The war in Sudan broke out suddenly in April 2023, and around 150,000 people have died since then. The conflict pits the Sudanese armed forces against the Rapid Support Forces, which receive arms and funding support from the United Arab Emirates and carry out massacres whose bloody traces can be seen from space. This conflict has been buried under the rubble of today’s turbulent times. But for journalist and writer Nesrine Malik the war in Sudan is very present. Born in Khartoum 50 years ago, she moved to the UK at 20, where she developed her career, and is now a columnist on Caretaker. She explains how this affected her: “I felt very lucky to have a life in the West, but I had my home somewhere else, I had the best of both worlds, so I didn’t think much about my identity. When the war started I felt like I had finally arrived in the West, because I had nowhere else to go,” Malik says before taking part in a debate at the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (CCCB).
In the war in Sudan, as in Gaza or Ukraine, narratives play a primary role. The book with which Malik became known, We need new stories. Challenging the toxic myths behind our age of discontent (We need new stories. Challenging the toxic myths of our age of discontent; no Spanish translation), I wanted to explain past events, but it ended up being prescient. Published in mid-2019, the essay that opened the doors to the Royal Society of Literature analyzes how politics and economics, especially on the right, have fabricated myths presented as natural facts that have given rise to phenomena like Trump. The fact that then came the pandemic, a renewed rise of the ultras, brutal wars and a second Trump administration only confirmed their theses. If Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, considered that myths are so strong that the only thing that can be done is to give them new meaning, Malik believes that new stories must be created.
Ask. Where do these myths come from and why is it so difficult to overturn them?
Answer. In themselves they are not a bad thing, they serve us to organize society. The problem is when they become corrupted and lead a group to have a feeling of superiority, of exceptionality. Then begins the hierarchy, the racism, the confinement in the tribes. Everything we consider inevitable is direct. And the left must create its own stories.
Q. Is the creation of these stories an unconscious process?
R. Not from the ruling class, which is very aware and concrete. The amount of money that think tank The spending by the right to support these stories is enormous, especially in the United States. In universities it was already done in the 1960s. We progressives aren’t very good at this.
Q. Is it because they are less monolithic?
R. One reason is that we simply don’t have the kind of funds that the right has. By definition, those who want the world to be more conservative have an economic interest. The other is that the right always fights, even when it is popular and in government. He believes that progressives have conquered the cultural space, the social space and the space of values in general. There is a certain complacency on the left.
Q. What do you think of Zohran Mamdani’s victory as mayor of New York?
R. It’s a good example of how these new stories are very powerful. Fraternity, brotherhood and solidarity are as or more mobilizing than cruelty. Mamdani appeals to the identity of our shared experiences. In the past, progressives were wrong about identity, they brought it to representation: it takes a black woman in the White House or an LGBTQ representative in the State Department, to essentially incorporate it into the establishmentbut not to change it, just to be part of it.
Q. Who are Trump and the right targeting?
R. To everyone. His message resonates with people of all backgrounds, which is why the second Trump administration is so amazing; he has broadened the profile of those who vote for him. Provides easy solutions and a sense of superior status to others. Even if you are an immigrant, you are better than someone who just arrived. It is exciting because it breaks with tradition, with sober and abstract politics.
Q. Are teenagers today more right-leaning?
R. They tend to adopt positions that give them a feeling of certainty. They try to find their place in the world, they are the ideal customer. We fail them by not offering clear and convincing visions of brotherhood, kindness and solidarity, which can also be attractive. But adolescents are more sociable than adults, they go to school, they interact more with those who are different. Their politics cannot be right-wing and isolated like that of adults.
Q. What is the role of technology in myth-making?
R. Very relevant. The technocracy is also the billionaire class and has a class interest in maintaining the myths. And social networks are interested in making the myths of division and hatred, struggle and cruelty persist. They promote participation, provide traffic, advertising and profits. There is an entire mythological economy that traps us in virtual spaces with tools like loops in videos or scroll infinite. But few talk in person like they do on the Internet.
Q. How do myths work in extreme situations like the Gaza war?
R. One of the ways this genocide was worked out was to get people to question their own eyes and ears, to not trust their own faculties, which is incredibly powerful. From Zionism and from the right, death and famine have been questioned or denied. This form of communication, essentially fascist, is allied with technology and networks.
Q. Why does Gaza get more attention than Sudan?
R. The war in Sudan is not financed with Western taxpayer money, as is the case with Gaza. Gaza is an internal issue of Western countries, with governments complicit, and this is why people worry and protest more. The responsibility in the Palestinian case is global, Israel was created because of a European crime, the Jewish Holocaust. The case of Sudan, isolated for years, is different: it is not even a civil war, it is between two armies, and the conflict is not strictly linked to the West.
Q. Yes, there are connections via third parties, for example to the United Arab Emirates.
R. Yes, what is happening in Sudan is a recent development in global politics. The rich Gulf countries are starting to become small imperial powers in the region, strengthened by the example of the United States and its transactional vision of foreign policy, and by Israel’s impunity in Gaza.
Q. How do you feel, as a Sudanese woman, about this war?
R. It’s been two years and I still can’t believe it’s happening. It is an unusual and fast war. Imagine that fighter planes arrive, the airport is bombed and in the afternoon all the planes at Barcelona airport are burned. This is how it happened.
