The Metro: The silence around Sudan, and a poet trying to break it
Nearly 14 million people are displaced. The U.S. and the U.N. have both used the word genocide. Sudanese American poet Khadega Mohammed explains why that still hasn’t been enough to break through.
Khadega Mohammed waves the Sudanese flag at a 2021 protest for Sudan in Washington, DC.
Four years in, the war in Sudan has produced the largest displacement crisis in the world. Nearly 14 million people have been forced from their homes. Both the United States government and a United Nations fact-finding mission have called the violence a genocide, citing a coordinated campaign by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces against the Zaghawa and Fur communities of Darfur.
In the United States, the response has been quiet.
Khadega Mohammed has spent much of her life trying to say something about that silence — through poetry, community organizing, and her work at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, where she is the only Sudanese person and the only Black person on staff.
Born in Sudan, raised in Saudi Arabia, and resettled in the United States with her family in 2007, Mohammed is a spoken word artist whose signature poem, “Between,” opens the PBS AfroPoP documentary “Revolution from Afar.”
She joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to talk about the Sudan she remembers, the America she lives in, and the in-between where her poetry was born.
Hear the full conversation using the media player above.
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