A Conversation with Safia Elhillo
Postscript’s EIC Vamika Sinha sat down with Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo, prior to her performance at this year’s Hekayah Festival, an event held as part of the UAE’s National Day Celebrations to showcase a diversity of artists, performers and creators exploring concepts of their home and heritage.
“Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Award, and the chapbook The Life and Times of Susie Knuckles (2012). With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Elhillo earned a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an MFA in poetry at the New School. Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015) and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (2018).”
Vamika Sinha: In your own words, how would you define your poetics?
Safia Elhillo: I think a lot about the poetics of mutation. And this is because I feel like I’ve been governed by the pursuit of fluency for my entire English-speaking life. In my Arabic-speaking life, that came later because in the first part of my life I took Arabic fluency for granted. But I noticed how this pursuit of fluency in English made me feel so deeply out of context. I felt inarticulate, clumsy, fumbling. In my poems, I am not interested in a mastery of English. I’m trying to mess with it. Now that I'm in, within the language, I’m trying to mess the whole thing up.
Syntax is one of the main ways I try to go about this. For instance, my mom, my grandparents, the way they phrase things in English, you can tell that the thought came up in Arabic and then they translated it out. So the syntax is slightly skewed, and I use that as a cheat code for my poems. So, in general, I always want the syntax to feel a little translated, a little odd. I want someone who is a native or fluent English speaker to have to stumble around in my poems a bit. Because if it’s a little too smooth, too easy and fluent, you don’t really have to spend time in the language. You just get the meaning straight away, and the words just become a means to get to that meaning. I want it to be a little stickier. To make them hang out for a second, and eventually arrive at the meaning, but having taken a more scenic route.
VS: That’s an interesting and unexpected answer. It seems like you’re disrupting the smoothness of merely using language as a means to meaning.
SE: Right. I often find that when someone, and I think they think they’re complimenting me, says that I speak English well, that’s such a useless sentiment to me. I don’t ever want someone to read my poems and think oh, she speaks English so well. That shouldn’t be the main takeaway. I’d rather they say, “She speaks English so strangely.”
VS: I love that, this disruptive aspect of playing with the conventions of what language is supposed to be and how it’s supposed to create beauty. What are the things that spark and trigger your urge, your need to make poetry? What starts the percolation in your mind?
SE: I’ve been trying to codify this for myself for a while now. When I first started writing, I took inspiration for granted. I just always wanted to write; everything else that I had to do was just time taken away from time I could be spending writing. But it’s not that like that now – I would much rather be taking a nap or watching television. But, in general, if I’m not reading then I’m not writing. Without fail. And to specify, that’s reading poetry. I read a lot of novels, but to me, my brain feels the same as when I’m watching TV. Reading poetry makes me feel sharper, more aware in the way I’m looking. Everything’s more clarified. I’m measuring out words a certain way, spending time in my thoughts in a certain way. So if I want to write poetry, I need to be reading poetry. Usually, if I’ve already organically been reading poems, then the desire to write will naturally come up in me. There’s nothing like reading a poem to make you feel like writing poetry’s just the funnest thing in the world. If I’m in a situation where I need to write something and create the conditions for it, I’ll go and re-read some beloved poems or book that I already know that I like to generate the feeling.
I also find a lot of inspiration in music. Obviously, reading poems moves me and I’ll often read something I relate to deeply, but listening to music will bring up deep, nonverbal emotion. So I’ll just be in a really big feeling, but not know what to call it. Then I’ll sit down and try to parse it by writing a poem. I’m not super fluent in my emotional vocabulary, and I feel like the word “fluent” is going to keep coming up here. I’ll be sitting listening to a song that makes me feel nostalgic or sad, but I won’t know that those are the specific emotions I’m feeling, it’ll just be like I have a “big feeling.” And then by the end of writing the poem, I’ll have a name for it. So music is like tricking myself into having a fertile emotion.
