The musician’s soulful voice rose softly, gradually filling the small room in the old Cairo building, blending with the strumming of his guitar. He began walking slowly around the room as he sang with quiet intensity. The women and men, young and old, stopped talking, shuffled their plastic chairs, and turned their faces toward him. Their bodies leaned forward as if to catch every word. As they soaked in the lyrics, their eyes held a distant gaze, as though they were listening to music from another time. Different emotions, hard to untangle, lingered in the room.
The room was sweltering on this summer evening, despite two standing fans and one water cooler that made little difference. Sometimes, two audience members would recognize each other and embrace warmly amid the music. Many do not meet as regularly as they did in Sudan, living far apart in Cairo’s various neighborhoods. Many cannot afford the frequent visits that marked their lives in Sudan, displacement has stretched the distances between them.
As the musician’s voice softly ended the last notes of the song, the applause was prolonged and warm.
Shammat Muhammad Nur, one of the founders of Igd al-Jalad—a renowned Sudanese music group formed in the late 1980s—currently leads Ahd Aljalad, a musical-theatrical group. For him, this was one of many musical evenings he has participated in since coming to Cairo. Like numerous Sudanese artists, he left Khartoum after the war erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on April 15, 2023.
Sudan’s war produces competing narratives—official accounts entangled with propaganda, truth colliding with manipulation and distortion, while political agendas and power wrestle with people’s demands for peace, change, economic and social justice, and bottom-up governance. Amid this cacophony, Sudanese artists in Egypt forge their own war stories through art, rebuilding not just their careers, but also transforming their creative processes to tell their truth of the conflict and to speak directly to displaced Sudanese communities.
Forced to flee encroaching violence
Sudan’s war began on a Saturday. The preceding Thursday and Friday, Shammat had performed at two events in Khartoum. Thursday’s performance celebrated a book launch by a young Sudanese woman at a cultural center in Khartoum Two, a residential area near downtown Khartoum. Friday’s concert in Burri, another neighborhood in Khartoum, supported the opening of community libraries through a voluntary initiative.
Shammat recalls that after leaving Friday’s concert in the early morning hours, he could smell gunpowder in the air. Fighting had just erupted between the SAF and RSF. As he was heading home, he passed through one military checkpoint after another, and started hearing gunshots as soon as he got home.
The subsequent days proved difficult. “I resisted the idea of leaving Sudan with everything I had. I kept telling myself the fighting would stop.” However, as he ventured out to buy bread and water for his family, conditions deteriorated. “Families were fleeing the neighborhood. The bakery had no bread. One day, our ice vendor was shot and killed.” When a rocket struck the corner of his home, he decided to evacuate his family from Khartoum.
We did not escape from Sudan. […] We were forced to leave.
Shammat Muhammad Nur
Shammat did not immediately leave Sudan. He traveled with his family to Dongola, the historic northern Sudanese town on the Nile. “I kept hoping the fighting would cease and we would return,” he says. Eventually, he realized they had to leave. He crossed the border with his family into Egypt. “We did not escape from Sudan,” he states emphatically. “We were forced to leave.”
Upon arriving in Cairo, Shammat joined forces with fellow Sudanese artists and threw himself into the intensive collective effort to bring the Union of Sudanese Artists Association in Egypt into existence. According to Muhammad Oleysh, a Sudanese director and head of the union’s projects and theater departments, the union aims to showcase Sudanese culture, heritage, and artistic diversity in Egypt, while supporting artists inside Sudan and helping them continue their work despite the ongoing conflict.
The union operates from a small space in an old building on one of central Cairo’s bustling streets. For many artists, this space has become a cultural anchor: theater groups conduct rehearsals, music groups practice, and it hosts book launches, seminars, training workshops, music classes, film screenings, and cultural events. The space has also contributed to forming new Sudanese music groups and houses a permanent visual arts exhibition.
Members pay a modest monthly subscription of 100 Egyptian pounds. Some manage this payment, but many cannot afford it. Each evening, dozens of Sudanese artists and art lovers gather at the union’s space for cultural events like Shammat’s performance. Despite these achievements, the Sudanese art scene in Egypt faces multiple challenges. Above all are production costs, the financial strain of purchasing artistic materials, and the requirements of working commercially as foreign artists.
“Since arriving here, we sing about war and its emotions, about missing one another, about mourning those who died, and the ache for our country.” Shammat’s group combines music with performance, sometimes “recreating real scenes from the current war.” For Shammat, performing brings buried realities to the surface of audience consciousness. “We haven’t reconciled with the war. Each of us left our roots somewhere in Sudan. But we’re trying to continue living. I have my voice.”
The group’s singing and performing in various Sudanese events across Egypt sends its own message. “The message isn’t that we’re okay. We’re not okay. We sing about war, so we’re not okay. But together, we can move through the suffering.”
Theater as testimony
For Siza Sorkatti, a Sudanese theater actress, the war also changed her life and career. When fighting broke out on April 15, she was rehearsing for a play “Local Governance” directed by young director Jasour Abualgasim, which focused on the need for bottom-up governance and on the role that the Sudanese youth could play. The play was set to perform in an open space in Khartoum. For Jasour, the ousted Bashir regime had intentionally severed citizens’ connection to public spaces, so performing there aimed to recreate that bond. A post-show discussion with the audience about the themes was planned as well, but none of it happened due to the war.
