I could describe Sherry Shenoda in many ways: poet, pediatrician, immigrant, intellectual, mystic, mother, daughter, granddaughter, aunt, wife, Egyptian, American, Coptic Christian, muse and hearer of the muse. Yet she defies description. In a world of people clawing desperately to stand out, I find her remarkable for her desire and willingness to stand in the long flowing river of beautiful traditions, including of family and faith. Sherry and I talked two years ago, about her first novel, The Lightkeeper. Sherry kindly agreed to talk again, this time about her book of poetry, Mummy Eaters. The book was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry in 2022, and won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Beyond the awards, I found Mummy Eaters a hard, visceral mix of intellect and emotion, of ancient longing and complex relationality. In it, the poems engage in a dialogue “between an imagined ancestor, one of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten, and the author as descendant.” It creates a captivating construct for Sherry’s ruminations on identity and ownership, desecration and courtesy, and place and spirit. All through it, I found a wise soul seeking, if not answers, then a credible way forward. And much of that path involves breathing to life more poetry in the world. Thank you, Sherry, for a sublime exchange. I read this book and I thought, “Wow, this is different from your first book, The Lightkeeper.” Very different, yes. But I love that. I've said this to a couple people now, but I'm tired of reading Cal Newport's books. I love his ideas, I love his podcast. But every book is between 220 and 240 pages, he stamps it out, and then two years later, he writes another book of 220 to 240 pages. It's the same formula. I'm bored with it. Some topics deserve 500 pages, some deserve four pages. Go with what the topic deserves. Yeah. But I'm glad it was a good read for you. I'm glad it spoke to you. Absolutely. To start, why did you write Mummy Eaters, and who'd you write it for? I was trying to understand my Coptic heritage, and I wanted to get at the link between Coptic Christians and their ancient Egyptian roots. So, I wanted to understand the context historically, as well as in the light of colonialism. And I wanted to move closer to my grandmothers, neither of whom learned to read, and my great aunt. She did learn how to read, but my two grandmothers didn't. They're all gone now. The ultimate answer to your question, the target audience is probably me. Which I think is probably the target audience for most writers. I write to figure out what I'm thinking, as I'm sure you do. And I'm always endlessly grateful if any of it translates to other people's life experiences. You explained it a little bit in the beginning of the book, but why did you title it, Mummy Eaters? Okay, so this refers to a practice, a gruesome practice in the 16th and 17th centuries, when Europeans would eat Egyptian human remains – mummies – for medicinal purposes. There is this conception that Europeans were civilized in a way that the rest of the world wasn't. I just wanted to highlight the maybe uncivil and barbaric ways that native Egyptians – alive and dead – were treated. It's a study on civility. The mummification process that the ancient Egyptians used was very reverent. It was thoughtful, it was deliberate, it was formulaic. But the way that the remains were dug up and used wasn't. And I wanted to lightly sketch this question that perhaps incivility existed because they weren't seen as being human, which I think we're gonna get to later. That was the reason for the title. You mentioned the mummification process being ritualized. The word that came to mind is “sacred.” Recently, I took a class on the Tale of Sinuhe from 1900 BC or so. Sinuhe leaves Egypt under strange circumstances, but he's very keen to return for the end of his life, and for his mummification and burial. In fact, the Tale is told from the perspective of him already being dead. He's telling the Tale after his death. Sinuhe is a very interesting character – I'm not necessarily sure that what you see is what you get in everything he writes. But to me, it's very clear that he sincerely wants to return to Egypt. The place of Egypt and burial in Egypt is critical for him. I'm interested in your view. In Mummy Eaters, the land of Egypt is hugely important. The mummification process is hugely important. You write about Egypt as sacred soil, about its desecration away from that sacredness. I’d like to hear from you about the importance of Egypt as a place, as a sacred place, for humanity, but also for you. Egypt is the land of my ancestors. And I was born in Cairo. I've been back multiple times since immigrating to the United States, but it doesn't belong to me in the same way that it would potentially belong to my cousins, who still live there. In some sense, the immigrant experience is very different from living in