The last time the wedding group had been together was January. A group of us visited Tutti, an island in the middle of Sudan’s capital, at sunrise. We sat on the banks of the Nile, dipping our feet into the quiet water. We felt the sun gradually warm our skins and stared into the glittering horizon. A fisherman cast his net from the edge of his dinghy like a spider in its first weave. We had no idea that by April, we would lose Khartoum, and our access to it, entirely.
A year and a half later, we flew to Morocco for my cousin Atheel’s wedding. The taxi dropped me off at the entrance to the winding, car-unfriendly neighborhood that my friends were staying in. As I walked the narrow streets of Marrakech I remembered the impossible streets of Tutti, how they challenged even the most skillful drivers, how the inhabitants of the little island could tell who wasn’t local from the way we got our cars stuck in all the little twists and turns.
I passed teenage boys parking their motorcycles, cramped corner stores with limescale-green painted doors. I thought of home, of country. I remembered how in Tutti, the shop owner near a friend’s house would have to either swing his doors all the way open or all the way shut so cars could pass through. The streets were so narrow he used to hand us our bags of vegetable Indomie instant noodles through the car window.
In the riad, we settled around the kitchen table and spoke of this and that. I hadn’t seen my friends Bayan and Nada since that morning in Tutti. The riad’s acoustics echoed with the timbre of our voices. The conversation inevitably veered toward two topics: the wedding and the war. I found myself impassioned, ranting about how much I had given and wanted to give Sudan before it took itself away from me. I was resentful about the years I spent conducting research that now felt obsolete and irrelevant.
We discussed what Bayan should wear to the first wedding event the next day: her high Jimmy Choos, which she had packed in her backpack as she was escaping the war the year before, or a shorter, more comfortable option?
“You packed that in the middle of the war?” I asked her incredulously.
“Of course, girl! That shit was expensive,” Bayan replied.
I tried to think about something surprising that I took with me when I left Khartoum after the war started, but nothing came up. In fact, the dresses and shoes I bought for the wedding almost doubled the size of my closet.
It seemed as though I had failed on two counts: packing a sufficient amount of my life when I left, and building a sufficient amount of life afterward.
I knew by now what I would have taken—my dad’s watch, my completed journals—but from the items I actually packed as I left my house for the last time? Nothing of note.
That bothered me.
There was so much more of me left behind: inconspicuous vitamin bottles filled with infused gummy candy, my tattered Afro-Grad 2018: “The Renaissance Year” college T-shirt that my family begged me to stop wearing around the house, the last bottle of perfume my father ever bought me before he passed away, a pair of gray Nike Cortez that pinched badly at the toes, and a framed photo I took of a violinist in Ad-Damazin, Sudan, serenading me.
I spent hours in bed every day, riddled with anxiety. The first day—opening day—I put on my stockings, bra, and pantyhose and shuffled back into bed. I arrived at the party three hours late, with chipped nails and a wrinkled dress.
What did it mean that I needed hours to get out of bed? I was postponing moments that were happening now, too tired to pick them up in the present, just to let them go later. But I couldn’t get out of bed, the world was too big. It sent out ripples upon ripples, huge and small.
For a long time, life had taken on a tinge of absurdity. A few months after escaping the war, I was in California watching Taylor Swift and Beyoncé perform during their tours. The fireworks that followed Taylor Swift’s concert gave me a panic attack. I sat on the concrete in Santa Clara until the stored cool from the night seeped through my jeans, sticking my thighs to the ground. The city had been legally renamed to Swiftie Clara for the duration of her tour’s run in the city. The fireworks were paid for by the city. Later, I told my therapist, I don’t think the panic attack was because of the fireworks.
It’s definitely because of the fireworks, he said.
The next day, I missed the bride’s entrance, the sunset ceremony, the parents’ speeches. I arrived at the venue, my black dress blending into the night, and immediately got lost, walking along a long, gravelly path in the completely wrong direction until I found myself in the dinner area. Employees were still balancing on chairs to string up the chandeliers and were setting the half-empty table with plates and cutlery. I was so far from where I was supposed to be that they sent me off with one of the staff to take me back to the reception area.
“I am allergic to walnuts,” one of the guests said to the waiter at the beginning of dinner. The long table was set, the chandeliers were lit, and the employees were beyond the eye-line. Every single time he set a plate in front of her, she would ask again if it followed her dietary requirements—not with the air of double-checking that her safety was ensured, but with the air of making sure he remembered to care.
By the third course, the waiter hovered the plate in front of her and received her habitual inquiry. “Are you sure it doesn’t have walnuts?” she asked indignantly.
