The Act of Naming: An Interview with Najlaa Eltom

This conversation is the first in a series of pieces by writers from Sudan and South Sudan. It is a collaboration between Platform 011 and Untold Narratives.

Mayada Ibrahim (MI): Our conversation began with the term ‘Global Majority’, and it quickly led us to the act of naming, a theme that comes up a lot in your work. In ‘The Name of the Body’, published in translation in the journal A Perfect Vacuum, you write that when a death takes place ‘[a] conspiracy of evasion unfolds through subtle transformations that begin with the act of naming’.1

Najlaa Eltom (NE): I was approaching the question of naming through the moment of death, the moment of our collective encounter with it. Death is an overwhelming reality, final and blunt. Observing the intricate practices and traditions surrounding death in Sudan, one senses that people have collectively invented ways of living with it, of softening its finality, one of which is renaming the deceased person al-janaza, a name that refers to the dead body. In Arabic, al-janaza means the bier, the dead, and the mourners who accompany them. In Islamic jurisprudence, the meaning is much the same. Al-janaza is a noun derived from the root j-n-z, meaning to cover or conceal, to shroud the dead and put them on a bier. Sudanese colloquial usage is consistent with these definitions: through the acts of shrouding, covering, prayer, and burial, the name of the deceased is veiled and they take this new, jurisprudential name. It is a process of concealment triggered by the encounter with death, where culture finds it necessary to erase personhood. From the moment of death, the body, which a moment ago had a name and a history, becomes al-janaza. It is a name all the dead enter into, a technical name with no person to own it, to occupy it. Once those around the deceased begin calling them al-janaza, a longer sequence of technical and procedural steps begins, steps they must take in response to the tragic scene of the body lying there, waiting. Directly facing death, facing the actual person who just died, is cruel and paralysing. But one can talk about al-janaza. One can act with the help of this impersonal intermediary. In the Islamic tradition, to honour the dead is to bury them, and burial must happen very quickly. The deceased becomes an emergency that has to be handled within a very short window: hours, a day at most.

MI: So even the name al-janaza is not the body’s alone. I had a hard time with a couple of the terms in English because they don’t perfectly map onto the Arabic. Terms like ‘the departed’ or ‘the deceased’ or ‘the late so-and-so’ work well enough, but ‘the house of mourning’ doesn’t have the same quotidian feel that the Arabic has. It sounds ornate in English. 

NE: Yes. In Sudanese Arabic we simply call it Bayt al bika, the ‘house of weeping’. That plainness is what makes it hard to translate. The house of weeping is a transitional name given to a transitional space. It is bound to the situation of death, of mourning. It is a place where we host death for a while. There is also the ‘house of the wedding’, another temporary name. Together, these names draw a kind of social and emotional geography, a map on which property is redefined emotionally. A house is owned by a certain family and holds the family name; that is the legal space. When someone dies, that legality recedes, making room for the symbolic and the emotional. You are obliged to offer condolences and recite al-Fatiha, and this has to take place in the house of weeping. The name stays attached to the house until you have fulfilled your social obligation towards the family. If you run into me on the street and you ask where I’m going, I might say I’m going to the house of weeping. It is a direction, a location on the social map, but it is not permanent. Like al-janaza, the name of the house of weeping is generic and communal. It serves certain purposes and vanishes afterwards.

MI: You reminded me of the collective funeral you helped organise in 2020 for the martyrs of the revolution whose bodies were never identified. 

NE: I was following the event from far away, but I remember that day vividly. The Protect the Right to Life Campaign (PRLC) sought to draw attention to the unidentified dead whose bodies decomposed in the morgues under the transitional government (2019–21). The campaign was a network that brought together the resistance committees, many grassroots organisations, and the families of the martyrs from both the December revolution and the September 2013 uprising, when more than 250 people were killed in a matter of hours, mostly students and young people working informally. In 2021, repeated power outages left the bodies in the morgues to decompose, especially in Wad Madani and Khartoum. Among them were bodies from the massacre of the sit-in on 3 June 2019.2 The campaign documented these and other grave violations committed against civilians. The funeral, which was not a typical funeral because there were no bodies to bury, was held in a community club in Al-Sahafa, in South Khartoum. It was a space to bid farewell to those who died without names, whose bodies had been abandoned to decay. 

MI: How do morgues typically handle frequent power outages?

NE: This was a catastrophic failure by the transitional government, which had promised to empower political participation and protect rights. The bodies in the morgue had decomposed to the point where people living around the morgue could smell them. What happened to the bodies was a huge shock to us all. 

MI: What happened to the bodies?

NE: The decomposed bodies were removed from the morgue and buried in numbered graves. In the process, significant evidence was compromised, which can only serve the perpetrators. To this day, there hasn’t been an investigation into how this happened. The bodies had no identities or names, and that was an offence against Sudanese culture, with its elaborate and complex traditions of burial and mourning. Taking away the dignity of the dead was an offence against society, especially against the families that continued to look for their missing sons and daughters for years. They might not even know that their loved ones had died. There was no way to find out. So the members of PRLC decided to do something to restore that dignity. On the legal front, the campaign, together with the resistance committees in Wad Madani, filed criminal complaints against the director of the Wad Madani morgue, the state health officials who had overseen it since 2018, and the Ministry of Health. The charges included negligence, contempt for the dead, and complicity in destroying evidence. Despite these efforts, no serious investigation has begun to this day. The cultural wound needed more than legal procedures, and the members of the campaign decided to organise a symbolic house of weeping. A tent was erected, people came and prayed, some recited the Quran, some cried on each other’s shoulders, and they left their signatures on a large piece of damouriyya, a local white cotton cloth stretched across the ground.

