Afro Women Poetry- SUDAN: Reem Yasir, Rajaa Bushara, Fatma Latif

REEM YASIR

Posted by AWP on 10 AUGUST 2022

River Styx

The Nile is a moving graveyard

The ground is soaked up with blood

The Nile has more skin than most

The Nile? You mean river Styx, and what a price you have paid to cross it.

The ground is shaking with grieve,

The city is crying tears of blood,

The streets are loud but quiet,

Filled with more silhouettes than people,

The wailing of the streets is unbearable,

The ground is in pain with all of the death

Saying that the bodies are too heavy with freedom to be caged inside of it

But can you hear it? Chains bending, cracking, can you hear it?

Chains sobbing they don’t want to let go, for they had been wrapped around,

closed together on our souls, making our happiness their own.

Quenching their thirst from our tears.

It’s a different type of lynching, where people die of suffocating from the

chains on the ground for they are not worthy of dying anywhere near the sky.

*****

Link to the Italian translation

Link to Afro Women Poetry website page https://afrowomenpoetry.net/en/reem-yasir/

Reem Yasir was born and raised in Sudan, and she is currently working as an assistant business analyst.

Being a Sudanese woman means to her a lot of things. It means loving her culture and hating it at the same time, to compromise between who you actually are and who you have to be, it’s being scared of walking the street, it’s being scared that one of your loved ones dying because of this current political situation. It’s knowing when to push and when to pull back without letting yourself be walked over by the conditioned sexism. It’s really hard to love this country but we are trying.

Her poetry and writing has always been a way to put her feelings and thoughts in one place, to freely express oneself without the fear of speaking to someone about them. She writes for herself and if during that process it somehow manages to reach someone out there and makes them feel something not matter how small, then it’s the cherry on top.

RAJAA BUSHARA

The 3rd

Posted by AWP on 19 JULY 2022

1- My rebelliousness cowered at the sound of bullets and teargas.
2- I stood behind my parents words and their fear of losing me in the mess.
3- Collapsing needs one to be standing.. but I was already lying down
when my mother called to tell me about the news she was watching on TV.
4- I used the dirty matress in the hospital where I work as shelter… it didn’t shelter anything.
5- Detachment… was what I thought I’d be doing while clinching my phone
so hard reading about who’s missing and who’s murdered.
6- I called Gaki’s phone so many times hoping he’d answer.
7- I called Mageed’s phone so many times and everytime it was off.
8- If transforming into a martyr… was what’s needed for this fucking revolution
to win then take me instead. Bring back everyone who was there and take me…
I can’t bear this burdening existence with its air clogged at the throat with
so many souls ascending-.. no wonder suffocation was the only thing
I managed to do with my lungs that day.
9- What’s good of chanting when everyone who’d chant with
you is dead? What’s good of chanting if the ones listening are still deaf,
still delaying their empathy or sympathy to people lost. To people not breathing
anymore To people… drenched in mud and blood and courage,
courage I could never carry in my heart.
10- When emotional pain starts numbing, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt a
nymore. It means I’m used to keep scratching where it hurts till it bleeds again
then maybe… I’ll get a glimpse of the pain my friends felt when they were there.
Where I wasn’t, While lying down in the comfort of my bed cursing this
survival I didn’t ask for.
11- The purpose of all this was to live. Not to end up dead. Not to end up jaree7.
Not to end up missing or losing what’s left of your sanity or hope or soul or will to live.
12- Invulnerability is a fucking privilege.
13- Existing… at this very moment is so severe Knowing… that last night… Just last night…
I was there… belonging… and it rained and we laughed and sang and held hands and
chanted against the fucking authority that was busy planing our death.
14- There… it is still burning.
“Dear god, how broke
do you have to be
to not buy people time?”*
15- I stopped praying.

*Andrea Gibson – Orlando

******

Link to the Italian translation

[The title refers to the Khartoum massacre that occurred on 3 June 2019, when armed forces suppressed a peaceful sit-in against the Transitional Military Council that had replaced dictator Omar al-Bashir. Over 100 protesters were killed, with the actual number of victims being very difficult to estimate as several bodies were reportedly thrown in the river Nile.]

Rajaa Bushara, Raj for her friends, @r_rebel on Instagram, works as a medical officer. She started writing at the age of 12 and ever since then spoken word poetry has been her passion. It has been the way she can express herself and speak about the struggles someone like her would go through. She participated in spoken word poetry events in Khartoum, Sudan. It has helped in improving her writing and her performing skills and also allowed her to see how words can affect people who listen to them.

Words are strong weapons and she dreams of using that weapon the right way not only to express those struggles, but in hopes to end them.

“The Sudan revolution was and still is the most vibrant and real event for many men and women of my generation. From struggling to live in a place where your voice isn’t well heard, and when it’s heard, it’s hardly taken seriously. The struggles of even getting the freedom of speech, of expressing one’s self felt like they will never pay. That is until the revolution began. And we do still struggle but now I have faith that we can actually succeed and make it better for us and the coming generations”.

