‘Mourning Air' explores the randomness of grief

Khaleej Times

27-04-2025

Such tiny words for such big feelings: Grief. Guilt. Loss. Rage. Hurt.
When someone close to you dies, sorrow clings to you, first like a suffocating blanket, next like a sheet, and finally like a shadow. It ebbs and flows and sometimes, seems to fade away. But then when you least expect it, it's the claw tugging at your heart.
The pain, the defeat, the candyfloss of memories, how do you express yourself in a way that will not glorify or demonise your subject? Leena Magdi, the Sudanese-American author of Mourning Air, found her way to cope required a reporter's mindset and a writer's arsenal of narrative – poetry, prose, storytelling.
Her brother was all of 21 when he was murdered by a national security officer in 2022 in Khartoum – and her tome is her way of processing this feeling of loss that is at once a singular and everyman experience.
'I've always had this idea of writing a book, but it's never come to me. But after everything happened, I had this feeling like there was so much in me and I needed to get it out,' she explains, adding that she had to navigate difficult terrain to get her story out. 'I felt like it wouldn't just help me to write about it, but it also helped to share.'
In her book, she deals in facts, about her life and her family's, anecdotes that speak of an unbreakable bond between siblings. 'What I ended up doing was just writing exactly what happened,' she says.
She tells City Times about the 6 things she learned while writing her book about home, grief, and family:
Grief is like a jack-in-the-box
'A lot of what makes grief so heavy is that it shows up randomly -- you could be driving in the car and everything is okay, and then you see something, or a song comes on the radio, and you're brought back to the depth of the emotion, even though it's always on your mind.'
'As time goes on, it kind of becomes like an umbrella. You're not always looking up at it, and you're not always aware of it, but it's there. But then in daily life, just tiny little things will remind you…it's not just this big, big thing that makes you sad or it's so many little things that are always going on that remind you of your loss.'
It's an uncomfortable conversation
'People would do this to help, but it actually just made me feel worse. I would start to say something, and then start to get teary eyed, and then they'd immediately be like, 'We don't have to talk about it.' But you need that talk about it. I remember I had this one friend who the same situation happened to, and she just sat next to me, and said, 'I'm okay to keep going. If you want to keep talking, I'm okay. If you don't, that's fine, too.''
Home is people
'It expanded my understanding of home, moving from California to Sudan, and then moving out of Sudan and moving back… it made me understand that home isn't defined by a place; you can create home wherever you go. It really helped me understand what I do want my home to be, or what was the feeling that I want to come with home and then create that wherever I go. It also gave me this understanding that you can't be too attached to anything because sometimes life forces you out of that comfort zone. You can't spend your life being upset about it, you're not helping yourself doing that. It took me a really long time to get to that conclusion, and I feel like that also goes into loss, like everything that we have we're going to lose, so it just makes you feel like, 'okay, I should take care of it while it's still here and while I'm still here'.
Two sides of the same coin
'I started thinking about so many other things in our life... there's always something good that accompanies that something bad or something bad that accompanies something good. It made me be like, 'whatever bad is happening, I can look for something that's good in it.''
Heal with joy
'The other one was the idea of breaking open and, and that was something that was triggered for me by one of my friends told me about this concept called Kintsugi (a centuries-old Japanese technique that uses lacquer and gold dust to restore broken ceramic and porcelain).' You just heal stronger and better than before.
Your relationship will evolve
'My relationship with grief has changed a whole lot. I think before I was scared of it. I didn't, I didn't want to show it at all. And that's because of being like, that's, that's because of who I am. I'm a very private person, ironically. But now I I feel like it's like a friend that's just that's always there with me and and I don't have to be afraid of. If it comes up and I'm choked up by tears and I have to cry, I don't feel like I have to hide it. It's fine.'