANOSI
CONTRIBUTORS LEENA HABIBALLA is a global soul of Sudanese origin and co-editor at Qahwa Project magazine. She graduated with a BSc in (neo-liberal) Genetics from University College London in 2014 and has since worked in fields that have nothing to do with said degree. Her talents include 7.9 Richter-scale-measuring sneezes, half-reading 10 books simultaneously and playing the drums. Follow her at allsudaneverything.tumblr.com.
AALA SHARFI is a 21 year old architecture graduate. A childhood spent both abroad and in Khartoum, as well as her ongoing experiences are generators of inspiration and ultimately, the realization of the importance of home. For her, Sudan will eternally present a comfort and a sense of belonging that is not found elsewhere.
RUND AL ARABI tells us that the name Rund stands for a flower of a tree that its branches used to resemble peace. Rund likes to remind her insides of that everyday. As a child, there wasn’t a thing she didn’t want to be, but growing up & realizing that invention & space exploration wasn’t something she had the skills for broke her heart. Until one day, she realized her already existing inventions: stories.
NADA NASERELDIN
has lived in Oman for 17 years and is now attending university in the
motherland. She is a dedicated storyteller, videographer and art critic but writing is her preferred means of self expression. She is a very patriotic citizen.
HANEEN MOHAMED is a pensive 17 yearold high school senior and an involuntary globetrotter. She was born in Germany, raised in the United States and currently is lounging around in the sands of Saudi Arabia. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Al Tayr Al Muhaajir and spends most of her time sobbing over 30 year old 3igd Al Jalaad clips. When she isn’t entertaining her diasporic angst, she’s probably yelling at Luscious Lyon through her computer screen for his audacious flagrancy or sulking over Frank Ocean’s unreleased album. She runs Vintage Sudan and her preferred pastime is watching obscure historical documentaries and taking world tours through Google Street View. She has a chronic angry-face and comes off as menacing but promises that she’s a kind soul cursed with the misfortune of having facial features that frown in their natural resting position. No one ever seems to quite know what exactly she’s saying because she loves to mumble, but she always manages to get her point across somehow. She is an obnoxiously proud Sudaniya and only wants to pay homage to the land of tender hearted Asmaraanis. tumblr: vintagesudan
twitter: @nablayah
SAJIDA HYDOUB is a 20yearold Chinaborn, South Korea raised Sudanese currently residing in the heart of Khartoum. She is the cofounder and executive editor of AlTayr AlMuhaajir. She is usually a business student when she’s not ditching classes to watch Brooklyn 99 reruns. Her favorite time of the year is mango and sugar cane season. When she’s not haggling raksha drivers and finding new vegan recipes, she’s usually ranting about politics and feminism on her blog or running her online magazine Spora. She loves listening to old Syed Khalifa tracks and whatever new angsty rap Drake is putting out these days. She is a trilingual, loud, sarcastic, and passionate old soul who just wants to live in a world where every Sudani is proud to be Sudani. site: sporazine.com
tumblr: niqabisinapris twitter: @niqabisinparis ig: @sxjda
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR The idea for this magazine emerged during one of my late night YouTube binge sessions, where I typically watch vintage Sudanese videos to quell my usual homesickness and diasporic angst. I came across an old Salah Ibn Badiya film, where the protagonist migrates to Egypt in pursuit of a music career, leaving his family loved ones behind in Sudan. The film painted a vivid picture of the emotional turmoil that comes with leaving home and through the protagonist’s wistful singing and aching for home I saw fragments of my family narrative, fragments of the universal diasporic narrative. With that being said, I sat down and thought long and hard about how little there is out there about us. Not much is said about us brown skinned Arabophone desert dwellers. It seems as if the world always forgets that there is more Nile beyond the Egyptian border, and that we exist as much as everyone else. We are incessantly absorbed into some larger monolithic story where we are stifled, silenced and stripped of our agency. Nowhere is the Sudanese person allowed to exist as complex and multilayered, nowhere are we allowed to be our own entity, deserving of autonomy and the right to an authentic voice. I created this magazine because I felt like us Sudanese folk need a space to simply be as we are, a space where we can be uninhibited and true to ourselves. I want to create a space that can humanize a group of people that have seemed to make a home out of society’s margins, and let them know “Hey, you’re welcome here. This place is yours to stay in, this is your home now.”.
