Sudanese social media has been buzzing about a video poem by Sara Elhassan, a retort to a Sudanese professor who claimed that most Sudanese women were ugly. For Making Sense of the Sudans, Elhassan explains what the episode reveals about Sudanese society. On October 13, 2014, I performed a spoken word piece, titled Video Response, at an open mic event in Khartoum. The performance was recorded and uploaded to YouTube, along with other pieces that were performed that night. In the weeks that followed, Video Response received a staggering number of views, and sparked a fascinating response of its own. But first, some background. In June, I was tagged in a Facebook video post by a cousin, with a message that read, "I thought you should see this". The video was a clip from a program aired on Blue Nile TV, a Sudanese satellite channel. It begins with a man - identified in the video description as a Sudanese professor - addressing the changes he's noticed in the country after living abroad for 25 years. "Firstly, the level of beauty has gone down, i.e. most of them [Sudanese women] are ugly, very much so. And ugly women create distress in [...]
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