Artwork by Kaya Joan
Exile did not begin the day I left Sudan. It began years earlier, when I was a girl hiding notebooks between the flour tins in my mother’s kitchen, writing stories the world around me had no room for.
Exile is not a forced transition from one place to another. It’s an extended experience that seeps into the soul, intertwines with the details of daily life, and sneaks into the smallest and simplest moments—making them different and strange, as if they are part of a life I do not fully belong to. Exile is an uprooting from my homeland, a gradual loss of a sense of belonging—a feeling of being lost between two times, between a geography that no longer contains me and another that does not fully recognize me.
Exile resides in the tone of my voice when I try to pronounce a word in my mother tongue, Arabic. Exile is the reminder that those who hear it will not understand it, nor will they understand me—not even my youngest daughter. It is in my mistakes and confusion when engaging with a new language that persistently tries to become familiar, and in the moments of silence when I find myself getting lost.
When I left Sudan unwillingly, I thought I was only leaving a geographical place and consoled myself with the possibility of returning one day. I used to wonder about the concept of a homeland: is it a place? A feeling? A memory? A longing? Or is it safety? Does “home” mean being part of a social fabric—having your language be familiar in the markets, breathing without feeling the need to justify your existence?
At first, I told myself I would work on rebuilding a new life for myself and my two daughters, and create a more merciful future for us. But little by little, I realized that exile is about more than geographical distance; it is a series of losses, the first of which is the loss of psychological safety. In Sudan, no matter how harsh things were, I knew the rules, and I understood how things went. But living in the US, everything felt fragile, temporary—as if I were walking on land still in the process of forming.
Once, as I sat in a crowded café in Pittsburgh, I looked at the people around me and wondered: do they know what it means to be out of place? To live in a world that does not fit you? To carry two languages in your head, yet feel that you do not speak either with true fluency? I watched the crowd and wanted to know if any of them felt what I felt: this vast distance that separated me from them even as I sat among them.
My experience in exile gave birth to a feeling of estrangement, making me reflect on those moments when no one here fully understands the context that I come from. No one knows why I smile with sadness as I listen to a song on YouTube like Mohammed Wardi’s “Al Mursal”—the song my mother used to hum along with as it played on the radio. No one understands why I sometimes cry for no reason while encircled by new friends. It’s not the moment itself that causes the tears; it’s the sudden ache beneath it. The way someone laughs and reminds me of a friend I left behind. Or the silence that falls when I realize I can’t explain what I’m feeling, without needing a long backstory. Sometimes I cry because I left; because I miss my language in my own mouth. And sometimes, I cry simply because I don’t know how to translate the weight I carry into a language that feels shared. There are words in Arabic that carry generations of meaning and layers. How do I translate the word “حنين” — not just as nostalgia, but as a kind of ache that longs for land, for touch, for ancestors and beloveds?
But my sense of alienation did not exclusively arise in America. To find the beginning of that feeling, we must look back many years.
As a child in Sudan, I thought that alienation was a feeling experienced only by migrants and exiles. I later learned that it is a state one can live in, even in the very heart of the place they belong to—an emotional disconnection, an invisible rupture that separates you from your surroundings. There are exiles within our own homelands, people who feel unseen and unrecognized in the very place they call home. I was a girl who asked too many questions, who read stories instead of memorizing rules, who dreamed of staying out past sunset. But I lived in a world where daughters were taught to lower their voices, to cover their bodies, and to avoid shame before they even knew its shape. My notebooks became hiding places for a version of myself I wasn’t allowed to be. Perhaps that is why my departure was not a great shock—I had already felt that I was on the margins.
To be a girl in Sudan, growing up during the rule of Omar al-Bashir’s totalitarian Islamic dictatorship regime (1989–2019), you had to live without a voice, without choice, and without even the space for your own internal questions. You were like a shadow passing through life—forbidden from speaking, expressing yourself, or even arguing with your older brother, father, or uncle. You had to obey everyone, be polite, and accept the decisions made on your behalf without your input, even if inside you were screaming. You had to obey your father because he was the first authority figure; then your brother, even if he was younger than you; then your husband, who would enforce your obedience in the name of religion, customs, and traditions. You had to obey the ruler, who controlled all of your destinies. And finally, you had to obey God—and even this relationship with God was dictated through men’s voices and decisions, not your own.