Haneen Mohamed Editor in Chief
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strange alone in their strangeness confused, as they wipe away the tears sorrowful, as they battle the anguish all they ever wish for is return. - mohammed wardi | al tayr al muhaajir
غريب وحيد في غربتو حيران يكفكف دمعتو حزنان يغالب لوعتو ويتمنى بس لي أوبتو ــــــــــ محمد وردي ،الطير المهاجر
SEEDS OF SUDANESE IDENTITY UNSETTLING THE LOGIC OF RACIALISATION BY LEENA HABIBALLA
W
ithin every Sudanese diasporan is an unceasing internal dialogue about where we fit in the dominant racial order. Sudan boasts of a vibrant history and was home to some of the most ancient civilizations in African memory. Today, it suffers from a violent legacy of Arab slavery, Ottoman imperialism and British colonialism. It is one of the most ethnically, culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse places on the continent and is even geographically ambiguous. Ascribed to the Sudanese body is a rich constellation of meaning, a mosaic of identity that is often compromised upon its translation into Western racial constructs. My parents are both Sudanese and Muslim, so growing up, national and religious identities were the primary forms of identification for me. An existing pigmentocratic order rooted in internalised anti-blackness has for a long time produced forms of shadeism in Sudanese communities, but was secondary to ethnic groupings and affiliations. My early childhood was spent living in a few Arab countries and facilitating the racism I endured even then, was the understanding that my darker skin-tone threatened my claim to Arabness. That to be authentically Arab, it was not enough to speak Arabic or have facets of Arab culture deeply syncretised into my own – I would have to necessarily not be visibly Black. My identity as an Arab was therefore always tentative and fraught, but was nevertheless an important part of my being and ultimately self-evident. To deny my Arabness with racist taunts (in Arabic, no less) was to affirm its existence, for how could one strip another of something that did not exist?
It was not until I was in my mid to late teens that I was forced to understand “Black” and “Arab” as ontologically separate. This was as a result of my introduction to the Western concept of “race.” With this new understanding came a new mechanistic sense of self and an acute self-awareness of my skin colour in relation to everyone else’s. Up until then, I had understood one to be Arab only in so far as they were culturally Arab and understood “Black” as a descriptor for a specific skin-tone and not a racial identity. Within this new social schema, “Black” and “Arab” were not only different racial identities but were also competing and mutually exclusive. I embodied both apparently irreconcilable racial categories and my body became the site of a visceral and daily contradiction. Whereas before, my Blackness and Arabness had shaped my reality in mutually informing (albeit abhorrent) ways – the former inspired anti-black racism from non-Black Arabs as a tool to resist my claim to the latter – I was now, in spite of myself, forced to embody alien versions of either at the expense of the other. In non-Black Western spaces, I became definitively Black and in Black spaces, I became definitively Arab. So real was this daily process of racialisation and racial interrogation, that I began to subconsciously internalise Western conceptions of “Arab” and “Black” – under the racist, orientalist Western gaze – in order to reproduce them in public spaces for the purpose of performing racial sincerity. In Arab and non-Black spaces, I would avoid identifying as Arab or speaking in Arabic so as not to arouse suspicion or have my
blackness become a subject of debate. And in Black spaces, the mere fact that I could speak Arabic made me feel like a traitor to my blackness. I was racially traumatised. Too Black to be Arab. Too Arab to be Black. This is the daily discourse that I have had to grapple with my entire life. This internal conflict was brought to public light when the story about Ahmed Mohamed – the 14 year-old prodigy arrested for being brilliant-while-Muslim – exploded in September. Ahmed Mohamed is Sudanese and thus has Afro-Arab heritage and Black African ancestry. However, you would not have been able to tell this if you got your cue from the majority of Americans who – in the absence of any ethnic subtext – read Ahmed’s body as brown, that is, South