The Unseen Scars Navigating the Psychological Landscape of Sudan’s War in New York

Thursday, 26 September, 2024, began as a normal and ordinary day. A day of “carrying on,” getting on with life. Yet in times like these, in the midst of genocide(s), it is hard to comprehend what “normal” or “ordinary” even mean. 

But the day was not ordinary. 

I remember my husband breaking the news while I was clearing up in the kitchen, the clatter of dishes loud in the background. He spoke slowly: “The neighbours in Sudan haven’t seen Mamoun for a few days … They broke the door to get in …” 

The words did not register. It was a narrative I never imagined or wished to hear.  The words scrambled my heart.

Mamoun.

Mamoun, my brother, was found dead in our family home in Khartoum, the Sudan. 

Mamoun was murdered. 

My beautiful, peace-loving, kindred soul. Mamoun who would not hurt anyone.

My body shakes as I write. An after-tremoring.

Our neighbours found his lifeless body on the ground. They gathered that he had been stabbed—twice. They reckoned he tried to fight back. With no direct way to reach us, they began a chain of calls and telecommunications that travelled worldwide.

Mamoun شهيد, Shaheed, which in Islam refers to those who die in God’s cause, and for an honorable cause. Mamoun defended his home, joining the many who have died because of this genocide. 

Tragically, this is where we are now. Human life rendered expendable, innocent lives taken. Even the simplest act, informing relatives of a death, becomes an ordeal. We are two years and five months into a war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). It is nearing a year since Mamoun’s murder. The violence continues, as does everything else.

I struggled to write this essay. I am tired and exhausted of the genocide(s). I anchor my work in Black feminist praxis, in refusal, wake work and care, centring the everyday labour of Black life and living, amid death and loss. A call to return to the archival memories of our bodies.

 

Death, Displacement, and Famine

All these wars,

Make the world unhomely

Make homes rust apart

Make you fall asleep, riddled with calamities

—Al-Saddig Al-Raddi (2008)

The scale and cost of this war are insurmountable and devastating. A systematic dismantling of the foundations of daily life, making basic survival a relentless struggle. As Martin Luther King (1967) stated: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

The basic right to life with dignity is being denied. 

The toll on civilians is catastrophic. Fourteen months into the war, a study estimated 61,202 deaths in Khartoum state alone (Dahab et al, 2024). That was then. The estimate excludes deaths in Darfur and Kordofan, where the killings have been mortifyingly intense—along with those who died en route to borders, in displacement camps, or as refugees.  

Sudan is now the “largest and fastest displacement crisis on record.” A displacement that has dislodged/dislocated and shaken the very ground on which we stand. Over 12 million people have been forced away from their homes, approximately 8.8 million who were internally displaced and more than 3.5 million who had fled as refugees (over half being children). This staggering forced migration has led to an “exhaustion of people” observed in refugee camps in Chad, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia.  Many have been displaced multiple times, a cycle of uprooting and uprootedness that deepens the chronic trauma gripping our population.

Famine is rapidly spreading. The WHO calls Sudan the “largest humanitarian crisis in the world.” Warnings say over 2.5 million people could die from starvation, with 25.6 million facing acute hunger. Food aid is weaponised to punish civilians, finance war, and coerce recruitment. 

Let this sit with you.

The numbers are staggering/shuddering. Yet there is a danger that they become “just numbers,” stripping away the humanness of lives cut short, bodies starved, alienation and devastation of communities. 

What good is the noise of numerals, the horrific stories told and retold, when they meet the stone silence of a watching world as spectator. 

The numerical and time feel meaningless. 

Time like water washing over, tepid, tumultuous –

passing      through the hollows and ridges

the curvatures and irregularities within,

The day nearing 3 years

With the markings of April 15   sKetChed in

permanent maroon ink

My  |      body a map|             A metaphor

Mirroring All the         Re    membering / dis    membering

As    sociating / dis          associating for you Sudani

An architectural landscape, of corpses scattered, wombs forsaken, 

Children begotten / forgotten, Etchings of bloodied anniversaries

A wretchedness | A violence

—personal poem

As time passes, I am pulled to the poetics of words and the necessity to write, to witness, amid active indifference and adversarial global silence. An anti-Blackness that chooses inaction and indifference, for Sudan, Palestine and Congo. Sudan is not a “forgotten war.” The world has chosen to ignore it. For those impacted, the label of “forgotten” in the face of unimaginable atrocities translates into “invisibility.”

I write as a Sudanese psychotherapist living in the UK, a sister, wife, mother, daughter, and witness, heartbroken, heart shattered, carrying a grief that lives and breathes in my bones. A loss that Foluke Taylor poignantly names as “the bone and marrow of us” (Taylor, 2023). My heart weeps in silence. 