If all of that doesn’t work, I’m in a space recently where I want to write a poem that I don’t already intuitively know how to write yet. So I’m looking at the work of other poets and almost trying to build myself a worksheet. There’s a poem called “Corfu” by Jenny Xie from her book Eye Level which I remember making me feel like I want to know how to write a poem like that. With the knowledge and skills I currently have, I don’t know how to do that yet.
The way I’ve used memory in my poems so far is in a line or a stanza, and then it’ll go back to some greater lyric meditation. But I will rarely spend the entire poem in one memory or one narrative, like a poem that feels like watching a movie. And this may be because I’m drawn to more narrative poems nowadays, and I haven’t done or known how to do that kind of thing before. Corfu was the first poem where I sat down and noted line by line what was happening on a narrative level. That gave me these one-line prompts that I would then fill in with my own memory and images. I moved some stuff around but I got a draft in a form in which I'm not yet fluent in.
VS: Do you think that poetry is less of a plot-driven medium for you? Or is this reach for narrative that you describe a kind of attempt for plot within your poems? A lot of people often think that poems are ephemeral things, that even when narrative, they’re imagistic, flitting from moment to moment, fragmentary. But some of the greatest poems can be those that consistently build narrative. It reminds me of when you said that when you read novels, your brain consumes them like TV. Nowadays, I become more convinced that these long TV series have become the new novel, shows like Bojack Horseman and Mad Men. But do you see yourself foraying more into creating plot in poetry in particular, and what can that do?
SE: At Cave Canem a few years ago, I was in a workshop with the writer Chris Abani, who is an amazing teacher and poet. That really shaped the way I edit my poems because we used a graph in which one axis was narrative and the other axis was lyric. If there was something off about a poem, he would say the first thing that you check for is if there is a correct narrative-lyric balance. And there’s no universally correct balance, it differs for the specific poem. But that’s what you would kind of chart out when workshopping. Maybe the poem might be too vague, so it could need more on the narrative end, and if the poem is too bare, stark or uninteresting, then there may not be enough lyric. That’s been a criteria I’ve used to edit my work for a long time.
I’ve never really thought about narrative as plot necessarily. Plot, the way I think about it, is cause and effect. So I don’t feel as married to cause and effect when writing a poem the way I do to actual narrative or story. What is very freeing for me in poetry is that you can make up the logic as the speaker of the poem. So the cause and effect in a poem can be whatever I decide it is. I can say the sky is gray because my lover has gone, for example. If I were writing a novel and wrote that, then I’d be like okay, sure, that sounds like a poem to me. Whereas in narrative, if I’m trying to actively trace cause and effect, and a character does something at random and there’s no catalyst that has generated that randomness, that needs to be corrected. But in poetry, there’s more space to play with that. Not every effect needs a traceable cause, or the cause can exist outside in the context of the poem. There’s a little more freedom from plot if I choose it.
All that to say, I do think I am thinking more about plot these days. There’s a difference between memory and story, and story is how you make sense of the memory, how you arrange it in arcs or so on. So I’m thinking about my memories and trying to carve out the story from the memory and then trying to make that story into a poem. And I’m still figuring it out because I’m not used to bringing narrative tools like plot into my poetry space.
I don’t particularly think one of my skills is being able to tell a story, like sitting at dinner and recounting something captivating. In working with memory, I sometimes try to cram everything that happened but what really needs to be done is the carving out of what happened in order for the real story to shine.
VS: When I think of cause and effect, I think of linearity and something firmly temporal. Something happened and so this happened. But poetry can exist without that, so I can almost conclude that poetry can transcend or play with temporality in a way that traditional narratives don’t have as much freedom to. And that’s one of the joys of poetry. So much of it is about flitting back and flirting with memories and the past, and then refitting it into the present and future. We’re constantly playing with time in poems, and that’s one of my favorite things about it.
