![]() Eritrea has a long coastline along the Red Sea, and so its history and identity are necessarily connected to water. Girmay begins this section by explaining an estimated 20,000 people have died at sea in the last two decades while trying to cross from Africa to Europe, and that nearly 300 Eritreans died on one day in 2013 when their boat sank attempting this crossing. The first half of the book is primarily concerned with Eritrean history, and particularly with the role the sea has played in this small African country’s national story. She explores Eritrean history (its wars, its migrations, its diaspora, of which she is a part), mythology, contemporary racial injustice in America, personal wounds, family, the nature of memory. ![]() Girmay picks up themes here like found objects on the shore, examines them, and sets them each back down in the depressions they left behind. ![]() ![]() Aracelis Girmay’s new poetry collection The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016) is a perpetually shifting document, one that skirts from one corner of her mind to another, from deep to deep, like the dark, unknowable seas that so possess her in these verses, like the sands that tumble and realign beneath them. ![]()
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