a place. But it still feels like the place that I came from. There's this curiosity that's born of distance and a desire to understand where my people came from, the land that nurtured my ancestors. In some broader sense, I think ancient Egypt belongs to the world, to humanity. So Mummy Eaters has been my way of starting to understand this incubator of culture, spirituality, human intelligence that was ancient Egypt and carried forth into modern times. Let me return to your purpose and process in writing the book. How long did it take from your first idea of it to getting the manuscript done? This was very different for me, Russell. This book took me by surprise. I normally write at a glacial pace, and this is not unrelated to the fact that I have three small boys. But this book was finished in about six months, which is lightning fast for me. This book wanted to be written. There was something urgent about this book. It goes back to what I was saying earlier that I wanted to understand. There was something that I wanted to untangle about where my family came from. It was a very urgent writing process. Very different from my novel, which took five years. Pull on that thread a little bit more, Sherry. What were you trying to unravel or understand? At its root, I wanted to get at the sins that we commit against each other. The ways that we commit violence against each other. As somebody who's slightly removed from that violence, what it means to forgive, because nothing was done to me directly, right? I didn't have my tongue cut out for speaking Coptic. My remains were not exhumed and consumed. I did not directly experience colonization or theft, but some of this was me trying to grapple with the question of, what is the statute of limitations on something that happened to your ancestors in the past? How long does generational trauma continue? And is it okay to even call it “generational trauma”? At the same time, I wanted to work on this parallel storyline. In the beginning of the book, this ancestor of the writer, one of the descendants of this pharaoh, Akhenaten, is being mummified. It also follows her journey into the afterlife. We dug people up, but they were actually people. And we consumed them. What did it mean spiritually for them to bury their human dead, and to preserve them? Why did it matter to have the body in the afterlife? Why did the incarnate, the human person, matter? Why did the physical body matter? In modern times, we sometimes incinerate our dead. We don't have the same reverence for the body of the dead that they did. I wanted to understand some of that as well. And I think in the seed of understanding their reverence for the dead, is the answer to why resurrection was so important to them. Because the body itself was really important. In the incarnation is the seed of what eventually becomes resurrection for them – the afterlife. That is their version of what we would think of as heaven. In ancient Egypt, the pharaohs were seen as an incarnation of the gods. The royalty was the incarnate god. They very much saw the things of the world and the key people of the world as the incarnate gods. Is that what you're speaking to in terms of the incarnation of the holy, the sacred, and the resurrection that everyone's bodies play a role in the sacred cycle? And mummification was a very important part of that? It was carrying forth and completing the cycle. Yes, well said. And you can see that in the story of Osiris. It's very cyclic. His body needed to be recovered to be resurrected – essentially, to be brought back. They were very, very reverent about the human body. They were reverent about the human body. They were also reverent about the place, the land. The name of Egypt is holy. The love of Egypt, the land, the place, is evident in Mummy Eaters. You and I have talked about Wendell Berry before - his view that people should have reverence for a place. Talk to me about that – not only the holiness and the sacredness of the human body as related to the divine, but also of Egypt as sacred and holy, and in some sense, distinct from other places. You were born there, but you haven't lived there for long. Yet you still feel a powerful connection with it. And I know your family does too. Talk to me about the specialness, the holiness, the sacredness of this place, Egypt. Is it sacred compared to anywhere else? All the land is sacred. The very first poem of the book is called “Sunflowers of Fukushima.” It's an invocation. There's this back and forth between speaking and silencing throughout the book. In Japan, from my understanding, nothing could grow in the land that was affected by the nuclear fallout. A monk – Monk Koyn Abe – planted a field of sunflower seeds, which basically pulled up the radiation, the toxicity that was in the soil. That was my prayer for the book – to pull up some of the toxicity that had been sown throughout time, whether it was through colonization, desecrati