SE: I remember being asked to write a synopsis for something and the assignment was explained to me as “just write down what happens.” And I was like, how are we using the word “happens?” The fact that the sky was blue and there was a gentle wind… I would write that. It happened! I don’t really have an event-based sense of happening. I think of everything simultaneously happening. There’s no linear temporality in my brain, that’s not how I think. It’s all happening to me all at once.
VS: Switching tack a little: Hekayah is a festival based in the UAE. How do you see yourself engaging with more Arab and Arabic-speaking readers and audiences?
SE: I don’t know if I’ve fully articulated an answer yet for this question. I think it’s very complicated for me and I don’t know if I have the public words for it yet.
VS: No worries. I was just curious about your connection to the festival, as I found it pleasantly surprising seeing you on the lineup, given your international status as a poet.
SE: My connection to Abu Dhabi is primarily social. I have family there, I’ve visited several times. I’ve been to Abu Dhabi a bunch but never in the capacity as a poet. So I know my context there as a visitor but I don’t quite yet know my capacity as a poet in this context yet. This would be the first time, even though I’m not physically there.
VS: Right. It would have been wonderful to have you here speaking on our stage. Do you think of your written poetry and spoken word as two different dimensions of your creative process or is it just a matter of writing things down and performing them? What’s the interplay of those two in your life?
SE: I think of them as the same. I know there are varying schools of thought on this but my own entry to poetry was through slam and spoken word. I was on a youth slam team from the age of 16 or 17 in DC, and then from there, some friends and I started NYU’s slam team in 2009 when I was a freshman, which I was part of for the duration of my undergrad. Right after graduating, I stopped participating in slam for the most part and separately started an MFA in poetry. I grew up at a time when the binary between spoken word and text was heavily enforced. Primarily in academic spaces, it was kind of looked down on poets who knew how to read their poems like they cared about them. And that binary is so boring to me. So boring. It is made up. It’s a bunch of arbitrary criteria that doesn’t apply either way. I believe for a poem to be good, I need to also be able to enjoy reading it on the page. And then when I’m performing the poem, whoever took the time to hear me read my poetry out loud, they should get something for their trouble.
My friend Angel Nafis once said that you can call me slam or spoken word or hip-hop or whatever you need to tell yourself to explain the fact that people don’t fall asleep when I read my poems. Because of my training as a performance poet, I think of it as an act of care and an act of respect. If someone is sitting in an audience watching me read my poem, I read my poem like I care about it. I don’t know if this is still done, but there was a time when the mark of a famous academic poet was that they read their poem in a monotone, like they didn’t really care or were bored of their own poem. Maybe it was to show they were aloof and sophisticated. I’m not aloof or sophisticated. I care. I care so much. And I love my poems! If you’re so bored of your poems, why are you subjecting this room full of people to hearing it? And if you’re not actually bored then what is the power in pretending you’re bored of this thing that I imagine you worked really hard at?
I care. I care so much. Maybe even if I could pretend that I didn’t, I don’t see the value in that. It is respectful to the work, the audience, and the art to treat it like I care.
I’ve spent time in both spaces because it’s all poetry at the end of the day to me. But as far as the communities, the spaces, and environments that have been created around each thing –– there are specific spaces for spoken word and specific spaces for reading poems on the page –– both spaces have taught me things, and as a result, I’ve realized they can’t be so different because the poems that are coming out of them are the same. I’m not out here trying to have the last word on page versus stage, but for me there is no versus. I write the poem on the page, then I go read it on the stage and it’s been the same poem the whole time. Any poem I’ve ever written, I’ve read it out loud to myself a thousand times, from first to final draft. Part of a poem working for me or feeling finished is that it has to work out loud. My ear is smarter than my eye. It’s been my poetry tool for longer. I grew up going to open mics and slams before I was reading books of poetry, so my ear is a little older than my eye in that regard.
