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ATAM TAPES #1: AL 7IJIL BEL RIJIL - MAHMOUD ABDELAZIZ
an authentic oud tape from the late mahmoud abdelaziz, a much esteemed singer that filled sudanese radios throughout the late 80's and 90's, until his recent death in 2013.
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 في سودانها
ولمن رآها زهـرة فواحـة فياضـة بالحسـن في ريعانها
هي مرتع الأباء مهد صباهمو كم انطوى الأجيال في أحضانها
واليوم لهفي يا سواكن لا أرى غـير التي تلتف في أكـفانها
والموج حــولك نادب فكأنه دمع الحـزينة فاض من أجفانها
This photoseries – Suakin al-Muta3afiya//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.
Leena Habiballa is a global soul of Sudanese origin. She graduated with a BSc in (neo-liberal) Genetics from University College London in 2014 and has since been doing work-based training in a few areas of social work in Khartoum. She is co-editor at Qahwa Project magazine and amateur writer/poetartist. Her talents include 7.9 Richter-scale-measuring sneezes, half-reading 10 books simultaneously and playing the drums. Follow her at allsudaneverything.tumblr.com
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
This 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.
Seeds of Sudanese Identity: Unsettling the Logic of Racialization
by Leena Habiballa
Within 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?
Identity – Iman Shaggag
I was racially traumatised.
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, rendering 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”.
Ahmed Mohamed and Family
“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 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 approximate “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. These locally non-existent binaries were 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.
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
