Morning in Serra Mattu: A Nubian Ode

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%E2%80%94which flooded the Nubian homelands%E2%80%94to 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/ %E2%80%98rash-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. (Apr.)