A day before the funeral, the poet Yousef Muhyaddin suggested borrowing the nahas of the Jamu’iya tribe in Omdurman to play it during the funeral. The copper kettle drum is a ceremonial instrument used to announce the death of a great person, such as a tribal leader. It was also typically used to announce war. The copper drum signifies a tribe’s authority and sovereignty. I think playing the nahas that day was a cultural cry to protest the assault and to restore a sense of pride.

MI: That’s so moving. 

NE: When I watched the video of the nahas being played, I totally broke down. It was a powerful statement. Of course, since the war erupted in April 2023, it has become commonplace for the dead not to be treated with dignity. We’ve heard so many stories about bodies disposed of in the streets and dogs eating them. Under shelling and military activities, many people were forced to bury their loved ones in their own homes.

MI: It’s strange to watch the impact of war and to see all the different ways people adapt. A friend who recently visited Sudan told me that in his neighbourhood there is a noticeable, heightened emphasis on jinn and ghosts, particularly in relation to homes abandoned during the war. He recommended the work of Kali Rubaii. I found her series of creative non-fiction stories ‘Note the Ghosts: Among the More-than-Living in Iraq’ deeply evocative.3 Based on ethnographic interviews conducted in Iraq between 2014 and 2022, these stories narrate how ghosts become part of the ecology of war. I think it resonated because I see many examples of people coping with an extraordinary situation, and often that takes new, unfamiliar shapes.

NE: Yes, and adaptation takes spiritual forms as well. In an essay titled ‘Neighbours without Borders: Reinventing Neighbourhood and Spiritual Solidarity as the Notion of Place Collapses’, published in Farida, a Sudanese feminist magazine, I wrote about my family’s neighbourhood in Al-Sahafa and the women who have lived there since the neighbourhood was established in 1969. This war forced them to leave for the first time in their lives. They lost their homes and became refugees. They created a WhatsApp group, and whenever they received word of someone from the neighbourhood dying, they exchanged condolences via voice notes. At funerals, people typically take part in a collective recitation of the Quran, a practice referred to as al-khatma. Given the reality that they couldn’t meet and read the Quran together, these neighbours completed the khatma from disparate geographies. The intention of the khatma is set at the start by name: for the soul of someone who has died, or for the healing of someone who is ill.  Each woman taking part in the collective khatma reads one of the Quran’s thirty parts every day. By the end of the month, the khatma is fulfilled. 

MI: Does everyone know each other well?

NE: Yes, they do. But also when they created the group, they added me even though I left the country in 2012. I think it was with the understanding that I’m from there even if I’m not there. There are three generations in the group. 

MI: What kind of dynamic does the presence of multiple generations create?

NE: The older women would send voice notes, weeping over the dead person and remembering some interactions with them, as is customary for women of their generation. Younger women seem a bit reserved, but they often coordinate the khatma, registering the participants’ names and posting daily updates on its progress. Together, through the WhatsApp group, they created a virtual house of weeping.

MI: It suggests an insistence.

NE: Yes, an insistence on traditions. I think this insistence is best read as a claim of ethical agency, to borrow Saba Mahmood’s term from Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2004), in which the choice to hold fast is a radical act, deeper than direct political resistance. Mahmood discusses self-formation; here I see a continuous process of community formation through a commitment to newly invented forms of social interaction. The khatma also brings sacred language into the everyday, the personal, the intimate. The words of the Quran become a collective refuge from pain and loss. It is a kind of cultural resistance but rarely read as such. The dominant liberal feminist discourse tends to ignore spiritual practices like these and insists on seeing women as victims. 

The khatma reveals an insistence that nothing changes, even though everything has changed. The place itself is gone. But place is not only geography: people make a place. I think of the moment the khatma is completed, all the women, scattered across different regions and countries as Internally Displaced Persons and refugees, are in the same place at the same moment. The completed Quran becomes their shared place. While the war waits for them in the geography of displacement, they invent a parallel geography of meeting. It is a collective migration from the geography of destruction to the geography of the sacred, the spiritual. These women believe they will meet again, and they work to maintain continuity until everyone comes back. Continuity itself is a form of resistance. They are waiting for a morning when they can return to a place where the streets are named after the people who live there. But the hope of return is elusive. Palestinians are still holding on to their keys, hoping one day to dwell in their old homes again.

MI: Going back to our starting point, how do you think the act of naming the Global Majority compares to these other acts of naming we discussed so far: al-janaza and the house of weeping as well as to practices like the virtual khatma and the nahas drum? 

NE: I’m a bit sceptical about the new term. Think of the trail of names that came before it: ‘Third World’, for example (what was the Second by the way?). Then ‘developing countries’, always in the present continuous, since we all know that these countries are never meant to board the liberal train of Progress. Then the ‘Global South’. There is an urge to tie these regions to a single name, and I think it comes from a place of anxiety: a need to classify, to pin down the Other who must inhabit a name, who must settle down and leave behind the state of namelessness, which is, to the eye that classifies, the state of the nomad. A Jamesonian framework might be useful here, though Jameson himself was not immune to this urge. Late capitalism has produced the postmodern disintegration of the subject. This disintegration, this individualisation that has robbed the political West of its sense of community, is projected onto our regions, where the individual is not, or not fully, the unit of the social contract. Scholars will always defend the need for a term, but communities will always overflow such terminology.   

A name may be necessary, but what matters more is the courage of encounter, in the phenomenological sense: to be truly present among, between, and with the elements, the people, the multiple realities, to meet the nahas drummer, not as an exotic figure, but as an agent, and to let that encounter act upon us, change us, teach us something.