The House Did Not Remember Me: An Interview with Sulaf

مع صبح الشروق نجر السفينة 

و فارض نورها بي شراع طوفها لينا 

و كيف الشورى يا نفسي اللعينة 

بتركبي و لا تأبي تبهدلينا

Her voice seems to draw the angels close.

Sulaf was born and raised in Sudan. She was supposed to go on a three-month residency in France when the Sudanese civil war broke out and she had to remain – a lucky and cruel escape. Her debut album, ABA, grew out of this rupture. It traces a journey through inheritance, exile, war, and belonging, carrying forward the artistic legacy and wisdom of her great-grandfather, the Sudanese poet Abdel Azim Sayed Ahmed, while asking what remains when a country, a family, and a self are transformed by displacement. For her, memory is not something fixed. It lives in voices, objects, songs, streets, and the spaces between leaving and returning. It is at once spiritual, sacred, and powerful.

In this conversation, Sulaf speaks about the oud as a companion, the notebooks and objects left behind by previous generations, what asylum taught her, and the role of music in preserving what escapes language and what displacement threatens to erase.

The interview was conducted in Sudanese Arabic, and I hope the translation captures its cadence and tenderness, as well as the sense of peace and connection that emerged as we shared memories and recognised how much of our experiences lived on in each other.

Nada Atieg (NA): I want to ask you about the oud. Before you play a note, how does your body respond? Do you remember the first time you held it?

Sulaf (S): I feel a very strong bond between us. Sometimes I pick it up because I feel a need to play. Other times it’s automatic; I’m half asleep and I reach for it without thinking. It’s a refuge to me, like a friend. I don’t remember the first time I held an oud, but I remember my uncle returning from university every holiday with a different instrument: a guitar, then a keyboard, then a violin. One day he brought an oud. Something about it grabbed me, and I immediately thought: I have to learn this. I was around thirteen, and I taught myself until 2020 when the oud school was established, which I joined to learn professionally.

NA: If someone from Khartoum who knew you at nineteen saw you performing in Europe today, what would surprise them most?

S: When I go back and watch the first videos I ever recorded, I feel like my playing is completely different. I used to play with only two fingers and now I think: How was I playing like that? Why wasn’t I using all four? But at the time, that was simply how I played. The way I sing has changed too. Maybe what people would notice is that I have more freedom now: in my voice, in the space I allow myself, in the performance itself. When I first started performing, my focus was on not moving too much so my tarha (headscarf) wouldn’t fall off my head, not making too many gestures. That felt necessary then. Your society and your environment appear in the way you perform. But slowly, with time, those things disappeared.

NA: Your debut album, Aba, is coming out in October. The title and many of the lyrics are shaped by inheritance and Sudanese poetry and are influenced by your great-grandfather, Abdel Azim Sayed Ahmed. In the album notes, you describe his glasses, his radio, his tumbak (tobacco). Why are those the things you remember?

S: He passed away when I was nine. My memories of him are how I used to play with him as a child. I never had the chance to have these types of conversations with him. Even the songs he wrote I heard mostly from other family members. What I remember is the way he walked, the way he spoke, the way he laughed. We used to visit their house every weekend, and when we walked in, he’d be lying in the courtyard listening to his old radio with its brown leather cover, his glasses and his tumbak beside him. Those are the things that come back to me.

NA: You write that he ‘looked like Sudan’. When did you realise you weren’t only remembering a person but a whole country?

S: Abdel Azim was deeply influenced by Sufism: simplicity, humility, letting go of excess. When I started working on these songs, I asked my grandmothers about him, what kind of person he was, how he thought. Through their stories, I understood how deep he was. In his dress and speech, he was an ordinary Sudanese man, but he was like the sea: a calm exterior with entire worlds inside. That is how I feel Sudan is too: the deeper you go, the more cultural abundance and stories you find. That’s why he reminds me of Sudan.

NA: You also mentioned that all his work was contained in a single notebook, and you don’t know whether that notebook still exists. Did knowing that an entire life’s work could disappear in a single moment change the way you think about memory and documentation? Did you think about this new album as a new/different kind of notebook?

S: Exactly. After the war, the work of documentation became much more important for all of us. If we don’t tell these stories ourselves, they disappear with the people who lived them. 