“Oh, it is full of walnuts,” he said. “Just kidding!” He winked, setting down the plate and leaving her fuming. I almost burst out laughing. She turned to her friends and angrily said something about the waiter taking this too lightly, how it was disrespectful, how this was life or death.
“Yeah, that’s really not funny,” my sister, sitting next to me at the table, commiserated somberly.
I leaned into my sister. “It’s fucking hilarious,” I whispered into her ear.
The minute my family and I packed our small belongings into our car and drove out of Khartoum, I could no longer eat or drink. Even after we sought shelter in Medani, the safest city near Khartoum, I was still riddled with anxiety. In the room we rented, my mother gave me some bread and water to force down, but my throat couldn’t remember the mechanism that allowed me to swallow.
We were far away from a familiar home that we left behind in what was now an unfamiliar city; Khartoum had looked like fire and brimstone as we drove away from it.
I was haunted by one image in particular: an abandoned bus on the side of the road, parked at a tilt, with its windows shattered and the driver’s door flung open. But it terrified me that there was nobody, and no bodies. I could see the scene: the bus driver stopped on the street by militia, the driver’s door flung open, the man pulled out and shot while soldiers swarmed the back of the bus, shattered the windows, feeding off the trouble.
In Medani, we developed a daily ritual. Every night, we took everything we had packed in our car up five steep flights of stifling hot stairs, then brought it back down with us each morning as we headed out. We left every day with the same mission: get seats on a bus out of Medani. We were trying to head east, toward Port Sudan, so we could negotiate, beg, bribe, or plead our way onto a ship out of the country. A few days later, we would score tickets on a bus driving twenty hours straight to Port Sudan. The tickets were as follows: three real ones, one seat on a step inside the bus, and one person—my brother—rode shama’aa: the slang word for people who stood the entire drive with their arm hanging on the rail above them like a coat hanger. But on that particular day, no luck.
Reaching the fourth floor with a faint buzz in my head, I suddenly felt lightheaded and on the edge of consciousness. “I’m so hot. I can’t breathe,” I gasped, sitting on the stairs, dark spots spilling into my peripheral vision. My family fanned me, concern etched into their faces. In those days, we were all constantly braced to encounter fits of violence, weakness, illness, tears, worry, anger.
Bayan had texted me every morning inviting me to the souq with them, but I declined. The last time I had been to a souq it was Souq Omdurman in Khartoum, now burnt to the ground. But here I was anyway, here we all were, among mixed family and friends, celebrating and witnessing a love my cousin grew. Here I was one year later, softly glittering in my black dress at the edge of everyone’s vision.
By the third day I finally looked put together, but by then everyone else had muted their efforts, relaxing into their personal senses of style.
After the guests eventually petered out of the final celebration, Bayan, Nada, and I headed to one of the pools in the venue. I took my stockings off from underneath my knitted skirt and dipped my legs into the water, pouring some on my bare arms to cool my skin against the Moroccan sun. I looked up at the palm trees around me and reflected that it was the first time in my life I lived somewhere that didn’t have any.
I turned back into our conversation; Bayan was trying to convince me to go out that night even though my flight was the next morning. Should she come home with me while I changed? Should we go straight to dinner?
In the end I went home alone, packed my flung-about dresses, my rolled-up hosiery on the floor, and my makeup bag on the bathroom counter. I took all the Sudanese cash out of my wallet to make room for my taxi fare. I texted Bayan an apology and a half-excuse about not having enough cash to both go out and head to the airport the next morning, and fell asleep.
My lateness to each wedding event meant I was not in any of the photos. The photos I was in looked strange, like I was confused and slightly perturbed about how I got there. Why do I accept knowing so little? Why do I accept not being in the photo? Why do I enjoy not having a trace?
My body’s language—don’t point out I’m here, lemme haunt—
If we still have some of our old things, then not everything is different. You pack Jimmy Choos in hopes to wear them again, to walk in them toward the same people again. In my case, I forgot all my belongings—or did I leave them behind?—in the hope to rise again from their ashes, born anew. In these split seconds, those short hours and long minutes in which we face danger and make impossible choices, what tethers us to the world? How do we find ourselves within context after context is destroyed—where do we look for those connections? During times of war, soldiers put their addresses and names in their pockets in case they are killed. Return body to sender.
I didn’t realize that when I escaped the war, I escaped with my family. If we had died we would have died together. I didn’t need to carry a material history of myself in my backpack. I was lucky that I left, without sneakers or journals. My family, in the car. Each of us, with nothing more than our house keys jingling in our pockets.
Ruba El Melik is an anthropologist. She is the co-author of (Un)doing Resistance: Authoritarianism and Attacks on the Arts in Sudan’s 30 Years of Islamist Rule