I am part of the DNA fabric woven into this text, carrying multiple losses, including those within my beloved family. The stakes are huge. It is personal, as well as political, as always with bodies marked as Black.

This war is not new in spirit. 

Sudan has long endured the weight and thunderings of militarised power and authoritarian rule. What is terrifying now is how heavily armed both forces are, and how the war engulfed the capital. The presence and interventions of external actors is haunting. Laying bare what Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman describe as the “afterlife of colonialism”—structures sustained by dispossession, hierarchies of power, and the extraction and exploitation of Black life. The aftereffects of colonialism, modernity, power, and greed converging into uncontrollable, violent bloodshed. 

A time may come to interrogate the reasons for this war, and to face where we, too, are implicated. 

 

The Psychological Tearing of the War

It feels important to dwell on the effect of this war on our psyche. 

The war’s sudden invasion into everyday life and existence in Sudan is a profound psychological assault, generating pervasive fear, danger, and havoc. For those still inside the battlefield, survival surpasses everything else. For those who fled, there is a flood of emotions: existential threat, displacement and alienation, and survivor’s guilt. This emotional scarring is the unseen burden carried by millions caught in the grip of the war. It has decimated the infrastructure of the country, leaving an indelible mark on the psyche of the Sudanese citizen.

People had no warning and no time to mentally, emotionally, or practically brace themselves. The shock, the intrusions into homes and streets, the physical violations endured have been triggering and tremoring. The collapse of perceived safety and the inherent unpredictability of life mark a deeper layer of trauma that extends far beyond physical danger. 

Normalcy and identity have been eroded. A loss not only of home and belongings but of dignity. A fear of the future, uncertainty and dread of the present. An entire way of living destroyed, aspirations obliterated, and a future once envisioned, shattered. A public erasure of memory, culture and heritage. A “psychic devastation” (Gerhardt, 2020): a suffering of loss and grief that lies beyond mourning and melancholia. This is not only about being forced to leave; it is the rupture of who one was—a fundamental tear in personal and collective identity.

 

Home and Un-homing

I am nostalgic for home but uncertain where home is or what it means, especially when I yearn for what was and cannot return to. I wrote this in 2022:

I’ve searched for home, yearning to be cradled, by its soft and succulent earth;
Honeysuckle nursing my wounded bosom. I long to return to home, enthralled in its embrace; home with the smell of jasmine and lavender, and a hint of my mother’s bakhoor.

Now that yearning feels even more urgent.

Mahmoud Darwish, in his poetics, writes of exile as the unfinished and incomplete, an ache that longs to be restored: 

The taste of earth … the Motherland.

Shield me with your eyes,

Take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrow.

Take me as a verse from my tragedy;

Take me as a toy, a brick from the house

So that our children will remember to return.

—Mahmoud Darwish (1974)

How, and to what, are we to return? 

We are living in a state of homelessness, a site of ripping/tearing away from the motherland. We live with an un-homing that Elliott-Cooper et al (2020) describe as “a violence that removes belonging to a particular community or home-space.” 

Under the conditions of war, home and un-homing take on new depths. There is violence in having to flee to survive and in leaving behind all that you have built. Our elders, who have witnessed turmoil for decades, now suffer silently in disbelief and depression. There is humiliation in having to leave. Borders have refused us, entry was barred, a hostile unwelcoming. 

To live now is to begin again, with memory and possessions erased. 

Even with this grim picture, there are glimmers of hope and hopefulness in how people make life in these times. Safia Elhillo tenderly invokes home as what we bring with us, what we plant and nurture into being. A journey that is long and gruelling, of making home whilst un-homed. 

Still, we survive. 

A meditation and refusal to forget

To write is a Black feminist practice of refusal and repair: a witnessing that requires tending and insisting on a “carrying on” with life. The war has taken bodies, has made us cross borders. Yet we live, survive, cook, mother, grieve, celebrate, dance, share, and we learn to hold the stories when others cannot. A centring of life and the living, whilst surrounded by death and dying. 

May we always remember our mothers, grandmothers, and ancestors, in how they survived graciously. Their labour and care an often-invisible breath we learn to breathe with. Christina Sharpe (2016) invites us to do wake work, a naming, a remembering and a refusal of letting the dead be abandoned or forgotten. Perhaps our calling is to find ways to mourn, grieve, and live. 

Until there is a return to Sudan, home is in our hearts and bodies. We as archival sites. We imagine and re-imagine. Our language warmed with our tongues; our rituals and heritage protected through storytelling. Our dead sculpted in our memories. 

Home is us. 

For you, Mamoun. ليك‭ ‬انت‭ ‬يا‭ ‬مأمون. For you, Sudani.ليك‭ ‬انت‭ ‬يا‭ ‬سوداني.   

… For the living who must live.

We are still here.