An ordeal of the Sudanese body

The war in Sudan is also a war on the Sudanese body, reconstructing it as a site of violence and conquest  

I would like to conceive of the following reflections as part of a collective struggle of the Sudanese people as they grapple with comprehending the disastrous reality unveiled by the April 2023 war. Besides the daily struggle for survival in the face of gunfire, airstrikes, and bombardments, stands another challenge: recognizing what has been lost, preserving what has survived, and repairing what can be repaired. This latter challenge is what my following reflections aim to address. Yet, it is also fair to say that these reflections mark a phase in my recent preoccupation with the place allocated to Sudanese bodies within the dire situation of Sudan. By using the body as a focal point, in this article and others to come, I advocate for suggesting alternative standpoints to the current Sudanese condition, transcending the polarised discourses shadowing the conflict. The subsequent remarks are, at best, an open invitation to dwell on the catastrophic reality that has befallen Sudan, to bear witness, and to listen to stories of violence, loss, and resilience etched into the bodies of the Sudanese people.  

My departure point would be the assertion that it is beyond my aim to delve into the historical background of the ongoing conflict between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF), nor to provide a thorough socio-political analysis of the complex realities on the ground. Instead, I am more inclined to ground the following remarks on the following assumption: that for most Sudanese citizens, the fight against the Rapid Support Forces is an existential matter. Aside from the political rhetoric of the army which propagates the message that the RSF poses an existential threat to the Sudanese nation-state, I am more attentive to a micro-understanding of the term existential war. 

Drawing inspiration from the day-to-day challenges facing ordinary Sudanese civilians, I will trace some of the micro dynamics triggered by the current conflict, situated within the general framework that gives these dynamics their condition of possibility. Central to these dynamics is what I identify as the politics of othering and enmity, relentlessly at work during the conflict. It seems clear to me that the RSF is now perceived by the SAF and its supporters as an enemy, and vice versa. The mutual reconstruction of each side as other, enemy, and as an existential threat makes elimination the most popular political language in post-15 April Sudan.  

German academic and jurist Carl Schmitt introduces us in 1927 to his view that the function of politics is to make clear the distinction between two categories: friend and enemy. For Schmitt, such a distinction is an existential matter, in the sense that identifying the enemy forms a precondition for the longevity and safety of the self-defined here as the nation-state. In his book The Concept of the Political, Schmitt writes that this distinction cannot be wished away through goodwill, in that if a people “no longer has the strength or will to remain in the sphere of the political, [it] does not make the political disappear from the world.” In his typically Darwinian style, he continues: “Only a weak people disappears.” 

That’s why he positioned war at the centre of political practice, not as a deviation from it as thought of in classical liberal theory. He would probably nod along to Heraclitus’ maxim that “war is the father of all and the king of all.”  

One might add that in conditions of war, the relation of the self-versus- the other/enemy takes an existential form not merely in the sense that one must kill in order not to get killed oneself, but also in that not killing the enemy decisively determines the living conditions and safety of the person or the group that exercises that restraint. In other words, Sudan has slipped into a state in which its belligerents operate almost with an understanding that killing is synonymous with freedom, while not killing ensures one becomes bound within an oppressive system. An inexact parallel exists here between how Sartre formulated anti-colonial violence as liberatory in the Algerian context and how violence is used in Sudan. Though the situations are very different, one can imagine the foot soldiers of the RSF and the SAF looking upon one another’s corpses concluding as Sartre did that “there remain a dead man, and a free man.” The survivor Sartre adds “for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.”  

This explains the decisions of many civilians to join the Popular Resistance; if we don’t kill or at least be prepared to do so when necessary if the RSF invade and occupy our homes and neighbourhoods, we will have to live under their tyranny, enduring perpetual fear and vulnerability in the face of RSF oppression. Human rights organisations have made clear what the stakes are through documentation of the RSF’s conduct in Darfur and other places. The social and material conditions created by the RSF’s oppressive machinery recall Italian philosopher Georgiou Agamben’s concept of the “bare life”; a life reduced to its basic needs and lived near uninhibited violence and thereby “exposed to death.”  

