Mamoun Eltlib is a Sudanese poet and writer. Since 2006, he has worked as an author and cultural editor for several Sudanese newspapers and magazines. He is the author of three published books (Tinya: The Lust of Water in the Perception), The Beast of Wanderings and The Placenta), which contain both poetry and prose. He has contributed to the creation of several cultural initiatives. His latest project focuses on the possibilities of preserving Sudan's cultural heritage via a virtual museum.  He lives in Zanzibar, Tanzania.

(1)
A student was shot in the head, a bullet that had been aimed at him. They say you can't hear the bullet that kills you. If you can hear it, you've survived. I came to understand this logic recently, when I found myself under a hail of bullets and bombardments. I've also come to believe that the bullet that kills you belongs entirely to you, that it's yours alone.
The student was watching the demonstrations from one of the upper floors of the engineering faculty buildings. The police, who were surrounding the scene, fired - allegedly - into the air. But the air received nothing, and a student who wasn't even part of the events was killed, thus becoming the centre of the affair.
I was with a large crowd of students who had managed to break the siege imposed by the "anti-freedom police". We made our way down Al-Sahafa Street and the back alleys of Al-Dim, before being dispersed by the police, slipping through the fingers of the city. We continued through the alleys until we reached the Arab market, having grabbed onto the first bus we’d spotted.
Meanwhile, Afah, accompanied by a group of students, carried the martyr's body through the university, where a weeping crowd followed the funeral procession. One of them raised his fist and shouted: Allahu Akbar! At this moment, the slogan was inappropriate: it was that of the assassins.
Afah broke free from the group and leapt towards the man with the megaphone, who was wearing a smile completely out of keeping with the scene. He punched him in the face. The students tried to restrain him and pull him away, but Afah wouldn’t calm down, continuing to attack the man, until he tore his shirt in rage. Later, someone from the student dorm lent him a shirt.

(2)
The students' anger spread throughout the capital. Before this incident, there had already been another student killed at Nilain University. The University of Khartoum joined the organised movement, through mass speeches. Demonstrations broke out, the streets filled, and I naively believed that the regime was collapsing. 
We’d been confident that once we’d marched into the heart of the Arab market, this nerve centre of the capital, the citizens would join our uprising. But they greeted us with sympathetic smiles, sometimes encouraging, but always from the sidelines.
The students eventually returned to their campuses, after a bitter defeat at the hands of the population... even though, in reality, it was indeed the police who had dispersed us.

(3)
The students began a three-day sit-in, occupying the university campuses and declaring the universities free of all ruling party control. The humiliated students of the Islamic Movement implemented a ferocious plan: they sneaked in at night with their weapons and spent the night in the main compound, after the university guards - officers of the security apparatus - had allowed them to break university regulations, which prohibited sleeping on campus, as well as, of course, bringing in bladed weapons.
We had spent the night in Omdourman, our home, and on this grim morning we decided to head straight for the main campus. Back then, communications hadn't yet reached the mobile phone stage, and if, like me, you weren't a political organiser, information didn't reach you. The political organisation team knew that a trap had been set inside the compound. Caught up in the enthusiasm, I rejected Ofeh's suggestion that we first go through Nilein University to assess the situation, and shouted that everyone should protect the sit-in from early morning.
We walked to the entrance and, as we took out our student IDs, a rampaging mob of students attacked us. Ofeh managed to evade them, running off as fast as he could, but one of them threw his heavy body at me, yelling and screaming: "Guards, this man gouged out my brother's eye yesterday! Stop him, he gouged out my brother's eye!" People surrounded me on all sides, the acrid smell of their sweat making me feel sick. One of them said, "Come with us to the guards' office." On the way, surrounded by six people, one of them told me in a cynical tone, "Don't worry, everything will be fine, these are just routine matters and you'll get back to class." As I crossed the campus, shackled, in full view of the students, the groups from the political organisations looked away and pretended to ignore my fateful march. And the moment I was ushered into the offices of the university guards, the nightmare began to take shape.

