The light from the small lamps hanging above my bed bends along the curves of her body like a river flowing down a slope.
It breaks at her hips and pours down between her legs.
It scatters.
The light guides me to where I touch and kiss.
It guides my lips to where they are meant to be.
With her, I light up my room and a space in my heart.
To see the tattoo.
On her back.
The rose on her arm.
The butterfly around her thigh… it carried me across times and places.
Where we were and had never been before.
I light my heart and remove the solid wall I built so the light reaches the space between her cheek and her ear, where I leave a kiss.
A small kiss… many kisses I scatter like stars on her body.
And like the stars, they light me up even after she’s gone.
Small galaxies I scatter on my body and draw on her neck… here and now, where we belong.
I lost my homeland, but for a moment…
For days… I found it in her arms.
The warmth of her embrace.
I did not realize my thirst until she quenched me.
She taught me how to drink.
Calmly and deliberately, with love and passion.
Slowly… And quickly.
To be quenched. And for us to flourish.
All Roads Lead to Love
I had started writing this article to navigate a little through Black queer sex and sexuality, drawing inspiration from several books I read recently. Somehow, all roads led to love. No matter how I tried to position myself, I found myself drowning in emotions.
I started with bell hooks in her book All About Love:
“When I was a child it was clear to me that a life was not worth living if we did not know love.”
At first, I thought bell had not lived through war in her life… but I continued reading.
bell hooks says: “It became difficult for me to continue believing in love’s promise, whenever the magic of power or the terror of fear prevailed, wherever I turned, over the will to love.”
It was hard to think and write about sex and intimacy, the body and the other, without thinking about my spirituality, love for myself and my community to which I belong, love for God and everything around me. Our sexuality is inseparable from our constant desire to connect with the other… whoever the other may be.
3 years of isolation, withdrawal, silence, revolution and war, and because the body remembers.
I find that our touches, our kisses, our openness and our nakedness are resistance… our fragile sides that wish to lean on others and open up to their love, to accept their affection and their giving, are also resistance. The desire for trust and connection, the exchange of giving, is resistance.
Our ecstasies, our bodies’ longing for life and the soul’s longing for beauty and love are also resistance.
I am still searching for my body, I recognize it in the woman sometimes and sometimes not, with East African features and a slender body that resists bending and exhaustion. I search in films, between the pages of books and in conversations with friends, heterosexuals, lesbians and queers…
Perhaps… my queerness was easier in my country, even if it rejected me, but at least I knew its entrances and exits. I drank from its Nile and took shade under its trees.
The plant dies when it is separated from its roots, violently uprooted. It dies from pain and grief, or at least that’s how I felt.
Since we were uprooted from our roots, defining myself has not been important. As soon as I mention I am Sudanese, I am asked about the war. Is this really all that Sudan represents? Is this really all that I represent to everyone?
We crossed borders and left behind all the old meanings: security, stability, home, companions…
I did not feel comfortable speaking, I did not feel courageous and confident enough to remember my name, and I closed all doors and windows to make it easier to ignore the sound of shells.
After a revolution, 3 coups and a war — if I count correctly — my thin Black queer body has no choice but to be the last pawn of resistance here. Sometimes I don’t know whether it is me who is dissipating or the reality around me. Our bodies carry the remnants of state security violence, and the violence of those who refused our presence in the streets because we did not look like them. My body carries my story and the stories of my friends and the women who were raped, flogged and imprisoned, and it carries my mother’s sorrow for her home that she built with her own hands until they cracked.
I wondered, when I was in the arms of one of them sometimes, if I was really here? If this person really existed and if this moment was really what it seemed?
Because the body remembers abandonment, rejection, fear and betrayal.
Because the body cries and shrinks, and that is why we sometimes unconsciously prefer forgetting and ignoring to survive.
The body also writes, the body bears witness, the body lives, to continue… for us to continue.
It was necessary to ask my circle to make sure I hadn’t lost my mind!