These layers of obedience were not just cultural habits—they were backed by law, enforced by religious teachings, and repeated in public discourse until they became part of our breath. For example, under the Personal Status Law, a father could marry off his daughter as young as ten. Girls could not travel without permission or male accompaniment. We were taught that obedience was godly, and questioning authority—any authority—was shameful. These ideas lived in the classrooms, mosques, streets, and inside our homes. They were repeated so often that even those who loved us enforced them, believing they were protecting us.
I was caught in this vortex, yet I was not truly there. Physically, I walked the streets, went to school, sat at home. But inside, my soul was always searching for something else—for a small opening to breathe through. I found that opening through reading, though this was not welcomed. My older brother, thinking it inappropriate, would get angry whenever he saw me reading. Though I hadn’t done anything wrong, he would yell and sometimes even hit me, as if knowledge itself was forbidden to me.
My older brother’s anger was not his alone. It reflected a society where even young boys were taught to guard the boundaries of a girl’s life. In Sudan, during that time, a girl with a book was seen as a danger to herself—she ran the risk of slipping beyond what was acceptable. Obedience was expected, and silence was safety. People believed stories could plant ideas that didn’t belong, and could carry girls beyond the fences tradition had built around us.
I was twelve when I first realized I could write. A girl in my neighborhood said she wrote a story, so I went home and did the same, scribbling my first tale with chalk on the kitchen wall of our Rakoba, an open space with pillars in our yard. I called it “The Three Friends.” My family, neighbors, and relatives read it, but no one took it seriously. Just one boy, a friend of my other brother, said, “I like it.”
Later, when I began to write more seriously, I used notebooks—secret ones I never showed my family. I hid them under my mattress, inside empty flour tins—even between the folds of my mother’s old scarves. I wrote late at night or when I was home alone, always alert, always afraid. I wrote about everything I couldn’t say aloud. I wrote about love. I wrote about dreams that could never be spoken: of being free to walk the streets at any time, of speaking without apology, of growing into a woman who didn’t need permission. I wrote about anger—rage at my brother for yelling and hitting me when he saw me reading novels instead of textbooks. I wrote about the questions no one wanted to hear: Why must we obey men? Why is silence safer than truth?
Writing became a form of rebellion I carried out in ink. And though I feared discovery, what I feared more was losing that fragile space where I could be fully myself.
I have lived in exile twice: once within my own country, my own town, and my own family as a girl trapped in silence; and once far away from home, as a woman and a mother of two girls, searching for the safety and freedom I could not find there.
I have lived in exile twice: once within my own country, my own town, and my own family as a girl trapped in silence; and once far away from home, as a woman and a mother of two girls, searching for the safety and freedom I could not find there.
That first exile was not marked by borders, but by expectations—silent rules written into the fabric of daily life. And it was harsher than the second exile, because there was nowhere to escape to. I lived in a society that did not see me as deserving of independence. My friend and I used to say, “I wish I had been born a boy.” Boys could move through public spaces without question—they stayed out late and gathered in the streets. My friend and I envied that ease, that freedom to go everywhere and not be asked where we had been. For us, being girls meant curfews and constant supervision. We had to explain everything: where we were going, who we were with, when we would return. Even in the same household as a boy, we lived under different rules. Boys were expected to speak boldly, to claim space. Girls were taught to stay polite, lower their gaze, obey, clean, and do chores. There were no spaces we could truly call our own, not even in our thoughts—unless we kept them hidden. So we dreamed of being other people—people whose lives were not bound by fear or society.
But years later, when I matured, I realized that I did not want to be someone else. I wanted to be myself without restrictions or fear. I could not accept reality as it was.
Due to the oppression in Sudan—whether it was the societal pressure placed on women, or the political pressure placed on all of us—resistance became the only choice. I was arrested during the protests in September 2013, when the government cut fuel subsidies and people across Sudan poured into the streets—starting in my city, Wad Medani. I joined the crowds refusing this decision. The security forces responded with brutal violence. I was arrested, beaten, sexually harassed, threatened with gang rape, jailed, and eventually taken to trial—alongside my brother and sister. The entire process was humiliating and cruel. It was meant to silence us, to strip us of our dignity. But instead, it revealed the regime’s fear—not just of organized dissent, but of ordinary people daring to speak.
