KHARTOUM (2022)
“Who are you?” asked the Caterpillar.
“I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
I never walked in Khartoum, not even from one place to another. How I dressed and moved always betrayed an alienness, signaled my distance from the in-group, and contributed to the immediate wrongness of my being outside on any street.
One late night, just as I had locked my bedroom’s door to protect against the darkness wanting to seep through from the other shadowy, unlit rooms in my empty house, my boyfriend called with a surprise. He had heard about an underground Afrobeat party at a hotel in the Amarat district of Khartoum. I was exhilarated since I’d been wanting to party with my boyfriend—a complicated premise in Khartoum—and I was surprised that he had gone and done it. If it weren’t for the empty house, with one parent deceased and the other taking months-long respites from the dreariness, leaving my home at a quarter to midnight in Khartoum would have been hard to explain and hard to do, his last-minute surprise looking poorly thought out. My father, mother, and I would have considered the short notice and expectation to find my way in the middle of the night to be a supreme lack of consideration. But empty houses make for easy freedoms and easier yeses, so I ordered a taxi and got dressed.
The rain in Khartoum took center stage amidst the lives of Khartoum’s inhabitants, trapping us inside as it turned sand into mud, flooded streets and houses, and made the roads hard to navigate. Standing outside, I could see that the dusty streets had long turned into their signature sludge. In the taxi, I felt guilty and tense as I watched the driver navigate the mud, driving in a zigzag so his wheels didn’t sink. I watched him weigh the option of asking me which of my neighborhood’s roads were best to lead us onto the paved, arterial streets against his impression of me, and then let it go after glancing at me in the rearview mirror. We drove silently, the windows rolled down, our noses fixing for the petrichor, grateful that the moon had set its gaze on our muddy route. I arrived at the Himont hotel at half-past midnight, took my boyfriend’s hand at the door, and entered a bustling lobby full of young men (and the women that came with them). We stood under golden chandeliers, one larger and more entrancing than the rest; I couldn’t help but notice the way it hung over a velvety abyss, dimly lighting a set of shadowy stairs that led to a lower level of doors that held secrets. I looked at my boyfriend next to me, my cheeks flushed, my hand feeling warm in his.
We crossed the lobby to a garden with an outbuilding the size of a small greenhouse. Inside, a DJ played Afrobeat while a small crowd braved the strobe lights. We took cues from our environment and danced without speaking. There was something about being outside that made us develop our own language of touches and glances. Together, with our bodies, we traversed the miasma, navigating the cloudiness with slow smiles. Being outside in Sudan meant visiting other neighborhoods, taking trips to fruit farms, or drinking tea by the riverbank; regular outsideness in Sudan was Nile water and the burning sun, university campuses and the passenger seat of your boyfriend’s car.. But I wanted shades and shades of being outside. And this way was new. At this party, my boyfriend and I were outside, somewhere we were not supposed to be, at something that was not supposed to be happening.
We were intoxicated at the sight of other couples there. Look, they’re like us! we told each other with dreamy eyes. He liked seeing people in love that wanted to show it and enjoyed when a love expressed itself loud, like the stink of a marijuana joint. But I saw a perversion in the women’s presence here; we had to relinquish control over our public perception to enter such a space. In this space I could grin and dance, but it was not easy to be bold. The other women danced tucked into their men’s shoulders, their best bet to just get lost in the moment. I looked at every couple and thought, Who must he be for her to agree to come outside with him? Maybe it’s sexist, but that’s what I thought.
Tiring of dancing, we left the hotel around four in the morning, walking on the wet asphalt outside. Amarat was a beautiful, older neighborhood in Khartoum that I’d never explored. That night, the streets were fresh and wet, how cities get after rain. Invisible to the citydweller’s eye during the day, the asphalt shone at night, glistening with breathtaking colors of no note: the brightest blacks, the deepest grays. I let go of his hand and walked to the middle of the intersection. Standing beneath sleeping traffic lights, I felt the expanse of the city. I felt that big, beautiful feeling and knew I was either the god of this street or its visiting angel. In that brief swatch of night, the city had finally emptied itself for me, both of folk and of taboo. I could jog or amble, study the ground or crane my neck to the sky, because the city had dismissed its regulars, cleansed its streets, and prepared itself for me, for my tortured walk.