“Writing and documenting all these events of the revolution will be my most important task, for they must be a part of my history. My dream is to be a performing spoken word artist for a living. I believe that would give me the ability to make the change I imagine and dream of achieving in the world, or at least inspire someone to do so.“

Rajaa Bushara’s page in Afro Women website https://afrowomenpoetry.net/en/rajaa-bushara/https://afrowomenpoetry.net/en/rajaa-bushara/

FATMA LATIF

(Blue) for Sudan

(1)

Clutched my heart a terrible invasive grief. One of my

father’s calling my skin its own, as it shed cries of
mercy. Of a divine pardon. Of an outpouring rahma* to
reach the lives lost to the march. Mourning settled in
the veins. Of a country that bled in each corner,
wounded dreams of the young.

Oh my light.

Cover them. In forgiveness. In acceptance. In a gentle
stream of your favor. For every sobbing, motionless
farewell. For every crushed, unfinished laughter. For
every bullet robbing a mother of her heart, a
home of its joys. Accept the souls.

My light.

These are the violent seasons. The hideous toiling. Offury. Of anger. Of
rage embedded with despair. No rest has touched the heart, as it bends,
imprisoned at the edge of a weeping pain, aching at the sight of blood-
stains in every burial ground. I carry nothing but prayers this nightfall.
Urging only for the souls welcome in-return.

God have mercy on them.

(2)

An unjustly speechlessness tortures a deeply wounded hour, circulating
images of a mother holding her son in farewell, falling to her knees,
gasping, wailing, frightened, fighting in unmovable disbelief, sobbing with
fists in lock to her chest, as she cries out for time to descend in final
standstill.

What is there to say?

To a heart shattered in pieces, abandoned painfully to a violent flood of
tears. My mother wraps me into an embrace, instantly, utters prayers of
submergence, reawakening fate to envelope my life, closely in its
watchful care.

What more is there to say?

The graves are weary with bearing the expressions, the dreams, the
music, echoing loudly the brilliant bravery of the young. No bullet can
ever silence that mighty loss. No bullet will ever silence such mighty loss,
overthrowing the cruelly hungry shadows of a reality cut unfairly short,
confidently commanding a serving place in history, assertive with a
legacy; outlasting.

What more is there to say?

I wipe the nights’ fatigue off my eyelid, utter a single prayer of
thankfulness; for the open summers of happiness, the larger than life;
hearts and spirits beautifully united, working, dancing, chanting for that
promise, the softness of companionship found with the focused march
for that promise, the unwavering courageous commitment to tomorrow’s
promise and all that splendid glory of the forever young. The never
forgotten.

(3)

Sudan; a weeping, wounded, bleeding land, marching with unshakable
confidence to the loud drums of its revolution.

Every street carries a duty enraged in determination, resisting the
violence. The cruelty. The shove and force of killers’ rules, intimidation
turned pale in fear, opposite people sketching limitless possibilities.
Boldly. Across the pages of tomorrow.

One unified voice. An uproar of freedom. That lit the rallies with passion
and power guarding the collective dream of a community. Strong-
hearted. Hopeful. Fierce in front lines with an incredible resilience tucked
underneath takes of persistence that gave courage a whole new name.

Not a single thing is capable of shattering the spirit of the Sudanese
people, my people, whose pride alone, stands to consume the shameless
flesh of every dictator, laying greedy hands to silence a country,
mastering strength and peace in its new journey, committed to reach the
finish line.

I am so humbled, never handcuffed in despair, my heart is so, so full.

(4)

Years from now.

When I am asked about honor. About the true meaning of resilience, of
of resilience, of what it means to paint the whole picture of a freedom fighter.

Years from now, when home isn’t an impossible embrace; that of a
conversation, renounced, enslaved in drowning sighs.

Years from now, when home is a honeyed land, that shades the grounds in
warmth of blues.

Years from now, when the extraordinary strength of martyrs are taught
in history class, when the names and faces are celebrated with proud
bells of victory and freedom.

Years from now, when the beauty of Sudan is in the details of people who
stood together in defiance to cruelty and injustice, when that beauty is a
story narrated by our eyes, hope as a loud witness against every
misfortunate that failed to shape a final address.

Years from now, when I speak of my country, I will sing with a heart so
filled with pride in-acknowledgement of the long journey of growth and
sacrifice, humming tunes of sorrow, happiness and the selfless love that
liberated the home in Sudan.

The title of the poem refers to blue, the favourite colour of Mohammed Hashim Mattar, a young man shot dead in Khartoum on June 3 2019 by paramilitary forces during a peaceful sit-in against dictator Omar al-Bashir, and then became the colour of the protest movement. The term also refers to the blues, as musical genre expressing longing and melancholy.

*rahma: mercy

Link to the Italian translation