Resisting Despair and Hopelessness Among the Displaced: Drama as a Psychological Therapist
Mohamed Ghulamabi
At the Sudanese Army General Command area, when diverse groups of Sudanese men and women gathered with their hopes and dreams for change, the scene appeared to me as a rare historical moment worthy of documentation in the annals of history from various perspectives.
It is true that the December revolution was a child of technology par excellence. Through the activists’ phones, rallies were planned, mobilized, and coordinated before they materialized on the ground. Yet, when the revolutionaries reached the sit-in area at the General Command, the scene was far grander than what mobile phones could capture. I remember telling the writer and novelist Ahmed Abu Hazem, author of “January, House of Winter,” which won the Tayeb Salih Award for Creative Writing, “This rare gathering of Sudanese people is a novel waiting to be written.” His reply was: “Yes, but it is a novel that has yet to end.” Abu Hazem was right. Time has turned, and after that profound unity at the General Command, Sudanese people now find themselves displaced—either internally displaced or refugees outside the country—and the narrative remains open-ended, as he put it.
This article revisits the role of the arts in the equation of today’s war, taking theater as a case study, while exploring the efforts of some dramatists in healing the wounds of displaced individuals in various shelter centers.
The story begins with director Rabie Youssef Al-Hassan, who recounted: *“With the outbreak of war in Khartoum, we organized a workshop in Wad Madani, bringing together dramatists from the capital and the regions to exchange experiences and dispel the untested assumption of estrangement between Khartoum and regional theater practitioners. The workshop culminated in a theatrical production titled ‘Barricades’ (Mutaris), which we toured in displacement centers in Wad Madani, performing it at the Ministry of Culture and Information’s cultural hall and the Lawyers Union headquarters. The show was set to be staged in more locations until Madani was overrun in December. We also produced a radio drama for Radio Dabanga titled ‘Mountain of Change,’ written and directed by me, featuring artists from both Madani and Khartoum. In collaboration with UNICEF and Save the Children, we presented ‘Naima is Pregnant,’ directed by Atef Al-Bahr, while I directed ‘Our Happy Family Magazine.’”
Currently in Port Sudan, Rabie Youssef and his colleagues have performed over 15 theatrical productions, touring multiple shelter centers across the city. Rabie explained: “We staged performances for different social groups—women, men, children, and the elderly—focusing on themes of rejecting hate speech, promoting coexistence, peace, mental health, and gender issues. On the stage of the Writers and Artists Theater in Port Sudan, we presented the play ‘Husmni’ (which means ‘Let’s Overcome and Move Forward’ in the Beja language) and the play ‘Silence,’ in collaboration with the UN Population Fund. My latest work was ‘The Journey,’ where artists performed on stage in their native languages, including Beja, Hausa, Tigrinya, Nubian, and Arabic.”
Director Sahir Mustafa also documented their theatrical work in detail. He highlighted their productions starting with “The Tale of War and Peace,” written and directed by Atta Shams El-Din, featuring Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud, Nizar Gomaa, Omnia Fathi, Amin Shabo, and Aladdin Raihan. This was followed by “In Times of War” by Kuwaiti writer Abdulrahman Hamadi, adapted by Osama Maksab and directed by Mohamed Osman, performed by the Habshatkat troupe.
Maksab himself authored and directed other plays, including “The Edge” and “This Way and That,” also performed by the Habshatkat troupe. Other notable productions include “Najat” by Mahmoud Talib, directed by Qasim Al-Arabi, and “Listen, Abdel-Samee’,” written by Abdelkarim Barshid, starring Qasim Al-Arabi and Omnia Fathi, and directed by Maher Hassan Said. Contributions were also made by artists such as Omnia Fathi, Atef Qatiri, Walid Al-Alfi, Ashraf Bashir, Faisal Hassan, and Mohamed Ahmed Al-Failabi.
A wide range of actors participated, including Abdel-Salam Jalloud, Ibrahim Khadr “Komk,” Mohamed Adam Kaza, Amin Shabo, Amir Ahmed Idris, Rifat Al-Sir, Naji Hawaya Allah, Amer Wad Amak, Naseeba Najm Al-Din, Mohamed Ahmed Al-Zaki, Radi Faiz, and Abdel-Ghaffar Khalid.
All these dramatists and their performances in displacement centers acted as an antidote to the loss experienced by the displaced. As the young theater director Rabie Youssef Al-Hassan courageously stated: “These performances were not only our chosen way to help the displaced escape their sense of fragmentation, turmoil, and loss, but they were also our personal outlet as artists—lifting us out of despair, frustration, and poverty into a state of psychological balance that we desperately need.”
