Elegy for Sudan’s Martyrs: Toward a Poetic Discourse of the Nile as a Site of Resistance and Repression

• In Event: The Afterlives of Waterways: Changing Sites of Violence, Resistance, and Histories across the African Diaspora

Description for Program

Utilizing documentary poetics and counter-archival methods this paper/presentation offers a poetic discourse on the Nile as a significant ecological site in the Sudanese people’s recent struggle for democracy and civilian rule. The focus will be on the following instances:
August 16, 2018 - ‘School Boat Tragedy’: A boat carrying school children capsizes in the Nile. At least 22 children and their school teacher drown. Nine boys survive. The fact that not a single Sudanese girl is among the survivors exemplifies how anthropocentric violence converges with gendered violence. Not incidentally, this tragic loss of young life occurred a mere three months before the popular movement that ended Omar al-Bashir’s thirty year dictatorship.
June 3, 2023 - ‘June 3rd Massacres’: Soon after pro-democracy activists oust Sudanese dictator and war criminal Omar al-Bashir, the military murders and drowns at least 120 pro-democracy activists in the Nile. These killings coincide with forced disappearances, detention, torture and organized rape of several hundred activists.
2024 - Suicides in the Nile: Reports indicate a growing trend of women and girls drowning themselves in the Nile. Suicide becomes a last resort to evade the RSF militia’s notorious use of organized rape and gang rape as a method of war. Amidst the collapse of the state, intensification of violence, staggering humanitarian crisis, engineered famine, and widespread displacement, the Nile doubles as a site of resistance and method of autonomous death.

In each instance, the Nile is the final resting place of children in school uniforms, pro-democracy activists murdered to quell the pursuit of democratic civilian rule, and women and girls faced with the impossible calculus of rape and war. This paper/presentation performs poetic theorization about the convergence of life, death, ecology, resistance, freedom dreams, and autonomy.

Author

• Umniya Najaer, University of Colorado Boulder