“This was how I came into the world, the son both of a living man, and of a ghost…”. In Hamid Dirar’s recently published memoir, the paradox of parentage takes central stage. Described by the novelist Nuruddin Farah as “a memoir of rare beauty”, by the Sudanese political commentator Magdi el Gizouli as “spellbinding”, and by the scholar Robert Irwin, in the Times Literary Supplement as “mesmerising“, The Amulet is a coming-of-age memoir that delights all those who read it.
Dr Dirar is author of the classic The Indigenous Fermented Foods of the Sudan (1993). He was born a nomadic camel-keeper in Eastern Sudan. The Amulet is an account of his boyhood and youth that transports the reader to his ancestral homeland in Nubia–the land of rocks–and thence to the Butana, the great grass plain along the Ethiopian border where he grew to manhood. He was, he explains, the son of two fathers: his birth father and his birth mother’s deceased husband, a religious teacher with powers that extended beyond the grave. In Hamid Dirar’s youth the modern world remained a distant prospect–until the day his life and the politics of Sudan were transformed by the military coup of 1964.
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