VS: Reading your poetry out loud, even during the writing process, is a way of amplifying its music. My own approach to writing poems is coming at it like a musician because that’s what I was first, that was my first training. And spoken word, for example, eventually led us to rap; it was also a way of bringing communities together. Poetry is also community, and that was something that was fostered far more in an oral sense rather than textual, also because written poetry has been controlled canon-wise for so long, and it still is, in my opinion. So saying it out loud, like you care, like it has its own pulse, its own heartbeat, is another thing from doing the ideation and putting it on your screen or writing it in your notebook. It’s like giving it its own mouth – so that the poem can just speak.
A little bit more of a doom and gloom question: how has this year and quarantine, the madness of 2020, affected your writing, your poetics, or your creative perspective?
SE: First of all, throw this whole year out. For a long time, especially in the first months when it felt like any second it may all be over, I wasn't really writing. For me, making a poem involves radical presence and paying attention. I have to really check in with myself and observe and think. And that’s not what I'm trying to do when the world is burning. I want to be distracted! I’m not trying to be present, this year sucks. Like, be present for what? But after a few months of that, you can only dissociate for so long.
I hadn’t written poems until August of this year. The last time was maybe late March. But starting in April, I was with two friends of mine, and we were all in early stages of narrative projects. I had very loose ideas of a second novel in verse. I still can’t write prose; the most prose I will write is an email. So we were all working on these projects, and none of us had ever been in a fiction workshop before either. We started writing roughly 10 pages a week and sent them to each other mid-week. On Fridays, we’d get on a Zoom call and workshop each other’s work. It was a very DIY space, talking to each other as readers. We’ve taken some breaks, but we’re still continuing up to now.
With poetry, towards the end of July, my friend reached out to do a 30/30 (30 poems in 30 days) with her during August. I had also committed to doing the Sealey Challenge, where you read a poetry book every day. I hadn’t really been reading poetry much until that month. This turned out to be an interesting combination. If I thought I was nostalgic before, there’s truly nothing like being shut at home without being able to see anyone to really get in your nostalgic bag for stuff that barely happened two seconds ago. So I was sitting a lot in my memories.
I was also not really a poet who wrote about childhood a lot. I’ve always felt too young to look at my childhood with the distance of new eyes. But the pandemic happened and now I feel 50 years older, so I can turn that nostalgic eye onto my past and give it the treatment that I felt I could only give to things that happened a very long time ago, often before I was born. So now I’m looking at childhood and memory with that myth-making eye, that storytelling eye.
This alchemy of new things has been great. A lot of my poems kind of feel the same color to me, and these feel different, a different color. It might be because they’re so much more narrative, or it might be because I’m bringing in imagery or parts of my life that I don’t usually treat with my poet’s eye. For the first time, I was writing poems about other stuff. Usually, if it’s not like diasporic longing or romantic heartbreak, I’m like, I don't know how to write about that! For instance, I was watching The Sopranos for the first time and that showed up in my poems.
I did not expect to write anything at this time. I told myself early on that I don’t want to make a record of this time in my life. I want to forget that it happened. But there is something to be said about being in the house all day with not much else to do. Plus I’m on a poetry fellowship right now where the only thing that’s asked of me is to read and write poems.
VS: The pandemic, for me personally, also got me thinking outside of myself, thinking about community especially, as I was on an island campus under lockdown. Which leads me to my next question: what does poetry do for you personally, what would you do if it were taken away? How does it add to your life, and does it give you community?
SE: I had a gazillion hobbies as a child. I played the flute and drew badly and tried to knit, I would pick them up and abandon them quickly. When I first got into poetry, I thought it would be the same. The main thing that stuck, especially because it was in spoken word spaces, was that at the time it was very lonely to be an artsy kid. Everyone else was off being normal. I remember going to this open mic for the first time and it was just this band of weirdos, and I thought – These are my people. If all I have to do to keep getting to hang out with these people is write some poems, then by all means, I will write the poems. Just please keep letting me be part of this community. So that kept me coming back. I thought poems were cool, I early on didn’t feel a particular spark or magic, I just loved poetry spaces and poets and the poetry community. And the poetry scene, especially at the time, was very grassroots and unpretentious. Everyone talked to everyone. It was a cozy, welcoming space and I wanted to be part of it. It kept me coming back long enough that I started to have creative impulses and some real points of view artistically. So I became a member of a poetry community and a poet at the same time.
