The Feminist Shrine:
A Sanctuary for Love, Gratitude, and Learning
To Roya Hassan-Roya with an Alif[1]
By HekmaYagoub
Translated by Najlaa Eltom
In exile, there is no map of mourning, no compass—only raw gaping wounds. No sooner does grief begin to heal than it tears open again, ripping flesh from spirit, over and over. Each time, pain nails us to a void beyond meaning. Crucified, beyond the wreckage of our broken souls. Scattered in the unknown, a drift in a void beyond meaning.
We stand before sorrow, nudging, embracing, and gazing at it—a familiarity so devastating that even death recoils. A familiarity that flickers in the words of poet Khalid Hassan Osman: “At night, grief clasps us in, an embrace that lingers.” In the mornings, we step into memory, into carnage. We delve into the distance that robbed us of mourning our loved ones, our kin, our comrades. We have been denied the right to gather our grief, to collect the sorrow-lets[2] left behind, scattered across the angaraib[3] where the dead were laid, across the[4] birish that cradled their bodies, the baroud water[5] perfumed and holy. Now the empty angaraib leans untouched, abandoned at the core of the devastated home. It lingers there, in the heart of the housh[6], a testimony of belonging to the farewell.
The gathering of people, their coming together in joy and sorrow, the wailing and lamentations—the way we cling to each other in moments of devastation—this is how we declare death. Exile did not take this from us alone; war had stolen it from those still in Sudan. It was snatched from them by bare power politics that erased the names of the dead, drowning them in the Nile. The missing, their bodies branded with fading numbers, stripped of names and history. Corpses abandoned at the edges of burning roads, their bodies turned into a feast for stray dogs and scavenger birds[7].
War confiscated families’ right to grief. War desecrated the dignity of the deceased and stole their final farewell. When we part with strangers, we cradle their estrangement, embracing it tightly. In giving it back to them, we reclaim it for ourselves, holding onto it, sheltering it from life’s arrogance and unrelenting cruelty[8]. This is respect—a tribute the living must bear, the weight we carry for those we love, the honor with which we bury even our enemies.
With anger, hope, and love, this shrine is built. It is a brief attempt at writing, for I feel I have too much to say about the violence of war and the wreckage it daily inflicts—enough to fill an entire book.
To write about Roya—to write around her—is to write about death in wartime. It is to explore her power to ignite the energy of writing the political, to set up the nihas drums[9] and play the rhythm of death and grief. It’s an attempt to depoliticize and de-commodify sorrow—or, in different terms; to ground sorrow in a feminist space. I imagine this effort can be realized by seating emotions in this shrine—a necessarily political act. I try to engage the imagination in an encounter with the idea of emotion dismissal by means of political erasure. It is a pervasive force, permeating both discourse and action during war. This erasure, though not always evident, manifests in the continuation of killing. The mere conception of political erasure is an implicit acknowledgment of its active actualization. Even if there is no explicit discourse of dismissal of grief, war—through relentless killing—forces us to drown in amnesia.
To write about Roya is to write about life and resistance. Writing was her means, her world—the space through which she strived to make the personal and the collective matters our own. Not the personal that centers the self, but that which sparks reflection on the collective. We claim it and write it as something that belongs to us—we, forever caught in the violent and speedy pace of life.
A life that tries to muffle sorrow by means of repetition, in endless cycles of tragic death. We will keep trying, amid contradictions, inconsistencies, helplessness, and desperate efforts. For how can a heart entertain consistency as it breaks? How can it sustain the effort when it never stops beating? Yet in its breaking life persists, and in its beating hope endures.
