{"id":36427,"date":"2024-11-17T00:20:10","date_gmt":"2024-11-16T21:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/?p=36427"},"modified":"2024-11-17T00:20:10","modified_gmt":"2024-11-16T21:20:10","slug":"a-child-in-grandmas-museum-the-right-to-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/17\/a-child-in-grandmas-museum-the-right-to-the-city\/","title":{"rendered":"A Child in Grandma\u2019s Museum: The Right to the City"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Abdullah Ali Ibrahim<\/strong><\/div>\n
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(About two years ago, I had to hire a nurse to care for a family member while the rest of us were at work. It struck me then that we might have become Americanized without even realizing it. This led me to reflect on our relationship with the city\u2014a space we inhabit with a mindset rooted in villages. Though we have become city dwellers, willingly or otherwise, as a society and as an elite, we have yet to fully confront this unsettling reality and its implications. Philosopher Henri Lefebvre called it \u201cthe right to the city.\u201d While we inhabit this right, we often approach it with the memories and judgments of the village. This reflection is part of what I\u2019ve written about this right.)<\/div>\n
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I hadn\u2019t encountered anything as gracious as the words of Randa Al-Abid (then 14 years old, more than a decade ago) in our cultural literature for some time. Her words were published in Jusoor, a magazine dedicated to documenting the experiences of the first generation of British Sudanese, edited by my friend Khalida Abdel Hafiz.<\/div>\n
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Randa wrote an essay reflecting on her impressions of Sudan after a family vacation there. Two moments from her essay stood out to me.<\/div>\n
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The first was her description of her family\u2019s celebratory reception upon her arrival. They slaughtered a sheep in her honor, presenting its internal organs as part of the feast. Horrified by the sight, Randa hid in the animal pen until the meal was over. When she returned, her family expressed their disappointment that she had missed a \u201ctruly special meal.\u201d Despite her aversion to the bloody scene, Randa wrote with a generous spirit: \u201cI was disgusted by the slaughtered sheep, but I remain grateful to my family for their kindness.\u201d This is true civility: refraining from using one\u2019s own ingrained customs as the ultimate standard, and resisting the temptation to label the unfamiliar practices of others as primitive or barbaric.<\/div>\n
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The second moment was her younger brother\u2019s comment on their grandmother\u2019s home. The little boy had spent the entire day exploring the house, running through its corners and proudly presenting his findings to their mother. When his mother called him to say goodbye to their grandmother, he responded, \u201cMom, this place is full of treasures. Let me stay in this museum!\u201d<\/div>\n
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Indeed, grandmothers\u2019 homes carry the charm of museums. This reminded me of my childhood visits to my maternal grandmother\u2019s house in the village of Al-Borsa in Meroe district. To this day, I can vividly recall the rows of grain and dates stored in the dangah (a shaded veranda) at the back of the house. From my grandmother, I recorded folk literature that I\u2019ll share another time. She had a fondness for a local candy called lakoum, which I used to bring her at my uncle\u2019s house in Khartoum’s Mogran district.<\/div>\n
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The boy\u2019s words about his grandmother\u2019s museum stirred in me a long-held interest in the cultural role of grandmothers and the evolving challenges of old age in our time. My first writing on this topic appeared in Qatar\u2019s Al-Doha magazine in the early 1980s, later reprinted in my books Abeer Al-Amkina and Bakht Al-Rida. In the latter, I highlighted Mahjoub Sharif\u2019s efforts to reclaim the cultural role of grandmothers through his \u201cPrice of the Journey\u201d project. This initiative brought storytelling by grandmothers to the neglected children of urban margins.<\/div>\n
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Dr. Abdul Rahim Bilal preceded me in recognizing Mahjoub\u2019s achievements. In a seminar on the elderly and development, he used Mahjoub\u2019s work to elaborate on the rights of the elderly in an increasingly urbanized and migrant society that grows more alienating by the day\u2014or outright neglects them. Abdul Rahim began his poignant speech by sharing the story of a friend whose visits to his mother became so infrequent that she remarked, \u201cYou only visit us occasionally now\u2014we might as well be a graveyard.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The Americans have a saying about someone who is kind and honorable: \u201cHis heart is in the right place.\u201d It is a privilege for people like me to have comrades across England, Halayeb Market, and the Goethe Institute (like Abdul Rahim), united by the enduring legacy of progressivism, lowering their wings in mercy\u2014for the grandmothers.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Abdullah Ali Ibrahim (About two years ago, I had to hire a nurse to care for a family member while the rest of us were at work. It struck me then that we might have become Americanized without even realizing it. This led me to reflect on our relationship with the city\u2014a space we …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36428,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36427\/revisions\/36428"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}