Stella Gaitano: “The purpose of the written word is liberation”

Stella Gaitano stands out as one of the most distinctive narrative voices to emerge from South Sudan. Writing from the fault lines of history, identity, and survival, her fiction bears witness to lives shaped by war, displacement, and the long aftermath of violence. With quiet precision and moral clarity, Stella’s work confronts harsh living conditions, fractured identities, and the cycles of conflict that have marked Sudan for decades and continue to reverberate across generations.

Born in Khartoum in 1978, Gaitano completed all stages of her education in northern Sudan. She trained as a pharmacist, studying in both Arabic and English, and later worked as a journalist for the Sudanese newspaper Ajras Al-Hurriya. She first drew attention with her early book New Paths (2002). Two years later, her debut short story collection, Withered Flowers (2004), announced a writer deeply attuned to the emotional and political textures of everyday life under strain. This was followed by The Return (2014), and in 2019 her first novel, Edo’s Souls, whose English translation received the British PEN Award, securing her a readership well beyond Sudan.

Stella’s prose moves fluidly between realism and myth, grounding human suffering in carefully rendered landscapes of place and memory. Writing in clear, intimate language, she situates Sudanese experience within a wider African imaginative world shaped by storytelling, folklore, and the uncanny. Her 2025 novel Irem further expanded this vision, while translations of her work into German and English have brought her voice to international audiences. Now based in Germany, she has received recognition for literary courage, and articulating questions of identity, migration, and displacement with rare ethical insistence.

For Stella, writing is inseparable from testimony. She has repeatedly argued that Sudanese society has endured decades of mutual destruction without justice or accountability. In the absence of reckoning, victims are compelled to endure and move forward while carrying the weight of unresolved violence. Her work insists on remembering what power seeks to erase, and on restoring presence to lives pushed to the margins of history.

In this interview for Geeska, Stella Gaitano reflects on language, liberty, and writing as an act of both resistance and reconciliation.

Latifa Mohamed Hasib Al-Qadi: Tell me about Stella Gaitano’s beginnings, and what led to the publication of your first short story collection, Withered Flowers, in 2004.

Stella Gaitano: Between 2000 and 2004, I was moving through many transitional phases in my life. I was an avid reader, but I had little access to good books because of poverty and the limited mobility imposed on a girl from an ordinary family, like thousands of Sudanese families. Everything was restricted, even the right to knowledge. When I entered university, I can say I discovered how vast the world was. Access to books expanded, and all it required was asking for help.

I remember how desperate I was for books in my teenage years. I once visited, with my mother, a relatively well-off family we knew, and we stayed there for two nights. By chance, I found Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s novel I Do Not Sleep. It was the longest book I had ever read. I could not borrow it or take it with me, so I secluded myself and read it over the two nights, racing against time. I finished it just before my mother decided we would return home. It was a unique experience.

As I said, university opened up a vast world for me. I began writing seriously and publishing in newspapers with the help of poet and journalist friends. The publication of my short story collection happened entirely by chance. I was carrying a printed manuscript of stories in my bag when one day the publisher Nour Al-Huda, director of Azza Publishing House in Sudan, asked to read it. I gave it to him and forgot about it. Later, I met a friend who congratulated me out of the blue, saying, “Congratulations, your first book is being printed in Cairo.” It was a huge surprise. That was in 2004, and from there everything changed.

L.Al-Q: You once said, “Writing was not a choice, but the only way to prove my existence.” How can writing be understood as a form of existence rather than merely a creative act? And what is the difference between writing as an expression of existence and writing to create existence itself?

S.G: When you belong to a country torn apart by wars and divisions, where millions die because of political intransigence and ideological and military fanaticism, writing becomes a duty, even a particular form of resistance. Everything is at risk of being buried and erased. We have been annihilating one another for decades, and we have yet to witness any real process of justice. Everyone escapes punishment, and victims are forced to move on while carrying the bitterness of injustice throughout their lives.

