When You Build Nations on Someone’s Bones
From “People Like Us” by Award-winning Darfuri Poet Emi Mahmoud
Mourning for Darfur
“Half the sand in the Sahara / tastes a lot like powdered bone.”
For decades the peoples of Darfur have suffered state-sponsored aggression, displacement and mass killings. A few days ago, the city of Al-Fasher fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF) and testimonies of unspeakable atrocities are pouring into the world’s media. The paramilitaries now at war with Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), grew out of armed militia movements actively funded and employed by former regimes. For over twenty years they were used to quell dissent in Sudan’s peripheries in the most brutal ways possible. They have been implicated in mass killings and attempted genocide. Shortly before the outbreak of the current conflict, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander-in-chief of Sudan’s Armed Forces pledged unwavering loyalty to his brothers in arms, the RSF. In early 2019, the Sudanese Security Forces and the Rapid Support Force acted in unison to crush peaceful pro-democracy protests, resulting in the killing, torture and rape of hundreds of civilians on the streets of Khartoum. At least forty bodies were thrown into the Nile.
Award-winning poet and activist Emi Mahmoud (Emtithal Mahmoud) wrote of the defiance of her people in the teeth of war long before this latest conflict. In her haunting poem People Like Us, Emi Mahmoud rages against the cruelty of war. Her words distill with searing pain the tragedy that is unfolding today.
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Watch her recital of People Like Us here:
You can read the poem in full in Sisters’ Entrance, Emtithal Mahmoud, Andrews McMeel Publishing.
If you would like to read more by Emi Mahmoud, see Emi Mahmoud Facebook
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