The Location of Loss, Grief, and Anger: On the Feminist Political Landscape
1. The Shrine: Why?
I approach this text as an act of creating a feminist shrine—not to fetishize an individual, but to liberate a state of soul and mind that stands against the erosion of spirit and memory. And since Roya herself would have rejected veneration, the shrine is not for reverence but for remembrance, love, and gratitude. It is a space where her words remain alive, both in meaning and in practice. This is what I felt after the passing of bell hooks, and what I discovered in her books: shrines of thought, spaces for spiritual and intellectual growth, and contemplation on the meaning of knowledge and feminist kinship. A shrine, in this sense, is an act of defiance—a public trial of the state’s efforts to confine us, drowning us in mysticism and the supernatural. It is a reckoning with the state’s failure to build institutions that nurture our spiritual, physical, and emotional well-being. A failure that leaves us pleading for the blessings of the sheikhs, hoping they might save us from the specters of poverty, illness, deprivation, and need. This centralizes the material needs these institutions should have provided. In their absence, the imagination turns to the blessings of the dead, seeking refuge in their aid. I do not condemn these acts of supplication; I seek to illuminate the void that made them necessary. Instead of visiting the shrine of a given sheikh, pleading for a miraculous cure to our ailments, we long for shrines of knowledge—spaces that hold the state accountable for its failure and staggering inadequacies.
We do not desire the patriarchal sanctity of dead men; we desire life—a life of continuous learning, grappling with questions of existence and annihilation, encountering their urgent and hazardous nature. In this sense, the shrine does not condemn supplication, nor does it dismiss the cries for salvation. It recognizes them as authentic acts of resistance, the final recourse of those stripped of all other choices. Here, the shrine directs the entire body toward a vast abyss of the scarecrow we call the state. The state that abandons us to desperation and superstition.
Superstition might offer us temporary shelter from our wounds and the vastness of our existential questions, but it will not bring back those we have lost. Yet, our tender motherly superstition, attuned to our fragility, will cradle us for a while. Feminism, across its diverse literature, believes that war is avertable, that poverty is not an inescapable fate. There was a moment before the weapons factory, before the nuclear bomb, before child labor and war profiteering. A moment when all of this could have been prevented.
We will mark our grief, we will adorn it with gratitude, encrust and lay it at the gates of illumination, the gates Roya’s writing flung open with her voice. For writing is not merely consolation; it is a refuge for emotions, bewildered and trembling, emotions drenched in fury.
A resting place where we lay our rage, so it may never be forgotten, so we may say: Here stood the feminist shrine of Roya Hassan:
Here, take the vision, all of it.
Here, take a defiance that rises above loss.
Here, take the audacity to turn illness and pain into resistance and struggle.
Here, take our rejection of war, militarization, conscription and militias, and the clotted remnants of a sterile patriarchal state.
Here, take these luminous rebellious attempts.
Here, take our grief—flowing, questioning, grappling with violence and the erosion of souls,
Here, take the ulcers of unending failure, take the open wounds of responsibility.
Here, take the blisters, the lesions, the festering scars.
2. The Tensions of Departure and Presence:
I, too, care, Roya.
The date of Roya’s “killing” remains an open gateway—a portal to the future, to justice, and to accountability. A date we hope will not close in on us, trapping us in bitterness, but one we open ourselves to. A date that leads us toward hope, toward a world where people no longer die in wars or from weapons paid for by the wealth stolen from us. It is the date of Roya Hassan’s birth: January 12, 1990, and from there into her writing. These are the milestones of a resistance that will endure until souls are protected, dignity is upheld, and our right to a life of dignity fully restored.
Through writing and conversation, Roya ignited questions about what it means to live in a postcolonial state, where neocolonialism suffocates so many nations across the global South. Neocolonialism operates through new tools and mechanisms embedded in the injustices of international systems that claim to uphold human rights. Yet, without doubt, they are the very instruments of recolonization.
Roya and I met through shared experiences—resistance, pain, institutional and societal violence, love, loss, and abandonment. We found each other in the questions of intimacy and isolation, and in the high price they carry. In the solitude that claims us, and in the solitude we knowingly and willingly embrace, driven by the freedom of consciousness and the inevitability that compels it. We met in her sharp gaze, a gaze that cuts through geography, through political, mental, and psychological boundaries. We met in our shared understanding of the savagery of capitalism and imperialism.
As a feminist, Roya rejected war. She protested through her writing, by reaching out to others, and by building networks. She protested against life with life itself, and again death with death. She wrote her own obituary, in a way only she could, instructing that it include the phrase: “After a long struggle with illness.” Then, with defiance, she added that she would keep an eye on what happens here, even from the afterlife. And indeed, she left behind her will.
