Translated from Arabic by Mayada Ibrahim
The house of mourning is a site of disassembly and displacement, where an enigma is transformed into common symbols that gesture towards the house’s obscurity, as well as its capacity to be moved, externalised, isolated. Collective acts reject death by reducing it to language. A conspiracy of evasion unfolds through subtle transformations that begin with the act of naming.
The house of mourning is a second birth for what was once a specific creature with a name. A moment ago they were a person. This earthly being in plastic slippers had a scent and snored when they slept and forgot often. Their name is now “the body”; a generic name, like a doctor’s lab coat, a worker’s overalls, like an egg tray, designed in absentia to fit its contents precisely, yet bearing no relation to them.
The name of “the body” initiates the surrendering of the person, erasing their qualities, laying them down into generality—a prelude to denying the emptiness they will become in both place and name. What is a name without its bearer? What is a scent that belongs to no one, or rather a scent that no longer belongs to anyone, a scent left suspended? What is a shroud? A collective garment, made by no one and everyone for no one. What is a grave? An indefinite place, determined by chance. What is a house of mourning? A communal place. It is not the mourning house of so-and-so, but the house of mourning. A possession sealed in death's hoofprint. A name that strips the familiar from a place that a moment ago was a refuge from the hell of the sun, or itself a kind of hell. Then it transforms into the place that strips death bare, as poet Ahmed Nashadir says, an abstraction of the abstract, where death is transformed into a gesture in space and time.
It is also an act of condensing, a charting of the map of loss, a creation of burning living matter—a prelude for what is to come.
This act of naming is charitable. It lightens the load of the person who can no longer be carried across the timid distance between the soul leaving them and entering non-personhood. The distance for which loved ones fasten their clothes, determined to disguise the body and the crime of death. They cleanse the deceased of their scent and their memories. They leave them exposed, innocent, caught unawares. No one dares mention them by name, lest they expose them further. Instead they call them “the body”. The absence is unbearable so there is no recourse but to create absence. Here they are burying so-and-so… But no one can bury so-and-so because so-and-so is my friend. He bought me Biringi cigarettes that are still in my pocket. No one can place so-and-so in the core of the earth, pile sand on top of her and leave her to the unknown, the darkness and the worms. I couldn’t… That is why they bury the body, which has a different scent from the scent of a person. It comes from an abstract place and wanders towards an abstract place. The departed, the deceased, the fallen, the martyr: names, gestures to a void. A sign in the present of a past meaning. The departed and the person never overlap in the same moment. The departed is the person’s future; the person is the past of the departed. The departed and the deceased attest to an absence. The departed and the deceased are names for an emptiness; the names of the chasm left by the person. Arrows suspended in a white field of white nothingness. Solitary or fatal arrows; the field is sacredness, it is eternity. My personhood was peeled away, and it dissolved into perpetuity. So many names and none of them belong to you. They talk about you at the house of mourning. They talk about you as though talking about a prophet. The most trivial memory is expanded to fill the space where you were. Then you appear in their dreams and they’re frightened. You have become “extraordinary”. Finally! They ask about the last words you uttered, those same people who were deaf to all the noise you made. They get closer to you because you are gone. Did you cry in your final moments? Did you utter the shahada? Who was with you? They won’t stop talking about you so as not to feel the void that took your place. The void is what they are running away from. They stack layer upon layer of kisra, they make potato stew and thermoses of tea. Your lingering smell is a trap they escape by remembering you. You are now big and extraordinary and you can’t even laugh about it.
Does the name “the body” establish an economy of death, an economy of the sacred, where value inflates through its absence? Value and scarcity are directly proportional, gradually leading to nonexistence. The nonexistent is a benchmark value, the eternal zero, the commerce of Sufism—turning away from that which has value in favor of the benchmark value, the nonexistent or nothingness. The dead swells in names, reaching the benchmark value, reaching God or immortality. Naming is the path to the sacred. Our Master, the Ustadh, His Holiness Sheikh So-and-So, the Hajj, Maulana—may he guide and save us. His Holiness, the Blessed So-and-So, His Grace, His Excellency… You entered, O earthly being, in plastic slippers into the courtyard with them. You became one of the companions, the sahaba. Your names pass from voice to voice to voice, so you are always out of reach. You have become distant and your names are many, like God’s ninety-nine names.
Grandmothers understood this enigma, referring to their husband as “Abu So-and-So” (father of So-and-So). They maintained the necessary distance between the two sides of the power relation, a distance of respect, or sacredness, or prohibition—all belonging to the same root, haa raa miim. Whereas Abu So-and-So designates her the name of the collective, “Haboba jama’a”, (grandmother of the people). One grandmother is many—this is true. You have become sacred like her and like the awe in the eye of Umm Balina Al-Senussi when she sings: “O So-and-So, your name is salt in desert basins.” The beloved is sacred, revered and kept behind the Watchful’s walls. The name is sacred. The name is a veil, and the greater the veiled one becomes, the more their names fragment in meaning. Essence resists designation, and the name unravels in orbit—seeking nearness, thirsting endlessly. The sacred is the salt of desert basins; the sacred is a sublime designation, redeemed by being named, but the moment you aim for exactness, you deviate from it. Naming is a strategic deviation, not a necessary confrontation. It is an escape from the direct gaze. That is why language exists. Push forward; the rear is sacred[1]. Language is the necessary distance between the sacred and the earthly, the flight from the silence of the eternal, the silence escaped into language, and that is also why a language cannot be reduced to a single word, that is why language begins not in the moment of naming but in the moment of deviation from that name, shadowing it, veiling it. The moment of language is the moment of undoing the meaning just brought into being.
A name is an incantation against death. In Sudan, deliberately unappealing names are sometimes given to save newborns from fatal afflictions. A name is a shield, a magical buffer capable of action. It transitions from non-action to action. The “doing” and “naming” become equal in impact, and the linguistic figure must be read in its performativity as language ascending to sovereignty, as a kind of magical act. The name of “the house of mourning” becomes a lasting mark—a trace that endures even after its cause has vanished, an eternal holy emptiness. The house may retrieve its name, but the memories attached to death remain. We say “We passed by the house of mourning on the day of mourning and we paid our respects to the mourners.” The place together with its inhabitants crosses into a new realm. In memory and in dreams, the house becomes detached from its function and from the earth it stands on. The unnamed mourners ascend to grief. Death is a hard currency against which everything is measured, revalued, renamed, and sanctified. The day of mourning is also an abstract time. A time torn from monotony and guarded with obfuscation. The country folk have rolled into town. The abstract place is now teeming. It becomes a mud bench where people collectively sit with death, negotiating with it, dragging it through the devilry of detail. A crowd bends down in unison over a smoky specter, tearing the air and setting fire to sorrow. The neighbors—and neighbors are crucial—file in. The Nubian drum arrives with copper hanging onto its hem. Every tree casts its own small shadow, and every flying bird adds a distant flutter. The tent crouches like a buffalo gathering its legs beneath it. The young men arrive, the local football team and the shopkeepers. Everyone attends with an imaginary knife in hand, and holes pour into themselves. The buffalo settles by the well of the pupil. At last, all hearts are present. The knives shred the silence of the specter as it thickens and dodges and flees to the pillar of light. Peace be upon you, dust-covered caretakers, guardians of storms and springs.
[1] During the Islamist regime’s war with the south, the military slogan “Push forward, the rear is secured” was widely used to encourage soldiers by guaranteeing the safety of their rear positions.