Two years have passed since the war erupted in Khartoum on April 15^th, 2023. Khartoum, capital of Sudan, where I was born, raised, studied, and gave birth to my children, only to leave it three years ago. Soon after, flames took hold. The war has stretched its arms, reaching parts of the land whose people had never before known its touch, not directly. Other regions, scarred by earlier wars, witnessed their people flee to Khartoum, which became a refuge, along with other urban centers, for those displaced when wars devoured their villages. Now, they flee again, perhaps for the second time, perhaps the third. A never-ending cycle.

Why do I tread so cautiously in recounting these truths? Because war wears different ages across Sudan’s expanse. For me, it is the same war that flared long ago in South Sudan, Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile regions, more than forty years ago. Then, it crept into Darfur region twenty two years ago. Its arrival in Khartoum was but the crowning of pervasive violence, a violence that central governments continued to create and to fail to contain by way of strategic wisdom.

What I mean to say is this: Sudan has been locked in war for decades, yet it was never branded as “Sudan’s war” until it reached the heart of the capital, the “center,” and set it ablaze.

In earlier times, wars were named after their regions: the war of the South, the war of the Nuba Mountains, the war of Darfur, and so on. Peripheral wars, birthed by the very center itself, lulling the capital’s population and those in war-free regions into believing these were distant matters, scarcely concerning them.

As a writer, I have been and remain consumed by this blood-soaked history. I could never escape seeing the war’s sweeping panorama, which I describe as a map of violence in motion, claiming new territories with each turn. It began in the twentieth century, in a small village at the farthest edge of the South, then spread like an oil stain on a searing sheet, until it coated the land entirely.

My passion for writing was born from and shaped by the immediacy and proximity of war. I wanted to make others see what I see. To watch, in high definition, the beast of war as it grows. I shaped words to tell scores of stories bearing the war’s ugly face, exposing its brutal deeds. Much like children patiently gather the tiny pieces of a puzzle to form a single, vivid image of an animal or a complete, comprehensible illustrated children’s story.

I dedicate my writing to this, at the very least, to complete the story. I write because I can no longer bear the amnesia and denial that the Sudanese people live in, only to be startled by war’s return each time, as if it were novelty. When I say “Sudanese,” I mean everyone, in the South and the North. I just made a necessary clarification that samples the dilemmas I grapple with since Sudan split into two after a long war that made coexistence in one nation impossible. I must name them together to dispel the confusion, that I speak only of the Sudan that remains. For South Sudan’s independence did not free it from the legacy of violence. The newly born country inherited that legacy’s tools and catalogues, and continued forging its own wars, just as wars persist now in the Sudan that no longer has its South.

I said I write because I can no longer bear the state of forgetting. Politicians address crises as ahistorical emergencies as though they lack roots, while citizens see wars as scattered and isolated realities, almost fragments. So, they keep turning the page. Perhaps collective amnesia is a sort of evasion to help people carry on? Perhaps it is.

When the war broke out in Sudan in 2023, I was writing avidly, working on the final edits of my second historical novel about another war, one that began in 1983.

I chose to write about the past, to chronicle what happened then, while the present teetered on the edge of ignition. Then the war of April 2023 stormed in.

I felt trapped in a bind, forced to draw a strict line between the war raging now on the ground and the one unfolding across the pages of my novel.

I strove to stay vigilant, alert, to keep from blurring the events of the two wars, separated by more than forty years.

Often, I found myself caught in a haze, where a frail line divides the real from the imagined. For wars mirror one another: scenes of shattered cities, refugees, brutal killings, skies choked with smoke, and the lies echoed by fighters in their camps. All of them blur together.

Writing became a kind of wrenching pain, a heavy duty. It compels one to wade through memory, to rouse the victims of old massacres, sated with death from wars that never met with political reckoning or justice. Therefore, I wrote with utmost caution, like one treading a minefield, wary that an explosion might erupt beneath my pen as I plucked each letter, one by one, arranging words side by side to capture the ugliness of war, hoping to dodge yet another.

I stopped writing when April war broke out, as if, in pity for my heart, I resolved to endure one war at a time.

Yet, despite all this, I had to press on. I could not abandon the souls I had awakened, to grant them some measure of justice, the justice of not being forgotten. At the same time, what I write might offer some wisdom to a present that trails blindly behind the past, without a shred of retrospectivity.

Writing of war, amidst its turmoil, reopens old wounds, striving to mend them with memory’s searing balm, even as new wounds bleed.

I wrote to confront the past, but it was also a writing to reject a present that repeats the past with bewildering folly. The present is merely a reflection of the past, cast in different places, choosing new victims and wielding newer, deadlier weapons.

Amid all this, dozens of writers remained consumed by their craft. In the past year alone, numerous publishing houses released scores of new works by Sudanese and South Sudanese authors. A barrage of novels, short stories, poetry, and literary criticism. Some were nominated for regional and international awards. It was as if the pen raced against the machinery of war.

Writing strives to resurrect the forgotten, placing them on a stage of witness.