Later that same year, a few of us began to gather quietly in Wad Medani. We were only a handful at first—less than ten people and including only two women, my friend and me. We met in secret, asking hard questions: Why hadn’t the uprising succeeded? What went wrong? What could resistance look like without weapons? At first, we weren’t trying to build a movement. We were just trying to survive with our hope intact.
That’s how the Medani Resistance Committees were born—named after our hometown about eighty-five miles southeast of Khartoum. We met in my house, speaking in low voices, sharing stories, fear, and the belief that another Sudan was still possible. We talked about revolution, justice, and the future we longed for. What we built was small, fragile, and risky. But it was real. And it grew.
From 2013 to 2018, we worked underground, writing and secretly distributing flyers in markets, mosques, universities, and any place where people gathered. We threw papers into alleyways, left them on benches, and wrote short but powerful messages on walls, awakening the awareness the regime sought to bury. Of course, we did not think that writing on walls would topple the regime, but we knew that every word, every message, and every flyer was a step on a long road forward.
From 2013 to 2018, we worked underground because there was no other way to survive and resist at the same time. After the protests were violently suppressed, the regime tightened its grip. The security forces became more aggressive and more paranoid. People were arrested simply for being activists—or for being suspected of thinking like one. Some were taken from their homes at night.
We couldn’t speak openly, couldn’t protest in the streets, and couldn’t even gather in small groups without risking surveillance. It wasn’t just dangerous for us—it was dangerous for what we were doing. So, we moved in silence. We held secret meetings in private homes. We printed flyers on borrowed printers, shared news one-to-one on apps, and wrote resistance slogans on walls in the dark of the night—knowing that even those small acts could lead to arrest or worse.
Still, we kept going. Not because we thought we would win quickly, but because we believed in planting something that might grow later. Each flyer, each sentence scribbled on a wall, was a way to say: We are still here. We didn’t know when change would come. But we needed to believe that it would—and that when it did, our words would be waiting.
Though what we were doing would not change the regime in the capital, it would make a difference in our city. And—like a fire that begins with a small spark—the revolution in December 2018 that toppled Omar al-Bashir’s thirty-year regime sparked a surge in resistance committees across many other cities. We began to hear about other groups, each one lighting its own fire and writing its own freedom with its own hands. We were not just activists; we were embers beneath the ashes, resisting because we refused to die in silence.
Writing and political activism were the reasons I came to America when Sudan became an unsafe place for me to live. I was staying in different houses for safety, and I was being followed.
But here, in Pittsburgh, I faced another kind of silence. I was free to write, but could I free myself from fear? From the guilt of leaving my friends behind to face the military’s violence? When I left Sudan, I thought I had left fear behind me, but I was wrong. I thought I would arrive in a new homeland where I could finally be myself, live as I wanted, and be rid of the restraints that had wrapped around my neck like a noose. Instead, I drowned in the silence of writer’s block, retreating into thoughts of death’s looming presence as I watched my two daughters grow up in a different world—speaking another language, living a childhood I never had.
A few months after I arrived in Pittsburgh as a writer-in-residence at City of Asylum—with my daughters, who were ten and two years old—the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world. Like everyone else, we were locked behind closed doors inside our homes. I withdrew, but amid this isolation and the waves of depression that overtook me, I discovered something new.
At a time when the outside world was shutting its doors, I turned inward and opened doors within myself instead. Though I had never done so before, I began writing poetry. Poetry became the way I could navigate all my tangled emotions—all this longing, all this anger, and all this hope that had not completely died.
At a time when the outside world was shutting its doors, I turned inward and opened doors within myself instead.
In the midst of the darkness, a small light crept in. That light was Diane, our neighbor and the co-founder of City of Asylum. She suggested that we talk daily over video calls to create a simple project that would keep us connected during the lockdown. She suggested that my eldest daughter could draw something every day and create a collage, and that I could write just one line. A single line every day wasn’t much, but it was enough to create a window in the thick wall I was trapped behind.
