Sudanese singer, songwriter, and oud player Sulaf pays tribute to her late Sufi great-grandfather, Abdelazim Sayed Ahmed, affectionately known within the family as “Aba.” The name came from one of his deaf daughters, who struggled to pronounce traditional paternal titles. After his only handwritten notebook of poetry was lost somewhere in war-torn Khartoum, Sulaf took it upon herself to preserve his words, turning them into a lifeline to her family’s past and a “naffag,” which is a small window into his world.
The 10-track debut album is rooted in her great-grandfather’s Sufi poetry, moving through exile, displacement, ancestral memory, and the kind of love that outlasts loss. Across the album, Sulaf draws on Sudanese folk traditions, Sufi chants, and Nubian rhythms, weaving the woody resonance of her oud with Kosinetz’s atmospheric electronics and retro-futurist synths. Narration-led passages, including ‘Intro Shogi Ana’ and ‘Outro Marhab Ya Alrasool’, lend the record a cinematic, almost documentary quality.
On ‘Naada’, sparse instrumentation and Sulaf’s hypnotic delivery give the song an almost cosmic weight, while ‘Shogi Ana’ becomes the album’s emotional centrepiece as she addresses her great-grandfather directly: “I wanted to write about me / I wrote about you instead.”
Following the outbreak of war in Sudan, Sulaf was forced into exile, leaving with little more than a small bag and the memories of home. On ABA, those memories become both archive and inheritance. Through her great-grandfather’s poetry, she traces the everyday realities, cultural roots, and collective resilience of Sudanese life, transforming personal loss into a way of keeping a world alive.