What Agamben noticed is that under certain circumstances, political authority exercises an absolute power to declare what he calls a “state of exception”, which allows it, among other things, to suspend certain articles of the constitution and normal functions of the state, particularly those protecting individual rights. “The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity,” writes Agamben, whilst authorities claim to do so in the name of law and order. 

In Sudan, military executive authorities have similarly granted themselves the right to exercise complete sovereignty over civilian lives through intrusion, detention, investigation, torture, and killing and so on. When Abdel Fattah al-Burhan warned that the country faces “bondage and colonialism” and described the RSF as a “cancer that has infected the body of the state” he was laying out the stakes. In another speech last summer, he underscored the state of exception that Sudan was in saying: “there is no time for discussion now, we are concentrating all our efforts on the war, to put an end to the rebellion.” 

Yet, a remarkable detail must be considered when utilising al-Burhan’s analysis to comprehend the current human condition in Sudan. Observing the areas controlled by the RSF in the aftermath of war (such as the largest portion of Khartoum, Darfur, and Madani), a state of exception seems to exist outside any legislative power of the sovereign. In fact, the power exercised over civilian lives in these areas literally emerges from the ashes of the sovereign, indicating the absence of the state and the redistribution of sovereignty among non-state actors and militias. 

Let me elaborate more on the dynamics and how they relate to the condition of Sudanese bodies. Yielding to the RSF’s de facto authority apparently means either being incorporated into its horror-producing machinery or giving up the ability to defend oneself and loved ones against looting, killing, and other forms of violence. Ironically, for an ordinary civilian, the urge to resist the RSF - even peacefully - might also collapse against the high probability of getting killed.  

In the areas controlled by the RSF, survival is subject to such contingencies as the mood of the armed man holding you: this is the “bare life.” You may get killed simply because an RSF soldier did not like the way you look. For many of Geneina’s residents in West Darfur, where the RSF and its allied Arab militias carried out a hideous massacre against the Masalit tribe in November 2023, the ability to mask your skin colour, hair texture, and dialect became directly proportional to your likelihood of survival. It is your body, not your deeds or any other attributes, that has the greater effect on your survival prospects. In such circumstances, appearance, bodily and personal attributes are almost reduced to mere signifiers for an insider (us) or an outsider (them) ethno-political position.  

Even if we are to concede the RSF charge that it is fighting to demarginalise the periphery in the face of a centralised “ethno-state”, the way it operates reveals something more than a simple disparity between intentions and actions. The SAF leadership has often belittled and mocked Hemedti’s origins, but when linked to the daily dynamics within the areas which fell to the RSF, the claims of defending marginalised groups appear more like a discursive framework under which various forms of violence against civilians are exercised. They aren’t the liberators they style themselves as and certainly haven’t been received that way. 

For the RSF, the demarginalisation framework manifests as an ideology of vindictive conquest and retribution, within which ethnicity, residence, and socioeconomic status are identified to assess one’s proximity to privileged groups which enjoyed the patronage of the Sudanese state or have ties to it. Finding oneself outside that is categorically devaluing, making the person located within it – like non-Arab Darfurians, Arabs of central and northern Sudan, and many others – a justifiable target for the wrath of the RSF and its allied militias.  

Of course, the discussion over this issue can – and should be – taken further, but I feel obliged to set it aside to focus on locating the body within the social condition resulting from the RSF’s taking over civilian residences.   

In the face of this existential predicament, let us turn to the materiality of being, to its primary vessel, the human corpus socially constructed as the body. From my point of view, an important reason behind many Khartoum residents’ decision to flee, particularly their female kin, was the unutterable anticipation that their bodies might be targeted by RSF and their allied militias. The weaponization of rape by the RSF in the current conflict reconstructs the female body as part of the war zone. The female body becomes a means through which damage can be inflicted on the enemy as the distinction between civilian and combatant collapses. For many RSF affiliates on the ground, the female body of the other – defined here in terms of ethnicity, political affiliation, or merely residence – bears no moral obligation; it becomes a morality-free zone. 

