Musa Ahmed Murawih

On the Edge of Scent and Spice Musa Ahmed Murawih Arabic edition

This is a small poetry collection in Arabic. Background: In 1989, Sudan Islamists toppled the country's democratically elected government through a military coup that they first denied they had been plotting all along. They then moved immediately to purge the country's civil service, military and police from anyone whose allegiance to them was in question, and installed their largely unqualified cadres in their stead. But most devastatingly, they injected their brand of militant Islamism into the ongoing war with the country's south, hosted many known terrorists like Usama bin Laden and others, and opened the infamous "Ghost Houses", where opponents were tortured, sometimes to death. Sudan, a constantly troubled but relatively progressive country that had toppled two dictatorships peacefully decades before the current Arab Spring, went on to top many of the world's black lists. This year (2011), the country split into two. This poetry collection, comprising four, long "epic" poems, powerfully combines the mythical and the realistic, the personal and the public, to recount in a lyrical, elegant language, what happened to the country and its peoples under the current Islamist regime.