Asian. As a result, arguments raged and rumbled online about which fictive and reductive Western racial category Ahmed truly embodies. People took to twitter, unleashing polemical diatribes defending the racialisation and essentialisation of Ahmed’s identity as either “Brown” or “Black.” Lost in all of this, of course, is the reality that racial constructs and racial politics in America specifically and the West generally cannot capture the complexity and fluidity of global ethnic identities with any subtlety. As a Sudanese person who has countless times fallen victim to this kind of racial policing, I am always interested in the ways in which Westerners react to Sudanese peoples’ complex identities and racial ambiguity. By racial ambiguity, I am not just talking about the colour of one’s skin or the texture of one’s hair – I am also talking about one’s culture, religious affiliation and heritage. Without homogenising the Sudanese population that exists worldwide, most of us carry within us different combinations of African, Arab and Muslim, ren-
dering us incoherent to Western racial paradigms. This incoherence makes us suspicious under racial surveillance. Our existence interrupts the seeming naturalness of Western racial formations and threatens to harmonise the hierarchical racial dogma and political order produced between the different identities we embody. Besides the immediate visual racial ambiguity, there are a couple of reasons why Ahmed was racialised as brown. First, the “War on Terror” led and championed by the US necessitates a body politic that creates a synonymy between terrorist, Muslim and brown. In order to justify the bombing of brown people abroad you must fabricate an equivalence between the three labels. This imperialist social thesaurus makes it easy then to read any Muslim as brown and any brown person as Muslim and both as ultimately threatening. Second, anti-blackness within brown and Muslim spaces constructs the victim of Islamophobia to be primarily and exclusively brown. Black Muslims are first and foremost read as Black and are not seen as legitimate subjects of Islamophobia. Ahmed was identified by his teachers and the police as an adult Muslim man, not a black Muslim boy. One ought to ask whether Ahmed’s talents would be so widely celebrated if he wasn’t racially ambiguous enough to fit the “brown” label or the “model minority” tropes afforded to South Asians. One could ask whether the same numbers of Muslims and South Asians would have expressed solidarity and outrage if evidence of Ahmed’s African heritage were clearly available on his skin. One could also ask what treatment Ahmed would have received from the police if his body could be easily coded as “black male”. “But Ahmed himself adopts the label ‘brown’ to describe his racial identity!” I hear you say. Some have argued that this is a clear example
“FUNERAL AND CRESCENT” IBRAHIM EL SALAHI
AHMED MOHAMED AND FAMILY of internalised anti-blackness at work. But this assumes that race is a science (it’s not) and that “black” is a biological reality (nah) and a universal personal identity for people of African heritage (nuh uh) and that blackness exists independently from other identities (it doesn’t) and that one could forensically ascertain whether Ahmed is authentically, racially black (nope). While the above concern is predicated on a real and problematic phenomenon in the wider Sudanese community, it is crucial that we distinguish between those instances and the struggle to self-narrate one’s body using a social vocabulary that is not one’s own. Black-Arab subjectivity is a result of a failure in the very framework through which we are expected to communicate the nuances and histories of our bodies. We fail to traverse the racial landscape before we even try because the language available to fuel such a translation has constructed itself around our identities thereby rendering any attempts at articulation fruitless. If we do not consider this we risk reifying ‘black’, decoupling ‘black’ from social construction and using ‘black’ in the service of Western cultural imperialism. In my opinion and experience, Ahmed’s self-referential use of “brown”, is his attempt to ap-
