»There is a dream into which I go to be alone with History, where she lays down all guise. The fewer the eyes and ears eager for her intrigues, the more naked, honest, she becomes. Or so she says. In the desert wind she drops her veil, no shyness, no shame. Yet she dons a new mask. History, sworn to her discretion, enters the scene in the form of a young dark boy named Sudan…«
I don’t know anyone who has forgotten.
Safia Elhillo
There is a dream into which I go to be alone with History, where she lays down all guise. The fewer the eyes and ears eager for her intrigues, the more naked, honest, she becomes. Or so she says. In the desert wind she drops her veil, no shyness, no shame. Yet she dons a new mask. History, sworn to her discretion, enters the scene in the form of a young dark boy named Sudan.
Sudan is orphaned since the global census refused him a recount. Sudan no longer has a self, where could he keep it? The boy remembers gender, genocide, he does not know what they mean. He recalls gazelles, giraffes, where the desert now floats countless grains of time. He does not know that harvest to be long gone. The Arabic he strives to swallow comes back up, a constant cry in the throat. He tries his black skin against the hot evening but sand still passes through.
Sudan, you dried-out kid, betrayed of hope, your un-body is shaped like a lost hour. You remember everything; exiled into the present tense. How long have you stood here? How long has History hidden your face under her calculated cover? Your smile and the hard set of your eyes, all they say, all they have seen.
I am here to be alone with a faceless archive, faceless as the dunes. Before I, too, become rubbed into all that ever was, I take on this hot mission, only to be accomplished here and now, which is where to catch History in her lies. But I didn’t expect to meet you here, Sudan, or that you would have been here forever, longer than the circumference of my modern mind. I am in Europe, reading the records of Nubia and Napata, pulling on the ropes of the past. I am here to meet with the ancient pharaohs and warrior queens, not you, young Sudan. Are you a ghost or a weed? Are you named after this land, the Land of the Blacks, or is it after you? Does your outstretched hand ask or point? History shows me where you are buried, she says that you keep on dying as the child that you are, a dead boy never to become a dead man. And by this timeless childhood, you are entrusted to keep the pyramids.
Your pyramids are poems, Sudan, poems from which many lines have been stolen. Lately the language falls down a broken ladder. This is History’s best excuse. I am just learning the whole story, how you set yourself apart from Egypt, drawing your own geometry at those beginnings of time. Sepulchers and gold-tipped spears, slippers covered in cheetah, your resplendent funeral songs, oils. And your dead of all ages go into catacombs of their own design, monuments of stone piled into everlasting towers that touch the sun, withstanding desert heat. But even the everlasting fades, even the hardiest stories crumble when no one utters them. If you are alone with these pyramids, you must be a monument, too, Sudan, you must be three thousand years old. No one says this about you. Shame to disclose I too mobilize into this class of forgetfulness.
How can I be a dead boy, the voice in the breeze now asks me, if i am the memory of this land, always dying? He speaks with lips unmoving. each of the dead go through me, one by one, I am returned to life, ready to die again with the next. you ask me to tell you about the pyramids, but the dead do not talk of pyramids, they say you must see your tomb for yourself. we speak in music because music is a tongue of the present tense. the sound of dying drowns out history. can you hear its wail like a prayer call through the door of my being? death is inside but dying cries out.
Sudan tells me what pyramids I should take my questions to. The long corridors smell like dust, a dead noise of insect wings resounds. If you walk this way, the boy says, it will not be long until you meet amanirenas, the great queen. her hands hold a sword and staff, not the husband beside her, her son must make his own name. she is here, still architecting her own crypt, in her kingdom still called kush. she is also in egypt, invading their roman authorities and claiming the land. she will not let the romans go south, get more of the continent. After all these years, it astounds me, is she still fighting this noble fight? She is always fighting, the boy says. as all of the dead are.
They must be restless beneath their breastplates, those poor and early souls, struck down by a poverty of modern memory—who but Sudan remembers them—their brittle shoulders, collarbones, dismantled by grave robbers, treasure hunters. They do not go naked into death but lately are disrobed. Their fingers, stripped in turn of shine and honor, now point down into the yawn of desert ground where bones groan. There is no more elegance, no empire. Is this the music you hear, Sudan, when the dead are huddled like refugees in the basement of the largest pyramid, this thronging for their treasures?
