Poetry: Two Poems by Safia Elhillo
Safia Elhillo’s The January Children has been on of the most exciting collections of 2017. These two new poems show why. Here, Elhillo comfortably explores established and invented forms with her beautiful, consistent focus on language, and bodies, and the hot spot where two cultures collide. There are few poets emerging today that can manage such a balance (think Akbar, think Monet, think Shire).
application for asylum
how did you learn fear?
i crossed a body of water
how did you learn fear?
i grew a new american body it was the summer [ ] died
& now?
i don’t like to be touched
what do you do?
i keep having the dream where my brother is dead i wake up & can’t remember where he lives
where do you live?
broken dishes in the water
where do you live?
[ ] died teenaged & his brother died too they were moonfaced & dark
where do you live?
we came here to be safe we crossed a body of water
where did you hide?
[ ] was killed in the summer in the country we asked to keep us
what do you hide?
it makes the bleeding brand new
what did you lose?
they were identical twins they look like my brother broken dishes in the water i don’t know where we’ll go
asmar
for Charif S.
not black our grandmothers insist & point
to vague & arid swathes across the map
arabia’s tribes conveniently nomadic to place
wherever blood begins to show a touch
of dark or daughters do not fear as they
are told the hot turmeric of the sun
allow instead its fingers’ pull of color
to the surface of the body kept
cloistered for generations attempt
at manmade white with creams & veils & fire
to kill the curl hair oiled & brushed out thin
so of course i hear the song that names it
asmar asmarani & hear my own dark name
i shake out the dark froth of my hair
***
i shake out the dark froth of my hair
the man in the silver shop says sudan
really but you look so clean ya asmar
& in an emirate by the water
at a party my girls & i are scrubbed
& polished with our eyelids painted gold
& yes we gleam & yes all day we tugged
the sun into our copper mouths
hair swollen in the heat forest of
acacia trees impenetrable though
a man dressed all in white thobe bluing in the
clean cold air conditioning from his car
rolls down the window & caws to his friends
“العبيد هنا” the niggers are here
***
“العبيد هنا” the niggers are here
our mothers debark a copper child on
each hip american future bluing
each life to match its new passport
& now & here the option to name the
asmar something new to pretend the word
in our new language is no longer black
despite bilad al sudan land of the
blacks as if our arabic will pale us
or blur the target disguise us as some
other other some more desirable
dusk as if the bullets will hear our sons’
sorghum inflections & bend to find some
black that holds up against language & sea
***
black that holds up against language & sea
black the only name assigned my body
that ever felt like mine black my hunted
kin my hunted blood & black my only
country & asmar & asmarani
& black that does not wait until called
a nigger or wait to be asked who
taught me to speak an arab’s arabic
or offered a window to some vaguer
brown to opt out of black to cling to the
vague & arid swathes of map ready
to fictionalize my beginnings i
unfurl in my sun worship to the dark
markings of the alphabet that named me
Safia Elhillo
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, and a Cave Canem Fellow, she received an MFA in poetry at the New School. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. In addition to appearing in several journals and anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, her work has been translated into Arabic, Japanese, Estonian, and Greek. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me.