Here, writing becomes testimony, prosecution, documentation, and remembrance. As a woman belonging to a group against which the central government waged war for twenty-two years, and whose people also fought back fiercely, followed by division and renewed wars in both Sudans for old and recurring reasons, I had to raise my pen, with all my fragility, to draw the larger picture of the violence exercised by those with power.

Writing thus becomes a responsibility and an act against forgetting, a responsibility to restore those who were erased back to existence, to build a memorial for them from ink and paper, and to open eyes to the ugliness of what is happening so it can be avoided in the future. This gives me a sense of existence, agency, and the ability to stir reflection and questions.

L.Al-Q: You lived through war and displacement. How did these experiences shape your human and literary identity?

S.G: When primary identities that we did not choose, but were born into, such as nationality, ethnicity, or religion, become a threat, identity turns into a daily battle between asserting the self and proving one’s existence. Perhaps it is wiser, in such context, to adopt other identities, what Amin Maalouf calls “non-murderous identities” such as belonging to universal human causes like justice, peace, freedom, and the right to life for all. These causes are also local, but when you speak about them locally, they must pass through the filter of identities that categorize you in a specific box.

L.Al-Q: You write in Arabic, which is not your mother tongue. In an interview with The New York Times, you said that you love Arabic and adore writing in it, describing it as the linguistic vessel you wish to fill with your personal stories and culture. How can a writer reconcile identity with a language that is not originally theirs, while turning it into a tool for a different existential awareness of the self?

S.G: I find this question about language to be another trap of identity. I have gone through different feelings about it. At first, I was proud of my ability to express myself in Arabic. Later, it became a challenge, not just of expression but of mastery. After South Sudan’s independence, I found myself having to justify why I write in this language. When I migrated, it became even more awkward, because Europe has clear classifications. They know Arabs and their language, Africans and their languages, and Arabic, in their minds, does not belong to Africa. I had to explain Sudan’s complex political history, full of identity wars and Arab-African tensions.

Arabic has now become one of Africa’s indigenous languages, to the extent that it may be a second mother tongue for someone like me. I received my early and secondary education in it, read books and acquired knowledge through it, communicated with people in one of its dialects, and now write in it. It has become part of my identity, and reconciliation with it is necessary despite political pressure. This has made me understand and “empathize” with anyone who finds themselves in a complex cultural and political contact zone, pressured from all sides to choose a single, clear affiliation, while in their human journey they have already belonged to the whole and continue to absorb other forms of belonging.

L.Al-Q: In works such as Withered Flowers and The Return, you depict characters shaped by war and displacement. Do you think war redefines the human being existentially, or merely reveals another face of humanity?

S.G: War redefines place, time, and the human being. In Sudan, our long experience with war has made displacement and forced settlement in and around cities appear almost normal. This alone reveals another face of both the displaced individual and the host society.

A human being belongs to their place, their homeland, their city, their village. Over time, this belonging becomes home, warmth, and safety. War overturns all of this. Forced displacement strips place of meaning. The home we lived in for years becomes luggage we carry with us until we find somewhere to settle, which was reflected by the story Zero in the Return collection.To feel safe, we must flee. Familiarity becomes an open wound of longing for everything we could not take with us; the walls, the streets and alleyways, the river nearby and the sounds of our neighbors.

How can man remain the same when the ground beneath him trembles, and he loses all the elements of his survival?

It is true that people respond differently. Some are refined by the experience and grow in understanding, while others descend into raw brutality and become enemies to themselves and others. Mirroring this reality, through writing, I show characters who rise, characters who question, characters who offer mercy, and characters who turn into monsters.

L.Al-Q: Your win of the 2025 PEN Pinter Writer of Courage Award from English PEN, in recognition of your literary courage in confronting restriction and resisting oppression, is a major form of global acknowledgment. In your view, what is the role of the writer today amid ongoing wars?

