Shenoda, Sherry

Sherry Shenoda is the author of The Lightkeeper: A Novel. A Coptic poet, writer, and pediatrician, she was born in Cairo, and works at the intersection of human rights and child health. She serves as a pediatrician in a nonprofit health center. Shenoda’s collection Mummy Eaters (‎University of Nebraska Press) follows in the footsteps of an imagined ancestor, one of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten in the 18th dynasty, Egypt. Much of Mummy Eaters is written as a call and response, in the Coptic tradition, between the imagined ancestor and the author as the descendant. Shenoda forges an imagined path through her ancestor’s mummification and journey to the afterlife. This exploration suggests the implications of colonialism in her passage. The mythology of the ancient Egyptians was oriented toward resurrection through the preservation of the human body in mummification. Shenoda juxtaposes this reverence for the human body as sacred matter, and a pathway to eternal life with the 16th- and 17th-century European fascination with ingesting Egyptian human remains as medicine, and using exhumed Egyptian mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer. Today, Egyptian human remains are displayed in museums.