There’s this stereotype of the solitary, hermit writer, but I don’t know those people. It’s such a collectivist form for me. And I know Emily Dickinson happened, I know some poets are very solitary, but I can't imagine wanting to make poems that way. I love reading the work of my friends and learning from them. I also haven’t really had the experience of vertical mentorship where an elder takes me under their wing. It’s been lateral. I’ve had horizontal mentorship because my peers have always been so generous with what they know, where they’ll learn something and turn around and teach it to all of us. No one hoards resources or knowledge. I was made a poet in those spaces. The only reason I know what I do of poetry is because somebody took the time to teach it to me. I didn’t learn a whole lot from academic spaces; I primarily benefited from the time and space to read and write, but as far as information, my community gave me that.
The main reason I care is because I love this community that’s part of my life. And, of course, I love poems, and I’m a nerd about language, but that wouldn’t be enough on its own. I write poems because I’m excited to show them to my community. Sitting in a circle and reading poems was such a big part of my adolescence. Wherever we were, at a club or something, by the end of the night, we’d be in that circle, somebody reading out poems. I’m more jaded now. But I need to spend more time remembering that feeling, because that's the engine. It’s not to prove how smart I am or show I can write a metaphor –– who cares? I just want to make my friends laugh or shed a tear and snap their fingers and give me a note.
VS: I find that beautiful and so resonant. The way I grew up, when I got into poetry, it was drilled into me that I had to work to be the best and make it academically good. But that all changed for me when I got lonely. I studied abroad in Paris and made very close friends there, one of whom now runs this magazine with me. We were literature majors, but we weren’t taking literature classes in France, and were simultaneously trying to break into this city, as women or people of color, in this city that was really big and intimidating and white. We made a group chat where we started writing poems and sending them everyday. It didn’t matter if we were drunk or if the poems were shitty or we were on the train home from the club or on a plane. But that’s when I really realized what poetry meant for me. It was a way of understanding not just myself, but also other people, people I care about. I learnt to care about myself and about these other people through the poems. If we were going through something, and maybe we didn't feel comfortable saying it out loud, we would put it in the poems. I just treasured that time. So much of the poetry community can be steeped in overly academic jargon or pretentiousness, but I find joy in just grabbing a Post-it and writing a poem and showing it to your friend and then feeling closer to that friend. Poetry is an antidote to loneliness and isolation, to being islanded.
SE: I love the word “islanded” so thank you for that.
VS: Of course. So the last question is coming from a more personal place. I have a complex and varied background and identity, which is why I’m so drawn to your work and its grappling with language and diasporic longing and “What am I?” and “What is home?” I’ve often felt like the poetics and literature I have access to, and this is also because I went to NYU, are very U.S. American-dominated. I was wondering what you think about that, whether the poetry and discourse around it that circulates the most is dominated by U.S. American voices and platforms. Personally, I often find it difficult to search where I fit in in the poetry world because my identity is so strange. I’m not attached to a Western hyphen – I’m not Indian-American or Indian-British or what have you. I carry two countries from the Global South and then I moved to the UAE, so where do I, or how do people like me, with these unwieldy identities – and there’s so many of us – how can we make a space for ourselves in the poetry world? As much as the U.S. American narrative, and the many hybrid U.S. American narratives, are important, I also want to hear from the weird ones like me. What if I’m a Bengali living in Zambia and I don’t see anyone with that confluence of identity doing poetry unless they’re going to a place like New York? And I was grateful to have that education but this is about access. If you want to write poetry, you read, but so much of academia and theory and othered canons of poetry remain inaccessible to so many.
