Taxes or Paperwork

Published in Minneapolis, Mizna is a literary magazine that showcases diverse Arab, Southwest Asian and North African voices. This story is a couple of years old now, but I’m afraid it feels as relevant as ever, painting an intimate portrait of the terrible guilt, anxiety and helplessness felt by those in the diaspora when their home is plunged into war. It’s powerful stuff, and I’m really pleased that we’re able to share it here.

The war breaks out two days before her final. She wakes up after an all-nighter. There are three calls on her phone, all from her mother. The WhatsApp groups are silent. The first sign that something was wrong. She finds out in pieces through the day, glimpses here and there from social media and Al Jazeera. The tears don’t come.

She is an ocean and a continent away, has been for three years now, and yet she finds herself here every single year. And for one brief second she is not scared, or angry, or beside herself with worry. She is tired.

It has happened often enough that she has a plan now. She calls her father first. He's the only one actually in Khartoum. Her mother is in Egypt, traveling with her grandmother to visit a specialist. They had left only a week before. He doesn't answer. She calls four more times before he picks up. The internet is weak, she can hear rumbling over the phone. He says that he’s fine. His voice betrays nothing and she tries to make hers do the same.

She calls her mother next, messaging her old friends and cousins while the phone rings. Some messages are replied to immediately, others are left straining, hanging.

Her mother has been busy all day. Calling, messaging, trying to keep track of everyone. There isn't just her father to think of. There are aunts and cousins, uncles in different parts of the country. People stranded at the airport as the planes on the tarmac are set ablaze. Her father messages asking about her exam.

He cracks jokes. He tells her that he is fine. He reminds her that she needs to submit the work permit application as soon as her grades are released. She hums, she knows that she will revisit this conversation at a later time. She thinks about translating the old adage about how death and paperwork are the only two constants in life. Wonders if it would be in poor taste when there are planes carrying bombs flying over him.

Is it paperwork? Or taxes? Aren’t taxes technically paperwork?

She finds herself here again.

She now has no home to return to. She will soon find out that this requires a lot of paperwork. There are visa applications and permits to fill out, fees to pay and specialists to consult. Staying is not just a matter of mobility anymore, there is no alternative.

There are a lot of emails to send. She goes to her final, she turns her phone off hours after her father has supposedly gotten on a bus to the Egyptian border. She wants to walk out, she wants to clutch her phone and call and call and call.

She watches the clock, waiting for the halfway point when she can finally submit her paper and collect her bag and turn on her phone. Her phone, she misses the weight of it, she can feel it, just out of reach. She hears a sniffle, then a choked sob. For a second she is mortified. Is it her? Is that her?

Her professor walks over, she’s walking toward her. She must be crying, she can’t feel anything, her eyes are moving between her professor’s face, her bag at the front of the room, and the giant countdown projected on the wall. Twenty minutes to go.

Her professor stops and turns to the front of the room, and she is finally able to rip her eyes away from the wall and the backpack and to the person sitting to her right. They’re crying – fat, glistening tears making trails down splotchy cheeks. They're having trouble breathing, their words coming out in gasps. The professor walks them out of the room. She wonders if anyone in the giant hall knows that she is screaming. If any of the two hundred people with her in this class have been watching the news. If they know anything about Sudan.

The twenty minutes are over. She hands in her paper. She grabs her bag, she turns on her phone. She calls her mother because she knows that if anyone would know where her father is it would be her. He had warned them to not call, they search phones sometimes, the internet and service are spotty along the road. He had assured them that he would update their mother and that she would update them in turn.

She hasn’t talked to her siblings for more than two minutes since the news broke out. They know as much as she does. Her mother tells her that they have all been glued to their phones and to the TV for news. The house is silent.

Her mother tells her that she hasn’t heard anything from him in hours. She gets on the bus home and collapses on the bed.

One of her friends files a petition on her behalf to allow her to retake the final. It's granted, and, on the day of the retake, she arrives in the designated classroom where she finds a couple of other students. One of them is the person who sat to her right during the original exam, the one who had the panic attack.

She wonders sometimes, in the depth of the night, about all the small things that have aligned to keep her family safe when so many families are not. She thinks about her grandmother’s illness that was such a challenge to her mother that it eventually took them both out of the country a week before the war began. She thinks about how, well before all of this, her father had sent her away for school and work. How the decision he made three years ago had saved them. How the money from a land sale a generation ago translated to her current comfort. How luck and privilege and wealth have protected her. How so many people are not protected. How a year ago they had moved away from the old neighborhood where she was raised, how this morning she had seen pictures of her neighbor's house with a gaping hole where their living room had been. The neighbors had evacuated in time, thankfully.