In the taxi back home at 6 a.m., I couldn’t keep my eyes open long enough to get home. I caught the driver watching me in the mirror as we crossed the bridge over the Nile, the morning light hitting the water and splintering across my eyelids, but I didn’t even have the lucidity to smile mysteriously, to play into his wondering about where I’d been or what I’d been doing.
Having a secret to confess makes you dynamic in the world, instead of flatly, plainly, human. That 4 a.m. walk was a secret between me, the hotel in Amarat, and my city, and it had acted upon me, giving me an aura of secrecy that made me become a window others wanted to crawl through.
NEW YORK (2023 and 2024)
After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
In New York, the torture was different: more gluttonous, perverse and hedonistic. I felt dazed and out of it on my first trip; I experienced an intense, greedy curiosity unlike ever before. I wanted to crawl into windows and have a rude little peek into everyone’s lives. I would stand under my sister’s building and watch people walk by. Some of them had such open faces, I felt I could guess their names, occupations and last heartbreaks, as if their lives were a movie playing over their faces. Every clue was a compulsion. But at the same time, I could never focus: there were too many windows, too many doors, too many roofs.
I’ve been to New York twice in my adult life. The trips were only a year apart but in between them I had moved to Istanbul and found a life there. In Istanbul, I learned to walk outside in new ways. I had never experienced walking as the primary user of a street. I never connected to walkable cities; I tended to be a little jumpy, and I hated the feeling of being exposed to the world, which I felt in New York. Then I realized a walkable city to me was one made for me first, cars second. In a walkable city I could stagger down the middle of the road. In Beyoglu, in Besiktas, and in Moda, taxi drivers and motorcyclists wove torturously through throngs of people walking languidly down the middle of narrow streets. In Istanbul, I was not a human relegated to the sidewalk or a person manning a vehicle, nor was I waiting for an early morning whisper of rain to clear the streets so I could be outside. In Istanbul, I could transmutate to be anything native to its streets and I did—I’ve been a pedestrian walking, a car moving, a motorcycle signaling to walkers with ease, a rodent on the street flitting across its corners.
By the time I visited New York again, I had learned not to wear headphones so I could listen to the city; I stopped to look at everything that interested me and I touched everything that I wanted to touch. I had read A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros, which validated me as a slow walker interested in walking as an unlock, a download, instead of a form of travel. I developed a laugh both against and towards the world. Everything was funny: the way New York asks its every inhabitant “And how are you being yourself today?”, and the way every person answered that question. I developed an obnoxious habit of reading as I stood waiting for public transportation. I watched people with flowers peeking out of their tote bags like baguettes, a fight outside of a club (“I can tell you bitches not from here!”), a girl wearing a corduroy co-ord set I could just tell she’d been wanting to wear, and a perfect dog—no two, no three—sniffing and looking around. I walked by buildings that lured you in with their old bones and the promise of a hidden history. Everything was both beautiful and hilarious; I wanted to feel smarter than the city, like I could map its allure completely, like I had figured out the question at the center of it, but eventually I had to succumb to the truth: How many other questions were even really worth asking?
ISTANBUL (2024)
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
In the lucidity of our collective loss, the sentiments of Sudanese people who survived the war the year before and were displaced became more romantic. The same photos that my acquaintances used to post online to endearingly point to Khartoum’s many problems—the muddy roads, the rainy autumns, the flooded streets, the broken brick piled up on corners, the garbage strewn here and there—they would post again to point to the beauty of all we had lost. With intense yearning, we could now feel these photos, the jutty rocks and shards of broken bottle-glass, still sharp underfoot despite being worn down by the soft spongy sandals of so many boys and girls who walked there on any given day; we could smell them: the rain, the muddy roads, the wet pavement, the rubber of car tyres. My house, which before seemed to only catch pools and pools of shadowy emptiness, indicating loss to me with every unlit, empty room, was now lost itself.