proximate “Black-Arab” and reconcile “African” with “Arab.” Ahmed, like all of us, has found himself caught navigating a racialised world. He cannot comprehend himself except through the narrow, colonial, American lexicon of race and racism. One cannot fully and legitimately translate the lived experience of “Black-Arab”, because it exists outside of the entire racial discourse through which one could hope to articulate it. This discourse cannot fathom “Black-Arab” except as a racial transgression, anti-black racial betrayal or categorical over-spillage to be mopped up, erased, punished and policed when asserted. In that sense our existence is unsettling and our whole identities are unthinkable and unthought, unintelligble to such a racial paradigm. What makes one thinkable/thought by any racial paradigm is its need to locate it within its empire. American imperialism does not need to locate and racialise Black-Arabs whole; it actually benefits from divorcing the two. It benefitted from it when it used an over-simplified, Western-centric language to represent the tragic conflict in Darfur as a ‘race war’ between what it constructed as “black Africans” and “Arabs” for its own political interests. This locally non-existent binary was deployed uncritically revealing an anti-Arab bias, as well as mystifying the complex web of causes behind the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. This was done in order to recreate the exotic and sentimental image of African wars predicated on primordial identities, in a bid to capitalise on the voyeuristic tendencies of many Westerners. What enabled this process and distorted framing was the pre-existing assumption that “Black” and “Arab” cannot co-exist in one geographical context, let alone one body.
Continental and diasporan non-Black Arabs also operate on this assumption and benefit from this separation by pitting their Arabness in direct opposition to blackness, thereby validating and protecting their claim to Arabness as well as gaining proximity to whiteness. What my experiences and the discussions surrounding Ahmed’s ‘race’ show is that race is a Western fantasy maintained by a daily, violent socio-political choreography. In an attempt to comprehend Sudanese identity, Western racial classifications render us impossible paradoxes thereby alienating us from our bodies, histories and ways of being. The ever-shifting space between my estranged self and my legitimate self is where my trauma lies. And I will no longer nurture this space. I refuse to rehearse the logics of race-making or dance to the imperialist drum of racialisation. I will not become easily consumable by Westerners and non-Black Arabs alike. I will not dilute myself into something you can understand. My complexity is necessary; it inspires a lived appreciation of intersectionality and the need to abolish the current racial order. I assert Black-Arabness not as a plea to integrate into the race map or gain recognition from an oppressive institution, but to announce that I am here to rattle, shake and disorient a rigid and dogmatic racial hierarchy. I am a Black-Arab and I will not uphold a narrative or politic that does not name my reality. I am a Black-Arab and I exist.
RECOVERING SUAKIN BY LEENA HABIBALLA
Suakin: a city once lauded as ‘The Venice of Africa’ in medieval times, now reduced to ruins. Scattered around the island are a few remains – historical remnants of a rich legacy. Until very recently, Suakin (meaning populated/inhabited place) was ironically a ghost town, spiritless and desolate. Sudanese poet Ibrahim Shaliya lamented this tragic downfall in his now famous ‘Suakin al-Bakiya’ (Weeping Suakin):
حقا سـواكن كنت أنت جميلة كوسـام مجد خط يف سودانها وملن رآها زهـرة فواحـة فياضـة بالحسـن يف ريعانها هي مرتع األباء مهد صباهمو كم انطوى األجيال يف أحضانها واليوم لهفي يا سواكن ال أرى غـري التي تلتف يف أكـفانها واملوج حــولك نادب فكأنه دمع الحـزينة فاض من أجفانها This photoseries – Suakin al-Muta’afiya/Recovering Suakin – is a form of consolation and reassurance to Shaliya; an attempt to visually resolve the paradox of a barren Suakin. The generous amount of sky and open expanse in each photo are at once a reminder of Suakin’s haunting emptiness and a signalling of a rebirth. Spaces, pregnant with possibility, where the slow cultivation of life and patient blossoming of a new Suakin is taking place. I hope to tell the story of a city that is beginning to rise out of the rubble, breathe, rebuild its dignity and reinsert itself back into the Sudanese popular imaginary. To depict how a city that once laid itself down as a bridge between Africa and the rest of the world has now – perhaps appropriately for an island – defiantly looked inward to self-heal and tend to its own wounds.
