A Conversation with Safia Elhillo

Jul 7

I’d never been a fan of poetry novels. I’ve always preferred the way prose painted such vivid, descriptive imagery. However, Safia Elhillo’s Bright Red Fruit managed to do that in captivating verses, completely changing my views on novels in verse. I recently had the privilege to talk to her about this novel and her creative process.

Samira is a very complex and realistic depiction of a teenage girl, and so I was wondering what the process of crafting her character was like for you.

So much of my life as a poet outside of the novels kind of calls for a responsibility to the autobiographical facts of my life, like kind of in a poem. I can't say something happened to me if it didn't happen to me. The fun thing about fiction is I get to spend time writing about characters who are not me, uh, which is very helpful when I'm sick and tired of my psychology and my own life stories. So with Samira, it was very fun to kind of lend some elements of my teenage life to this character. So Sudanese, American, Washington D.C, teen poet. But then almost write an alternate version of the story. So here are some similar ingredients to the ones that I had in my life at that age and I already know how that story worked out. Here I am 16 years later or whatever. It was a fun almost, I don't know, almost like fan fiction or something to be like okay, Sudanese-American poet, Washington D.C, but an alternate version of the story, which then kind of by default made Samira into a fundamentally different character than I was at that age.

And I think it also helped to kind of have some distance from that age to like I'm close enough to it that I remember some of the feeling of like just wanting to be treated like I was grown and to be given all the freedom in the world to do whatever I wanted, but also the ways in which I wasn't able to understand how protected I was and I sometimes like misread that protection as protectiveness or overbearingness on that. I also grew up in a very communal community and so sometimes I was like “Please leave me alone!” But as I grew up later I think I came to understand it as such great fortune that I was that I grew up so among, and so I had so many people in my business making sure I was okay. So it was a really interesting vantage point to try and write this character from where I kind of have sympathy for both ends. Now that I'm an adult, you know, I remember just that like burning desire for freedom and also how the grown people in my life were able to see dangers that I was not aware of, and so that really kind of fed into trying to make this character who is like you at any age. It's very easy to take for granted the things that you've never had to go without. And so I wanted to assign like the kind of central drive of Samita's character is a desire for freedom and also, a lot of the mistakes that she makes are engineered by the fact that she just takes for granted the care that the care that she receives, and the rebellion is a little misplaced, which I remember from my teenage self. But, because I am now my adult self and kind of the engineer of the universe of this book, I kind of get like could invent some scenarios based on stories that I heard growing up, things that I went through as a teenager, but rewrite them in a way that kind of emphasizes community care, that emphasizes like finding your voice, uh, where it doesn't all have to be like bleak and have a sad ending because, you know, it's Y.A.

So how did your passion for writing and poetry start?

It was always in my life because my maternal grandfather was a poet. And even before I super understood what poetry was, it was just like one of the main facts I knew about my grandfather was that he was a poet, whatever that meant. So by the time I pulled up to the family and was like ‘I'm a poet’, they were like ‘Okay’. You usually hear these stories where, especially with immigrant families, they're like ‘No, go be an engineer’ or whatever, and it just wasn't that my family, because there was precedent. But the way I came to poetry on my own as a teenager.

In the era of my coming of age, it was like a very kind of canonical teenage girl thing to keep a diary, and I wanted to have some kind of space to like, work out my thoughts, and process my feelings. But what I was not going to do was sit down and spell out in prose everything that I was up to and just leave it in a book that anyone could just pick up and read. I also like eternally lived in fear of being in trouble with my mom. So I was like I'm not going to just sit and write in a diary. I'm not going to sit and write down that I've been dating, you know so it, 's ‘cause I'm not supposed to be dating, you know? But the impulse to process things through writing was very present, and so the loophole that I found is that if I wrote down these entries as poems instead of being like a dear diary, today my boyfriend broke up with me, whatever, then, if the book was found, I could be like ‘it's just a poem!