SE: I love this question. I think we’re fortunate to be living in an age where the Internet has democratized so much. First of all, I think the idea that the United States is a literary hub is propaganda. It’s literally not true. There’s incredible poetry coming out of South Africa ––a handful of amazing festivals are based there. The Lagos Poetry Festival has had amazing programming these past few years, Abu Dhabi has Rooftop Rhythms, Khartoum has a bunch of specific community-based spaces like this that also have online presences so that I, who do not live in any of these cities, can also be consuming the work coming out of these spaces and vice-versa. On a more formal level, there’s also programs which are U.S. based but with a more global eye, like the African Poetry Book Fund, whose initial project was to publish 100 African poets within 10 years. They put out so many books and it’s never a condition that any of the poets they publish have to be based in the U.S. They do a box set of chapbooks every year called New Generation African Poets by poets who have not published a full-length collection of work yet. And that’s one of the main spaces where I’m reading new poets there. It’s also a space where you can get to see analysis and criticism being applied to that work, where we normally only see that critical lens being placed on large-scale canonical work. They also do a bunch of programming where it’s not just like they’re bringing this work to the US and publishing it there.
The U.S. market is not the be-all and end-all of people who read and care about poetry. The U.S. aspect is only a small part of what they do, and they work with bookstores and libraries in the countries of origin of the writers they’re publishing to make sure it’s not just Africans talking to U.S. Americans about Africa. I love the work that they do and it’s helped me to stop falling into the thinking that the U.S. is the world.
And also, I’m just very online. It’s where I primarily learn about new poets to read and also where I learn about theory and prosody. Jericho Brown, every few weeks on his Twitter, will make a beautiful thread, and I’ll feel like now finally I have an MFA after reading that thread. I like to follow poets on Twitter and know what they think and that always teaches me something. It’s great and democratic and mostly free. It’s the end of gatekeeping in so many ways, where so much of this information used to be jealously guarded and distributed with a little dropper. And now it’s just all out there, as it should be.
The world is not like a bunch of countries anymore, in so many senses. I started to get this sense, even in the U.S., where so many of the people I’ve met at festivals or at slam events have not been from the same city as me, and I felt so close to them. Sometimes we lived in different countries. And I think that’s because of the technology we have now. I can read the work and the tweets of someone who lives anywhere in the world. Proximity doesn’t really dictate anything anymore. Which is helpful for me as someone who spent a lot of her formative years living in New York, thinking that if I ever left, I would be giving up that world and community. But I left New York and live to tell the tale. There’s community and spaces of congregation that exist now that have nothing to do with proximity or geography or nationally delineated borders, so it makes it that there’s no excuse to be sitting and reading within the echo chamber of U.S. publishing.
VS: It’s interesting that the Internet helps dissolve borders but also is a space where we are so hyper aware of them. I was in a class reading Emily Apter, who talks about how the Internet is a kind of borderless space that we aspire to and fantasize about in our poems or literature about borders, countries, cosmopolitanism. It’s one of the most unique things about our generation, this new territory of the Internet.
SE: Yeah, I came of age on the Internet. I grew up on Tumblr. I met my friend Warsan Shire on MySpace when we were both teenagers in different countries. Both of us grew up and came into our poetics on the Internet. I felt like a poet on Tumblr way before I felt like a poet in the world.
VS: Technology has definitely become part of the fabric of identity-making, of growing up, and no generation has had to navigate that before. So there’s no handbook. It’s almost like we’re making it up as we go with our poems. It’ll be fascinating to see analyzed in history years down the line, when people are more used to it.
Well, that was my last question. But it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.
SE: Likewise, and thank you for these incredibly thoughtful questions!
The video of the full interview can be found on our Patreon page.
Visuals: Isabel Ríos