ASYLUM SEEKER BY AALA SHARFI
This art piece was inspired by the sharp rise in the Sudanese youth's desire to immigrate to the west generated by a subsequent desire to abandon Sudanese nationalism, culture, and identity. I realize that I cannot possibly represent the many stories and tribulations my people have all been through, however this is an attempt of expression from a stance lacking ignorance, arrogance and privilege of what has occurred regarding the strongly embedded trending mindset of my current generation.
a路sy路lum seek路er noun 1. a person who has left their home country as a political refugee and is ` seeking asylum in another. 2. a series of numbers 3. a fighter maintained a zest for life? 4. an Outsider is safe? 5. an enclosure of foreign freedom 6. an exposure to alien liberties and opportunities will you ever belong? . 7. a receiver of backhanded discrimination 8. an upside down/right side up seeker of refuge amongst an upside down/right side up society
ASYLUM SEEKER INK & WATERCOLOR ON CARD 148 X 210 MM
SEARCHING FOR SELF IN A CHESS BOARD BY RUND AL-ARABI
click, click snap, snap and you smile for pictures, never knowing which’ll be the one decorated with a black ribbon, hanging down like a chandelier. Just like flowers blooming, Only to end up laying next to a tombstone. *** click, click pixels march in tune, mourning another hero that died with a smile on their face. *** Newspapers; the ink gets prepared, ferments, for the missing piece, of a missing piece, of a family portrait. *** click, click i spin around when hearing the sound, to end up looking like a small tornado, as they say, cameras don’t lie i never showed a face in pictures, i never wanted to be found. they’ll have to go through the pain of recalling a vague memory the black will recall white, white shall recall black, because brown never exists in a chess board so i keep spinning.
MOTHER AT THE AIRPORT BY NADA NASERELDIN
I am one of Sudan’s belongings; Sudan is where I don’t get along A missing home and a distant symbiosis My country doesn’t care whether I am in it or out of it Homesickness is inevitable We have to catch the illness We have to catch the illness Airports are contagious Once felt like we were being punished for earning the label” Diasporas” My grandma always says: “Nothing beautiful comes without a cost” I avoid my people so they won’t hear My heart beat with another accent I love being around my people so they can hear that My heart shatters with the same tone as theirs I avoid my people so they won’t See the كرسةslipping through the gaps between my knuckles Just the way my culture does. I love being around my people so they can see two cultures Entwined in one single body My grandmother told my mom to get us back home “If you don’t get the white pigments and use phrases in Khaliji accents Like our neighbor ختمةfrom Saudi Arabia Then what is the use? Honey, come back home if you are poor and don’t have food Come back! You have been an embarrassment for me ”ققدام نسوان الحلةِ”ة Conversations were not as easy as copy and paste in Google translate It turned out that no subtitle would appear in the footer of a family gathering Smile is an invalid character in Sudan Speaking up would embarrass my grandmother Moving my tongue will remind the citizens with grandfathers Who dedicated their blood to wash their grandson’s tongues From the language of their enemies دام نسوان الحلة
(A mother at the airport with her son on her lap Telling him all the stories of the broken land She mentioned everything about it The fact that it was broken, and that she kept it inside folded His heart reacted rapidly He inhaled as much as his lungs could handle From air And the reaction reflected on his eyes as glare But the glare soon went matte as he looked below At the display his eyes received from the plane’s window It was the same as the pictures in his science workbook With the title beneath saying “poor” He looks at his mom with disappointment As he shouts “but mom! you lied! It’s all broken”) The airport is where we get our first lie The airport is where we catch our first sickness Airports are contagious We have to catch the illness We have to catch the illness Mother at the airport, is not what I am planning to be.