I remember seeing videos of Sudanese children in Egypt speaking with Egyptian accents, which is completely understandable, but it made me wonder: will they know the stories of Fatima al-Samha [Fatima the Beautiful – a Sudanese folktale] and the stories we grew up with? War can erase an entire people’s archive. What I always loved about visiting family was an elder telling me: this person was so-and-so, there was a wedding here, who did what. Those stories, the songs, the culture, they tell you who you are. They shape your ear. They shape how you experience longing. They shape how you understand nostalgia. They shape what it means for me to say: ‘I am a Sudanese woman.’ It means I am an extension of my grandmother, and her grandmother, and her grandmother. That extension means stories, songs, culture, henna, and all these things.

NA: Was there a line of your great-grandfather’s poetry that you only understood later, when you needed it?

S: So many. There’s one poem called ‘Samin fi Sulukhum’. I only understood part of it last year, after I’d already recorded it. He writes about people who have the truth within them and aren’t attached to anything. For a long time, I wondered what that meant. I realised it wasn’t indifference, it was surrender. There’s a phrase: zahidīn fi sukūn (quietly detached). That was exactly who Abdel Azim was. Every time I return to those words, I discover another meaning.

NA: How do his words speak to your own life? 

S: They don’t necessarily describe my life exactly, but they touch me in two ways. One is that they remind me there are ways of living other than the capitalist system we live in today, with its expectations of always having to achieve more – to be more successful, more visible, and to make more money. When I hear a phrase like zāhidīn fī sukūn it offers the opposite to this demand. It lets me relax my body a little. It’s a voice I need because it balances everything else.

The other way they touch me is in their expression of longing. In songs like ‘Bitti Alhitali’, the first song on the album, he speaks to his daughter, but it felt like he is speaking these words directly to me. I hear love, care, and tenderness, and the ache of separation. The world we live in makes it easy to lose our empathy, to become individualistic or to forget ourselves. These words remind me of the kind of person I want to be. They arrived at exactly the right moment. They contain answers to a world full of questions, and they bring me back to myself.

NA: Going back to the day you left Sudan: what did you pack, and how did you imagine that residency?

S: It was going to be my first time in Europe, so I had no specific image. I imagined three months working with other artists and then returning home. It never felt like a real goodbye. I packed one big bag with clothes, my laptop, whatever I thought I’d need. My biggest worry was the usual one, that I’d forgotten something. I never once thought: what if I don't see them again?

NA: Are there certain smells or sounds of Sudan that you carry with you, that bring Sudan back to you physically?

S: To me, the smell of home is very specific: food mixed with bukhoor (incense), mixed with freshly washed clothes. Sometimes I like to recreate that here. Something unexpected happened recently when I was in Manchester. I was sitting in a restaurant next to an older couple eating soup. They were breaking bread and dipping it into the soup, and suddenly I felt like I was watching my grandmother and grandfather. It was such a small thing, but it brought me home. Older people often do that for me. They remind me that people can look different, live differently, come from completely different places, and still share something deeply human.

And there are songs: ‘Na’ma’ by Ajd Al Jilad, the songs of Haidar Port Sudan, of Al-Kabali with Al-Balabil. When I miss Sudan at night, I put those on, and they bring back the feeling of sitting in a courtyard in Sudan.

NA: What was the asylum process like? What did it teach you?

S: Honestly, it taught me many things. It made me more compassionate. It changed how I see people who are unhoused, for example. Before, I’d give something because I felt I was doing a good thing. Now I think that could have been me – it really could have. The asylum process made me appreciate things I used to take for granted: a safe place to sleep, food, stability. The hardest part was integrating with people far from my own experience. I remember sitting on the metro and understanding nothing. I felt invisible, like I was inside a bubble and I couldn’t hear anything from outside; they couldn’t hear me either. That isolation forces you to reevaluate everything, your values, what you believe, who you are.

When I reread Season of Migration to the North, I understood it completely differently. There were things I could have never understood before. Migration brought me back to a fundamental question: who am I? And that question shaped the album. I started calling my mother to ask about my father: ‘What was he like? What were his habits? Who were his friends?’ I asked her to tell me stories about him. Because I realised that if I had children here in France, they would grow up French. They wouldn’t automatically know these parts of me. I needed to know myself first. And to know myself, I needed to know where I came from. Maybe that’s what migration does. When you no longer feel rooted, you are forced to reconnect with yourself. It was difficult. But it was also beautiful. If I could go back, I would choose to do it again.

NA: Do you have a memory you’re afraid of losing because you’ve been away too long?

S: About two months ago, I started writing things down whenever something beautiful happens. I record the details, because I started thinking about the memories I might lose.

NA: What about things you can’t fully capture, like voices or feelings?

