Across Country Lines: Connection in Times of War

This blog post is cross-posted from the first edition of Black Women* at Edinburgh's Nurtured Magazine.

Hanaa Yousof reflects on receiving the news that there is war in Sudan and what it means to be separated from your country, not knowing when you can see it again. 

connection
kəˈnɛkʃən • noun
a relationship in which a person or thing is linked or associated with something else. (Bab.la 2025)

***

“Do not dig a grave for me
I will rest in every inch of the Earth
I’ll lie like water in the body of the Nile
I’ll lie like the sun over my fields
A person like me doesn’t live in a grave 
They stood up …
And I stood up …
Why do young tyrants think 
And their colours pale 
That the death of the fighter is the death of the cause?”

— an excerpt from the poem ‘Do Not Dig a Grave for Me’ by Muhammad Muftah Al-Fayturi

***

“الحرب في السودان!" 

‘[There is] a war in Sudan’. Mama’s voice woke me up, slowly but surely, syllables cutting through my consciousness. Our TV was kept on rotation, switching between various news channels, some in Arabic, some in English. The endless phone calls, my parents scrolling through Facebook restlessly, and the stream of WhatsApp messages gradually became a familiar routine. After a while, the thought felt like a dull pain that would seep in through sharp lurches, invading my physicality as I was brushing my teeth, or cooking dinner, or sitting through a too-long class. Calls home from University became a sort of catharsis – solace was found in that mutual distress. ]

One of the most unnerving things I’ve come to understand in the past 600 days is the way in which truth has transformed into an ugly, disingenuous thing during this war (and long, long before it). Hiding behind forcefully ascribed monikers like ‘forgotten war’, ‘silent war’, ‘hidden genocide’, are indescribable amounts of horror. A death toll stuck at a standstill for months at a time. Whole towns were completely cut off, with Darfuri regions and the regime of ethnic cleansing hit in a particularly sinister manner.
And an especially staggering new reality — how sexual violence has been utilised as a weapon of war, with little attention paid to this on a wider scale. 
  
In their report, Khartoum is Not Safe for Women!, Human Rights Watch (2024) reported that women between 9 and 60, as well as men and boys, had been subjected to intense feats of sexual violence by the RSF militia in particular, with the phenomenon underreported and information heavily suppressed. One account relayed a case of this suppression in action:

“The RSF have also tried to prevent their acts of sexual violence from being documented or reported. In the early months of the conflict, RSF members detained a health professional from a hospital in Khartoum, questioned her for several hours, and threatened her. According to a healthcare provider, an RSF member who detained her said: “You should not provide information about us to the health ministry or to the United Nations. The sexual violence cases you are reporting about should not be reported and you should stop receiving SGBV victims in the hospital…. I can kill you right here right now if I want to, you should be careful and stop sending reports.”

Reports by the BBC of the mass suicides of Sudanese women in the face of the horrific infliction of rape – as well as to escape this threat – call to a significant level of suffering (Wafula 2024). And with longstanding telecommunications blackouts across the country, it is impossible to ever gauge a true measure of the scale of terror.

As we continue to bear witness to these unspeakable horrors, it is easy to feel the kind of hopelessness that weighs you down. Online spaces, where Sudanese voices are briefly heard as people become voyeurs to this horror, mirror this hopelessness in action; fervour to act becomes misplaced exhaustion, exhaustion becomes pity. This warps the narrative; suddenly, suffering begins and ends at the point of people’s acknowledgement – and is swept to the past once your feelings dissipate. If pity becomes your modus operandi, if you are moved by only the most extreme scenes of suffering, until your memory buries the information underneath other discarded layers, what changes?

/

Being separated from Sudan and its heritage has meant that memories have come alive to fill the gaps that physical connection can no longer account for. Mama and Baba and I, sitting together on beds in al 7osh , bagging leaves for our molokhiyya  with my paternal Grandmother just before we left for Khartoum. Our drive out to a farm where I witnessed a sunset so beautiful it is still stuck in my mind's eye; the moon directly opposing the setting sun – something I’d never seen before – the two working in tandem to produce their glorious show of colours. Rolling fatayir in the kitchen, gathered around the quintessential metal tray to eat, drinking shai together before Maghrib; in these moments, everything is level, everything comes together as one. And the knowledge that condemning memories to the lockbox where your subconscious lives means history is at risk of disappearing – history is born at the point of your recollections.

/
The way in which these moments coalesce in my consciousness, and my complete certainty that my character is shaped by the women and countless Sudaniyeen  who came before me, is what makes me sure that Sudan will survive. I am not sure when I’ll next see my country, or what rebuilding even looks like. But I know that our connection knows no bounds – I know it is internal, innate, permanent. And that truth is enough.

Bibliography

1.    “CONNECTION - Definition in English - Bab.la.” 2025. En.bab.la. bab.la. 2025. https://en.bab.la/dictionary/english/connection.
2.    Human Rights Watch. 2024. “‘Khartoum Is Not Safe for Women!’” Human Rights Watch. July 28, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/07/28/khartoum-not-safe-women/sexual-violence-against-women-and-girls-sudans-capital..
3.    Wafula, Ian. 2024. “Sudan Civil War: Women Raped by RSF Fighters in Gezira State Die by Suicide, Activists Say.” BBC News, October 31, 2024. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8xpqvz0e88o.