It didn't happen. And then, through kind of those early poems, a friend of mine started writing poetry around the same time that I did. She started taking me to open mics and I got absorbed into the DC poetry community. That way, I was on the DC slam team when I was a teenager and that was the thing that kept me a poet. I think it's like I wasn't. It's not like that. You know the movie moment where I wrote my first moment, my first poem, and it was like oh, I found my calling.

You know, for years my poems were not very good, but it didn't matter, it wasn't something that I needed to be good at.

Yet the thing that made me want to be good at it was seeing all these poets around DC in community with each other and the ways that they just like belonged to each other and hung out with each other, and I so craved that kind of belonging that I was like okay, the way to keep being invited back to these spaces is to write poems. So I have to write a bunch of poems and now that I'm in a community with these people, I want them to like me and respect me. And I think they will like me more if they think my poems are good. So I have to figure out how to make my poems better. So it kind of gradually snowballed from there. But the two inciting things where I just was too scared to keep a real diary, and then was hungry for the kind of community I saw in that DC poetry community around that time.

So, with poetry being an outlet for you as a teen, what was the meaning of poetry and writing to you? And as time went on, has the definition changed for you? Is it still an outlet or is it something else?

It's my job now, you know so it's just not a personal outlet in the same way because now, writing is kind of writing, poetry is kind of inextricably linked to publishing for me and, now that I'm adult and my boundaries are a little better, there's some stuff that I just don't want to publish about, and so it means that, this thing that I kind of instinctually, naturally, would turn to work out everything in my life when I was younger. Now there's a bit of a barrier in place where it can't be the first thing I turn to anymore because, with all due respect to my beloved readers, some things are not my reader’s business yet. So I have had to find other, probably honestly more healthy, sustainable outlets like therapy to deal with some, painful things that come up in my life, where the instinct is not always, ‘Oh, a bad thing happened to me, let me go make art out of it’, which I think was a very was for a lot of the early years of my life as a poet. That was kind of the immediate order of operations, and I think, in part, it was because, as, just the way the culture was when I was younger, there was a lot of currency in writing about trauma and in revisiting trauma and in re-aggravating your trauma, and so I was made to believe for a long time that the most interesting things about me were the things that hurt me the most and that made poetry not very fun for a long time.

You know, it kind of creates this association in my mind, between feeling bad and writing poetry, but I love writing poetry. I love poetry more than most things, and so I needed to find a way to break that association, and so it also means that now there are more steps in place for me between having an experience and writing a poem about it, which also means that I write a lot less than I did when I was urgently scribbling as a 15, 16, 17-year-old, you know. So I do mourn that, but I do think if I had kept going in that way, I probably would not be a poet anymore, I think.

I would have been like I would like to get well, and if it costs me the poems, so be it. So this way, you know, poetry is still the main thing in my life and also it is not my main way of coping with pain or trauma or discomfort. And, weirdly, because my main hobby became my job, I've now for years, I'm just like in eternal pursuit of a new hobby because I'm trying to learn how to have a hobby without the impulse to professionalize it, you know. After all, the one other became my job. And so now, every time I try to learn to play chess, I'm like what if I join a chess competition?

Diaspora narratives, and especially African diaspora narratives, are quite new and not very often seen. So what do you see or hope for the future of this sort of genre of literature?

You know, it's interesting to hear it being talked about as something new, because I think of it as being so much older than me and so much older than us, where I feel that I exist in a long tradition. And I think part of this rupture as a result of colonialism is that so many people have, for so many years before me, made lives away from their places of origin. Where I was raised in a Sudanese diaspora community in DC by a bunch of Sudanese diaspora elders like two, three, maybe not three generations, but like two generations ahead. So I grew up in a world that was made possible by a bunch of Sudanese elders who had rebuilt a life out of that rupture and who had kind of reconstructed a version of the world and reconstructed a version of home and belonging and all of that was just already there for me to step into and grow up in. And so I think of myself as deeply being a child of those spaces and deeply like in the lineage of those spaces. This is all to say that I don't think I'm doing anything particularly new or original, I think I'm just kind of continuing in the ways that I was taught.

One of the main conversations that I hear around hyphenated identity stuff is about language. The only reason I speak Arabic is because I was raised in a Sudanese diaspora space where a bunch of aunties and uncles were like ‘We must teach you to speak Arabic so that it doesn't get lost here.’ But because I was also an American child, [I] was inherently hybrid, where, yes, I was in these classrooms being taught Sudanese Arabic by a bunch of Sudanese elders, but my classmates in those classrooms were Sudanese-American teenagers. So we would be in these rooms learning Arabic, learning like the Sudanese national anthem or whatever, and then we would go on break and drink our little Capri Suns and like, be American kids with each other, but with that added layer of belonging. Those were the spaces where, with those kids in particular (because with the adults, it was almost disrespectful to speak in English to the adults) I felt like the language of my poetics was forged, where these were kids that spoke my exact language my exact, intersecting, overlapping languages, and so those were the only spaces in my life where I could just talk and the word would come out in whatever language it occurred to me, and I didn't have to take that beat before to be like, is this English, is this Arabic? I could just talk. And so many things about the way I process the world through language were formed in those spaces. So many things like my sense of humor formed in those spaces, where it's just funnier to be able to talk in two languages to someone, you know? And so all of those elements that became kind of a foundational element of my poetics weren't invented by me and none of those things were invented around me. All of those things already existed, by the time I came around and learned to speak and started to process the world through language.

So I guess my hope for diaspora literature especially, you know, I imagine one of the like common traits found throughout diaspora literature is that it is literature written by people who exist in the aftermath of some sort of rupture, and I do see a version of the story where that rupture creates a gap in the lineage and makes it hard to kind of reach back in a certain way.

But I think my impulse is to kind of warn my fellow diasporic writers against this kind of narrative that we are alone or uniquely positioned or not in a lineage, or there is a rupture or a break in the line or a break in the lineage, because I feel very grateful that I feel so deeply descendant, and I feel so deeply unalone as a writer, I feel so deeply unalone as a Sudanese person, as a Sudanese-American person, and I do think one of the things that, in the U.S at least, which is such a like an individualist society, and because the culture I grew up in is such a collectivist society, the thing that I feel butting heads a lot, even just like in my poems, is like we versus the I.

You know, and I think it's very easy in centering the I, which is easy to do in a poem, especially because we're so like deep in the confessional tradition at this point, I think it's very easy, in over prioritizing the I and the individual, to do a lot of erasure of the people that we're indebted to and of the cultures and lineages and histories that we're indebted to, and I think it's very easy in that position to be like I'm the first, I'm the only, and I would like to gently invite us to consider that it's maybe not so interesting or such a flex to be the first or the only. That seems pretty miserable to me.

I don't want to be the first or the only anything, so I'm very glad and very grateful that I'm not the first or the only anything. How lucky am I to be so among and so in a lineage that I don't have to be the first or the only anything? I wish that for all of my fellow diasporic writers as well.

Both your books Home is Not a Country and Bright Red Fruit share themes of cultural connectivity, belonging, and mother-daughter relationships. However, these themes are portrayed in two very different ways, with characters with different origins. So how did your approach to exploring these themes differ between those two perspectives?

I think fundamentally the nucleus of Home is not a Country is loneliness. It's such a lonely book, it's such a lonely main character, and because it was my first novel after it was done I kind of wanted to set the record for each truth where I, as a young person, did have moments of deep loneliness and sadness and all that. But that's not the whole story. And I felt like if that was the only book, it kind of misrepresents the larger point that I'm trying to make, the larger story I'm trying to tell. And so Bright Red Fruit is about community and how one can still be very lonely and very isolated within a community. But it was almost like I wanted to finish what I started saying, especially towards the end of Home is Not a Country, which is about a Sudanese-American world that is crowded, for better, for worse, a lot of people, because that was also a version of the experience that I had. We're just, you know, I grew up in DC in the early 2000s. There are Sudanese people everywhere, for better, for worse, and I felt like that wasn't fully represented in Home is Not a Country.