Are you afraid? Do you miss your loved ones? Do you find it difficult to start conversations? I feel the need to cry with them, but there is no network in the area they were displaced to… How can we cry when we have reached safety and they are still under siege?
We haven’t even gotten to talking about sex yet!!
I remember when my friend said to me one day: “Sometimes our desire for sex is really a desire for intimacy and human connection, not sex itself.” I tried to oppose her in denial… She meant I needed a hug instead of an orgasm? She answered yes.
I think she was trying to provoke something inside me. I still don’t know what it was, but it was truly provoked… Perhaps this text is the proof!
Could all those disappointments have been overcome with a hug?
“Sex is a fundamental necessity for survival, it is part of our heritage, culture and knowledge, but we neglect to talk about it and consider it shameful and inappropriate. Sometimes we express it through jokes, but we always neglect to talk about it directly. What makes sex a taboo subject? Why do we have a complex when we talk about it? And why do we get uncomfortable with children’s innocent questions about the birth of their siblings, and how they came into this world?”
Fatima Babiker, a Sudanese researcher, wondered in the introduction to her book “Sex, Sexuality and the Exploitation of Sudanese Women” about why we have a complex about talking about sex in Sudanese society and why we collectively, consciously and unconsciously, prefer to ignore sex as part of our culture and continuity. I wonder beyond that to add: why do we ignore sex and our sexualities as part of our identity, our desires and our pleasures, and why did Fatima limit the title of her book to linking sexuality with exploitation!
I had made the decision to abstain from sex after two attempts, the alternative to which was the hug my friend had mentioned.
Since I left my home with nothing but the clothes on my body and my passport, and my body was not really my body, my hair was also sad. I found nothing in my research that could explain it to me.
No one told me: “You don’t necessarily have to experience direct sexual violence to suffer from a disorder that affects our sexuality and intimacy.”
In a study entitled “Black Liberatory Bodily Practices: Africana Aesthetics in Psychotherapeutic Movement Observation”,
This study explored body healing practices among Black people of the African diaspora, and the coping strategies they use to resist the effects of racism and oppression and mitigate them, leading to healing and building liberatory practices. “Focusing on Black liberation requires a particular discourse on race. This discourse calls for destabilizing discourses and beliefs based on disability concerning Black people. To address and dismantle racial hierarchy, special attention must be paid to the structures that reproduce these harms and injustices. The repercussions of this racial hierarchy include physiological effects and experiences that manifest in the body in relation to racial trauma, such as restricted movement, dissociation from the body, and hypervigilance. These factors impose on historically underrepresented groups — such as Black people of the African diaspora — the need to adapt their body language, movement patterns, and verbal communication to conform to the dominant norm.”
The Body, Intimacy and Love of the Land.
We are not separate from the earth from which we were created and to which we return. We are not separate from each other either, even if experiences differ and distances separate us. Intimacy transcends mere action to mean actual presence (here and now) with the whole body, mind and also love, and like worship and drawing closer to God, we form intentions to also draw closer to each other, with sincerity of intention, presence, questioning to know, attention and listening. Intimacy here does not mean “that something happens”, but the presence itself is what matters, treating the body with respect and consideration.
Without coercion, with slowness and deliberation, respecting both its resistance and its openness. Abstaining from sharing intimacy becomes a ritual, and returning to it also a ritual, by not sharing those deep moments without awareness, and with exhausted, thirsty bodies in their own right. Intimacy sometimes requires explicit verbal expression from us, even if souls are in harmony, so as not to become a silent and imposed act. Here, the goal of the intimate ritual is not merely sexual pleasure but connection beyond material states or bodily arousal, and it is completed by sincerity (laughter from the heart, a silent tear, a long hug). When the soul settles and the body follows, it is not really the ritual that matters, but its impact. That is what the feeling of safety means.
I wake up early to open the living room windows, while the tea boils slowly. As soon as I enter her door, she purifies me with some incense, a kiss on the cheek and some biscuits. We sometimes replace tea with coffee, in the Moroccan style, so she can read my cup; some prophecies come true and we misinterpret others.
