Morning in Serra Mattu
A Nubian Ode
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A mosaic of interrelated stories exploding with personality, myth, and geohistorical weight, Morning in Serra Mattu is a profound, joyful meditation on life in modern Sudan. Arif Gamal seamlessly blends large-scale political realities with the local and the traditional: "old villages/whose ancient way is so composed/each single blade of grass is known/and in its place." Epic in scope, spellbinding in its intimacy, generosity, and wisdom, Morning in Serra Mattu is the book we didn't know we needed.
how thrilling it was in the earliest morning
to race barefoot down the sandy slopes and dunes
with all the bellowing goats
and dogs and sheep and other animals
for their first morning drink
and to swim in the fresh waters of the flowing river
while the thousand upon thousand
of high unhindered Nubian stars began to fall away
before a tinge of milky line along the hills
until light grew from nearly nothing
to an immensity
—from "Return to Serra Mattu"
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There is nothing quite like this arresting, careful narrative: an oral tale updated for the 21st century, a memoir of two generations in one decimated place, a reported history in sparse verse. Now an environmental researcher in Berkeley, Gamal grew up in Sudan, the son of a diplomat from a Nubian family. His poem ("as told to E. G. Dubovsky, who recorded it in verse") follows his heroic grandmother Fatmareya, his hardworking, educated father Jamal, and the Nubians of southern Egypt and northern Sudan, from the end of the British Empire to the installation of the Aswan dam which flooded the Nubian homelands to the modern diaspora and continuing Sudanese civil wars. Dubovsky and Gamal have fashioned a text that works as both memoir and folklore, as education and protest, as a compilation of well-told anecdotes, and as pure description. The exiles are "lonely for their country/ where sweet desert rain fell softly/ rash-ash'/ every dawn for about half an hour." Short titled segments connect the roster of characters ("he was the one who jumped the black bull") to set-pieces of larger scope, but the story of Gamal's family never gets lost. The result is a strong, strange introduction to a history, a family, and a terrain most Americans have not seen.
