Najlaa Eltom

The Feminist Shrine

By Hekma Yagoub

Translated from Arabic by Najlaa Eltom

By patriarchal design, war hastened the deaths of kidney patients dependent on dialysis, and those with terminal illnesses who clung to life through treatment, only to have their last hope crushed. Pain, too, is political. Grief is political. Because war weaponizes pain and grief, turning them into ends in themselves.”

Hekma Yagoub’s ‘The Feminist Shrine’ is nothing less than a manifesto: a radical reimagining of death, resistance, and the bonds between women. This extraordinary essay confronts the abyss that opens when death shatters our fragile existence. Each loss arrives as a fresh catastrophe, we neither learn to endure it nor grow accustomed. Our Sudanese culture insists ‘الموت ما بتوالف’, and rightly so: death cannot be domesticated. Here, Hekma gazes unflinchingly at grief and loss, revealing how mourning rituals become acts of collective defiance. Her work exposes the revolutionary potential of sorrow, transforming shared grief into both battleground and sanctuary, a living shrine where friendship outlasts even death.

Personally, this essay arrived as I grappled with the impossible task of writing about Roya Hassan, whose loss in the early days of this war shattered so many of us. How does one speak of a person who was entire worlds? The flood of tributes to her only deepened my silence, as though the sheer magnitude of love she inspired made words feel hollow. But Hekma’s piece gave me a way to mourn beyond the neat grammar of loss. In her vision of grief as an unburied shrine, I found a language for farewell.

Read Hekma’s essay here:

The Feminist Shrine – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

With immense gratitude to Hekma for trusting me with her words, and to Roya for all the light she was, and remains.