The New Yorker Radio Hour - Safia Elhillo on Vulnerability and Anger in “Girls That Never Die”

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

The poet Safia Elhillo first found her voice onstage, performing in youth poetry slams in Washington, D.C., where she grew up, the child of Sudanese immigrants. She published her first collection in 2017, and in 2021 her novel in verse, “Home Is Not a Country,” was long-listed for the National Book Award. She’s now out with a new collection, “Girls That Never Die,” which she characterizes as her most personal and vulnerable work yet. It responds to some of the backlash she received online after her earlier work was published. “Before this book, I think I had really clear rules for myself about what I was and was not allowed to write poetry about. And my body was one of the things that I was not allowed to write poetry about,” Elhillo tells Dana Goodyear. “I think I really had to sit down and dismantle this idea that if I was polite enough, respectful enough, modest enough, quiet enough, silent enough—that nobody would ever want to do me harm.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Safia El Hillo came into the spotlight in youth poetry slams in Washington, D.C., where she grew up. She's the child of Sudanese immigrants. She published her first poetry collection in 2017, and she wrote a novel in verse called Home is Not a Country. El Hillo's new collection is called Girls That Never Die. When I first read Safia's poetry, I was really struck by just how raw it is. Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a poet herself.

She's obviously someone who's really deeply interested in language and nuance and subtlety, but there's something so candid and embodied about the work that really was what grabbed me. Most of Safia's work up to this point has really focused on questions of identity, how race, culture, religion, country of origin, define who you are. And in this book, she's doing all of that, but she's also made it incredibly personal, and that feels really different. When we spoke, I asked her to read a poem from the new collection. The poem's called, On Eid, we slaughter lambs, and I know intimately the color. Here's an excerpt. I ride an Uber spilling the last of the day's ginger light.

Driver handsome enough to pull listening sounds as he chats. Our talk is casual at its center, but at the edges I taste in old brittleness, memory of something burnt. He circles his mouth to an electronic cigarette, and its vapor braids into the earth and vinegar smell of sweat. You are Muslim, he tells me, not a question. and I nod, smile at his smoke-dark eyes in the mirror.

I count the prayer beads strung in a necklace from his rearview. 99 and perfect, glossy and unworn. Mine are sandalwood and leave their perfume when cabling through my fingers. Drink, smoke, he demands an inventory of my wickedness, in the way men of my faith think me immediately theirs, daughter and sister and wife, always a test and never asking my name. Before this book, I think I had very clear rules from myself about what I was and was not allowed to write poetry about. And my body was one of the things that I was not allowed to write poetry

about because I also didn't ever want to do anything that would call attention to my body or make anyone want to look at it or perceive it or pay attention to it. My first book is called The January Children and it came out in 2017. And my body is not really in that book. It is kind of thinking primarily about language and identity and place. And still, even though I wrote a book that followed all my rules about what I was and was not allowed to write poetry about. After the book came out, I was having a pretty rough time on the internet. And it would often be men in my inbox, a lot of whom share some of my intersections. And they were just so mad at me.

And I was like, I didn't do anything. Basically, you were being told that you weren't being modest because you had published poems. Or what was the specific? It wasn't even about the poems. I think it's just that I was like existing on the internet, you know, just like a lot of name calling and slut shaming and things like that. Meanwhile, here I was thinking that I was like winning the modesty game, you know. I was very particular about like what kinds of clothes I could be photographed in and the kinds of things I could, I would discuss in public. And I think it really, I had to sit down and really dismantle this idea that if I was whatever,

polite enough, respectful enough, modest enough, quiet enough, silent enough, that nobody would ever want to do me harm. And when I started, and I started to write some poems around that time just because that's, you know, one of the main ways I process a feeling. And I immediately felt those poems starting to like nudge up against my rules. Um, my, um, my my body was very much in those poems. I also don't know that I'd ever written a particularly angry poem before that, or at least I'd never sat down to write primarily from a place of anger. Yeah, you've characterized it in the acknowledgments to the book,

you characterize it as a breaking of silence, not just for you, but also for other women in your circle and in your family. And there are a number of poems that either directly or indirectly talk about cutting. Can you explain for readers who might not be familiar what that practice is? Yeah, so cutting refers to FGM, which is female genital mutilation. It's a process whereby a child's clitoris and sometimes other parts of the genital mutilation. are removed in an effort to discourage promiscuity later on in life. And this was something that you wanted to address.

It seems like a really direct way of centering a female body in the poems, but also a way of questioning a practice that is part of your family's heritage. Yeah, it's, so this is something that has been on my mind probably since I was a child. You know, I grew up knowing that FGM was a common practice in Sudan and in a lot of surrounding countries. And there would often be an allusion to the practice having happened in my family and in my own lineage. And just the like casual speculation also in my family about who had or had not been. and in what style and to what extent was, you know, it was spoken of pretty quietly and usually in like specifically cloistered femme spaces, but still very casually.

There was never like an announcement of it or even any real processing. It's just, you know, this person was cut. This person was not. At this point, it fell out of fashion. And so recent generations, it's not. as prevalent. And I think, I mean, obviously, it just really stayed with me. But I haven't really dedicated a lot of time and space in my poems to it before that, because that very much felt within the realm of these are things we do not talk about. This is family business. This is not

to be talked about outside of the home in any way. But I really just cannot be contributing to a culture of silence anymore. And so I figure the least I can do is keep my side of the street clean. Girls that never die. Perhaps a cow, some gold for a girl, carried kicking from her father's house, from her father's name, and slung over a shoulder and passed to another, whose belonging will name her, will give her form. Girl like water, shapeless without the bull. Girl, perhaps cut, perhaps in the pharaonic way, sent off to be split.

Girl as paintbrush, sent off to stain a sheet. Perhaps by cover of night. Perhaps the husband is old and the girl a child. legs clamped tight as if by stitching. Perhaps his brothers, perhaps his cousins. Men as ropes, as chains, brought in to peel the girl like young fruit. The pith still bitter, still clinging to the rind. Poet's Safia El Hillo.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I want to switch gears a bit and talk about language. So you include a lot of Arabic words and phrases in your poetry. but you've also said elsewhere that that language is complicated for you. Can you talk about how you feel about Arabic and why you sometimes include it in your poems, but don't fully embrace the language? So the writer Alamein Abd al-Mahmoud just released a memoir a few months ago called Son of Elsewhere.

And I think it's maybe the first English language memoir by a Sudanese person I've ever read. And he talks in that book about how his Arabic is kind of frozen at age 12 because that's the age at which he left Sudan and immigrated to Canada. So I am also deeply a child in Arabic. I actually don't have, I don't even think it's a question of fluency or not fluency in that like I get how the grammar works. You know, I can conjugate a verb, but there is just a fundamental lack of adult vocation. in my Arabic. So there's, there are just a lot of words that I don't know, a lot of nuance that I can't express. I know how to like ask how you're doing and how your family's doing and how is your health

and thank God a bunch of times and praise the food and, you know, make small talk, talk about the weather, things like that. So if I'm like, if we're having lunch, my Arabic is great. But for just the vocabulary and the range that I need to access to write poetry in order to say exactly, exactly what I mean, I don't have access to that in Arabic because I just, I don't have the vocabulary for it. There is a poem I would love to have you read that is about that because I was thinking when you were saying, I can ask about the weather and I'm a really good lunch date in Arabic. And I was like, but you can also swear. So will you read profanity for us? