At 24, Safia Elhillo is already a poetry veteran. She competed in slams from the age of 17, is published, teaches poetry at the International High School in Queens and has just completed an MFA in Poetry at The New School. She is also the joint winner, alongside Nick Makoha, of the Brunel University African Poetry Prize 2015.
Elhillo is a Cave Canem Fellow and a poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, a journal of black expression. Her work has been nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize, and appears in several publications including Vinyl Poetry, Bird’s Thumb, Union Station Magazine, and RedLeafPoetry’s African Diaspora Poetry Folio. Of Sudanese origin, and based in New York, poetry runs in Elhillo’s family; her grandfather writes poetry, as does her aunt.
She explains to Joy Francis why the thought of people reading her work makes her want to hide, her fascination with dead artists like Ol’ Dirty Bastard and her take on the collective mourning over the deaths of African American men which has inspired a new kind of poetry movement.
Congratulations on winning the Brunel University African Poetry Prize jointly with Nick Makoha. You have been called “a refreshing and extraordinary new voice whose poetry is haunting, original and deeply affecting”. How does it feel to have won and what impact would you like it to have on your profile and work?
It’s very surreal and exciting to have won. I actively tried not to think about it for a long time after submission, so when I got the news it was a nice jolt to me. As an act of self preservation, I try not to think about who is reading my work as it makes me want to hide in a hole. Obviously it’s exciting and a privilege to have an expanding readership, and I don’t want to been seen as ungrateful, but I am a hermit.
But you teach.
I like kids. They are easier to deal with and teaching is in balance with everything I do, and it helps to keep me in check. I’ve made a career talking about my feelings and myself. Teaching is not about me and it reminds me that the world doesn’t revolve around the self.
A big thing is made about the fact that you are only 24 yet you are a critically acclaimed poet and a teacher. How do you feel about that perception?
It has been coming up quite a lot recently, when I’m the oldest I’ve ever been. They are acting like I’m a foetus. I started out in poetry slams at 17 and I have a lot of peers in my age group doing this work. My mentors back then are the age I am now, though they seemed really old at the time. On the one hand I objectively know I am very young and most of the world is older and wiser than I am. I also look young, which doesn’t help my cause whatsoever, yet I feel like a 65 year old man.
How would you describe your poetry and what themes capture you?
I like to try to make poems which feel translated. I don’t come from an Anglophone background so it’s important to me not to erase the fact that I am choosing to live and work in English when my family is from Sudan and speaks Arabic. I like putting untranslated chunks of Arabic in my poems. A lot of the themes I write about are to do with my family, immigration, alienation, and my big identity crises. I often use poetry as a lens to talk about other things and write about dead artists a lot, like Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the Egyptian singer, actor and overall heartthrob Abdel Halim Hafez, who died in 1977. He sung about asmarani, which translates as a term of endearment for a brown skin person. There is intra-Arab racism over the question of identifying as black or Arab. There is a lot of scapegoating and super-fictional hierarchies about how Arab someone is.
What inspired you to pursue this craft?
I’ve been writing poems for a while. I wasn’t much of a journal keeper but poetry was my version of a diary. I was worried that my mother would find it so I would write on hotel stationary and roll them up. A friend invited me to open mic nights a lot and that introduced me to the performance part of it. At the time poetry slam was the only platform where I saw people who looked like me. I have my issues with it now, but at the time it was an invaluable and nurturing space for me.
What changed?
It’s a space where you are competing with your poems. I was writing trauma poems, which were the most rewarded, when I was in the darkest space in my life, so there was very little room to heal. It’s not like this for everyone, but I never found that balance, so I had to make the decision for myself. There are ways to have poetry and experience poetry away from the competition setting. It was validating for me early on, but it got to a point where I didn’t have to win a poetry slam to feel I’d written a good poem.
What is the situation facing poetry in the US currently, and New York particularly? R.A. Villanueva said there is a ferocity in poetry by writers of colour at the moment. Do you agree?
From what I’ve observed, from a considerable distance, I feel like part of the community but barely leave my house unless I have to. There is nothing new on the racial landscape, but now we have the visuals [via social media] to back it up, where you are being made to look at it. There is a collective mourning happening here. The rage is there, but it has brought people together to build each other while we are all still alive, so there is a movement borne of black poets who are speaking out. There was a moment born called #BlackPoetsSpeakOut, started by two Cave Canem graduates, where black poets are invited to submit videos of themselves reading poems (either their own or by another poet), celebrating black life or mourning black death. It’s what we can contribute in the face of the mass murder of people who look like us. It’s about having a platform poets know people will read, and there is a responsibility that comes with that.
What next for you?
I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m due for a mid-20s crisis. I’m figuring out if I want to live in New York anymore. I’m not actively choosing it, but I don’t know where else I’d rather be, and I’m researching PhD programmes. I know how to do school and it’s a socially acceptable place to not to be in the real world. I may do some travelling. It’s been a year and a half since I went to Sudan, but I was only there for five days. I’m looking into the fiction of race in Sudan and I am looking for a research grant to explore this area. The way the Sudanese cultural ethnic identity is broken up is that the North is seen as Arab and the South is considered African. The country is in Africa. There isn’t any crucial conversation about what it means to be an Arab. I want to ask Sudanese people what race they think they are, but I need to flesh out the idea a bit more.
What advice do you have for budding poets, particularly of colour?
The advice I wished someone had given me when I was budding was just read as much as possible. This is not to say that you should emulate the poets you like, but taste is at the base level of what then becomes your voice. If you figure out what you like about them, then you can boil it down to the skill and not the style, and then you can hone your own writing. Writing is a muscle. It isn’t about waiting around to be inspired. It is work and you need to do it like you are an accountant, doctor or lawyer. Don’t wait for the moments that inspire you to work and to only exclusively work in those moments. If I did that, I would only write one poem every two years.
Read Elhillo’s poem the lovers.
[toggle title=” Read an extract from Elhillo’s poem the lovers.”]
the lovers
khartoum in the eighties
my mother with ribbons in her hair
dress fanning about her nutmeg calves
my father
who i hear
was so lively & handsome
that only bad magic could have emptied
& filled him with smoke
the borrowed record player
the generation that would leave
to make nostalgia of these nights
to hyphenate their children
& grow gnarled by diaspora’s
every winter
but tonight, motown crackling
into the hot twilight,
mosquitoes swaying
in the velvet dusk,
my parents dance
without ever touching.
©Copyright Safia Elhillo 2015/the lovers was originally published in Vinyl.[/toggle]