S.G: The only thing we can do is to advocate, to try to draw attention to what is happening, and to seek solidarity using the tools available to us as writers. This can be done through writing itself, and through direct dialogue with audiences and, when possible, with political decision-makers.

L.Al-Q: Given the unique position of South Sudanese literature on cultural borderlands, what do you think it can offer to both Arabic and African literatures?

S.G: I believe it can offer a great deal. South Sudan is one of the countries that forms a bridge between the Arab and African worlds. This is true first through language, Arabic and English, and second because it was part of Sudan until 2011. Today it shares one of the longest borders between the two. Writers from South Sudan have become known in both contexts, in Sudan, Egypt, and other Arab countries through writing in Arabic, and in neighboring African countries through the spread of English. This creates a shared space of circulation between the two worlds.

L.Al-Q: You have described exile as not merely an escape, but a space for reflecting on the meaning of true return. Can exile become a rebuilding of the self rather than a severing from one’s roots?

S.G: Exile, like war, carries a high psychological and emotional cost, especially for someone who believed they could only live in their homeland, in the betterment of which they had invested a lot. When I arrived in exile, I was consumed by anger for a long time and chose silence. That outward silence allowed for an inward dialogue that led to reconciliation with the past, the self, and the homeland, and to accepting the new reality as an opportunity rather than a punishment.

I try to accept exile as a new experience that requires flexibility and expansion, an addition to my existing selves, another layer of identity. It is not necessarily a rupture, but an accumulation and extension.

L.Al-Q: In your writing, memory often appears as a blurred mirror where physical sensations and psychological pain overlap. How can memory become a universal structure of existence rather than merely a narrative device for recalling stories?

S.G: These forgotten worlds occupy me deeply at this stage. I have returned to an old conviction that our recurring descent into cycles of violence and war stems from our inability to process past events. Sadly, those events remain confined to the memories of perpetrators and survivors alone, and neither has an interest in reopening the wound. Yet history keeps repeating itself, as if determined to teach each generation the same lesson. I see no real horizon for changing this trajectory or breaking free from it unless we return to memory as it truly is and approach it with awareness rather than fear. The worlds of memory resemble the realities of Sudan, but many people fail to find points of connection between them, or even to see them as two complementary images of a single truth.

L.Al-Q:What is the situation of women in South Sudan today, and do you believe literature can be a tool for change?

S.G: I believe it is dire. The condition of women and other marginalized groups must always be measured through state policies and overall stability. South Sudan is a divided country, marked by armed conflict and a corrupt government absorbed in its own survival, fighting problems and militias created by poor governance and leadership. In such a context, women’s issues are the last thing the state considers. Many women are displaced or refugees, raped or killed. Girls’ education remains a major challenge, alongside entrenched customs and traditions. Yet despite all this, women continue to show resilience, trying to survive on their own.

L.Al-Q: You have said that writing is not a means of preaching or comfort, but a daily act of resistance. How can writing, as a relationship between the writer and the text, function as existential resistance rather than merely aesthetic expression? Is this resistance a rejection of reality, or an attempt to understand and heal it?

S.G: A writer may write with the hope of effecting change, but that requires active reading from the intended audience. Today, images and videos strongly compete with reading, alongside other factors such as high illiteracy rates and the rising cost of books. If writing remains trapped inside covers, then literature’s power to change reality disappears. This is deeply painful for writers, especially when one is writing for a specific audience.

When I write about Sudan, it is certainly a rejection of reality and an attempt to comprehend and put the past on trial. This may allow new generations, if they read or find other ways to access knowledge, to imagine change as something possible.

L.Al-Q: Images and natural landscapes have a strong intellectual presence in your work. What role do nature and geography play in your novels?

S.G: I write about human beings, and in my work the human being is deeply connected to the surrounding natural world. Nature is also a protagonist in my writing. Those towering trees shape decisive events, or sometimes stand simply as silent witnesses. Nature also plays a crucial role in feelings of longing and loss when people migrate. For Africans in particular, the relationship with nature is profound and is sometimes elevated to a sacred level, which makes it difficult to separate from writing.

