Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we engage with lived experiences, embeddedness, spatiality and narratives of inbetweeness conceived as liminality in Khartoum, Sudan. We do so through a conversation with a writer of South Sudanese origins who was born and lived most of her life in Khartoum, Stella Gaitano.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we engage with lived experiences, embeddedness, spatiality and narratives of inbetweeness conceived as liminality in Khartoum, Sudan. We do so through a conversation with a writer of South Sudanese origins who was born and lived most of her life in Khartoum, Stella Gaitano. We explore her life through the everyday use of language, her embodied experiences, but also the way she uses language in her novels to shed light on the complexities of the everyday experience of her inbetweeness in Khartoum and in Juba, in her experiences and choices she has made as a result of displacement and prolonged conflict in South Sudan.

Building on spatial anthropology (Roberts 2018), this paper engages with the way sociocultural practices and multiple geographies in the life and the writings of Stella have shaped the experiential dynamics of liminal spaces such as Khartoum and Juba. These dynamics shape her writings through which she renders loss and displacement, contradictions of belonging and exclusion in the two nations of Sudan and South Sudan.

Based on our long-term fieldworks researching displacement of South Sudanese in Sudan and South Sudan, we explore the concept of inbetweeness as a space, both a physical and emotional, allowing for the different manifestations of geographies, negotiating identity and notions of belonging. Stella's cultural background and the use of Arabic as a language of creative expression represents the crux of inbetweeness of identity and belonging. This meeting of two cultural components creates a poignant framework to examine inbetweeness as both liminal and transformative.