From Beirut to Khartoum, the Arab world is changing beyond our recognition

By: Nesrine Malik / The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com

In recent months, I experienced a grim ritual every time I met people from several Arab countries. It was a kind of mutual comfort and information. How are things with you? Where is your family? I hope you are safe. I hope they are safe. I hope you are well. We are with you.

There is a comfort in this, but also a sense of embarrassment. Comfort, because the words are sincere, while solidarity is unbearable in its seriousness. Embarrassment, because the magnitude of what many people are experiencing is too great to be contained in those words. Everything is described by the trauma of the survivor, but also by the disintegration of the knowledge that the disasters that are destroying our nations have brought the distances between us closer.

At the center of it all is Palestine – an open trauma that haunts these interactions. A silence has fallen where before there was anger and shock. Lebanon is added to this. Before the ceasefire, a Lebanese friend told me that it was a strange feeling to think that she might not have a place to return to any time soon. "Horror," said another when I asked her about her family's situation in Beirut. Then we left this topic.

At the same time, Sudan, for a year and a half, is in a merciless and incomprehensible war. Even in the occupied West Bank, almost every Palestinian I met asked me about Sudan; their sensibilities about the war there are carved out of their experience. “It's such a shame,” one man told me, “[and] so unnecessary. It is always our leaders who want to fight, never the people". Wherever it takes place, it feels like a single war, the causes of which are complex, but the consequences for those who suffer are simple. We are all in familiar trouble.

If we broaden the perspective, the picture in the Arab world looks bleak. Big and small fires are burning everywhere. Many countries – Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Syria – are either torn apart by ongoing low-intensity conflicts (Syria is escalating again), or suffering through humanitarian crises.

The consequences of recent years are shocking. Not only in terms of deaths, but also displacement. Scenes of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese fleeing the fighting in recent months have been repeated across the region. Inheritance is a painful odyssey of movement, fragmentation and precarious displacement. Almost every Sudanese I know, inside and outside Sudan, has gathered with other family members in temporary circumstances, living out of a suitcase, waiting for the next time they have to move again. And, they are lucky, safe from ethnic cleansing and starvation in other parts of the country.

Another consequence, less pressing when talking about life and death, takes place in the background. Great historical cities are being destroyed and a process of wiping out civilizations is taking place. All UNESCO world heritage sites in Syria have been damaged or destroyed. The Great Mosque of Omar in Gaza, which dates back to the fifth century and has been described as the "historic heart of Gaza", has been demolished by the Israel Defense Forces. The ancient city of Sana'a in Yemen, inhabited for more than two thousand five hundred years, has been classified as "at risk" since 2015. This year, in Sudan, tens of thousands of artifacts, some dating back to the Pharaonic era , have been robbed. Cities can be rebuilt, but heritage is irreplaceable.

Even stable countries, such as Egypt, have not escaped this cultural sabotage. Heritage sites are being destroyed to make way for urban development by a government rushing to rebuild Egypt to fit a monoculture of military rule. There is a metaphor in this that applies to the entire region. For the sake of entrenching power, the political elite is willing to vandalize identity.

Even in my mind I feel the cultural frameworks are blurring as the physical architecture is disappearing. And, along with it, many other things are being hidden - the feeling of rootedness, of continuity, of the future. I look at my children and feel the chill of the realization that the topography of Sudan and the Arab world, as I experienced it through literature, art and travel, is something they will never know. For them, the bonds that bind them to their parents – as they bound me to mine – are being severed.

I know I sound like a nostalgic woman now. Singing the blues of exile, idealizing the past that was always far from ideal, I'm ready to annoy a new generation by telling them that it wasn't always like this. Because I used to be that younger generation, listening to old people drinking Marlboro and tea, telling me how bad it was that I didn't experience the golden age when we studied medicine for free in Baghdad, when we went to the theater in Damascus , when we were waiting for the activist Malcolm X in Omdurman. When we had giant publishing houses and pan-Arab solidarity. I thought to myself, well, but isn't it your failure too? Because your generation failed to translate this into a political project that would not be hijacked again and again by military men and dictators.

When the center of political and economic power in the region is shifting towards the oil-rich Gulf states, which are focusing on emphasizing hyper-consumerism and modernity, I hear myself saying, "It hasn't always been this way." It hasn't always been a fashion show like Lebanese designer Elie Saab's in Riyadh last month that dominated social media with videos of J-Lo and Céline Dion belting out their hits for local and global influencers. Or an interesting sporting event and glamor extravaganza, while orgies of violence unfold elsewhere. It has not always been this desire to define our status by proximity to superpowers, nor this thirst to demonstrate our global taste.

I am more tolerant now of those older people, to whom I also want to say: You didn't know how good you had it. I now realize that what I considered their failure was something much bigger, much more connected to the global and domestic alliances that prevented a popular uprising from emerging or suppressed it when it did break out. Each demonstration was met with opposition through mediators.

An Iraqi friend recently gave me some comfort about Sudan. She told me that Baghdad was starting to feel normal, for the first time in 20 years. Things were far from ideal, but there was a chance that after a few decades there would be an opportunity for a fresh start. And, perhaps the best you can hope for, is a fresh start rather than a rehashing of the past. Meanwhile, the only thing that can be said to friends and strangers, all now compatriots, is that: I hope you are safe. I hope you are well. We are with you. /Telegraph/