A poem by Rania Mamoun begins: “sometimes hiding’s where you are safe. hiding from every one every thing every where / hiding from you in you.”
Mamoun wrote the untitled poem in March 2020. It was just days into the pandemic — and less than a year since she and her two daughters fled her home country of Sudan, where she had been arrested and beaten, and her writings censored, for voicing opposition to the repressive government.
Since coming to Pittsburgh, Mamoun has continued writing, but always under the pen name “RaMa.” That changes this week with the publication of her debut poetry collection, “Something Evergreen Called Life” (Action Books).
Mamoun is using her full name. And she is not hiding anymore.
“Now, with this book, I said enough is enough, she said." And whatever happens I will deal with it."
In Sudan, Mamoun spent most of her life under the rule of the autocrat Omar al-Bashir. After three decades in power, al-Bashir was driven from office in 2019, in a popular uprising. By that time Mamoun — who had several novels and story collections to her credit — was already planning to leave the country with the help of the ICORN Cities of Refuge program. Since then, she’s been one of the several writers in residence at City of Asylum, which shelters writers persecuted in their home countries.
The poems in “Something Evergreen” grew out of her experience during the first few months of the pandemic, when she and City of Asylum co-founder, artist Diane Samuels, would meet daily via video chat. Mamoun writes in Arabic; Samuels would create collages in response to Mamoun’s rough translations of lines or poems she wrote.
The dated but untitled poems range from Mamoun’s childhood and young adulthood (“in our twenties we would meet on burning days to sip coffee / he would talk to me about poetry God & philosophy”) to the loneliness of exile: “my heart is cracked in two / half here / half far /adrift.”
“I was trying to find the connection between two homes. Because now I consider Pittsburgh my home,” said Mamoun, who is 44.
Mamoun called the project (whose cover art is by Samuels) therapeutic.
“For me, this book — it is a journey of healing and a journey to go back to myself and connect and understand all of this world,” she said. “And just express myself in this exile and the loneliness.”
At this week’s book launch, Mamoun will read from the book, joined by her Paris-based translator, Yasmine Seale.
This event is Sat., March 4, at Alphabet City, on the North Side, and admission is free. More information is here.
