Darfur poet triumphs in international poetry slam

Emtithal Mahmoud, whose family were driven from Sudan by war when she was a child, wins performance poetry title for pieces drawing on a traumatic history

‘There’s always more to write’ ... Emtithal Mahmoud Photograph: Román Castellanos-Monfil

Alison Flood

Wednesday 4 November 2015  The Guardian

“When I was 7, she cradled bullets in the billows of her robes,” writes Emtithal Mahmoud in the poem Mama, with which she won the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship in Washington DC. “That same night, she taught me how to get gunpowder out of cotton with a bar of soap.”

But Mahmoud, who comes from Darfur and is currently a senior at Yale University studying anthropology and molecular biology, says her mother has yet to hear the poem she inspired; she left for Sudan on the first day of the poetry competition, which was also the day of Mahmoud’s grandmother’s death.
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