A Sudanese writer at the gates of Egypt

The wind trails its skirts and unfurls them as it pleases / Would that I were counted among those claimed by the wind. — Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘ah (d. 712 CE)

I am sick to death of buying tickets / Lord, I’ve had my fill of exile. — Bayram Al-Tunisi (d. 1961)

The distance between the first verse and the second is not merely a matter of time. Both poets grapple with themes of travel and exile, yet approaching these from entirely different moods. Umar ibn Abi Rabi‘ah lived the experience within the confines of his own era. Borders had yet to be drawn, and people had no notion of the nation-state, its institutions, its bureaucracy, its laws. Borders were not yet closed, nor were citizens of one country barred from entering another. Asylum, whether political or humanitarian, did not exist as a concept. Rabi‘ah mounted his steed and set off to wherever the geography in front of him, however limited its choices, allowed.

Bayram, by contrast, lived in a different age—one where geography had grown wider even as feet became shackled. No clocks marked the hour of departure, only the hands of the unknown. No luggage except that which memory hoarded, feelings lived to excess, and countless postponed experiences. For Bayram, there were only walls, barbed wire, and suspicious glances.

The reasons for travel have splintered, multiplied, diverged. What compels a Palestinian, an Iraqi, a Syrian, or a Sudanese to leave their place of birth is not what might prompt a Swede to do the same. War, hunger, and repression live on only in the imagination of the Third World, forcing people to abandon the playgrounds of their childhood, the alleys of their youth.

Political reality determines the identity of a journey. The Africans packed into slave traders’ ships to build Western civilization were, in a sense, travelers too. The migrants fleeing the infernos of their homelands, those swallowed by the Mediterranean, are also travelers. Those who survive the drowning are not greeted with flowers or warm embraces, but with camps ready to expose them to every kind of humiliation and exploitation, not to mention the laws waiting to convict them of crimes they never committed.

Seasons of migration to the north

Ten days after war erupted in Sudan between the national army and the Rapid Support Forces militia, I found myself standing in what is known as “Al-Muhayid”(the Neutral Zone)—the name given to the strip separating the Sudanese crossing of Ashkeit and the Egyptian crossing of Qustul, on the border between the two countries. A stretch of no more than 100 meters, where travelers wait for permission to enter before visa procedures can even begin.

Those with prior experience warned us to watch out for the scorpions that thrive in the desert, especially in summer. I turned that warning over in my mind as I watched, with my own eyes, scorpions moving freely between the two crossings, needing neither passport nor visa! The irony brought back the final moments of the characters in Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun,” and the fate they met inside a sealed iron tank, under heat that would melt stone before it melted flesh. They died because borders between nations are staffed by officials whose job is to sort those deemed fit to enter from those who are not.

The young Egyptian border guard, who looked to be in the middle of his military service, had no interest in the questions racing through my mind. Did he know my father was buried in a cemetery in Suez? Did he know my sister’s children are Egyptian through their father? Did he know my first published poem appeared in Sabah Al-Kheir magazine? Did he know Naguib Mahfouz has always been my favorite writer?

The driver who took us from Abu Simbel to Aswan wore the same galabiya as people in northern Sudan

Did the border guard know that I developed anemia from staying awake through all 18 days of Egypt’s January 2011 revolution? These questions recognize no borders, no barbed wire, no watchtowers—but they mean nothing to the passport officer, whose duty serves national security, and for whom any lapse would be treated as high treason.

Imagined borders, colonial dividing lines

In “Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan,” Joseph Massad analyzes nationalist and patriotic discourse, critiquing its frequent complicity with colonial thought and institutions. He also traces the production of national identity and culture: the nation-state is the postcolonial heir, with its geographic borders, its army, its national anthem, its historical narrative, its cuisine, its dress, its songs—all of them sacred assets that passport officers are duty-bound to guard and defend.

All of this is well and good. But these borders were drawn far from us, no one asked for our opinion. And beyond that: do they really represent the true divisions between the social and ethnic groups that colonialism scattered and fractured, deepening the sense of difference among them? From the Sudanese city of Dongola (capital of the Northern State, bordering Egypt’s southern frontier) all the way to Aswan (Egypt’s southern gateway), you feel no essential difference between the people—not in appearance, dress, customs, or tradition.

The minibus driver who took us from Abu Simbel to Aswan wore the very same jalabiya that is customary in northern Sudan. When I asked why he was playing Sudanese songs—assuming it was out of courtesy toward us—he replied that Aswanis regularly listen to Mohamed Al-Amin, Mohamed Wardi, Abdel Karim Al-Kabli, and Eman El-Shareef, all Sudanese artists.

The nation-state is a European invention that began with ethnic cleansing in lands occupied by the white man’s armies

I don’t mean here to erase the backgrounds and contexts that gave each people their particularity. My point is that the bonds connecting people across borders are stronger and deeper than those who drew and guard those borders ever imagined. Defining ourselves as citizens of a particular state does not necessarily mean that we had any real hand in shaping our present reality.

The relentless campaigns targeting refugees and those fleeing harsh realities in the very countries where they’ve sought refuge are the product of a populist discourse that draws its legitimacy from the ideas of modern nation-state theorists. Built around concepts such as “the nation,” this discourse claims for itself everything noble and beautiful, while heaping upon “the Other” everything ugly and reprehensible.

In “Europe’s Culture and Barbarism,” French thinker Edgar Morin traces the emergence of the concept of “the nation” within the European context, before seeping out into the rest of the world to become a pillar of what came to be known as the nation-state. Morin writes: “What happened in that strange year, 1492? It was not only the discovery of America and the beginning of the conquest of the New World. It was also the year Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, fell. Immediately afterward came the decree targeting Jews and Muslims with an ultimatum, forcing them to choose between conversion to Christianity or expulsion. This European invention—the nation—was founded first upon religious cleansing.”

Here lies the crux of the matter. That cleansing gradually took on an ethnic character, one the nation-state later exploited to consolidate its own narrative. Borders then become psychological and emotional barriers for societies to summon in moments of crisis and failure.

Do I sound embittered in these lines? So be it. A measure of bitterness does no harm if it helps pass the time of a refugee—not in the legal sense, but in the literal one—waiting with passport in hand in the visa queue, hoping to enter land that, little more than a century ago, was one country under one authority.