Mummy Eaters

Sherry Shenoda's collection Mummy Eaters explores the mythology of the ancient Egyptians and the implications of colonialism on her passage. It juxtaposes the reverence for the human body as sacred matter and a pathway to eternal life with the European fascination with ingesting Egyptian human remains as medicine and using exhumed Egyptian mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 104 pages
Publication date: 05 August 2022
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Sherry Shenoda's collection "Mummy Eaters" has been awarded the American Book Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2022. It follows the journey of an imagined ancestor, one of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten in the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, as she explores the mummification process and the afterlife. Shenoda weaves together the mythology of the ancient Egyptians, which emphasized the preservation of the human body through mummification, with the European fascination with consuming Egyptian human remains as medicine and using exhumed mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer. The book is written in the Coptic tradition, with the imagined ancestor and the author as descendant engaging in a call and response dialogue.

Weight: 178g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 11 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496232540