Loving women is easy for me; being close to them, sharing laughter and tears, belonging to spaces that transcend individuality and are not based on competition. I felt safe and accepted, and found myself more tolerant and understanding. Yet, since the war, their bodies disturb me as much as my own body disturbs me. I feel embarrassed hugging my friends, and I hesitate to ask for affection from anyone.
I was lucky enough to be recently invited to a “smoke session” that my friends decided to hold with the increase in cold and humidity in our city. It was a session adorned with stars, cold and humid enough that we thought it was raining without clouds. We sat around the rahhala fire that night. One of us was massaging her body with cocoa butter slowly and carefully, while another arranged the coffee cups with the same attention. I watched them with love and admiration as I wrapped myself in my mother’s garment to sit on the rahhala and warm up. We exchanged photos, our eyes shining when we noticed how the smoke caressed our strands of hair, reflecting the dim light to form a halo around us. It was a moment when we became aware of the beauty of the fire, the smoke and our bodies.
The smoke ritual has always been associated in the Sudanese social imagination, especially in central communities, with married women, and sometimes with divorced women. This is due to the close link between smoke and Sudanese women’s sexuality, a space that has historically been forbidden, surrounded by silence and surveillance, for married and unmarried women to varying degrees.
When we asked our mothers and grandmothers in our childhood about the benefits of smoke, they would answer mechanically: “It removes dampness.”
We cannot deny this benefit through experience, but what they omitted to mention is why smoke was associated with married women? And why was this ritual confined solely to the framework of heterosexual marriage?
Stories and tales abound about the benefits, effects and even harms of smoke, but until now, I don’t think we have subjected it to scientific study. What really interests me is the ability of our mothers, grandmothers and the women before them to preserve this custom across centuries and across different political, religious and social systems. How did they keep smoke for themselves before it was for their husbands? They did not simply dissolve a female ritual into a misogynistic system! Rather, the ritual became protected, contained and redefined as a ritual associated with “socially acceptable” women within the framework of marriage.
Before the April war, before the war that preceded the April war and throughout history, women managed to create life and diverse spaces to live it. They adapted to their environments, tailored what was around them to their needs, and managed, one way or another, and continuously, to pass on everything that was useful to them: the scent and making of incense, smoke and henna sessions, body adornment, girls’ songs and dances of the brides of the Nile, and meanings close to intimacy and comfort.
After the April war, I find myself, like many Sudanese women in the diaspora, searching for everything that reminds us of our land and our cultures. Each of us searches for our seeds, the smell of homes and the small rituals of our mothers that formed the rhythm of life. We search for Sudan and for ourselves in their food and their clothes. We search for everything that returns us to our safe and most comfortable moments, familiarity and warmth, in the memory of our mothers’ embraces fragrant with firewood and sandalwood oil, in the taste of coffee sometimes burnt that reminds us of people we lost who used to love it.
We search for Sudan in everything that resembles a memory, a smell, a color, a taste.
The rahhala is a small brazier or fire pit where charcoal or burning wood is placed. The rahhala can be a clay or metal vessel, or a small hole in the ground where embers are placed and over which acacia wood is laid.
The divorced woman is one whose bond has been dissolved and broken, and the status of “divorcée” is considered a social stigma in Sudan.
I keep finding myself lost again.
I love you but cannot cry in your arms?
I know you love me but how do we truly share our fears?
How do I share my anger at myself with you?
I know I miss you but I also know I will not return to see you… and that was perhaps our final farewell.
Do I deserve your love?
Do you still love me?
How can we be together, and how can we first be for ourselves?
Knowledge is lost when we kill curiosity and questioning and impose fear. Experiences are lost when we choose silence and start changing words and sometimes metaphors, and meanings are lost, and with them the story is lost in the archives of oblivion. I did not have sources in my language to understand my feelings and desires.
In times of disaster, when we lose security itself at its various levels and definitions, our need for intimacy takes on different meanings and values. Likewise, the other’s body becomes a moment of temporary safety sometimes, an escape and a refuge where there is at least something familiar.