Her mind keeps turning to things she shouldn't be thinking about now. Mundane, practical concerns like her car's oil that needs changing. She cannot help but feel selfish to even contemplate them. How their house is gone now, and for how long, they do not know. How she needs to find a better job than the part-time receptionist gig she has, something with better pay, because it isn’t just herself that she will be supporting now. She thinks about the plane ticket to go see her escaped family members in Egypt, the new travel restrictions against Sudanese people. The mess of notices and updates and requirements that change by the day. She thinks of her graduation. She thinks about how her family is now scattered across Sudan and several other countries. She thinks of how lucky she is. How small.

She wonders about how much her country has been through. She wonders if there was a better age to feel all of this. To witness it. She is twenty-one and everything is ending. She is twenty-one and everything is starting. Would she have preferred to be younger? To have these stories be memories so faint, she will no longer feel the borders of them by the time she is old enough to realize everything that had happened? She wonders if she would have preferred to face this when she was older, more assured, more established.

She thinks of her uncle who is forty and had just gotten a promotion three months before the war broke out. She thinks of his daughter, only six months old. How they were trapped at the border because the little one didn’t have a passport.

Even when escaping death, paperwork remains.

She receives an email with a notice that her passport is ready for pick-up at the post office. She had sent it a few weeks ago to be stamped with her new entry visa, the one tied to her work permit. The one she applied for a few weeks after the war broke out. There is a long line, and she passes the time staring at the TV, a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Sudan doesn’t come up once. It has been four months. She is still screaming. Louder than ever and she still sometimes wonders if the people around her can see it in her eyes.

Her friends try their best. They really do. But as time passes, resentment grows inside her. She can’t bring herself to care about anything. None of their problems matter, none of her problems matter either. She talks about Sudan as much as she can. She thinks about how the closest people to her now have never been there, have never known what it used to be or how much has been lost. She wonders if they can ever know her.

She is hit with the myopia of her own thoughts. How her sentiments lately have been full of the nostalgia she scoffed at among the diaspora community here. The flat yearning for an idea of a home, and not the actual home she knew. The home that was her neighborhood, yes, but also her grandmother’s house on Fridays when all her cousins would spend the whole day playing in the yard. The home that was her sixth grade class. The home that was the hot summer afternoons when the electricity would cut out and the heat would be so exhausting she would doze on the cool tile floor of her living room. She had made fun of them, the kids her age who had been born and raised outside Sudan. She couldn’t relate to them, much preferred the company of their parents who had known and remembered the home that had actually been there, the home that now haunted them.

She thought that finally, now, she can understand them, can understand the uncritical nostalgia, the obvious, desperate longing, the platitudes of vague statements of political action.

Taking care of yourself is resistance.

Simply engaging in tradition is resistance.

Taking jobs even if it was somewhere reprehensible is resistance.

She wondered if, with the passing of enough time, she would look back and think of this time in her life, waiting in a line for her passport that was worth nothing now if not for the entry visa stamp on it, as resistance. As self-care.

She meets someone new. Someone who wants to talk to her about the education nonprofit she volunteers for. They talk about the rising cost of education and other barriers for highschool students. She mentions that she had moved here for university. They ask her where she moved from. For a minute she forgets everything. The answer rises in her with no burden, muscle memory unhindered by everything in the past six months. And the whole world forgetting would be easier if she herself didn’t wake up every single day to a brief moment of forgetting, a brief moment where everything was alright. Before the awareness of the vacuum sets in. Before the grief she doesn’t want to acknowledge as grief, because grief implies finality, implies an end, implies living with it for the rest of her life. The whole world forgetting would be easier if she was not yanked into the memory every single day. If it didn’t feel like they were the only ones who remembered.

The person across from her is smiling. The vacuum.

“Would you ever go back?”

Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary Arab film, literature, and art. Published biannually, both digitally and in print, the literary journal is a Whiting Award-winning publication that showcases diverse Arab and Southwest Asian and North African voices.

Jwan Omer was born and raised in Khartoum, Sudan. Her work has been included in Mizna. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada where she completed her undergraduate studies and was a contributor to The Varsity, the student newspaper.

Driss Chaoui is a colour enthusiast living in Toulouse, France, with their fabulous cat friend. When not working on a new illustration job, they are usually gossiping around with their friends or brainstorming their next creative side project. You can see more of their work on Instagram.