The world is my home, but there is no doubt that Sudan resides deep in my heart and my mind.
I suppose this can often be overshadowed by my arrogant western influenced refusal to engage with its pungent culture. It is often the countless faults it has that I find myself placing at the forefront of the opinions I voice. With its power cuts, lack of water sanitation, low infant mortality, a history of war and repeated immutable violations of human rights. Shamefully, I’ve chosen over the years to blind myself to the happenings within my country; living thousands of miles away in England this has been more than an easy task. I’ve chosen to detach myself by snubbing off pride and nationalistic attitudes. But this wasn’t always the case.
My oldest memories date back to my childhood, being of the age four. Memories littered with sand, carting around tires, climbing half torn trees and building small sculptures out of bricks left from the house that was never completed. As a child, Sudan represented freedom. Coming from a two by three metre sand pit in my Scottish nursery, I was faced by sand pits that stretched far across acres of land, desert heat and the silence of parents too engaged in their own happenings to worry about how far I’d strayed away. What could be more refreshing? And so year after year I anxiously awaited my return to Sudan, my favourite place in the world.
Certainly being around my large family is what made my visits all the more exciting. You see Sudanese people tend to be extremely warmed hearted, with an unexplainably beautiful gift of hospitality towards any stranger, let alone family member. And so each time I went I felt I could fall comfortably into the arms of their gentle souls, with full trust and a feeling of limitless love. Being young it is custom to address your elders (i.e. aunties, grandparents) with the prefix ‘mama’ or ‘baba’. My relationships with my elders did indeed embody the prefix; I was surrounded by mothers and fathers from every angle. What a rarity that is to come by for a child in the West.
Growing up in England, I very soon became perfectly moulded into what a Sudanese person would call a ‘khawajeeya’ (foreigner). My identity was very much British, and there was little to set me apart from the average English twelve year old. By this point visits to Sudan were becoming less frequent due to my parents occupations. Along with this came my lack of tolerance towards anything remotely different from the life I was living in England. Returning to Sudan at the age of thirteen I felt a sudden isolation in the place that was once so dear to me, I felt like a stranger. Freedom had turned to prison. The desert heat now choked me. I couldn’t relate to anything, or anyone.
(to be continued)
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