It is hardly surprising that people dance during war. Sometimes these are dances of victory. This past October, after eighteen months of siege, the city of El-Fasher in North Darfur fell to the Janjaweed—the nickname of the government-aligned Arab militias who razed Darfur twenty years ago, now widely used for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces who succeeded them and have been fighting their former backers in the regular army since 2023. When the news broke, footage circulated of fighters dancing to celebrate in Nyala, a city in South Darfur that they had occupied since the beginning of Sudan’s bloody, three-year-long war. But there is another kind of dance you might see in Darfur today: the dance of those who survived massacres, who celebrate staying alive even as they mourn loved ones—family members, friends, classmates, neighbors—and reckon with the loss of their homes, their possessions, their livestock, all but their memories.…