In Search of Our Mother’s Land

We are from South Sudan, the youngest country in the world. Our country is uniquely abundant, corrupt, beautiful, and marred by both internal and foreign violence. We are from 64 tribes carved out of our lands by British hands and forced into a unified identity by Arab reductionalists. We are from thousands of different clans and family lineages silenced by a six-colored flag. We are from the Nuer tribe;, we are from the Drinka tribe;, we are Kuku, Bari, Shilouk. We have our own languages, but somehow all speak English or Arabic. We spiritually cherish, all of us, the Blue and White Nile that flows in between our communities. We are proud and stubborn. We play card games and cheat when the children’s heads turn away. We play football and lie while shouting ‘wallahi.’

We love our country, truly, but we are leaving our lands in waves. We are deserting our country for any UN or IRC supported migrations out of Sudan with well over 2.4 million refugees displaced worldwide. Warsan Shire, a Somali poet said, “Nobody leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well… You only leave home when home won’t let you stay.”

Our home is not letting us stay. We’re not allowed on our lands, we’re not allowed by our waters, we’re not allowed to be with our elders. 

Why is the question that hangs barren and unanswered inside the arms of widowed mothers losing hold of their novel child soldiers. It hangs heavy like the burden of burning flesh and images of a life lost on a tree. Where is our promised peaceful paradise? 

They came first during the day. Arab merchants who moshed words between their teeth with a thick, brutal, and uncommon accent. They came companionably and cordially, asking for supper and henna. They left the next day for the peninsula with new slaves. They read us a book brighter than the afternoon sun, and while we drowned in God’s intemperate flood cycles, they came and stole the uprooted gold from its soil.

And then they came at night. They came with knives, ammunition, and guns. They came as ambition, greed, and violence. They came as British imperialists who claimed ownership of our houses. They came as diplomats with markers blind to tribal distinctions. They came as artists, dealing and stealing our history into 13.5×16.5 inch frames for foreign museums.

They came, settled, and we woke up in a stranger’s country.

Rebeca Athoch Lang is a South Sudanese refugee and former UN Women’s Rights Chairwoman for Ethiopia’s Zone F division. While fleeing the Second Sudanese civil war where over 2 million people died, she and her family walked for three months to find themselves at the border of a stranger’s country. 

“They [Arab forces] came during the night and burned the town down while we were still inside. We survived and my mom took my siblings and I [to] Ethiopia,” said Rebeca. “I was nine years old.” 

Although the Second Civil War has ended, her country still finds itself drowning in conflict and struggle. Today’s South Sudan continues to suffer from food insecurity, armed conflict, mass displacement, disease outbreaks, and wide-spread poverty, with tribalism as a foundational issue. Many of these reasons discourage a significant percentage of the South Sudanese diaspora, like Yarangel John, an American citizen, from returning. 

“I was born in America, but I’ve always felt close to my country. I want to return, but I’m afraid of what happens if there’s violence and we get stuck in it,” said Yarangel. “What happens then?” 

Where many are afraid to return, Rebeca is determined: “Violence happens everywhere, in every country. When the war comes [here], I will go to Kenya and stay with family and return when the war is over.”

Although the notion that people can flee during times of war imply an economic and nationalistic privilege many victims of war often can not afford, Although unintentionally, the phenomenon described in this response allows to explore the ethno-centricity of citizens in western countries. 

We, American citizens, often hold onto the news with wide hands for numbers to carelessly fall through, not realizing them as lives. We often see preschools and hospitals as precise geographical coordinates. We view countries in the majority world, as inanimate objects in an inexorable turmoil of oppression; we do not see ourselves in their struggles.

Rebeca and Yarangel reside in Seattle, WA, a city where, as of 2024, over 30,000 people are unhoused. They are both originally from South Sudan, a country with a high internal displacement crisis, and while both locales deal with masses of people without steady shelter, food sources, and in constant search for stability, the conversation around the state’s livability differs. South Sudan is dubbed ‘dangerous’ while the USA is exempt from serious considerations of the same label. 

In our imperial privilege, we exceptionalize the violence and disorder in our western countries, while ghettoizing majority world countries. 

We sensationalize children in Somalia holding onto AK-47’s, but grow silent when we hear its piercing sound in our classrooms. We stand against displacement, but watch as wealthy university students abruptly uproot Black and Brown families from their homes. We pity impoverished countries without water, while ignoring the over 2.2 million without running water and the 27% percent of Americans who can’t afford proper electricity. 

It’s cardinal that we reconsider how we understand violence in relation to western and non-western nations.The narrative has to change so that we dissolve the flimsy separation of western and non-western oppression. It’s time to let go of the idea that it is better to suffer here, than to suffer there. Suffering is an absolute experience; there are no countries to save, but rather people to aid. 

Maybe Warsan Shire is wrong. Maybe home is not the mouth of a shark. Maybe home is the water that houses the shark, the victim, and the deserter within a tight fetter of dependency.

Home is where you are brave enough to brace the storm. 

“I believe tribalism [in South Sudan] will end one day…When I was at the [refugee] camp, we all played together even though we were different tribes. We, South Sudanese, are good people with good hearts.. . It will take a long time but, yes, I have to believe one day it will end.” —Rebeca Athoch Lang