Norman MacDonald

I’m from Kemet. You call it Egypt. Now I live in Texas. Crafted from wood and ritually painted nearly 2,000 years ago, my job in afterlife protection never ends. I haven’t always done it so well. 

Since antiquity, foods and food cultures have migrated from the Middle East westward as far as the Canary Islands. After 1492 the Canaries became a leading port of departure to the New World, and new research shows that Canarian culinary influences flowed particularly to the dry lands that today straddle the border between Mexico and the us. Those influences led to crops and livestock that have helped produce the region’s distinctive cuisine today—from albóndigas and atoles to sopapillas and zalabias.

I was carved to adorn a soldier's ring, but one day in the steamy bathhouse of the Second Legion Augusta, I came unglued, slipped my mooring, and then darkness–and plenty of rotten company–for nearly 2,000 years.

Royal trumpet of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, I was born to command armies, priests and whole populations. But my days with him were few. Layed to rest with my mouthpiece toward my 19-year-old pharaoh, I fell silent for 3,262 years. Then one of you tried to play me.

“You have marveled at me since beyond memory, at once dreading the flash of my blinding light and eager for my return. My brilliance was recorded and sung about; my rumbles of warnings, in pithy Latin on a North African stone inscribed—’FVLGVR CONDITV’--‘Lightening was buried here.’”

Independent since 1975, Suriname began as an English and then a Dutch colony. Now among the western hemisphere’s most culturally diverse countries, it also lays claim to the hemisphere’s highest percentage of population identifying as Muslims: 14 percent. Our Canada-born, Amsterdam-based, award-winning illustrator-author paid a visit to sketch and listen.