In the initial days following the onset of the fighting in Khartoum, Siza found herself turning to a theatrical text she had previously performed from the Spanish play “The Death of Zeus,” by Marco Magoa, translated into classical Arabic. “I kept an emergency bag by the door for when we were ready to leave. It contained my passport, water, dates, my baby niece’s diapers, and a paper with that play’s text.”
Part of the script translates to:
“We women and girls can climb waterfalls against the current.
Up there, we hold on to fog like mythological creatures.
We seek justice with the will of newborns hungering for their mother’s breast.”
“Reading the text made me feel brave; that whatever happens, we women could still make it through,” she recalls.
Reading the text made me feel brave; that whatever happens, we women could still make it through
Siza Sorkatti
Like Shammat, after approximately 40 days at home amid fighting in the capital, Siza decided to leave with her family. She also crossed the border into Egypt. On the bus toward the Sudanese-Egyptian border, Siza reflected on how she had planned to come to Cairo to study, not flee war. Strangers became fellow travelers, sharing stories. She especially remembers an elderly woman with a quiet demeanor and warm smile; she was the only passenger traveling alone, trying to reach family in Egypt. “We all felt responsible for her,” Siza recalls.
During a rest stop, everyone got off the bus. The elderly woman made her way to a chair for a cup of tea. Suddenly Siza realized something was wrong. As she pushed forward toward her, Siza’s sister called out to the crowd, “Move away, let her breathe.” Someone whispered, “Take that girl away, she doesn’t know what death looks like.” The woman was dying alone in that chair.
Upon first arriving in Egypt, she went to Alexandria, where she lived through months of what she now believes was depression. “I isolated myself and didn’t leave the house. I believed I had no more life opportunities and would accomplish nothing.”
She eventually put together a project called “Haboba Wanisini”; the title translates to “Grandmother, Tell Me a Story”, an animation series for children inspired by Sudanese folktales passed down by grandmothers. “I loved my grandmother. She narrated to me these traditional Sudanese stories long ago, and they shaped my personality as an actress.”
She explains her focus on war-affected children: “These children were cut off from their Sudanese social and cultural contexts. They only speak about projectiles, the Janjaweed, and play war games. I wanted to tell them stories that would show them a Sudan beyond their wartime experience, reinforcing old memories and building new ones. I remember Sudan, but my niece, who was three when we left, might not.” Siza was both the creator and manager of the project, and also played the role of the grandmother.
She also began working with director Muhammad Oleysh on rehearsals for his play “Noon Al-Fajwa” (“The Femininity Gap”). The play explores the subjugation of women in society and concepts of resistance, and follows three Sudanese women in their soul-searching under oppressive circumstances, through dance and song. For Muhammad, the play aimed to break from imposed social and political framing of women, exploring how women’s own resistance could free them from these boundaries. “I wanted to revisit the women’s body artistically and aesthetically,” he explains.
“The war took many things from me. But I wake each morning and try,” says Siza. At the moment, she is rehearsing for a new play by director Jasour Abualgasim. The play examines war, displacement, and the refugee experience among Sudanese who fled to Egypt. It explores their daily struggles—depression, pressure, uncertainty about the future—as part of their collective suffering. The play’s central theme is that the suffering of Sudanese people is shared, but as Jasour explains, “we have the power to overcome it with knowledge and experience that will ensure that the future for us and those who come after us is better.” The new play’s title, “Memory Fracture,” captures his belief that war created a fissure through which memories seep away.
Expressing enduring struggle
Sudanese art threads through most events in Cairo, where poetry, music, and theatrical performance merge to create narrative spaces and experiences. Poetry mingles with music and acting, demonstrating that Sudanese artistic creativity persists.
The nature and content of this creative work have transformed through different chapters—the authoritarian years, the revolutionary moment, and now the war. But its core remains unchanged. The artistic defiance runs deep. For decades, beneath the weight of Bashir’s regime, Sudanese artists quietly persisted, threading through poetry, music, and theater the alternative worlds that power sought to deny, nurturing possibilities that oppression could not crush. In the revolutionary moment, that defiance flowered into celebration and guardianship. Amid this war, that struggle lives on.
Sudanese artists persist in creating spaces for telling their own war testimonies and their meanings
For Sudanese artists, their work continues to be haunted by conflict; by experiences they lived through or encountered in the suffering of others. Often, theirs is a story infused with memory, loss, exile, and the homeland. They continue trying to reconcile with their emotions of forced departure, while feeling they haven’t left.
Even as displacement brings its own hardships—financial struggles, precarious livelihoods, uncertain incomes, survival pressures, the burden of rebuilding careers in exile—Sudanese artists persist in creating spaces for telling their own war testimonies and their meanings.
As these artists continue to enact their vision of the war and its toll on them and the Sudanese people through their artistic work and processes, they affirm their enduring struggle. As a poem by Gasim Abu Zaid goes:
“The wound continues to bleed,
But our vein still throbs,
And the Nile flows…”
Nada Wanni is an independent research, policy, and development advisor with experience in regional security, conflict research, peace building, and development programming.