She is not sleeping, Sudan says, the famous queen Amanishakheto. she never sleeps without her jeweled armband. She subsists on scarab beetles, their iridescent guts, and the praise poems still scratched into the surrounding stones. I am looking for her shield and signet rings in Berlin, I want to recollect the glint of her commanding hand. I feel she is waiting for me to ensure her ornaments still exist as she does. The guide at the Egyptian Museum tells me there is not much spectacular about the Nubian exhibit. No queen’s gold, no ivory hairpins or makeup palette. Little grace, even though her name is in the exhibition text, no glamour. I hope not to forget her, Sudan, but her evidence is taken and appraised, put away in cellars. Are her jewels safer beneath Berlin than in the bombed tombs they are stolen from? The queen is not sleeping but she is not here. Instead, I meet a stele of her, her profile slashed into the stone slab. An inscription displayed in cursive Meroitic is without translation, but in its slants I read a stark anger. Is this a death poem, a war poem, a miscarriage poem? Anger slants out of her carved left eye. It would reflect my own anger were the queen and I separated by glass. But she is exposed in the dark and empty museum room.
History is transparent to Sudan, he looks through her at every rape, every burning, every flood. He sees all this in the present tense, it is happening here and now, the dead numbers rising in a curved graph, they pile higher than the pyramids. This part some of us remember, if we remember Sudan at all. Death into death, is that not his nearest name to us? All eyes on him, all lies—we prefer forgetting. But Sudan cannot forget. History can conceal the crimes no more. The Arabs will come to collect his bread in the morning, the West will refuse him water for tea in the evening. Sudan is left with time-bombs for dinner. Hunger becomes his ugly, undying dictator.
Over one hundred thousand Sudanese could die of hunger by the end of this month. Children and mothers. The men mostly dissolve in gunpowder and national ruin. But hunger. In the present tense, which is where Sudan lives, and where I must dig out my research to plant this archive of a dream. Hunger, I must not forget hunger. In every crevice of my hours, it ripples over each thought, one way or another, never wearing the face of death. But in this actual moment: to lose against and die of hunger? I must pen a monument to the horror. So many souls, poor Sudan, he eats them all, every last famished denizen of the Land of the Blacks. Otherwise they wander riteless, finding no religion nor rendezvous with their gods and kings. The boy either way stays hungry.
Take me with you to Meroë, Sudan. If you starve there I shall starve too, I shall keep a visceral memory. Take me to your own pyramid, among the smaller ones, where the Kushite children gather to play games, not knowing which edge of life they skip on. Do those younger ones still enter through here, vital joys in heart, notions in mind of ruling a land of their own? I want to remember your strengths, Sudan, and the fires that you keep. Loud as a nation, you fight off the despot until your protest for peace is wrested by generals. The raw metal, earth-deep fight in you is deathless. But History does not report this. All we remember is lifelessness: the war, how your temples cast shadows of doom, your milk runs dry and motherless, your honey hardens, and all your screaming women cry—in birth and death—out of hunger.
Sudan has not spoken for a long time. His gaze is turned from me, is he bored of my acute guilt, my desperation? I am a liar and a disciple of History. But he has something to tell me. Famine overwhelms the catacombs and many souls now forage the sands of Meroë. In the desert haze they all look alike, sucking on the same scorpion. Sudan pours me a coffee, hot in the hot night, he cannot drink so I do not drink. We breathe in the dead around us, the desert, the drink. It is dark inside the dream. I have had infinite deaths, the boy finally says to me. But many have been gallant, too.
Not every time the gunshot burnt-up hunger-struck death tolls. sorry for you sudan all eyes sorry to be you is not my only story. i also cry when my queens die, i cry for months in poetry and relief paintings of gods, carrying my grief like a stone slab down the pyramid hallway. my craftsmen engrave her valiant memory, my beauticians adorn her with timeless national treasures, i decorate her bandaged eyes in the style of the present tense. my queens are put to sleep with pride. this is not the same for history. when she dies there is no one who remembers, no door for her to pass through, no rest, no remainder. she goes quietly like a passing light, taking all tenses with her. then i in this past life can continue, out of the memory of songs, to meet the future. the doors to the pyramids are open and uncrowded, doors within me leading back to a green desert, giraffes grazing on neem branches, and elephant calves.
Sudan’s voice is fading fast, as the first sighs of dawn draw near Berlin. I doubt I will see him again. But I will not forget him. I will not forget you, Sudan. The boy hears me, turns around. He looks so strong and so tired with his dark eyes hooded from the sand. Here is something to write about history, he says, with the final fire of his voice. she will die one of these days, in the present tense, and not hide me anymore. history will die and i will still be somewhere here. Weird shell of a boy, Sudan. He keeps his ancient eyes on me, walking backwards into the desert.