Sudanese Migrants and Exiles in North America » (1st Edition)

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.

Foreign Affairs

During the almost half a century since its independence, Sudan has been unsuccessful in creating a national identity that all its citizens can willingly share. Civil war and economic hardship have internally displaced millions of people and caused hundreds of thousands more to emigrate or flee into exile. This interesting study presents a nicely textured picture of the Sudanese diaspora in the United States and Canada, surveying the reasons people left home, their economic and social coping strategies, their reluctance to assimilate non-Sudanese life styles, and their attitudes regarding religion, traditional customs, women's status, and politics at home. The author finds that exile causes Sudanese to lose their deeply felt particularistic ethnic, racial, and religious identities and to develop instead a sense of themselves as simply "Sudanese." In her view, this adaptation bodes well for the future reconstruction of Sudan if moderate leaders ever replace the present extremists in Khartoum.