L.Al-Q: In Edo’s Souls, suffering repeats itself across generations, as if in an endless cycle. How can writers confront conflict and violence without falling into the trap of repetition? To what extent can literature reshape inherited pain into a human understanding of the self and the other?

S.G: I am not afraid of repetition. Readers may grow weary, yes, but privately I tell myself that I write to expose the ugliness of war and violence, so that my people might understand that peace is also an available and possible option. Wars may be similar in their destructive power and in how they deform life, but the stories of those who wage them and those who bear their consequences are different. I believe that continuing to tell these stories creates a form of collective solidarity and a collective rejection of violence as the sole solution.

All Sudanese have now experienced war, but have we reached the point of competing over suffering, over who suffered more and which war was more lethal? Literature may help place all these images side by side, forcing us to confront a painful question: why did we, and why do we still, do all this to ourselves?

L.Al-Q: When you speak of moving beyond the binary of victim and perpetrator, do you believe a human being can inhabit both roles at once? If so, how can literature dismantle the implicit frameworks that keep reproducing this binary?

S.G: There is one perpetrator at the top of the pyramid, the aggressor against everyone. In Sudan’s case, this perpetrator is the central governments. Beneath them, people are made to exchange roles as victims and perpetrators after being set against one another in various ways, through political, religious, and ethnic polarization, especially when they are manipulated and used as tools to strike one another for the benefit of the single perpetrator at the top.

It serves the true perpetrators for victims to suffocate one another, for each to see the other as the direct cause of their suffering. Here, literature tries to make people look at the situation from multiple angles. It may generate empathy or open a two-way dialogue. It may also lead to a question: what would I have done if I were in the other’s place, as perpetrator or victim, in moments of attack, self-defense, revenge, anger, or hatred?

L.Al-Q: Given your belief that writing clarifies the world but does not change it directly, how can a text become a bridge between individual awareness and shared knowledge of existence? Is the purpose of the word liberation, or clarification?

S.G: Individual awareness can clash with collective interest. The group often prefers you to be a follower and demands a language of fanaticism and rigid boundaries. It may ask you to speak only of what concerns you personally and to leave others to face their fate, even if they suffer from the same problem. An individual can find themselves trapped, unsure which language they are allowed to use. Some issues cannot endure silence, yet they also cannot bear the addition of one wound to another.

The purpose of the written word is liberation. Words have freed us, just as we have freed ourselves through them. Engaging with language leads us to think, thinking creates clarity, and clarity leads to liberation.

L.Al-Q: Acknowledging the self that contributes to destruction is a theme you raised in your acceptance speeches. How can a writer confront the evil within themselves with ethical awareness and transform it into a tool for building peace rather than merely documenting violence?

S.G: It is extremely difficult. Human nature resists acknowledging the unjust self and keeps pointing a finger at others as embodiments of absolute evil. We may accept the injustice inflicted on everyone, but it is far harder to admit that we, too, contributed to the spread of evil in one way or another. We secretly wished for those who oppressed us to be punished swiftly by someone stronger. We applauded revenge instead of pursuing justice. Even the expansion of war into other regions brought a sense of satisfaction to some, because when war burned in their own areas, they felt they had received insufficient empathy.

For change to occur, we must all be willing to lose something, to act at times against our own interests, and to courageously bear the consequences of acknowledging injustices and offering apologies. Documenting violence is the first step, followed by justice, and only then can peace be built. In our case, we cannot skip this sequence. It has been skipped before in numerous peace agreements, where politicians shake hands, smile for cameras, and divide wealth and power, forgetting the blood that was shed. That is why those agreements failed, and why violence returns each time more ferociously than before, trapping us in an endless cycle of atrocities.

This is what occupies me now. Perhaps something will happen that shortens this long path.