Changing the World Through Words: Emtithal Mahmoud the Influential Sudanese Poet
By Febronia Hanna
Sudanese poet, Emtithal Mahmoud, is a woman who won the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam Championship, sat with American Presidents and debated them. Moreover, she also got comforted by the Dali Lama and was selected to be one of the most influential 100 women for 2015 of the BBC.
She wrote this poem after the tragic death of both her mother and grandmother. As she heard the news that her mother died on the plane on her way to the grandmother’s funeral; she thought about that the fact that her grandmother had survived famine and war; but in the end, she died not just of cancer but the lack of proper medical research.
Emtithal was invited to many important events; she was a speaker at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ nuclear ethics conference. There she spoke for about an hour putting a human face on the refugee crisis. Since then she’s been a part of the roundtable discussion at the White House.
She recently published her debut poetry album “Sister’s Entrance”, in which she answers a question that she was recently asked at her first UN general assembly meeting: “The one-millionth refugee just left South Sudan; can you comment?”.
The Sudanese poet is an inspiration to all women all over the world. The way she describes the real struggles of the black continent is very authentic and real. As she rages her way through her poems, people get a deep feeling of empathy and a much better understanding of how things are run in Sudan.
