i am always thinking about place

specifically, sudan

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of participating in a writer’s conference as a panelist. The panel was titled: Place and Belonging Across Genre. When I saw that I would be giving a talk on place, my mind naturally went to Sudan. As a country, Sudan is one of my obsessions as a writer. As my family’s homeland, it is a source of both grief and joy. I saw this conference as an opportunity to bring Sudan to the forefront of everyone’s minds.

Here are the words I shared with the audience at the conference:

As human beings, we long for a place to call our own because our origin story is one of exile. We do not get to claim ownership of Paradise, so we obsess over and crave the idea of home here on earth. This is especially true of immigrants, because our experience of exile is an ongoing reality, whether it is voluntary or by force – immigrants are never afforded the luxury of truly being rooted to a place. As a child of immigrants, I’ve always had more questions than answers when it comes to place and belonging. And as a writer, I think I build a home for myself in my stories and between stanzas. It’s the closest I can get to making sense of the elusive nature of place.

When I write fiction, I think of place as a separate character, as its own entity. It becomes a backdrop for my characters, a necessary detail to help the story take shape. It’s easy to be as elaborate, as daring as I want to be when it comes to painting a setting. I have a particular, and equal, fondness for small village towns and big cities. I write about the places I’ve lived, the ones most familiar to me – Jeddah, Huntsville, Alabama, Dallas, Boston. But the place that occupies my fiction most is Sudan. I write about my home country because it was never home, because I find myself longing for it, especially now.

When I write fiction, I approach writing about place in a playful, experimental way. But as a poet and essayist, place becomes my burden. When I write poems and nonfiction, I can’t hide behind a story I made up. Suddenly I have to face and grapple with the truth that I don’t know anything about place. The truth that I am from so many places, which means I am from none. There is no degree of separation when I write the truth. I write myself into my fiction, too, but in my poems and essays, I am on the page without any tricks. This is the reason I struggle with writing about Sudan, because I am not intimately familiar with it (as a place, as an experience, as a reality) so I hesitate to write about it in case this shows. But I have found a compromise in writing about my parents’ home from a sense of curiosity instead of authority. I write about Sudan to get to know Sudan. And I tell myself that in this there is also some kind of belonging.

Rasha Shaath addresses what I think is a universal immigrant writer’s experience in her essay, I wish I’d inherited baba’s sense of belonging:

“When people ask me where I’m from, I’m quick to rattle off the list of countries I belong to in some tangential way, because all of my belonging feels tangential. I say I’m Palestinian but my father’s mother is Iranian. I say I’m also Saudi, not because of blood but because I’m lucky to have the passport. I say I grew up in Jordan and that my mother was formerly Jordanian but is now Saudi because of that passport. But she’s originally Syrian. I usually say this with a mixture of weariness and pride, as if I’m revealing something special about myself. All my life, I’ve wrung my hands and contorted myself into an all-defining identity crisis which feels like a comfort zone but operates like an enormous limitation, disavowing any chance for a real stake in the ground.”

Even though I have only been to the homeland a few times, have only experienced it in small doses, I claim my parents’ birth country just as much as they do. Still, I recognize the privilege that I have to be able to claim a country without having experienced any of the heartbreak my parents did, the pain and trauma my relatives are experiencing now. My love for Sudan has always been a long distance one. I only saw the wholesome parts of it, and experienced only its sweetness, in small bursts and a few weeks at a time. I have not stood in lines for bread or gasoline until my back ached. I have not been beaten by rebel forces. I have not bled for my country, or any country, for that matter. I know this and I am still desperate to say I am from there, that my heart belongs to a place I barely know.

My place, my home, is parsed together – bits and pieces of people and countries and cities and histories that are not entirely my own. I grapple with this constantly. I study Sudan through my father’s poetry, through my mother’s retelling of her childhood. It is a painful truth that I am borrowing someone else’s Sudan every time I say I am from there.

During the last few years, the massacres in Sudan and in Gaza have made me start thinking about place in a more radical sense. I examine the truth: my cousins and aunts forced to flee in the dead of night, to take buses and risk being stopped by the RSF, some of them actually stopped and questioned before thankfully being released. My husband’s cousin detained for months. My cousin’s husband shot dead in his own home. I examine these truths and juxtapose them with every post on social media that calls this a war, calls this displacement. A bitter pill to swallow – that even this word is attached to place. Displacement is both inaccurate and insulting because it suggests that my people, my relatives, are now homeless. Wandering. Lost. When in fact their displacement was a violent removal, an extraction. They were forcibly taken from their home, their place, and this made them even more determined to stay, more determined to dig their heels into the land. To cling to the walls of the homes they had built with their own hands.

I have never experienced this sort of violence. I do not understand when my cousin says he has trouble sleeping because he hears canons and gunfire all the time now. But hearing their stories gives me my own determination. I feel a personal responsibility to immortalize Sudan in my writing, especially when I am writing nonfiction. Because this is larger than any story I could weave from my own head. It is necessary and, I believe, an obligation on my part. As a writer. As a Sudani writer. As an American writer. To make sure that my people have a place for themselves – if they can’t be in their country for now, then at least I can reunite them on paper.

I can’t help but question: What makes a country ours? To what extent do we belong to a land? How many of us must die before we are given the right to stay in our own homes? Does a land claim its people back? I don’t have answers but the lesson is this: in the aftermath of violent removal, my family members have found their home, their place, in each other, in new nations. For now. But they keep looking over their shoulders, toward Sudan. Their internal compass is uneasy, but it doesn’t waver from its true north. This gives me hope that one day we will return, that I can get the chance to form my own homeland stories. Ones that are not borrowed but entirely mine.