“When I was 7, she cradled bullets in the billows of her robes,” writes Emtithal Mahmoud in the poem Mama, with which she won the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship in Washington DC. “That same night, she taught me how to get gunpowder out of cotton with a bar of soap.”

But Mahmoud, who comes from Darfur and is currently a senior at Yale University studying anthropology and molecular biology, says her mother has yet to hear the poem she inspired; she left for Sudan on the first day of the poetry competition, which was also the day of Mahmoud’s grandmother’s death.

“Given the circumstances, my mother has never heard the Mama poem and does not yet know of its existence. If she knew how compassionate people were about her journey and her strength, I am sure she would soldier on with renewed conviction,” she says.

The poem opens as a man asks Mahmoud, “Hey yo sistah, you from the motherland? … ‘cause you got a little bit of flavor in you, I’m just admiring what your mama gave you’”, and sees her respond:

Let me tell you something about my mama

She can reduce a man to tattered flesh without so much as blinking

Her words fester beneath your skin and the whole time,

You won’t be able to stop cradling her eyes.

My mama is a woman, flawless and formidable in the same step.

Woman walks into a warzone and has warriors cowering at her feet.



It was the final piece Mahmoud performed in the competition, which sees performance poets from around the world compete in a series of rounds. She had nearly pulled out of the poetry slam altogether after learning of her grandmother’s death, but she told Yale News that her parents felt her grandmother would have wanted her to be there.

“My grandma never learned how to read or write. They didn’t teach women how to do that back then in my country,” she told Yale News. “Even when she was staying with us here, she was always over my shoulder: ‘Do your thing. Read, read, write.’”



Her first two poems, People Like Us, and Bullets, also deal with Darfur, the first noting that “Flesh was never meant to dance with silver bullets”, and the second dealing with how she feels guilty for living in America, and that her “body should be lined with bullets: one for each of my brothers and sisters who stopped a bullet for me.”

They helped her make it to the finals, but she needed two more poems to continue competing; she wrote one the next day about her grandmother, and completed the half-finished Mama, giving herself three hours to memorise them before her performances.

Yale News reports that halfway through Mama, the crowd gave her a standing ovation, and she received a perfect score. She dedicated the win to her grandmother.

Emtithal Mahmoud performs “The Colors We Ascribe”, one of the poems that took her through to the competition final.

“The poems I entered and the poems I write in general tend to deal with flawed social perceptions, point out disparities, and address injustices that don’t normally receive much attention. Above all, the poems I shared during this competition helped me grapple with personal experiences that left me speechless and only able to move forward through poetry – the tip of the iceberg really,” Mahmoud tells the Guardian by email.

“Performing the poems was very hard given the situation. I was right in the midst of the things I was speaking on and that made everything all the more visceral, all the more taxing, and all the more urgent. I felt like I had said everything there is to say each time I left the stage. Although you know, we can never truly say everything. There’s always more to write.”

Mahmoud’s family left Sudan for Yemen when she was a toddler, moving to the US in 1998. She began writing poetry as a child “in order to help my parents raise awareness for our people in Darfur”. “My goal was to make sure that the children, my cousins, were not forgotten in the attempts to address the atrocities in Darfur,” she says.

It wasn’t until she came to Yale that she discovered spoken word poetry, and was “completely enthralled by the emotive force by which each poet performed”. She joined spoken word group Oyé, and made the Yale slam team, representing the university at a national level before qualifying for the Individual World Poetry Slam.

“I never expected the win,” she said. “It was such a beautiful experience and I did work hard, but I never imagined that so many would show such compassion in this time. To me, the win means solace, that despite all that has happened, there are hundreds and hundreds of people out there reaching out in solidarity and hopes of moving forward towards peace.”

Mama

I was walking down the street when a man stopped me and said,

Hey yo sistah, you from the motherland?

Because my skin is a shade too deep not to have come from foreign soil

Because this garment on my head screams Africa

Because my body is a beacon calling everybody to come flock to the motherland

I said, I’m Sudanese, why?

He says, ‘cause you got a little bit of flavor in you,

I’m just admiring what your mama gave you

Let me tell you something about my mama

She can reduce a man to tattered flesh without so much as blinking

Her words fester beneath your skin and the whole time,

You won’t be able to stop cradling her eyes.

My mama is a woman, flawless and formidable in the same step.

Woman walks into a warzone and has warriors cowering at her feet

My mama carries all of us in her body,

on her face, in her blood and

Blood is no good once you let it loose

So she always holds us close.

When I was 7, she cradled bullets in the billows of her robes.

That same night, she taught me how to get gunpowder out of cotton with a bar of soap.

Years later when the soldiers held her at gunpoint and asked her who she was

She said, I am a daughter of Adam, I am a woman, who the hell are you?

The last time we went home, we watched our village burn,

Soldiers pouring blood from civilian skulls

As if they too could turn water into wine.

They stole the ground beneath our feet.

The woman who raised me

turned and said, don’t be scared

I’m your mother, I’m here, I won’t let them through.

My mama gave me conviction.

Women like her

Inherit tired eyes,

Bruised wrists and titanium plated spines.

The daughters of widows wearing the wings of amputees

Carry countries between their shoulder blades.

I’m not saying dating is a first world problem, but these trifling motherfuckers seem to be.

The kind who’ll quote Rumi, but not know what he sacrificed for war.

Who’ll fawn over Lupita, but turn their racial filters on.

Who’ll take their politics with a latte when I take mine with tear gas.

Every guy I meet wants to be my introduction to the dark side,

Wants me to open up this obsidian skin and let them read every tearful page,

Because what survivor hasn’t had her struggle made spectacle?

Don’t talk about the motherland unless you know that being from Africa

means waking up an afterthought in this country.

Don’t talk about my flavor unless you know that

My flavor is insurrection, it is rebellion, resistance

My flavor is mutiny

It is burden, it is grit and it is compromise

And you don’t know compromise until you’ve rebuilt your home for the third time

Without bricks, without mortar, without any other option.

I turned to the man and said,

My mother and I can’t walk the streets alone back home any more.

Back home, there are no streets to walk any more.