The current genocide in Sudan, carried out by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and supported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) against the Sudanese people, is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis with over 13.6 million people–families, scientists, schoolchildren, artists, caretakers, activists, and spiritual leaders–displaced, starved, injured, and ill as of January 2026. But “humanitarian crisis” is often deployed as a passive term, as if the genocide that the UAE-backed RSF is perpetrating were a natural disaster. Rather, we must name what it is: an active, chosen act of inhumanity, upheld by worldwide disregard for and exploitation of Sudanese lives, as Black lives globally are so often disregarded and exploited by Western nations and nations seeking their power.
In this genocide, as in all genocides, women and girls of all ages, from infants to elders, are forced into especially great danger and harm. The RSF has instrumentalized rape and sexual violence as a mass weapon time and time again, a war crime of immense cruelty. Recent, horrifying reports have come out that the very people who are supposed to provide medical care to those displaced, Doctors Without Borders (Medicines Sans Frontiers/MSF), have been “targeting underage girls or trading food or jobs for sex with refugees” from Sudan, as well as in Chad.
This utter atrocity is beyond language, but as a literary magazine, Room will still use the words: to those responsible for the genocide, and to those who should have been alleviating its worst impacts yet continue to take advantage, we condemn you. Canada–which, while making empty gestures toward supporting Sudan, has eagerly made itself complicit in the genocide, with Mark Carney being the first prime minister in over 40 years to visit the UAE, on top of recently suspending immigration documents coming from numerous African countries including Sudan–we condemn you. The diplomatic and economic ties that PM Carney is trying to strengthen are meant to enrich Canada and the UAE at the direct expense of Sudan, the impacts of which will be borne heavily by women, girls, and gender-diverse people. Room is emphatically against this exchange of blood money, and the pretense that it is not blood money.
Room Magazine adds our voice to those who have fought, protested, educated, and raged against the RSF, UAE, and both entities’ many Western backers. We unequivocally stand with the tens of thousands of victims of rape, genocide, and displacement who the Western world has tried to silence, ignore, and deny for numerous reasons, the survivors’ Africanness and Blackness being chief among them. We believe that our shared humanity is dependent upon supporting those resisting the genocidal aims of the UAE-backed RSF, and we reject any narrative that paints this genocide as a nebulous “conflict” without true perpetrators, as a “complex situation” without implicit support from so-called Canada, or as something that is natural to Africa. Exploitation, devastation, ecocide, and foreign state-enforced mass violence should not be thought of as normal for any African nation, any African people, and Room will always be against media and governmental narratives that endorse this sort of portrayal. Black lives matter everywhere.
We at Room urge our community of readers, writers, artists, and activists to support Sudan materially and in the attention economy: uplift efforts to make the Canadian government impose an arms embargo on the UAE immediately, boycott UAE-originating products and travel, continue to #KeepEyesOnSudan support #HandsOffSudan and contribute to grassroots funds supporting those harmed by this genocide:
- Tkaronto-based Sudan Solidarity Collective: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=C9GCHUJN37MCG
- Support specific people and families via vetted funds on Sudanfunds: www.sudanfunds.com/campaigns
- Support Women Not Weapons: www.globalgiving.org/projects/padsforpeace/
- Follow Sara at bsonblast for updates on the RSF’s advance
Reading List
From “Girls that Never Die,” by Safia Elhillo
[what if i will not die]
[what will govern me then]
[how to govern me then]
[what bounty then on my name]
[what stone what rope what man
will be my officer]
Excerpt from “The Circle Line,” by Leila Aboulela, from Elsewhere Home, via BookBrowse
Cheese melts in London like nowhere else. Old mixes with new like nowhere else. The city is blessed. But a girl can sob her heart out in London’s streets and no one will stop, no one will raise an eyebrow, no one will ask why. Oh, city of opportunities, career ladders and fame, you promised me I could start afresh, make my fortune. Rise and cruise up high. But I age and watch the chances fold in, the paths converge. I live the narrowing and the shutting down.
This shrinkage makes for a modest life, a failure. It opens the trapdoor on what I thought was beneath me: the cesspool of bitter and delirious crime. Last year my fiancé was arrested for money laundering. I had no inkling of it, not the vaguest idea. Lucky you didn’t go down with him, people tell me. They can’t be bothered with the state of my heart.
“Najlaa Eltom & Mayada Ibrahim in conversation”, by Najlaa Eltom and Mayada Ibrahim, via 128 LIT
Najlaa Eltom: The architecture of violence, refined through centuries of what can only be described as laboratory experiments in the Global South, has evolved into sophisticated techniques—this is knowledge that is honed on our lands. When people start to question the system, these tactics are there to subjugate those at the lower rungs of the power hierarchy. This machinery of oppression will inevitably turn against you because it requires constant fuel; you and I are merely neighbors in its path. When my house burns, yours is next in line—fire does not discriminate by color; it simply needs to be fed. The absence of empathy is lethal—not only for the victims, who inhabit a different plane of awareness, but for those unable to envision themselves in the victim’s position. In “An Exercise in Creative Writing,” I was thinking about the philosophical and ethical dimensions of empathy.
Excerpt from “The River Stopped Its Flow,” by Rania Mamounm, translated by Yasmine Seale, via The Dial
the river stopped its flow
the fish dried up & died
in open-mouthed
surprise
for a time like forever
I came & went
on the slender cord of hope
Excerpt from “Black Time,” by Fatin Abbas, via Akademie Schloss Solitude
The measurable seconds, minutes, hours that structure white time assume a linearity that is – for many Black people, people of color, formerly colonized people, queer people, any group shaped by histories of violence – an illusion. Black time is a joke, but it’s also deadly serious. It’s marked by layers of trauma: historical trauma of slavery and colonialism, out of which arises societal trauma of structural racism, out of which arises economic trauma of continued dispossession. Often, these overlapping traumas feed into familial or intimate trauma.