For a long time, our consciousness has been shaped by writings that urge us to harness our anger, to wield it with purpose. But anger alone, or grief alone, is not what makes us feminists. It is the intellectual labor that helps us to understand the roots of our anger, and the tools we grasp to analyze and critique the world and the lived reality around us. This is what makes us feminists, as Sara Ahmed says[10].
This is a moment to channel our anger and rejection of war. A call to all feminists who have resisted war as a principle, as an idea, in word and in deed—toward the collective transformation to which bell hooks dedicated her life. This is because collective political resistance grows from critical consciousness, learning from it, advancing toward the frontlines of struggle.
This is also a moment to say that Roya’s death from malaria—as she herself mocked the absurdity of dying from malaria in 2023—was no ordinary death. It was a deliberate, systematic killing. It was part of the slow extermination of Sudanese citizens. War forced Roya, in the depths of illness, to leave Khartoum and travel to Al Rahad, in Kordofan[11] .
This is a moment to express feminist rage—a collective anger and a shared grief at witnessing the collapse of what remains of a failed state. This is a moment to grieve the women who died in childbirth, for they, too did not die natural deaths. Their deaths were caused by the collapse of the healthcare system.
This is a moment write about the killing of children in orphanages, homes, and camps—where bodies pile in silence. This is a moment to write about war and why feminism stands in absolute opposition to it. A moment to say that we are reaping the ruin of militarization and militia rule —a war that stripped life of its vitality. This is a moment to say that feminist writing remains one of our last openings against despair and ruin. Writing as resistance, writing that Roya shared with us, and that I now pass on to comrades.
Because the grief we endure here is not the ordinary grief we once knew. This is not the familiar grief we would evade, even as we knew it was inevitable. War has thrown even inevitability and uncertainty into chaos. War has scheduled our mourning, dictated the timing of our rage, only to muffle that rage by an ever-accelerating vehicle of catastrophe. People have always known they would not live forever, but they did not choose death. Death came to them, in military and militia uniforms, waiting at their doorsteps. Death stormed their safety, shattered their certainty, and tore through their peace with a blast of a shell. War has imposed a real-time timetable for death. It is an inevitable encounter and nobody can escape it, not even in flight. Death has bound people to the relentless anticipation of the unknown, trapping them within its timeline. Grief is always something unanticipated, no one would willingly invite it to their door. Yet, it descends like a haunting nightmare.
By a patriarchal design, war hastened the deaths of kidney patients dependent on dialysis, and those with terminal illnesses who clung to life through treatment, only to have their last hope crushed. Pain, too, is political. Grief is political. Because war weaponizes pain and grief, turning them into an end in themselves. Even political ceasefires have become an opportune time for violating bodies and looting homes—a bitter marketplace where militias shop for what remains.
The Ethos of Ferocious Geographies
War does not discriminate in its brutality—it targets women and men alike. The machinery of violence spares no one. Yet the impact of war is never the same. The ability to endure and resist is shaped by class, age, gender and one’s physical and mental condition. The elderly can’t easily flee the inferno of war. Their escape is constrained, and their mobility is limited. The same is true for people with special needs and those who rely on mobility aids—for them, flight is often not an option. Their suffering has been a defining chapter in the book of neglect and systematic discrimination. It is an exclusion that is deeply rooted in the structure of a state whose infrastructure was crumbling long before the war. A state where resources were drained to serve the ruling elite, the same elite that now finds itself locked in a struggle with those it once excluded. Both sides fight over wealth and power, employing the same instruments of control. We also see disparities in material means—how some could not bear the crushing financial burden of internal displacement, let alone the cost of fleeing to neighboring countries.