“DON’T WORRY, SHE’LL HATE SUDAN” BY ARWA ELSANOSI
I’ve never known what my homeland looks like. I am Sudanese, I have always known that. I mean my passport is green, and I speak the dialect fluently – I don’t even have a moghtarba accent! We even have a couple of bambars at home and we eat molah on the daily (nothing tops Sudanese cuisine) and my mother proudly wears her beautiful tiyab everywhere she goes. But what did all of that really mean to me when I have never been to Sudan? Well, it just meant that the cultural items I am so fond of, are supposed to have some deeper meaning or should give me vivid memories of a country I have never visited. It also meant that all I knew about Sudan was what “others” told me. All my life, Sudan had a distorted image in my mind made out of stories I put together like pieces of a jigsaw of different Sudans seen by different people: It was the 70s Khartoum of my dad, with memories of high-end journalism written in English for an audience I really can’t imagine. Sudan to me was also my mother’s childhood memories of boarding school and neighborhood girls’ small talks on their way to the Dokkan. To me, Sudan was my sister’s recent undergraduate experience suffering from transportation issues and never-ending bureaucratic procedures. And of course, Sudan was the war-torn, famine-stricken, Shari’a-enforcing, terrorist-supporting state in the news. For years I wanted to adopt each and every image told to me as my own, but realized that all of these images more or less meant nothing to me. I had to form my own image of Sudan. And
so, last Eid I decided to finally go to Sudan. But you may wonder, “How come your parents never took you when you were younger?” and the answer is: They never got the chance to. When I was young we traveled to other neighboring countries, for leisure, like most other expatriate families did. So, I never got the chance to actually visit Sudan. But let me not play the victim here, if I had a strong will, I probably would have found a way or time to visit. I admit that. Of course, when I decided to go with my sister to Sudan. I heard it all. “Why on earth would you want to go there? If you have the money just go anywhere else!”, “You will never survive”, “The weather is horrible now! It’s fall! That means mud, dirt and mosquitoes! Then, I heard the worst of them all. Mom was on the phone telling someone: “Yeah, you’ve heard right, she is going to Sudan. Oh don’t worry about it, she will hate it!” Unfortunately, this is what Sudan is to most of the Sudanese diaspora. It is a punishment. You don’t go to Sudan because you want to, you go to Sudan because you have to and if you had the option, you probably wouldn’t go. But there is a reason to why Sudanese immigrants think this way; they are the middle class of Sudan living in conditions that are considered average abroad, but luxurious back home. With time, they get used to the lifestyle of living abroad, I mean after all, seeking better living conditions is the reason why they left in the first place. Consequently, Sudan becomes the annual hell-like, mandatory summer visit.
And so, I went to Sudan. My first impression after a long hour waiting for my luggage in the not-so-international Khartoum airport was “Hey! it’s so much cleaner than people say it is!” and from that point on, I hated every Sudanese I met abroad who lied to me about how gross and dirty Sudan was. I really loved Sudan. I loved the smell of earth after it rained. I loved the people. I probably fell in love with almost every and each one of them, and as a foodie woman, the good food had my heart; everything tasted like home, despite the fact that almost everyone expected it to be a cultural shock. They don’t quite realize that living abroad doesn’t mean we never make kisra I didn’t find a single reason as to why I would hate Sudan. When I told people I loved Sudan and that I would live there, they often responded: “You are only saying this because you are a ‘tourist’ visiting for a couple of weeks and leaving” and “Why would you? This country lacks ‘basic human needs’ like paved roads and electric supply”. However, it is important to raise questions about th bargains we are willing to make. This whole idea of universality of rights is really worth questioning, but more importantly, there are other things that I felt in Sudan that materialistic things couldn’t buy. For example, I felt alive. I have to say sorry to mom and friends, but I love Sudan.
“THE MUSICIANS III” WILSON EPRAHIM