Mourning Air explores the randomness of grief

Such tiny words for such big feelings: Grief. Guilt. Loss. Rage. Hurt.

- Karishma Nandkeolyar [e-mail]

When someone close to you dies, sorrow clings to you, first like a suffocating blanket, next like a sheet, and finally like a shadow. It ebbs and flows and sometimes, seems to fade away. But then when you least expect it, it’s the claw tugging at your heart.

The pain, the defeat, the candyfloss of memories, how do you express yourself in a way that will not glorify or demonise your subject? Leena Magdi, the Sudanese-American author of Mourning Air (published by Dubai-based The Dreamwork Collective), found her way to cope required a reporter’s mindset and a writer’s arsenal of narrative - poetry, prose, storytelling.

Her brother was all of 21 when he was murdered by a national security officer in 2022 in Khartoum - and her tome is her way of processing this feeling of loss that is at once a singular and everyman experience.

“I’ve always had this idea of writing a book, but it’s never come to me. But after everything happened, I had this feeling like there was so much in me and I needed to get it out,” she explains, adding that she had to navigate difficult terrain to get her story out. “I felt like it wouldn’t just help me to write about it, but it also helped to share.”