Our lines are the first vehicle we ride to reach the shape of memory. Nubian aunties have been sketching our way to a lost homeland on sand, and etching those shapes in our collective consciousness, before they swipe the sand to level with the palm of their hand. And this particular kind of sketching lives in its visceral temporality and swift ephemerality that will govern its appearance and disappearance on the face of sand as a quotidian practice that evades capture, but lets the land speak to our hand. Nubian sand sketches are deliberately fugitive, washed away by tide or time, yet persisting as muscle memory. To sketch is to let the body archive the invisible: the weight of a lost doorframe, the slant of light no longer falling on a grandmother’s threshold.
Before the High Dam flooded our homelands, and before the forced migrations and the museum-ification of a people, there were sketches in the sand mapping ways to kinships, carving space for play, markings, etchings, and constant relationship expressed through touch between Nubians and their sand.[1] But for our displaced generation, they became maps of return, choreographies of displacement, alibis against erasure. The dam’s water did not just flood land; it flooded time. The Nubian hand, moving across paper or earth, drags the river backwards. Every line is a rematriation.
Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) posits visuality as a term for who gets to see and the medium through which these power relations are neutralised and countervisuality, beyond its simplistic understanding as an opposite, is inherently antivisual.[2] In claiming the right to look, the Nubian sketch looks back in memory to a contested history, then appears to disappear, whether in sand, or in the mind’s eye, as counter-insurgency. It does not ask permission. It remembers the contours of villages now submerged, architectures now orphaned from their ecosystems, and the geometry of courtyards dissolved into the lakebed of silt.
In Nubian cosmology, to sketch in the sand is to let the wind have its say; to refuse the closure of an image and the capture of a pictorial plane. And when architecture students from distant academies, Western academies, utilitarian academies, come to Nubia, their sketchbooks fill with ochre walls, domed roofs, ‘timeless’ silhouettes. But what does their line fail to hold? How do their assigned sketches become cartographic drawings? And why did it strike my core to see the flesh of my buildings through their lines? Why did the crack in the wall I see in their sketch book hurt more than the crack in the wall in my people’s homes?
Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick reminds us that the cartographic impulse is not innocent.[3] It is the impulse to keep visual records of what you see, perceive and deem real. Their sketches freeze Nubia into an aesthetic artefact, while Nubians sketch to keep the land alive, not as a static image, but as a body in motion. The Nubia studio sketches, those crisp, confident lines of visiting architects, are autopsy traces. They see the form but not the pulse. Fred Moten’s black mo’nin’hums here.[4] What is seen is not what is looked for, moreover, it is not listened to. The students’ pens render Nubia as past, while Nubians sketch as future anterior: we will have been here. Their lines induce the shock and disarming weight of witnessing outsiders sketch your homeland, a moment where the personal and political collide in the act of drawing.
I am their professor. I am also their subject. In the classroom, my words carry weight; they elicit agreement and engagement during lectures on Nubian displacement, decolonial architecture and the ethics of representation. But here, in our displaced villages, my authority dissolves into the ochre dust. I am both the gatekeeper and the gate itself, swinging wide open despite my better judgment and the iffy feeling in my heart. I shouldn’t have brought them here. I thought knowledge and proximity would breed kinship and solidarity, but in these transactional institutions, my premise was naïve.
They came with their sketchbooks like notepads for confession, as if the land owed them its story. They sat on Mastabas, their sketchbooks splayed like surgical trays. Pencils scraped the page, tracing the curve of a dome, the lattice of a window they would never have to crawl through to escape the heat. Their lines were clean, assured, as if our houses had agreed to stand still for them. I wondered if they knew what they were drawing. Not the architecture, not the ‘vernacular genius’ their discipline fetishised, but the echo of a place.
Their lines were precise, their shading meticulous. They captured the texture of our walls but not the weight of their collapse. They drew the angles of our doorways, but not the ghosts that still passed through them. They believed their drawings were neutral, just shapes, just shadows. The Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck writes of the colonialism of the gaze, how looking is never just looking, but an act of possession.[5] Their sketches were not testimonies; they were claims. Each stroke said: I have seen. I now know.
There is a particular violence in watching them sketch the cracks in our walls. I walked past these cracks numerous times, and I grew up underneath them. They are not just fissures in mudbrick; they are the wrinkles of a home that has weathered displacement, the scars of a land that remembers the weight of water it was forced to swallow as this water cracks the silt underneath the walls and renders them perpetually cracked. In their sketchbooks, the cracks are frozen. Rendered in precise, clinical strokes, they become aesthetic choices, textural details, evidence of time’s passage in some romantic, distant sense. They do not see that these cracks are not idle; they grieve.
The cracks they draw are static, but the ones I know are relentless. They multiply when the government trucks rumble through, promising repairs that never come. They deepen when the tourists sigh: How poetic, how timeless. They are not just lines on a wall; they are the borders of our endurance. And in my naïve dreams and ambitions of creating pedagogical modules of solidarity, I thought a studio could be a window for more witnesses of our scars.
But to witness is to hold. To carry. To let the weight of what you have seen reshape you. Witnessing demands accountability. It demands that you let the wound rewrite you. But their sketches were closed loops, final. They did not ask: What happened here?
What I brought onto myself is an extractive gaze; it is something else entirely, a performance of attention that takes without transformation, a gaze that collects pain like a currency but refuses to pay the debt of reckoning. It is the sketchbook filled with the lines of our homes, but not the names of the displaced. It is the architecture student’s meticulous rendering of a ‘vanishing’ culture, while their future firm designs the next demolition.
As Frantz Fanon warned, the colonial world is a world cut in two.[6] The sketch, too, cuts: it divides the seen from the unseen, the documented from the disappeared. Ironically, I start my studio at this point of juncture. I remind my students that the visualisation comes with a decision, by drawing they decide what ought to appear and by drawing they also decide what didn’t. The pedagogical challenge, here, for an architecture teacher in the Western world like myself, is not to teach how to sketch Nubia, but whether one should.
----
----
[1]Nubians were displaced in Egypt and Sudan as a result of building the Aswan High Dam. On Nubian Displacement, see the work of Nubian Scholar Yasmin Moll, University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory, ‘Narrating Nubia: The Social Lives of Heritage’, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/nubia/ (accessed 13 September 2025).
[2]Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press, Durham, 2011.
[3]Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke University Press, Durham, 2020.
[4]Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,’ in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, p. 71.
[5]Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘R-Words: Refusing Research,’ in Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (eds), Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaklands, 2014, pp. 223-247.
[6]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York, 1963.