The Body, the Land, and What Lies Between
We see what our comrade Roya endured on her journey from Khartoum to Kordofan, her movement already hindered by MS, her steps reliant on a cane. We see that struggle reflected in the endless lines of those fleeing the horrors of war in El Geneina, West Darfur. We see it now, as we have read it in history—endless lines, thrown into chaos by the crushing grip of militias, stretching toward Chad’s outstretched hand. In the camps, soldiers stood assembled. How could people find comfort in such militarized generosity? Is there anything more terrifying than an army clad in uniforms identical to those of the killers? Human lines, where spirits are shattering, and souls are bleeding. Lines that have thinned as some collapsed under the weight of war. Others stretch into endless queues of suffering. Still others have fallen where they stood—bodies bound to the earth, corpses fixed in place, becoming shields for the living to take cover behind. Lines! Is that all language can offer to describe people in war? What misery, and what poverty of words!
I believe the word “lines” imprisons resistance, stripping it of the possibility of survival—doing it a terrible injustice. It is a word that evokes scarcity, of space dissolving into nothingness. It is a terrifying signifier in the lexicons of ferocious geographies.
Yet, within the boundaries of violence, there exists a different scene: The people of Kutum North Darfur, who fled under relentless bombardment as the city was once again declared unlivable. The solidarity of the survivors attests to authentic resilience, to a deeply ingrained generosity, a generosity forged in the face of calculated erasure, dwindling resources, and the looming specters of famine. However, this solidarity remained untouched by militarization. It is a comfort that has not been conscribed.
What the subheading attempts to draw from the ideas of the body, the land, and what lies between is a celebration of the powerful efforts of solidarity and compassion among families. This inspiration also seeks to expose the political erasure of the solidarity among displaced people, a boundless, unmatched compassion, as reflected in the Qur’anic verse, “Feeding, on a day of privation”.[12]
The scarcity of space created by war, the vanishing cities, feet clinging to the earth, resisting the violent force of expulsion. An immediate rupture demanding the retrieval of the images hidden by brutality and political collusion. The scenes of the deadly 1984 famine[13], when between 60,000-80,000 men and women walked, in an earthly unity, fleeing from the farthest reaches of Darfur to the outskirts of Khartoum. Only for Khartoum to now lie in ruins. The numbers, vast as they were, pale in comparison to the tragedy of today[14].
Endless lines of bodies, gaunt from hunger, wailing out of starvation. And just as before, they were sent back to Kordofan in what was called “The Glorious Return,” in February 1985. At the time, Kordofan did not receive the militarized American aid rubbed into the chant: “Your torment is near, O tyrant Americans, we are prepared for you”[15]. The delay—or deliberate political and structural obstruction of relief— forced them to travel back to Khartoum once again, on foot. Their bodies weakened, their stomachs empty, while the head of the country refused to declare the catastrophe. At the time, Marshall Jaaffar Nimeiri not only hesitated to declare the famine, but also pushed the narrative that now echoes in the erasure of certain Arab groups’ Sudanese identity. The government declared that those displaced were not Sudanese but Chadian. And I imagine, Nimeiri, that they have returned now to be welcomed by Chad, fed with the full “honor” of militarized generosity. The rhetoric of ethnicity, of political and developmental neglect, these are the formulas for war inscribed in the history of militarized dictatorship. These are the pages of violence left open.
This legacy places before us injustices that manifest in different ways, yet they are surely fundamental injustices that remain root causes of the current eruptions of war. If left unaddressed, they will inevitably continue to fuel many wars to come.
Narratives of Resistance: Feminist Joys
Roya spoke the truth aloud, a defiant act, one that threatens the very foundations of patriarchy, one that unsettles the state and its guardians. To proclaim acts of love is also a threat to the military and police structures of a state built on a vast reserve of hatred and exclusion, especially against women.
Roya confronted state-sanctioned racism in its systematic oppression of revolutionaries, both women and men. In her essay “Hair and Power: Tales of Domination Through Head Shaving in Sudan,” she employed multiple analytical tools to expose how discriminatory policies are designed to humiliate and wound dignity. But she did not leave us there, at the scene of violence and brutality. She picked up the torch of resistance, the sharp awareness of those who had endured oppression and the realization that the machinery of repression could never extinguish the fire of revolutionary consciousness.
