Synopsis

The Marabou Who Crossed the Sea follows a second-generation daughter as she seeks to understand her mother and, consequently, the ugliness of the marabou. Written by Ugandan-American poet and teacher, Rohanna Ssanyu, the collection examines the dispersal of a family and the fate of its children. Through the busy streets of the capital, in airmail envelopes, and on big crooked letters, The Marabou Who Crossed the Sea finds beauty in a present viewed through bloodshot eyes. The stork and its counterpart, the crane, with its crown of gold sequins and tail of button strings, find solace.

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Praise for The Marabou Who Crossed the Sea

Rohanna Ssanyu’s The Marabou Who Crossed the Sea traces a family’s multigenerational journey across Uganda, America, and memory. Through shifting perspectives—of child, mother, ancestor—it explores diaspora, inheritance, loss, and belonging. Ssanyu brings a sharp, unsentimental eye to this material. In one poem, she notes, “We cannot afford the ticket home to bury grandmother. / All the men holding her casket are strangers.” In another, when the narrator attempts to speak to her Auntie in Luganda, we understand the narrator’s displacement: “Auntie scrunches her nose and tells me / just speak in English / so I curse her in Spanish.” This book is funny and sad and clear-eyed. It is the first book in a promising career. 

— Charles Rafferty, author of The Appendectomy Grin

Rohanna gives us the opportunity to look back, cradled by the hard work of our ancestors, hopeful for futures filled with the abundance of what they left for us to water, and grow and birth into the world in which we live, even by way of our own children.

We are introduced to a history we may not have experienced, through the sounds, and smells. Through the pictures painted, and tastes offered to us in the bits offered in her work, Rohanna takes us to a place we never knew we needed to be. And begs us to ask, who and where do we come from?

— Nikkya Hargrove, author of Mama: A Queer, Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found