(4)
I called him Adam. He was the first person I met when I walked in. He wrapped his huge, rough hands around my entire head then started rubbing my cheeks as if he were kneading bread. Then he pulled back slightly, suddenly spread his forearms like the wings of a huge bird and brought his palms down on my temples with all his might. I heard nothing more.
The next instant, Adam, the guards, the desk and I toppled over. I was on the floor. He grabbed me by the shoulders and straightened me up to make sure I wouldn't fall again, then began massaging my head again. This time, the effect was terrifying. It was then that I realized I'd entered a place beyond imagination. This was reality in the raw, in the form of hell.
They emptied my pockets. Adam grabbed my card, read my name, then pulled out a folded sheet of paper I knew well: damning evidence. It was a revolutionary poem, written by a friend in popular dialect, inspired by the great Communist-affiliated poet Hamid. Adam began to read it aloud with excessive emphasis that made the assembly burst out laughing. Then he said to me: "Are you a Communist? Those are communist poems, my friend. Take him away." He had the face of an elephant. And the body of an elephant. My head reached his belly. He pushed me out with his hand, saying, "I’ll see you later." A patrol of plainclothes officers immediately picked me up and led me out a back door, where their tinted vehicle was waiting. They threw me violently onto the front seat, slammed my head between my knees and blindfolded me.
I knelt down to receive my first offering: a fragment of hell. A tiny ember placed on my outstretched tongue, just enough to give me a glimpse of what the daughters and sons of this country had endured and still endure. What happened to me that day was nothing. A single day, which began early in the morning and ended around midnight. But that day was a window onto a world of stories: stories of prisons and torture, told through the voices and eyes of my friends. It's a life that imprints itself on a human being. Sometimes it crushes him. Sometimes, it drives him to madness.

(5)
When the blindfold is removed from my eyes, a unique scene is revealed; starting with the reception desk, where my name is registered with others queuing inside the small building. We enter under a hail of slaps, punches, kicks, insults and name-calling. When I entered the small courtyard, open to a beautiful sky and bright sunshine, I didn't perceive them until after the darkness of the journey. I did not see them, and instead of indulging in calming meditation, I observed those who had entered before me, standing with their foreheads pressed against the wall. Behind them were executioners armed with rigid pipes, once buried underground to carry water and life, but now mercilessly falling on their backs - and later on mine. Before urging me to join the crowd, the man who had greeted me at the gates of this Islamic hell said to me: "Don't they tell you that if you don't fear God, you should fear men? Well, here, we don't fear God." The slaps rain down relentlessly, it's a ritual. Occasionally, the pipes come down on our backs, and questions are asked by unfamiliar voices just behind my ear. I'll never see their faces. For that matter, I'll never see anyone other than the interrogator Adam, a few executioners and a madman. They all live where some of us are taken: a dark office, as silent as a tomb. When my turn came, I discovered this chamber of silence - often explored by musicians - padded from within, so that neither the lowest notes of a bass, nor the most piercing high notes of a soprano, nor, of course, the deepest howls of pain could escape. After the torture sessions, Adam would come in and sit calmly at his desk, almost giving the illusion of a saviour, especially when he sternly ordered: "What's all this? Leave him alone, leave him alone. Come, my son, sit down. Why so much violence?" During his feigned interrogation, once the three tormentors had left and just as my body was beginning to relax, the door would suddenly open and the madman would enter, screaming hysterically, "Let me have this miscreant, this infidel, let me have him!" By the time he uttered these words, he'd already thrown me away from the "saviour" and was smashing the chair I'd just been sitting on, my body barely relaxed.

(6)
At the end of the night, when they realized that this "fake" kid, this boy who cried incessantly and screamed in pain, had no information to give them, one of them approached and said, "If you don't sign the commitment papers, you'll stay with us tonight, we'll fuck you, we'll rape you.You're already cute, and I've decided you'll be for me. "Where were the damn papers? I signed them after a terrifying hesitation. It was an undertaking not to engage in any further political activity and to cooperate with the authorities if asked to do so. For years, this sheet of paper floated in my mind, tossed about by the capricious winds of memory. Then they loaded me into their vehicle with tinted windows, as if I were one of them, accompanied by another inmate, a neighbor I never saw again. They threw me out of the vehicle, not far from my home. A young rickshaw driver took pity on my bruised and bleeding legs and picked me up. When I opened the door to the house and found my mother asleep inside, I crawled up on my hands and knees, climbed the steps to the roof, found a bed already made up and lay down on it without a second thought. I fell asleep immediately. At dawn, I woke up to hear someone sobbing beside me. It was Habib, my aunt's son, kneeling beside the bed, his face buried in the blood-stained sheets.

