Sudanese poet, Safia Elhillo, feels very differently now about the idea of belonging than she did at the time of writing her award-winning collection, The January Children. Looking back, she was ‘so concerned with a sort of diasporic longing that centered nationhood and nationality as the primary sites of belonging, and I just really don’t believe that anymore.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
If your life at this moment was a line from a poem, what poem would that be and what line?
A representative line of my life at the moment can be found in Aracelis Girmay’s poem, You Are Who I Love. It goes this way: ‘Finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love.’
What is your writing process: edit as you write or draft first, then edit?
I definitely draft first, then edit. If I try to bring my editor brain into a fragile first draft, I’ll never get the draft out.
The January Children, which won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, is a ‘deeply personal collection of poems that describe the experience of navigating the postcolonial world as a stranger in one’s own land’. Looking back, what’s one thing you might revise/do differently if you were to write it again?
I feel very differently now about belonging than I did at the time of writing that book, which was so concerned with a sort of diasporic longing that centered nationhood and nationality as the primary sites of belonging, and I just really don’t believe that anymore, so I would write a lot of those poems differently.
If I try to bring my editor brain into a fragile first draft, I’ll never get the draft out.
Do you have a personal favourite from the collection? If yes, which is it and why?
You know, I actually haven’t read those poems in ages, so I don’t know that I have a favorite anymore. It almost feels like those poems are no longer mine, like that book no longer belongs to me.
How did your approach to writing change, while working on your novel-in-verse, Home Is Not a Country?
I had to learn about plot, about cause and effect. It was the first time I had to think about things ‘happening’ in my writing, which made me realize that I had a very loose relationship at best to things ‘happening’ in terms of narrative events in my work prior to that. Things were happening formally in the poems, but I don’t know that much was happening-happening. For the first time in my writing life, I also got to make things up, where I could write the word ‘I’ and it wouldn’t be read as autobiographical.
Your latest book, Bright Red Fruit, is a novel-in-verse about a teenager’s journey into the slam poetry scene and the dangerous new relationship that could threaten all her dreams. Which book/author had the most influence on your approach to writing it?
I spent a lot of time with different tellings of and meditations on the Persephone myth by Ovid and Homer. I also read Louise Glück’s Averno and Melissa Febos’s essay, ‘Thesmophoria’, in the anthology titled What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About.
What’s the most you’ve spent on a book of poems?
I spent around $50 on Anne Carson’s Nox, which is a book in the form of a box of loose papers.
What makes a poem unforgettable?
What makes a poem unforgettable is when it doesn’t neatly conclude or resolve, and instead, haunts. When a poem is strange and changes my perception. When I can’t figure out its machinery and have to just experience it like it’s magic, like it can’t be reverse engineered.
For the first time in my writing life, I also got to make things up, where I could write the word ‘I’ and it wouldn’t be read as autobiographical.
Which book did you enjoy in the last year and wish more people knew about?
I enjoyed reading Sean Michaels’ Do You Remember Being Born. It is a novel about an ageing poet who agrees to collaborate with a poetry bot.
What’s a book on your bookshelf that might surprise your friends?
I have so many old handmade chapbooks from like 15 years ago that belong to my friends, ones that they maybe don’t even have copies of anymore
What’s the last book you gifted someone?
Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies.
And what’s the last book someone gifted you?
Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm.
What makes a poem unforgettable is when it doesn’t neatly conclude or resolve, and instead, haunts.
What is the most meaningful piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Louise Glück told me that my poems need to ‘look out the window’ sometimes and not attend so literally to the subject matter, and I feel like following that advice made my poems more interesting.
What’s the worst thing/advice to tell a poet?
That poetry is ornamental and not political. Poetry is political.
Which poets working today are you rooting for?
I am rooting for any poet who is, to quote Rasha Abdulhadi, ‘throw[ing] sand on the gears of genocide’.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on loose poems, maybe a novel, maybe a screenplay—just lots of little loose experiments, mostly⎈
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