To Bear Time: On Sudan’s Long Endurance

The war in Sudan has displaced millions and cast a shadow over the country’s future. Against these odds, the spirit of popular struggle endures in ‘minor’, indeterminate scales of social and political action.

‘And even if the City falls and one of us survives, he will carry the City inside him. On the roads of exile, he will be the City.’

— Zbigniew Herbert, Report from a Besieged City, 1982.

‘Run. People are coming. They must not catch us here / Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.’

— Gwendolyn Brooks, A Lovely Love, 1960.

‘Stone is a shoulder on which to bear Time / with trees formed of tears and ribbons and planets.’

— Federico García Lorca, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, 1935.

Because the light takes on a lacquered quality—it shifts, retreats, intensifies—the top half of the photograph appears, at first glance, closer to a painting. What the camera might gain in detail or focus, the painter’s eye readily foregoes, allowing the scene to tremble and condense with activity. In the lower half, where people are gathered, the light is more even, colours richly but softly contrasted. Yet it is, all of it, a photograph. Dinan Alasad, a writer and statistician, shot it in her hometown, Khartoum, in 2021, three years after the December Revolution ended the suffocating 30-year regime of Omar al-Bashir. It had a powerful effect on me when I first saw it and, since the war in Sudan began in 2023, I keep returning to it. One reason for my fascination with this photo is how the image seems composed of two halves. Halves which—with the fence serving as a border—appear in clear, but not unsettling, juxtaposition. On the one hand, the sharply twisting branches and dense foliage of the trees offer a glimpse of abundant, untamed natural life. On the other, we see a miniature, everyday scene of urban life where the landscape is flat and arid, exposed to constant treading. 

While the trees evoke deep, geologic time, the temporal frame of the gathering is necessarily much shorter, not just because the lifespan of trees far outlasts that of humans but because the space itself lacks any real (permanent) structures—it is little more than a roadside, it seems. No sign marks the parameters of its use, nor indicates how many uses it might be put to at any given time. As we see in the photo, it is at once a place of prayer, a venue for discussion, and the present location of a food vendor’s shop. It is, that is, otherwise nondescript, taking the shape of whatever needs people bring to it and whatever they might leave behind. As such, the gatherings are makeshift, often unplanned, tangential. These two scales of time, a rooted perennialism and the inchoate lived present, intersect in the photograph, emphasizing the roadside as a locus of spatial and temporal indeterminacy. No conventions, protocols, or customs determine the exact function of the roadside or even its precise margins. It is bordered, simply, by road...