It goes without saying that the body, in the sociological sense, indicates something more than the materiality of the corpus, forming a social institution that also includes non-material constituents (e.g. norms, traditions, perceptions, etc.). The female body represents an intense materialised and symbolic carrier of many patriarchal contradictions. This reality was hideously exhibited during the current war in Sudan. On the one hand, the rape of a female family member is deemed a fate worse than the death of all family members, including the assaulted female herself. Many Sudanese civilians had to grapple with this terrifying idea, while others were less doomed to experience it as a living nightmare. 

I recall a conversation with friends about the atrocities committed by the RSF during the current war in Khartoum. One recounted the heart-wrenching tale of a family of three members: a husband, his wife, and their daughter faced with RSF intrusion. Despite yielding to all kinds of looting and privacy violation, they were all murdered when the father resisted the soldiers’ attempt to sexually assault their daughter. Having shared the family’s tragic story, my friend added in grim relief that “it is better for them to die, if they surrendered to the sexual assault, the father would never be able to look his family in the eye, neither could they. It is better to die, even though they might still rape your family after killing you.”  

In a society where patriarchal conceptions of “honour” have a lot to do with regulating the behaviour and conduct of women, rape stands as something extraordinary, precisely because of the irretrievability of the things lost or broken when it takes place. Even death can be processed discursively – through heroism, martyrdom, or any other redemptive narratives. Rape, on the other hand, defies discursive resolution. The peculiarity of rape goes beyond the act of violation and the effects of stigmatisation, victim-blaming, and the internalised sense of guilt that often results. Rape interrupts the internal bonds within the family and disrupts the victim’s relationship with her own body. “Aggressors understand that this crime attacks individual and collective identity, social relationships, and status,” said Adama Dieng in 2017, who was then the UN’s Acting special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict. 

The seemingly inability of victimized family members to look each other in the eye marks the weight of rape on their sense and perception of the world. With rape, the victim’s life, as well as her family’s, discover the psychological consequences of what it means to live a “bare life.” It’s a life where language fails to repair the agony of losing almost everything, including the integrity of one’s own body. A life where time is frozen in one moment of catastrophe, repetitively recurring as an irresolvable personal and collective trauma. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, we “cannot learn to forget” the past, however far or fast we run, the chain that binds us to that moment remains and grows taught as we try to break its grip. Rape represents a collective crisis as much as it is an individual tragedy. Understanding this dilemma is only possible when we recognize how the body functions as a means for communicating (with), inhabiting and being in the world.  

For RSF fighters, the sexual violence they have perpetrated operates according to a certain capitalist logic. As the bodies they’ve violated accumulate, it adds to an economy of enmity within which the maximum loss and pain inflicted upon the other brings the self-closer to maximising its final profit from the war. Many RSF soldiers appeared on social media showing off the valuables they have looted from civilian homes, while others tend to hang female jewellery on their guns. The symbolism of this gesture shouldn’t be dismissed as another example of their brutal and vindictive chauvinism. 

Their use of rape as a weapon of war should be situated within this trend, as the female body is integrated into this economy of violence. Contrary to the victims for whom rape represents an ultimate loss, many RSF affiliates experience rape as a victory and sovereignty achieved over the other. In accordance with the logic of armed conflict, weakening the enemy forms a precondition for increasing the power of the self. Tragically enough for Sudanese citizens, the dialectic of weakening/gaining strength is often channelled through the body, exercised in the form of sovereignty achieved through violence. Due to the unfolding calamity of the current conflict, new and disturbing images of the Sudanese body are now prevailing, taking the form of displacement, starvation, torture, death, terror, and many others. Each image bears the burden of a dreadful story that ought to be heard, challenged, and learnt from. Whether we like it or not, the future of Sudan is now tied to these images, to our ability to see through, and beyond, them.