How A Sudanese Refugee Made My Christmas Less Pessimistic

As a child growing up in the 1980s in Washington, DC, Christmas was a time when the usual monotony of my Catholic school existence gave way to an indescribable magic.

It was not so much the presents as the sense that reality had been temporarily suspended and replaced by something far more invigorating – which I suppose is part of the reason I insisted on believing in Santa Claus until I was 10 years old.

Of course, mine was a relatively privileged childhood in the United States capital, an imperial headquarters that continues to this day to embody the racism and socioeconomic inequality that governs life in the so-called “land of the free.”

While I knew vaguely of such domestic issues growing up, I knew even less of my country’s contributions to global suffering; in my birth year of 1982, for example, Washington had greenlit the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people.

Closer to home, the decade of the 1980s was characterised by US backing for mass right-wing slaughter in Central America, all in the noble pursuit of making the world safe for capitalism.

That the tedium of Catholic school was my greatest earthly complaint meant that I was doing much better than a whole lot of folks – something that became even clearer when I abandoned the US in 2003, at the age of 21, in favour of an itinerant lifestyle that brought me into contact with the fallout of US misdeeds from Colombia to Vietnam.

I am now 42, and I did not have high hopes for Christmas when, in mid-December, I flew from Mexico to DC, where my parents had returned to live – following their own lengthy stretch abroad – shortly before my father’s death last year. This year, it was not just my dad’s absence that seemed to preemptively put a damper on festivities.

The potential for indescribable magic would seem to have been fairly soundly obliterated by the dismal terrestrial state of affairs and the US-backed Israeli genocide that continues to rage in the Gaza Strip, where almost the entire population has been forcibly displaced.

Meanwhile, America’s conversion of Christmas into a giant traffic jam of Amazon delivery trucks merely drives home the all-consuming presence of apocalyptic capitalism and the reduction of humanity to an infinite soul-sucking series of economic transactions.

Ironically, my first inkling of holiday cheer here in DC was triggered by just such a transaction-based interaction when a Sudanese driver working for the ride-share company my mother uses gave me a hug.

Hailing from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, the man – we’ll call him Alsafi – had registered his enthusiasm at the sight of my “Free Palestine” sweatshirt when he arrived to pick me up.

Also 42, he had worked as a human rights lawyer in Sudan – itself no stranger to systematic killing and mass forced displacement – prior to fleeing the country in 2013 after one too many arrest-and-torture sessions.

Upon getting to the United States, however, Alsafi determined that the American dream was not at all what it was cracked up to be. Not only did he regularly find himself on the receiving end of overtly racist comportment, but he had also quickly tired of the oppressive consumerism that has become a substitute for life itself. He, too, was now plotting his exit from the country. Needless to say, we had much to talk about.