For many feminists—whether they identify as such or not—grieving Roya’s departure from the feminist sphere is a painful endeavor. Unrelenting questions about how to stay loyal to her pledges and the questions she posed—questions that placed the margins at the very center, questions born of urgency, restless longing, fervor for change, and a sharp awareness of the immense challenges that surrounded us. Because Roya is every one of us, she is each and every one. Despite the uniqueness of her own pain, she rose above suffering and spoke of the state’s central failure. She wrote about the agony of public health care centers, demanding to be seen as a human being, not merely as an emergency case on a chart. She understood, too, the constraints that left medical workers powerless, caught in the same broken system. What clarity, Roya, what astonishing clarity!
When she wrote her brief statement “Our lives are an unending series of wars,” she distilled the essence of state violence and the struggle against it. The violence of the state, and our fierce labor resisting it. The violence of the nation-state, where ruling elites have sought to militarize our very existence. A violence waged equally on the bodies of women and men.
Writing about Roya is an act of resistance, a protest against war, and an attempt to transform grief into action. What we learn from Roya is to never hesitate, to begin, to reach out as much as we can. Because, as the saying goes, “To Begin is to Complete.”
Because feminism is a collective movement, the pickaxe will be carried again and again, and ideas will continue to bloom. The books Roya shared with comrades will be read, and her vision will set the darkness of our paths ablaze. Everything Roya revealed through her experience, everything she illuminated in her blog Ta Marbouta—this is the very essence of feminism.
Resistance in wartime, despite its dangers, endures, Roya. You would have marveled at how midwives rose to their roles, welcoming life with unshakable courage and a defiance that declares: life persists, no matter what. You would have been moved, too, by the green signs of social organization taking shape in cities untouched by the war’s direct fire. And by revolutionary community kitchens that have begun serving meals to the displaced.
Feminist Loyalty: The Struggle of the Manuscript
The Joy of “To Begin is to Complete”
You would have loved how comrades called upon one another—the very women you addressed in your letters, each word crafted with care and deep love, sealed with an embrace and kisses. You would have loved the name of the page that archives your writings, a site of pilgrimage so beautiful and graceful named Roya with an Alif! It is an act of loyalty from a comrade who chose not to sign her name. Out of wisdom, I imagine, and devotion to your name—to your urgent, piercing questions. A shrine that remains. A place we return to whenever we need reason, wisdom, and persistence.
You would have been moved by the loyalty to the history of pain and suffering as well, by how your comrade Faihaa al-Amin corrected the record, ensuring that the date of your MS diagnosis was 2017, honoring the truth of your struggle and pain, a fact misstated in an obituary written by your comrades at al-Jamhuriya.
It would have brought you joy—the loyalty to the manuscript you once outlined, “Sitat al-Aragi, Outcast Not Citizens”[16]. The piece has now come to light on Khat 30, published on June 7, 2023. I tell you this because you always knew you would remain alive in people, through your vision. It is the joy of “To Begin is to Complete,” Roya: pure feminist joy. The joy of seeing a manuscript fight its way into the world. The joy of knowing that every restless thought we etch onto paper is a field of sparks that must never be extinguished, not by death, distraction, or the weight of systematic barriers. Isn’t this something to celebrate?
I tell you this because you once said you cared about what would happen after your passing. Though in that message, with your usual sharp humor, you pointed out that “care” is the one word we should always associate with you. And you were right, because you did care, truly. And caring needs no further explanation.
You would have been deeply unsettled, Roya, by how state defenders insist on normalizing violence, by how they align themselves with the familiar beast, justifying it as the violence they have known.
More unsettling news, Roya: Communication with El Geneina has been cut off, and there is growing fear about what is happening there. A comrade wrote on Facebook that they have lost contact with feminist activist Ablaa Saleh Bush. On April 29, Ablaa wrote that, after what people have endured in this war, we need to redefine what safety is, launching the hashtag #AgainstWar, #AgainstMilitarization.
Yet, despite the waves of rage, grief, and despair, there are eruptions of humanity and flashes of light here and there, just as you knew, dear Roya.
We say: This war is not in our name. It is waged at the heaviest cost, in a history already fractured by civil wars and political divisions. War has never borne fruit. Weapons have never delivered justice—not in any of its forms.
