“Jarelnebi notices that you died on the same day as his brother Hassan—December 15, 2006. You were 87 years old, living in Paris. Hassan was 38, killed in a battle at Sayah in the north of Darfur.”

From our January 2014 issue, read “Letter to My Father,” in which Jérôme Tubiana revisits Darfur, where his parents were once ethnographers. Translated from the French by Colin Robertson and Paul Reeve.