I lost everyone… when we were all forced to seek refuge where you cannot access without visas, without residency and without return tickets.
Distances faded in the first year, then longing faded in the second, then we faded in the third year…
In mid-April, in the first year of the war in my city, I had no choice but to acknowledge the need to establish a hierarchy of priorities to survive, me and those with me. That hierarchy which I had always refused, I found myself building with my bare hands and without equipment. I wondered a lot then who I was amidst all this?
Alone crossing borders and in the corridors of governmental and non-governmental institutions to have my existence recognized as a migrant, as a human being without a homeland or citizenship. My continuous search for us to continue as long as we could, between loss, dealing with abandonment and embracing surrender as a doctrine with no real options.
Months passed without me seeing my reflection in the woman, or perhaps without me being able to recognize my reflection!!
How am I supposed to love myself? To meet my needs, to do or to be? When I am nothing but the remains of a human being with no promised land, no papers proving my existence, no family, no home or future, not even my underwear!
What I had was barely enough for me to survive, me and my family. Materially and morally, there wasn’t much. The feeling of lack and fear that I felt, for the first time, I wasn’t even enough for myself.
Another study indicated that “some people who do not live with partners chose to reorganize their intimate lives so that the sexual relationship is not at the center. Instead, they gave more space to friendships or adopted different forms of relationships, such as emotional commitment without sexual constraint, or rejecting the traditional link between intimacy and living under one roof.”
But the body is exhausted, tired and sad.
“Pray standing, if you cannot, then sitting, if you cannot, then on your side.”
I had to acknowledge first to myself that my body is burdened with too much, and that is why it is difficult for me to recognize it and to allow others to do so.
I chose intimacy. I abstained from dating and trying to get close to anyone. No one accepted the idea that my body was not available at this moment in history… and I had to preserve what was left of me.
Burdened with shed blood, occupied land and history that will be forgotten, our past that we lived and our memories that will not last much longer than the homes destroyed by shells. Burdened with betrayal, loneliness and anger, with our longing for our mothers, sisters and loved ones with no path, no time or direction to arrive or return. We must understand the importance of repossessing ourselves, our bodies and writing our own narrative, otherwise they will write about us in words that do not resemble us and do not express our reality that we alone have lived.
“Healing systems in the African diaspora and indigenous African therapeutic systems view the human being as part of nature and the universe, not as a being separate from them or merely affected by them. Indigenous healing is understood as practices and beliefs that emerge from within the culture itself and aim to support community members according to their context and experiences within this framework. African Black psychology offers a different understanding of the human psyche, surpassing the narrow individual focus and the view of the human being only through the lens of deficit and need. It emphasizes the importance of historical and cultural context in understanding the human experience.”
“The transgenerational trauma resulting from slavery and the consideration of human beings as ‘property’ can have a profound impact on the self-esteem and socialization processes of Black individuals.”
War imposes a spontaneous feeling of isolation — up until this moment in history, we have never been a people more isolated from each other. Families dispersed, friends separated, communities disintegrated. Loved ones truly had no choice but to resist despite the bullets, distances and death. Relationships began, others ended. Children were born, our children grew up in war and in exile, and we buried far too many.
Between visa requirements, residency conditions, legal proofs internal and external, forcibly displaced people and refugees do not have enough of anything…
Most Sudanese in the diaspora do not have enough to cover rent, living expenses, education and medical care, in addition to the cost of residency renewal, nor enough peace to stop for a moment to absorb everything that is happening, and perhaps plan the next step!
Not having the minimum of stability while we live on the edge…
Crossing borders requires a passport valid for at least 6 months, a security clearance for several thousand dollars, a transit visa for a few hundred more, a plane ticket.
Borders require many papers, and sometimes all we have left are our bodies.
Crossing requires stamps, and memory remains burdened with memories of abandoned homes, the sounds of shells, and names we no longer call.
But all that is not enough for them to validate the crossing!
The resistance of our bodies is not recognized as an indication of our right to survival. They do not recognize migrants’ bodies as documents, nor the desire to live as legal proof.
