Sudanese Women Refugees

This book examines the social, cultural, economic, and political transformations that have occurred among southern Sudanese women refugees as they experience life in Cairo, Egypt. It intends to show how these women use their newly acquired skills and knowledge to challenge their past and to challenge the image of women refugees as victims and dependents. The author counters previous literature's tendency to categorize these women as victimized, dependent and backwards, rather than recognizing their strength and contributions to their new societies.

Resilience in South Sudanese Women describes the historical injustices in Southern Sudan that led to the outbreak of civil wars. These injustices included socio-economic and political marginalization that denied the women basic needs. It gives firsthand life experiences of the Sudanese women during the protracted civil wars in their country. It narrates the horrors of the gruesome journeys that they took as they fled war zone, burying their kids on unmarked graves and moving on. It shows how they dealt with homelessness in host countries through various coping strategies, and their eventual resettlement in USA where again they experienced cultural collisions. However, their determination, innovation, and resilience always helped them to overcome the struggles.

This book examines the social, cultural, economic, and political transformations that have occurred among southern Sudanese women refugees as they experience life in Cairo, Egypt. It intends to show how these women use their newly acquired skills and knowledge to challenge their past and to challenge the image of women refugees as victims and dependents. The author counters previous literature's tendency to categorize these women as victimized, dependent and backwards, rather than recognizing their strength and contributions to their new societies.

My thesis examines how southern Sudanese women refugees understand the social, cultural, economic and political transformations that have affected their lives in exile. It intends to show how these women use their experiences to re-evaluate their past and to challenge the image of women refugees as victims and dependents in refugee literature. The assumption I make hear is that, the situation of African women refugees has been analyzed from the varied perspectives that tend to universalize and victimize the refugees. This thesis argues against the universalized, victimized and dependent image of African women refugees by invoking African women's power, agency and their differences. My findings suggest that life in exile has both negative and positive consequences on refugee lives. Due to war and displacement, the social and cultural traditions of those affected are disrupted, leading to changes in behavior, perceptions and lifestyles. Economic difficulties and resettlement program to a third country have led to increase in cases of separation and divorce and have further forced many refugees to alcoholism and prostitution. Although displacement and life in exile disrupt the normal life of those affected, life in exile can be of benefit to refugees. My interviews indicate that life in Cairo allowed women to re-evaluate their perceptions, which in turn necessitated a shift in gender roles, whereby women adopted new social and economic roles contrary to those, which existed in Sudan. Their status of being bread winners, challenge, both the dependent image of a woman refugee and the long-held belief among southern Sudanese that women are always dependent on men economically. Women's new roles also challenge the public-private distinction, rendering it insignificant. It further rendered their representation as victims and dependents in the refugee literature unacceptable. A discursive framework of the interlocking and the intersecting systems of oppression and the idea of the 'simultaneity' of oppression is used in order to capture the complexities of the everyday experiences of the refugees. The underlying assumption in this framework is, the refusal to either address one form of oppression while leaving the others intact or to hierarchize oppressions.

In one of the first books devoted to the experience of Sudanese immigrants and exiles in the United States, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf places her community into context, showing its increasing historical and political significance. Abusharaf herself participates in many aspects of life in the migrant community and in the Sudan in ways that a non-Sudanese could not. Attending religious events, social gatherings, and meetings, Abusharaf discovers that a national sense of common Sudanese identity emerges more strongly among immigrants in North America than it does at home. Sudanese immigrants use informal transatlantic networks to ease the immigration process, and act on the local level to help others find housing and employment. They gather for political activism, to share feasts, and to celebrate marriages, always negotiating between tradition and the challenges of their new surroundings.Abusharaf uses a combination of conversations with Sudanese friends, interviews, and life histories to portray several groups among the Sudanese immigrant population: Southern war refugees, including the "Lost Boys of Sudan," spent years in camps in Kenya or Uganda; professionals were expelled from the Gulf because their country's rulers backed Iraq in the Gulf War; Christian Copts suffered from religious persecution in Sudan; and women migrated alone.

Includes statistical tables.

Over twenty years of civil war in predominantly Christian Southern Sudan has forced countless people from their homes. Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan examines the lives of women who have forged a new community in a shantytown on the outskirts of Khartoum, the largely Muslim, heavily Arabized capital in the north of the country. Sudanese-born anthropologist Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf delivers a rich ethnography of this squatter settlement based on personal interviews with displaced women and careful observation of the various strategies they adopt to reconstruct their lives and livelihoods. Her findings debunk the myth that these settlements are utterly abject, and instead she discovers a dynamic culture where many women play an active role in fighting for peace and social change. Abusharaf also examines the way women’s bodies are politicized by their displacement, analyzing issues such as religious conversion, marriage, and female circumcision. An urgent dispatch from the ongoing humanitarian crisis in northeastern Africa, Transforming Displaced Women in Sudan will be essential for anyone concerned with the interrelated consequences of war, forced migration, and gender inequality.