Another Great Book Set in Sudan

As I’m packing and preparing the Simbolei Community Library for shipment from Michigan to Kenya, one of the greatest challenges for me is the temptation to continue to purchase new books. I am trying to cut back on purchases so that I can get the books we already have ready for shipment and I can turn my attention to other moving related tasks that need to be done.

Having gotten that off my chest, I want to follow up on last week’s post about A Rope from the Sky, a recent history of South Sudan, with another Sudan related book in an entirely different genre.

Morning in Serra Mattu : A Nubian Ode is a collection of interrelated verse stories that describe the culture, environment and people of Nubia, an ancient civilization and now a region in the country of Sudan. This is a beautiful and intriguing book, the poetry full of delicate and intimate details while overall the poems weave the story of historical and environmental change.

Over 100,000 Nubian people in Egypt and Sudan were displaced upon completion of Egypt’s Aswan High Dam in 1960 and this event is one of the tragic themes of the stories. But, the history in this book reaches much farther back into the distant past as well as into the present.

Here is an excerpt from the poem With Alawiyya -

Alawiyya was your sister
one year older
with whom you loved to set out to explore
and together you knew all the roads
and hidden paths and complex secret passageways
of all those neighborhoods
sometimes climbing on roofs of garages
from which height you reached out with a wire
you bent with a hook to pull
tamarinds down toward you
taking in your hands the fruit
and the British were quite crazy with such sun
to grow every kind of citrus that they could
to water with each moon
they flooded the gardens from the Nile
the orchard then became a lake
from With Alawiyya in Morning in Serra Mattu

With books we can travel the world, finding our common feelings with people from other times and places but also learning to see the world through another person’s experiences. As we prepare to move the Simbolei Community Library into its new home , I find books to be both soothing and inspiring. I’ll continue to share treasures for adults and children, both books specifically related to Africa and books related to topics such as development and education so that you can share the journey of discovery with us.

Happy reading!

— Andrea