Description

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World Literature Today has described John Mateer as "the most recent reincarnation of of the international poet". Born in South Africa, John Mateer has for the past two decades been documenting the world seen from the Indian Ocean edge of Australia, travelling frequently to Asia, Europe and elsewhere. Unbelievers or 'The Moor', like his previous surveys of the visages of the Portuguese Empire in Southern Barbarians and of his memories of South Africa in Ex-White-described by novelist J.M. Coetzee as "rolling back the tide of forgetting"-recovers aspects of the hidden past that haunt our present. In Unbelievers, Mateer seeks out evidence of the importance of the Islamic and Arabic history in places as diverse as Dubai, Seville, Cairo and the Portuguese village of Monsanto. He is not only interested in the past but in the deep present, its poetics.