Building Feminist Movements: Feminism Builds, Patriarchy Tears Down
I loved Roya’s faith in emerging feminist movements and a different feminist world, redefined by knowledge and awareness. In an interview after winning the Duriyya Feminist Organization Award, she described the feminist movement as a vanguard, noting that women had begun to claim their voices by occupying public spaces. When asked about the possibility of a feminist revolution in Sudan, she spoke of the brutality of the repressive state, the weight of its oppression of the movement, and how the movement, in turn, shapes women’s experiences in distinct ways.
In the interview, she emphasized the importance of building knowledge and developing tools of resistance against a state that militarizes every aspect of our lives. Yet she remained hopeful and aware that the state seeks to control how we imagine the future, conscious of how it militarizes both bodies and public spaces. She ended with the response of a fighter who believes in change and works toward it with awareness and persistence: Resistance shall continue. She said that the Duriyya Award had inspired her to work with grassroots groups in Sudan, focusing on women’s oral histories, untold stories, and unheard voices that are denied their fair share in the public sphere. In her storytelling, she held tightly to a passion that fought against the erasure of distant and unfamiliar memories. She held onto the burden of refusing to yield to the violent power of exclusion.
Roya immersed herself in the feminist pursuit of building grassroots networks, both in theory and in practice. She engaged in this work with relentless dedication, a commitment reflected in the words of feminist writer Riry Salih, who credited Roya with helping to establish Miriam Feminist Studies Organization in Al Fasher, North Darfur. A writing that carries love before gratitude. Because love—tangible and felt—is the fruit of feminist labor, the seeds Roya planted. A labor witnessed by the Regional Coalition of Women Human Rights Defenders, which honored her in an obituary: “Roya always encouraged us to extend the coalition’s hand to those organizing outside Khartoum. She helped us build strong bridges with them.”
As we witnessed feminists working to build movements in the peripheries—in regions hampered by wars and conflicts—we also see calls for further militarization, for prolonging the war under the guise of self-defense.
It’s a call that speaks to the state’s catastrophic failure and the absurdity of the position held by Darfur Governor Minni Arko Minnawi, who posted on his official X account a public call urging citizens to take up arms and defend themselves. A call that recklessly extended to his own forces, ordering them to confront the violence erupting in the city without any ethical or legal grounds. A call that tells us once again that this man continues to wage war driven by a deeply entrenched militia mindset and discourse. Minnawi’s call comes at a time when reports of a collapsing healthcare system are widespread and kidney patients and those with chronic illnesses are dying in growing numbers. Yet we hear no calls from this warlord to protect these institutions or safeguard the lives of those who depend on them. But this is no surprise: Just months before the war erupted, Minnawi was busy inaugurating a mosque, while in El Fasher, advanced diagnostic labs were already scarce, forcing patients to travel all the way to Khartoum for treatment. And now even that has been reduced to rubble, destroyed by the very weapons this governor urges people to take up.
I hadn’t intended to dwell on this here, as I plan to write about it separately, but it must be said: the contrast between patriarchal politics, built on war, and feminist labor, driven by creation and knowledge, is undeniable. This is the lesson Roya and her comrade Riry leave us with.
A Final Note: May It Be So!
From Roya’s digital shrine, Roya, a martyr of war, who illuminated the peripheries and chose them as her final resting place, I believe a fierce power has been born, one of rage and grief, and not for Roya alone. Because here, Roya stands for hope in action. Let us take her name as a path forward, renewing our rejection of war, our rejection of the policies that fuel war, of militarization in Sudan and across the world. Let us move forward, starting from the bond forged by grief, rage, and pain. It is a bond of solidarity, rejection, and protest.
We reject and resist the European Union’s policies, their funding of Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, through the Khartoum process, all while fully aware of his crimes in Darfur.
We reject the policies of the United Kingdom, which has supported and continues to support the Sudanese army through training and beyond.
We reject Russia’s policies, its arms trade fueling war through Wagner’s mercenary companies.
We reject the war policies in Yemen, a war in which Sudanese forces took part, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
We reject the ongoing regional and international interventions. We reject all the policies driven by self-interest, indifferent to the fate of the Sudanese people.
