I’ve tried to write this so many times.
And every time, my hands shake.
Because how do you describe what no one should ever have to see?
How do you find words for a country being torn apart,
while the world pretends it can’t hear the sound of it breaking?
I’ve watched fragments of lives I can’t unsee.
People burying their own selves. Alive.
Faces that still look straight into the camera, as if asking the person behind it:
Will you let them kill us?
Mothers holding what remains of their families.
Children wandering through streets where even the dust smells like blood.
Streets drenched in blood that can be seen from space.
Al Fashir Sudan - Seen from satellite
And it’s not just the deaths that breaks me.
It’s the laughter.
The sound of men who find amusement in other people’s pain.
The cruelty that doesn’t even bother to hide itself.
There are places in Sudan now, where the ground itself remembers.
Walls, whisper what was done there.
Houses have become graves.
Entire families disappear, before their names are written down.
And still, people search.
Fathers call through the ruins for daughters who no longer answer.
Sisters hold photographs like prayers.
Mothers speak to the wind because even hope deserves to be spoken aloud.
The silence surrounding them feels heavier than the rubble.
We are witnessing a genocide in daylight, in real time
and somehow, we are still debating whether to call it that.
But we will not soften this.
We will not look away.
And we will not let Sudan vanish into silence.
Because silence is complicity.
And silence is what the killers count on.
Sudan does not need pity.
It needs witnesses.
It needs voices that will not tremble when they say its name.
If justice won’t come from the powerful,
then let it rise from the rest of us. From the ones who refuse to forget.
From the ones who refuse to be quiet.
If the world’s heart has gone quiet,
then let ours be loud enough to break it open.
For every hour that Sudan bleeds.
Hafsa