On the first day of our creative project, I wrote one line: “Mom, I miss you.” That day was March 21st—Mother’s Day in the Middle East and, of course, Sudan—a day when we used to celebrate my mom with a small party, songs, gifts, and laughter. She had passed away years before I came to the U.S., but that day, her absence felt fresh.
That line turned into several verses, then into a poem, then into a hundred days of continuous writing. I became a poet. Words became a lifeboat, and writing pulled me out of the darkness. After that, I wrote a couple of poems about my mom in the book. They weren’t planned, but they arrived as if they had been waiting. In grief, in love, in memory—she returned to me through language.
In that daily hour-long session with Diane, I returned to myself—telling her my stories, reclaiming my memories, and rebuilding my relationship with exile in a new way.
Diane listened as I read my poems in Arabic, even though she did not understand them. Without knowing the language, she could hear the music, and through my emotions, she grasped something that needed no translation. After first reading the poems in Arabic, I would translate them hesitantly for her, and she would understand or interpret the text in her own way. She didn’t add words, but somehow, she added weight: a kind of depth that showed me layers and meaning I hadn’t intended, but now couldn’t unsee. Every day, I became more amazed at poetry’s ability to reshape my experience with exile—to make it less lonely, and to transform it from a kind of loss into a space for creativity.
When the hundred days ended, I was no longer the same. The pandemic no longer frightened me; the specter of death had faded, and exile was no longer the heavy burden it used to be.
The poems from those hundred days were translated into English, and published in 2023 in a book titled Something Evergreen Called Life, translated by Yasmine Seale.
I know that I will not return to Sudan anytime soon—that perhaps I will never return. Yet, I will not remain lost in the in-between. I will continue to carry my homeland: in my words, in my stories, in the voices of my daughters, in cooking Sudanese dishes in my American kitchen, and in my insistence on teaching my daughter Layan that the bread I make at home is called gourassa قُرَّاصَة not pancake, and that the beef stew is Moolah مُلَاح not sauce. I carry my homeland in the small details: in the songs I dance to in the middle of the kitchen, wearing my pajamas and waiting for the morning coffee on the stove; in my online meetings with Sudanese friends, my daughters listening as we speak in the Sudanese dialect and discuss new plans to keep the flame of resistance alive.
I carry my homeland in the car every morning on our way to school, tuning into a YouTube channel that retells Sudanese folk stories in a modern way, and laughing with my older daughter Raghad at Layan’s attempts to pronounce Sudanese words with her American tongue. These are the same stories my grandmother used to tell me on nights when the electricity would cut out, as we lay on beds in the yard of our home in Medani, under the stars. My grandmother’s voice would rise and fall like a song, her hands gesturing in the dark, our shadows dancing against the walls. Now, my daughters listen to “Alassad wa Altha’lb,” where wit overcomes pride, and laugh at the fox’s tricks. They ask me to repeat “Wad Umm Barayma,” about the outcast child who becomes a hero. And Layan grips her seatbelt a little tighter during “Ummona Alghoula,” half-afraid and half-enchanted—just like I was. These tales are more than just stories. They carry the sound of my childhood, and I pass them on like a thread stitched through time, language, and place.
Do you see it now? Exile, for me, is no longer a place but a constant state of searching for a home, building a home, and nurturing it. It is no longer a form of helplessness; it has become the ability to recreate oneself, find small homelands within language, writing, the tiny details of daily life, and the new friendships that extend their hands to me when the world shuts its doors.
The question, “Where do I belong?” no longer torments me. I have realized that I belong to all these details, to all these poems, and to this exile which—despite its cruelty—has returned me to myself.
Today, I am not that woman who fears having her voice broken—nor the girl who used to hide her notebooks under the bed or among her mother’s kitchen utensils, afraid that her older brother would find them. Today, I write loudly. I write because I want my daughters to know that they can be whoever they choose to be, and that they can reject the restraints that once tried to suffocate me.
Exile has taught me that freedom is not a place but a state of mind. It is the ability to hold onto yourself despite everything. To be a Sudanese woman means knowing the meaning of constraint, succeeding in breaking that constraint, and knowing the true victory of finding your voice after years of silence.