I join the poet Mujahid El Douma, in his powerful vow to never stop writing about the erased: “The forgotten, the absented, the unthought of, the backyards of tyrants and their allies, those who justify violence, justify our killing in the name of our interest. But, despite it all, we exist, in one another, in each other’s eyes. We share everything, we share this hardship.”
Sharing our hardship is a conscious recognition and validation of the boundaries of pain and the human conditions essential for solidarity—not to fetishize suffering or grief—but because war has unleashed this eruption of raw, fierce emotions.
Hekma Yaqoub
15 June 2023
Glasgow, Scotland
[1] In her Facebook profile, the late Roya Hassan wrote her name followed by the phrase “Roya with an Alif”—a playful yet deliberate distinction between رؤيا (vision) and رؤية (dream), the latter ending with a Ta Marbuta. Her friends embraced her humor and began calling her “Roya with an Alif” as a mark of affection and respect. In a double entendre, Roya named her podcast Ta Marbuta—a letter that signifies the feminine form of nouns in Arabic, yet at the same time, it is the very Ta Marbuta she sought to correct with her signature phrase, “with an Alif.”
[2] Translator’s Note: The term “sorrow-lets” is a coined expression inspired by the imagery in the Hekma’s text, where she describes grief as something scattered across objects. The term attempts to capture this image of grief as a fragmented and lingering reality.
[3] Angaraib (عنقريب) is a traditional Sudanese bed made of a wooden frame with tightly woven strips of rope or palm fiber. It is commonly used for sleeping, resting, and, in funerary practices, for carrying the deceased before burial.
[4] Birish (برش) is a traditional Sudanese mat, typically woven from palm leaves or grass. It is often placed on top of the Angaraib (wooden rope bed) for added comfort and is also used in funerary rituals as a resting surface for the deceased before burial.
[5] Baroud water (ماء البرود) is a perfumed water used in Sudanese funerary rituals for washing the deceased before burial. It is often infused with fragrant substances, symbolizing purification and respect for the departed. The Baroud process is more than just washing the body—it is a deeply significant ritual that includes perfuming and other practices, carrying profound cultural meaning in Sudanese traditions.
[6] Alhoush (الحوش) is not just an open space within Sudanese homes; it is a realm of intimacy and familiarity, deeply tied to the human connection with the earth, the sky, and the stars. It is where people gather for storytelling, laughter, and long evening conversations, where social bonds are nurtured through moments of shared warmth and presence. In Hekma Yagoub’s text, Alhoush becomes a space of collective grieving, where ancient traditions shape the farewell to the dead—turning mourning into an act of communal belonging.
[7] For more on the topic, see the article (in Arabic) published in Madameek online newspaper on April 21, 2021: ‘Morgues or Theatres of State Violence?’ link to the article https://www.medameek.com/?p=46579
[8] For further information, the Protect the Right to Life Campaign has extensive documentation, which can be accessed here: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/TXNRrbx4dsChneK7/?mibextid=oFDknk
[9] Nihas drums (نحاس) are large ceremonial drums traditionally used in Sudanese communities to signal war, mark significant gatherings, and assert authority. They are also played in mourning rituals to grieve the death of community members, serving as a collective expression of loss and remembrance.
[10] While writing this article, I drew inspiration from the writings of Roya Hassan, bell hooks, and Sara Ahmed, particularly her work The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
[11] Al-Rahad is a city located in the state of North Kordofan, at an elevation of 490 meters (1,608 feet) above sea level. It is approximately 379 kilometres away from the capital, Khartoum.
[12] Surah Al-Balad, verse 14. Yusuf Ali translation
[13] See Gerard Prunier, Darfur: A 21st Century Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2008).
[14] According to UN reports, the number of refugees in Chad has now exceeded one million. As of April 4, 2023, the number of those fleeing the war had surpassed 604,000. See the link.
[15] A segment of the chant that was recited in the 1990s by cadres of the Islamist regime under the ousted government of President Omar Al Bashir.
[16] Aragi is the local Sudanese alcoholic beverage. Sitat-al Aragi refers to women who produce and sell the Aragi, often from their homes. This small-scale trade is largely undertaken by women form marginalized communities who face economic and racial suppression.