A legal alien

I remember feeling sadness for the singer, the first time I heard the song “Englishman in New York” by The Police. I could picture him so vividly in my mind: tall, pale, British, and proud. His love for adventure brought him to the crazy streets of New York, but loneliness created an urge in him to rearrange the same blue, red and white colors forming the flag that viciously blurred his vision and all his senses, but one – the sense of belonging.

My identity was something I never took for granted; I felt proud that I got to choose my identity. I am not Sudanese by birth, and back in the 1980’s mothers were not allowed to pass on their nationality to their children. As a result, I was a child of nowhere, with no land to claim as my own. No skin tone or local dialect could make me abide to the norms that ruled my less – or perhaps more – privileged peers. There was no flag to blur my senses.

I watched as my mother fought to secure an identity for me. Initially, I was irritated and confused: why limit oneself to one place when one can be free? But as I grew older, singing the national anthem every morning in school gradually became the best part of my day. I experienced a toxic mixture of maternal and romantic feelings towards just about everyone around me. I materialized the concept of a country in my head, and, in the process, fell in desperate, hopeless love with it.

I was more Sudanese than ever – or so I believed. But as I scrolled down the list of countries on an online application, I came across the name ‘South Sudan’. I had never actually seen those words together in a country list before, and I found myself smiling. But I also felt detached, apathetic. There was no such thing as South Sudan in my vocabulary, and I eyed the name as if it was a sick joke, a political scam that did not affect us – the Sudanese people. I scrolled down the list to Sudan, and felt the same detachment. Before I could start to soothe my consciousness with some absurd justification, I remembered: I was born in South Sudan, a foreign country. I now lived in Sudan, which also felt like a foreign country. It was no longer a sick political joke, but reality. It was then that I felt the impact of that crooked line they drew into my childhood map; a line so brutal and sharp that it cut through my home, my identity, and every aspect of my life.

Much like a clean, sharp surgical incision, there was no pain, no blood, and no tears. Not initially.

I neither belong to the south, nor to the north. In my state of confusion, I must now start a new internal, and perhaps eternal, search for identity.