S: That reminds me of my father’s voice. I don’t remember his speaking voice but the voice inside. You know when you put your head on someone’s chest and hear their voice from inside their body? That’s still there. The memory I’m most afraid of losing is connected to my mother. There’s a song, ‘Khawatir Fil’, about a baby elephant that was captured, singing to his mother: ‘Why did they lock me away, mother, what do I do?’ I would hear my mother’s voice inside those words, and it would break my heart, so I stopped listening to it for a long time. Last year, when I was listening to an older playlist, it came on and I finally told her about it. ‘Subhan Allah,’ she said. ‘That song came out in 1997. I was pregnant with you.’ She and my father had just moved to Saudi Arabia. She was afraid to stay home alone, so she’d wait for him in the car all day, listening to that song constantly. She told me she felt imprisoned during that time. I couldn’t believe it; this memory had been living inside me all along. Sometimes I get anxious when life gets so busy that I feel like I’ve neglected her. We only have the amount of time together that has been written for us in this life, but my mother is part of me and her memories too. 

NA: When you’re on stage and know something terrible has happened in Sudan, how do you carry that? Is there a feeling of guilt in being the one who got out?

S: I had that feeling in the first year. I couldn’t enjoy my life, thinking: how can I be happy when my mother and siblings are in the middle of a war? But it disappeared completely when the Rapid Support Forces entered our house, and my family had to leave in such a horrible way. At that moment, I thought: thank God I am here, I can help them from here. I went from feeling guilty to feeling grateful for the position I was in. I need to believe that I deserve to be in a safe place, because everyone deserves that. Everyone deserves a dignified life. Guilt is a very heavy feeling. It can eat away at a person and stop them from moving forward. But you have to face it, work through it, and understand what it is asking from you.

NA: You worked with Maxime Kosinetz on the album. He has worked with artists whose music is deeply connected to place, memory, and displacement. What did you recognise in his way of working?

S: It was a long process that started with voice recordings from my grandmothers and elders. They were strange to his ears and translating them into an album took a lot of time. Especially in the beginning, it was very difficult. What I appreciate about Maxime is that he is open to that. He never approached the music as something old that needed to be made new, or something foreign that needed to be made Western. He wanted to go deeper into it, to allow it to reveal its own authenticity. I think that was important when working with something like that. You have to step back from yourself and your ego. You have to listen first.

NA: If you could sing one song in Khartoum again tomorrow, what and where would it be? 

S: I would sing two songs. One needs other people to sing along, and I’m lucky to have family members from both sides of the family who sing. There are always gatherings. My uncles Mamoun and Mohamed Abdel Rahim come with their ouds, and people gather in the courtyard to sing. There is one memory I will never forget. It was during a henna celebration, and I was walking from our house to my uncle’s house in the same neighborhood after isha prayer. It was dark, and the street was empty. As I got closer to the house, which opened onto a square, I heard them singing with the oud, the wind carried their voices and their happiness to me. The song was ‘Bitgooli La’. People were dancing, everyone moving together. I could feel the atmosphere before I even reached them. I remember thinking: by God, this is a feeling from heaven. For me, heaven could be something like that: the beauty of that moment, people connected by blood, all sharing the same joy. It felt like the music brought everyone into the same state of happiness. So, if I return to Sudan, I want to sing ‘Bitgooli La’ in my uncle’s courtyard. I want to recreate that feeling.

The other song – it will be on my next album if all goes well – I wrote one day when I went back to our old house in Doroshab. It’s where we grew up, where I came of age. It is the house where my father passed away. There are so many memories there. When I went back, I felt a very strange feeling, because my expectations of the connection that would happen between me and this house were very, very high. But when I went there, I felt that it did not remember me. I mean, I know and remember, but there was no physical feeling that came from the house. I would love to go to this house and sing this song there.

NA: What do you want ABA to have achieved ten years from now – for you, and for people who hear it but might have never been to Sudan?

S: Before this album, I released a song called ‘Sho Giana’. People created something around it called ‘Loved Ones in Memory’. Thousands of videos appeared, with people sharing memories of Sudan, about their loved ones, their streets, their homes. What was beautiful is that the song itself wasn’t actually about Sudan. But something in it opened that door. The song begins with my grandmother’s voice, and when I hear it, I feel like I’m sitting outside in the arisha (pergola) of her house. The heat, the sound of the fan turning, the sounds after Friday prayers. That feeling; that is what I hope ABA carries. I don’t want its success to be measured commercially. What matters is that someone feels the freedom in these songs; that they hear a Sudanese voice. This is a Sudanese sound. This is Sudanese life. These are Sudanese people. People who sing when they are happy, when they are sad, when they celebrate. People who sing because singing itself is part of life.