Activist Emi Mahmoud Performs a Poem for Sudan

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Transcript

00:00Memories of my childhood live between the rings of sand around my ankles and the desert

00:06heat in my lungs.

00:08I still believe that nothing washes worry from tired skin better than the Nile and my

00:13grandma's hands.

00:15Every day I go to school with the weight of dead neighbors on my shoulders.

00:19The first time I saw bomb smoke it didn't wind and billow like the heat from the kitchen

00:23hearth but it forced itself on the Darfur sky smothering the sun with tears that it stole

00:28from our bodies.

00:29The worst thing about genocide isn't the hunger, the murder, the politics, the government

00:33paid soldiers that chase you across borders and into camps.

00:37It's the silence.

00:39For three months they closed the schools down because people like us are an eyesore.

00:43So the first month we took it.

00:45The second we waited.

00:46The third month we met underneath the date palm trees drinking up every second our teachers

00:50gave us turning fruit pits into fractions.

00:52On the last day they came with a message, put them in their place.

00:55We didn't stand a chance, flesh was never meant to dance with several bullets so we prayed

00:59for the sun to come and melt daggers from our backs.

01:03I hid underneath the bed that day with four other people.

01:08Twelve years later and I can't help but wonder where my cousins hid when the soldiers torched

01:12the houses through the bodies in the wells so if the weapons didn't get you the poison would

01:15and sometimes they didn't want to use bullets because it would cost them more than we did.

01:20What does it matter?

01:21I've seen sixteen ways to stop a heart when you build nations on someone's bones.

01:26What sense does it make to break them?

01:27In one day my mother choked on rifle smoke.

01:30My father washed the blood from his face.

01:32My uncles carried half the bodies to the hospital and the rest to the grave and we watched.

01:37For every funeral we planned there were sixty we couldn't.

01:39Half the sand in the Sahara tastes a lot like powdered bone.

01:43And when the soldiers came, our blood on their ankles.

01:49I remember their laces, scarlet footprints on the floor.

01:54I remember waking to the sign of hatched voices in the night etched with the kind of sorrow

01:59that turns even the loudest dreams to ash.

02:02Our parents came home with broken collarbones and a taste of fear carved into their skin

02:07and it was impossible to believe in anything.

02:09Fear is the coldest thing in the desert and it burns you.

02:13Bows you down to half your height and owns you.

02:16And no one hears you because what could grow in the desert anyway?