The Face of Truth | Ibrahim Shaglawi The Sudanese Scene and Brecht’s Dilemma
The Sudanese scene today resembles a stage open to all possibilities, where players exchange their roles under dim lights, while the audience sits at the heart of the hall following the drama of transformations, after the fourth wall that long separated ruler from ruled, and text from those living its consequences, has collapsed.
It is as if Brecht’s epic theatre has come back to life in Sudan, where the audience is no longer a mere spectator, but a decisive element in shaping the story and its outcomes, creating meaning, rereading destiny, and crafting the future.
Sudan has spent long decades under an elite that treated power as a closed script in which the audience is not allowed to modify a single scene. But the recent war—with all the victories, defeats, displacement, and betrayal it carried—swept away this illusion and turned the citizen into part of building and directing the event, not merely watching it. He sees the scene with clarity and attentiveness: who writes the script, who distributes the roles, who controls the lighting and the movement of the curtain, and who changes the direction of the stage without his permission.
Within this context, the international Quartet moves through a temporary alliance held together by interests, with a roadmap that appears coherent but proposes a settlement built on false peace with surrender beneath it— a plan that re-engineers Sudan’s internal dynamics according to external calculations, grants influence to those who have none, works to exclude significant political forces, and reshapes military and security institutions away from the logic of protecting the nation and according to the balance of international interests. Yet this approach—seeking to write Sudan’s destiny in closed rooms—collides with a people accustomed to confronting guardianship, trained in rewriting scripts, and rebelling against anything carrying the scent of colonialism, even if draped in soft diplomatic cloth.
What complicates the picture further is that the Quartet moves with the spirit of one who considers himself the playwright, writing ready-made chapters to be imposed on a stage whose people, in the near past, were the ones changing scenes, overturning scripts, and rebelling against every imprint of imposed authority. Since independence, Sudanese have proven that they are not an audience driven by emotion or repression or false promises, but a force capable of exposing even the strongest international scenarios once they regain awareness and agency.
Thus, the Brechtian “alienation effect” becomes starkly present in this scene, as daily life itself has turned into a strange event that demands contemplation: schools turned into shelters, cities split between displacement, resistance, and endurance; life managed and produced under bombardment; identities redefining themselves amid contradictions.
From the womb of this suffering, awareness was born, and the meaning of state, security, and homeland was reconsidered, as well as the shameful narratives and errors of the past that can no longer be patched with rhetoric that beautifies the ugly or polishes colonialism, nor with a top-down agreement that ignores the core of the crisis. Meanwhile, international interests move across the exhausted geography according to regional and global winds that aim to steer the sails alone.
As for the politicians, they remain mired in the same opportunism, reviving in their own way the spirit of “The Threepenny Opera,” when they speak of morality before food, and of reform before dignity—while the crisis unfolds before their eyes: a crisis of life sinking every day into deeper levels of siege and confiscation of the people’s will. That is why the Sudanese mock all of them, exposing the disconnection between a dependent political rhetoric and the reality that safeguards the nation’s security and prevents its collapse.
Sudan appears, as in Brecht’s theatre, a land living scenes disconnected in time and space but united by a single spirit: a war extending to be settled by the gun, mediations descending from the sky, agreements written in secret and destroyed in public, and international interests moving across fatigued geography to satisfy regional and global illusions. The scenes change faster than the people can catch their breath, yet the wounded state still knows how to define itself—its army and its independence.
In this turbulent reality, according to #Face_of_Truth, the ending remains open, as Brecht wanted in his epic theatre: a curtain that does not fall and questions that never cease.
Thus, the way out of the dilemma cannot come through scripts written in dark rooms, nor through external approaches that treat Sudan as a field of influence. The solution begins when the audience regains its role—as owner of the script, not a witness to it; a partner in re-engineering the state, not an object of engineering; a force that redefines sovereignty in its true meaning, imposing on all that the theater—as Brecht said—is not owned by the actors but by those who sit in the hall and carry the idea.
And so, the story will not be complete unless Sudanese themselves are the ones raising and lowering the curtain, determining how the tale ends. In a nation shaped by rebellion, no external power can write the scene without the signature of its people.
Wishing you well and peace.
Saturday, December 6, 2025
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