They demand instead proofs that most people crossing borders do not possess and probably will not possess in the short or even long term, because the state that issues and stamps no longer exists, or simply because they do not have enough money.
Consciously or unconsciously, migrants have no choice but to submit to the machinery of oppression wherever they are. No space for resistance, no right to citizenship, no opposition. Between the proofs we possess, translated and in a professional format stamped by external sources, and those we do not possess, lost in the corridors of what remains of the state, the non-citizens fall into a bottomless pit.
Insufficiency here is not an individual responsibility to label as failure and attribute to those around us or to carry alone. It is a complete policy that keeps the non-citizen in a constant state of request and waiting, and forced gratitude for any crumb. Not having enough means others manage one’s life, it means making one’s survival conditional on good behavior, patience and silence.
“It is easier to talk about love than to practice it, and easier to express the pain of its absence than to be able to describe its presence.”
hooks says: “We excel at describing the absence of love because we do not know what it means to be loved.”
This sentence perfectly describes the extent of our emotional poverty, a poverty that taught us how to spot loss and name deprivation, and how to develop a language and precise vocabulary for pain, while leaving the act of loving itself vague, deferred and conditional. Love is an act, as hooks sees it: it is not a description nor a name we give to a particular feeling.
“Love is a practice that requires conscious effort, a capacity for listening, and a willingness to take responsibility for the other without possessing them. Love here is not separate from justice and love cannot be genuine unless it builds safety. Because we grew up in an emotionally impoverished environment, we became demanders of love, we crave it without knowing how to practice it or what it requires, and we are sometimes ashamed of it even in our safest spaces. Here, the absence of love becomes more evident than its presence.”
I think often, perhaps…
If I had been quenched with love a little earlier, perhaps I would have had my own definition. Perhaps I would love myself and the world in a less painful and more open way.
Love does not form in a vacuum and therefore cannot flourish from nothing. In times of war, love is a rebellion against circumstances, politics and weapons. We find in love and closeness tranquility, and in the arms of those we love, some calm and peace, and a moment of safety, even if it is under the rubble.
We find love in our most genuine relationships, our platonic connections that we chose and carefully shaped to protect us. There, we redefined the meaning of kinship bonds and giving, of healing and understanding, of collective care in ways that celebrate our individuality and strengthen our partnerships and alliances as well.
We find it within our communities that we turn to and contribute to building and sustaining.
And inside our bodies that carry so much, between a spectrum of kisses and wounds still healing.
Between the corridors of memory and gatherings of companions.
In our conscious and unconscious choices to live and remain.
We begin to understand the true meaning of love when we begin to love the most complex and hardest composition to accept: ourselves.
It is easy to say “I love you” when we are sufficiently saturated with love, when others quench us and we are satisfied.
We flourish, bear fruit and offer from the same source enough love to satisfy others. And our journey with love begins when we learn.
To love all our aspects, those that shine with pride and those buried in shame as well.
We share love when we receive enough for our cups to overflow, when we love ourselves enough to receive love without surprise or denial.
Without shame or guilt, with all entitlement and pride. Then, “I love you” becomes easy, fluid, light to pronounce and often repeated.
I love you on your birthday, I love your hair and your choice of its new color, I woke up today and remembered I miss you, so I am sending this to you.
We begin to receive love when we understand the meaning of…
Our unconditional worthiness for ourselves first…
When we refuse to accept anything less, that heavy conversation delayed for days, the gift that never reached us, the dinner invitation we never received.
The attention that came late by days, weeks, months, and comes after we have moved on.
Our unconditional and sometimes conditional love overflows, for ourselves, for friends, for the beloved, for stray cats, trees, butterflies and sunlight streaming through curtains.
For a cup of coffee together on a rainy morning when we don’t feel like working… and we don’t.
It was the end of July when I met her.
It was the end of August when I opened the door for her to enter.
It was the end of September when I gave her my only sketchbook.
It was the end of December when I was sure that I loved myself…
In remembering the land and loving it, and being grateful for what it gave.
E.Omer.
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