(7)
I spent a few days at home, unable to believe, each time I woke up, that I was no longer there. I was in shock, ashamed as I thought back to the countless stories glorifying the resilience of "men" in detention centers - we wouldn't hear about women until much later - and compared those stories to my own collapse, so swift, so brutal. I'd thought myself brave, but in the space of a single day, I'd cried, begged, pleaded, screamed... I remembered the silent room and thanked its soundproofing for keeping all that moaning and humiliation prisoner. Nothing had come out - not like those I remembered, the men who had endured days, weeks, months and years in the ghost houses and prisons erected in God's name. All that shame and indignity had remained locked up in that room, only to emerge twenty years later, in the lines of this book. I remembered that I had met an angel in the midst of this incessant darkness.Prayer was the only acceptable excuse to get a break from torture. The call to prayer was a blessing: all you had to do was raise your hand and shout, "I want to pray", and the torturers would burst out laughing: "You, pray? You, the communist, the infidel?" Then, eventually, they would agree. But even prayer was a pain: I couldn't put the soles of my feet on the ground, so I'd lean on my knees to sit during tachahoud. Just then, a kitten appeared from a dark corner. It was brown, tiny, barely more than a baby. It sat down in front of me, folding its tail around itself like a garment. It looked at me, and I burst into tears. At that moment, I understood what frightened me most: I didn't want to believe that the Sudanese - in particular - could commit such atrocities, with such methodical, meticulous cruelty. I'd always seen the human capacity for evil as a theoretical abstraction, but this kitten's mere presence brought me back to this chilling reality. Like him, this realization belonged to another world, a parallel world, almost palpable - it was right there, on the other side of the walls of that building, and it shone in that cat's eyes.

(8)
My resistance to the shock of the detention center was paradoxical and strange: I decided to return to Nilein University, where political activism was in full swing. At the gate of the old Faculty of Arts, I saw the madman from the detention center coming down the steps, dressed in smart civilian clothes. I immediately turned around and didn't slow down, as my heart was about to stop. Then, seized with anger, I turned around and went inside. I sat down among the students who had actually come to congratulate me! My confusion intensified until I finally understood that they considered me a hero. A dull nausea rose in my stomach, but I didn't puke my guts out. I took it upon myself to ask the question that had been tormenting me: "What about the commitments we sign?" One of them shrugged flippantly: "Nonsense, it’s just a piece of paper. You sign and forget." A week later, my aunt told me that a man was asking for me on the phone. It was an old black landline phone, with a numbered dial and a heavy handset from a bygone era. I picked up and heard Adam's voice on the other end: "Write down this number and call from the grocery store." The handset suddenly seemed even heavier. When I put it down again, my whole body tingled. So, hell wasn't over? Was this paper, this promise, real? My mind raced, replaying every word of the document in my memory, while my feet carried me mechanically toward the grocery store. I remembered the signature... Why had I signed the poet's name? I could have used my real name, the one on the official documents. What exactly did he want from me? I had no information to give, because I'd never been a political activist! I handed the trembling sheet to Seddik, the grocer, and he handed me his worn-out telephone. I listened to strange instructions, questions about figures to which I paid no attention. Then, at the end of the call, without really knowing why, I asked, "Can we meet face to face?" He paused for a moment, then replied, "Why not? Tomorrow, rue du Nil, in front of the Grand Hotel, at one o'clock. I'll be washing my car there." The call ended and I found myself thinking about water. The water that washes cars, that flows, mixed with blood and tears, before melting into the Nile. That night, I didn't sleep. I spent hours mentally writing and rewriting my speech to the security officer.

Also on Literatur.Review: Imaginary Lives in Sudan's War Zone by Leila Aboulela

(9)
That day, I didn't see the Nile. I turned my back on it and stared at the buildings, watching every car with tinted windows that approached the parking lot, worried. But no car came. He arrived on foot and ordered me to follow him. We entered a romantic restaurant, where he ordered a juice. I sipped mine. He clasped his huge hands together in front of him, stared me straight in the eye and said, "Tell me what you have to say." So I write down what I remember:
Adam, "Our Father who art in intelligence..."
What I'm about to tell you may seem foolish, unrelated to any political excuse, but it's the most sincere thing I can confess to you. Now that you know that I'm not an organized militant, that I don't hold any information, perhaps you'll understand why I'm telling you this: I'm a poet. He frowned, obviously surprised. So I continued my offensive:
I'm twenty-one today. If you think I'm going to deny my identity as a poet to collaborate with a regime that tortures and murders, as you did that day, then you can strike that idea from your mind. You're looking to kill a poet, not a student, not a politician. And you know perfectly well that no true writing can come from a soul that has betrayed humanity. Today, the poet's fate is in your hands and mine. If the price to pay is to return with you to your detention center, then let's go. Let it be done. But if you let me go, know that I'll never forget your mercy as long as I live.
As I finished, I felt the tears welling up. In fact, they were already rolling down my cheeks. Adam gave a mocking smile as he leaned back in his chair, then his face froze into a grave expression. There was an interminable silence. Finally, he settled the bill, stood up and said, "Farewell, poet."
I never saw him again.

The 2003 uprising is one of a series of peaceful student revolts against the Islamic National Front dictatorship, which turned against democratic rule in 1989 and ruled Sudan for thirty years under the leadership of General Omar Al -Bashir, until his regime was overthrown by a peaceful revolution in April 2019.