Also, because Home is Not a Country was my first novel, I was a little skittish about some specificities like the country of Sudan is not named in that entire book, because I also didn't want someone who didn't already know about Sudan to try and read my book like it was a textbook about the Sudanese experience or whatever. And I also wanted the freedom to get to make stuff up without feeling responsible for accurately representing a named version of Sudan. Because then, like my mom or whoever would be like that's not where that street is, you know. So this way I was like, well, I didn't say it was in Sudan, so it could be wherever I put it. But, and you know, DC the home is not a country is not set in DC proper either, I grew up in DC, but a lot of the Sudanese diaspora communities that I was a part of were in the outskirts outside of DC, so Northern Virginia and mostly like Montgomery County and Howard County, Maryland, and so Home is Not a Country is set in like an unnamed suburb outside of DC which is also not named. So, like in my mind it's set in skyline towers in Northern Virginia, but that's not named either.

That's just the image I needed to hold in my head to get the story out. And after it was done, I kind of again because you know, my bread and butter is poetry and poetry thrives on specificity I just kind of felt itchy about how unspecific it felt at the end and so I wanted my second time around to be like these people are Sudanese, this is Washington DC, and just like enjoy how solid it was, how solid a foundation I felt I had by naming those things specifically and in doing that kind of loudly and identifying who I had in mind while I was writing this story and what community specifically I was talking to when I was writing this story, whereas the first time around it was like if you know, you know, but I'm not going to say it.

Girls That Never Die uses Greek mythology as an anchor to mythologize your work. What motivated the incorporation of myth into this book?

I don't know when I became, like, such a Greek mythology girl. When I first started writing Bright Red Fruit, it didn't have the Persephone and Hades stuff in it, but I kept getting stuck. I couldn't find a way through the story that I knew I wanted to tell about a young Sudanese-American poet, about community, about grooming, about eternally lurking predators, and I had been rereading. So I started writing Bright Red Fruit in the early pandemic. I was living in Oakland, and I was doing a poetry fellowship where the poet Louise Glick was one of my teachers I don't know if this, I don't know if it was the first time that I had read this book of hers called Averno, but I was revisiting it that summer and she has a couple of poems in that book about Persephone, and one of the epigraphs in Bright Red Fruit comes from a poem in that book.

And there was a line that struck me which was in the tale of Persephone, which can be read as an argument between the mother and the lover: the daughter is just meat. I had read the myth of Persephone, or a version of the myth of Persephone by then, in which it was very much framed as like mom and daughter versus this bad man. Rarely had I read a version of that myth that centered on the agency of the daughter, where it is like the battle of wills between the mother and the kidnapper. And then, you know, Persephone is just kind of a mystery. Does she eat the fruit on purpose? Does she go on purpose? Was she kidnapped? Nobody seems to know for sure. And I found that gap in the story to be really interesting and to have it pointed out in that poem. The thought wouldn't leave me once I read that line.

So then it was really helpful to try to like superimpose that myth onto the story I was trying to tell, because then the myth worked almost as like training wheels for my story, where it's not, you know, Bright Red Fruit is not a beat by beat retelling of the myth, but it kind of it borrows the larger structure. She's taken, the mom helps, she comes back, but she's changed, you know. It made these checkpoints for me that were helpful as I was writing the story. I'd be like, okay, I'm stuck. What happens at this point in the myth? And then I could be like, okay, in the myth, this is the part where this happens. And then I could either take that and use it to keep going forward, or I could be like that doesn't quite fit the story I'm trying to tell.

But it was still generative in giving me a decision to make fit the story I'm trying to tell. But it was still generative in giving me the decision to make, and it also meant that I could slowly draw like take away a bunch of my autobiographical stuff out of that story and replace it with stuff from the myth, which then just made me a much less cagey storyteller, where then I was like okay, now I'm willing to really get into details and roll my sleeves up here, because I'm not talking about my own business anymore now. This is just Persephone stuff, so I can get vivid and get invested, instead of being like, how do I protect myself and my anonymity in this storytelling? I could just take huge chunks out of the story and replace them with something else which was very helpful.

Responses and questions have been edited for clarity

You can find Safia Elhillo at https://safia-mafia.com/bio