Istanbul was a city of sounds and they penetrated the small apartment that I was renting to write and recuperate in after losing my home. After so much loss, I could do nothing in the world but lend an ear. I hated the outside, I didn’t fare well outside, I felt pulled from safety outside, and though I never went outside—I was never left alone. The city’s soundscape contained me with such unassuming ease; it never occurred to Istanbul that I was homeless, a passer-through, a fraud in that city, a person of no belonging. Since I had ears, sounds would ring through them. From within my rented flat the world outside played in front of me: men fought with their girlfriends on the phone underneath my windows, employees snuck smoke breaks outside my door, a jazz band played sets at the bar below every weekend, a cat took a liking to jumping on my windowpane with a thwock and became a nightly visitor. I was experiencing great difficulty leaving my apartment without extreme discomfort, yet life seeped through.
Istanbul was the first place I found after the war, the first place where I felt the outside flooding into my life again. But staying within the confines of my home for long, uninterrupted periods of time meant I was only visiting the outside with one of my senses, and this caused my inside/outside binary to collapse. I began to depersonalize myself and personalize everything else. I found myself feeling close to the creaking of the floorboards in my apartment, became familiar with the groaning of the wintered pipes, and fond of the nightly rumble of my erratic fridge. It was hypnotic to derive intimacy from the world without really being in it, and I lived in a state of bliss, suspended within Istanbul’s womb as equally as any of its sonic components. At first this felt inviting, like peering over your mother’s shoulder on a boring day to see a friend asking if you could come outside and play. But then came nights where I felt like I was sinking in that window, frail, weak and losing my breath. Neither a breeze nor a stone shifted outside. I couldn’t be enacted upon, changed, saved by an outdoors that I’d been sneaking bits of through my windows. I was undocumented as a convener with nature.
It is hard for me to be in the world and go outside without the whispering, the looks, the fear that my home might disappear while I’m outside. If the trick of trauma is to prevent me from downloading my own life, I’ve both succumbed to it and found perversely wonderful ways to subvert it. Each city presents me with a different kind of torture, a wrench thrown into the wheels of my imagination. Sometimes it is dark; oftentimes it is playful. The key to facing my torture in every city is to indulge, to feel entitled to crawl through people’s windows and ask them what they’re doing, to touch every brick and stone, to wiggle open hundred-year-old doors, to kick at decorative stones and lamp poles, to peer through fences into sports fields and basketball courts. Maybe this is my sense of intellectual superiority or maybe it is the newfound rat in me; neither acknowledge shut doors. There’s always a little hole—rat, rabbit or loop—to go through.
A year into my life in Istanbul, I’ve taken to throwing my trash out in the middle of the night, at two in the morning when no one is still out on my street. I make my way down the stairs of my first-floor apartment in my slippers and pajama shorts, stealing away into the quiet of the night with the shtuck of the building door’s electronic latch. I step outside my building and am released into an empty street like the breath of a sigh. Welcome, the pavement says, welcome, the windows say, welcome, the moisture in the air says. A gentle breeze whispers in my ear, touches my shoulders. I lift my arms up high and fling one bag of trash away, then another, and another. Free of others’ eyes, I peer upward at people’s windows and look at the breadth of their apartments. I make note that some apartments on my street, with their high floors and big windows, must have panoramic views of the Bosphorus water nearby. Am I allowed to be here? The question hits my body like a shock to my system, but my cotton pajamas sway in the breeze and so do I and the question floats away. Though it is time to return to the warm cave of my apartment, I feel a sudden yearning to stay here, outside, forever.
Ruba El Melik is a Sudanese writer. Her writing can be found in LOLWE, Sand Journal, Mizna: SWANA Lit + Art, and Acacia Magazine. She is the co-author of (Un)Doing Resistance: Authoritarianism and Attacks on the Arts in Sudan’s 30 Years of Islamist Rule (Andariya, 2022).