We write to mark the chasm between ordinary life and the state of war. War, no matter how long it lingers, will never be normalized. Its very existence is a kind of history veering far off course, unsettling what is intrinsic.

War is an intruder, however many decades it presses upon a nation’s chest. It breeds a state of emergency around itself, as if we flee to unfamiliar places, dwell in ancient times where the state has vanished, forcing us to reorganize ourselves just to secure a morsel of bread. We live in clusters to shield one another, side by side with strangers like us, in lands our feet had never trod before.

These transient temporalities and spaces are what writing seeks to capture. It sets to preserve the memory of longing for an ordinary life where all may live in peace.

To my mind, the abundance of literary creation amidst war is akin to arming oneself against war, a resilience imperative to shielding the future, so the venom, of this and past wars, does not seep into the hearts and minds of the generations to come.

At the height of humanity’s defeat, we turn to writing. Writing, too, is a form of asylum. Through it, we set immortality against genocide, bare chests against bullets, hoping to lend them a pulse or to whisper of life’s sweetness.

Thus, writing became the sole pillar that kept us from falling into the furnace of despair, helping us navigate spirals of panic attacks, feelings of helplessness, and waves of grief.

Writing sustained us through the isolation of exile and asylums, and through it, we proclaim: Here we are, still standing, inscribing our wounded homelands. With our publications, we affirm that we have not forgotten, nor will we forget.

Writing has always been our tender companion, comforting our hearts, offering solace.

For me, writing is the final savior I turn to in my darkest moments of despair and terror.

When calamities rage, nothing distracts me but sitting to write. I sit before a screen blazing with light, blinding my sight, shielding me from the growing darkness engulfing my surroundings. I take refuge in it from the evils outside, from heart-breaking news and my powerlessness before it. Writing allows me to channel out my anger, sorrow, and frustrations in a somewhat structured way. It reminds me of my purpose as a writer. In this moment, I can almost distill my mission to this: drawing eyes to the tragedy of war, rallying more souls to stand with the human causes and the catastrophe we endure.

Time has not been on my side, nor has the vast distance allowed me to read all the works of my fellow writers during this war. Yet I am nearly certain their pages are woven with themes of war and its scars, of longing, desperate love between one human and another, and between a human and a harsh homeland. When will it end? Yes, we all await the end of this war, but how and when? I do not know.

It is hard to pin down why we write so prolifically in this particular moment, why we are so eager to publish our work, even those writers who once shied away from sharing their words have begun to do so, if only by releasing older pieces.

But broadly, I can say that writing has indeed become a form of resilience, a way to confront violence. The violence that unfolds before their eyes. The violence that simultaneously turned them into prey and witnesses. This pervasive violence has struck their closest kin, and they mourn them, lost in brutal ways, across social media. All this tells us that this war is no longer news relayed about others; it has become an event they are entangled in, one way or another. For those corpses are no longer the bodies of strangers whose fates they could ignore, and the blood flowing across Sudanese soil, rivaling the Nile’s flood, is no longer foreign. It is the blood of their slain brothers, their raped daughters and mothers, their murdered friends, their neighbors snatched by bombardment, people whose faces and names they know.

When the news calls them victims, we name them heroes and martyrs.

When reports label them victims of sexual violence, we call them survivors.

When we hear of their limbs and flesh scattered by a shell or warplane’s strike, we name them doves of peace, filling the sky’s dome, hovering in protest.

When they say children die of hunger, we say they refused food in defiance of the famine gripping the global South, despite fertile lands and abundant rivers, if only the conflicts would cease!

Hence, we dodge the truth of the catastrophe. Writing offers us a chance to sort out things, beginning with our souls tossed by grief and fear for those still caught in the claws of this war.

When I was busy writing, fresh texts emerged here and there, documenting the horrors of the war. The April war endowed everyone with the power of having a voice. Unlike previous wars, which, despite their cruelty and longevity, were addressed by a few faint voices, this war has been chronicled with intensity and precision.

I am tempted to say to my fellow writers and those commenting on social media with their vivid accounts of war’s atrocities: you are not writing only of the current war, but also of older wars that never received such a surge of words.

If war is the undoing of peace in all its forms, then writing is a war against war, a war for survival, for resilience, for keeping the spilled blood warm, whispering in the ears of those who wield weapons about the futility of this senseless killing.

With every word we write, we set memory aglow with these scenes, our prose pulsing with the blood of living ink. In this, we sow wisdom for tomorrow, shaping a collective resolve to end all wars.

This, I believe, is what writing has meant to me since I began weaving words with bloody events. I do not forget the grace of writing; it has armed me with a resilience to absorb tragedy and live with it, allowing me to face those around me with a radiant smile.

I write the most violent scenes, sometimes collapsing in tears as I do. This is how I acknowledge the realities that have happened and are happening now.

War wields a devastating force. Perhaps the only chance for survival lies in accepting its occurrence and admitting our powerlessness to avert all its consequences, so that what we write remains a vivid wound, a raised scar in memory, baring the truth, the full truth.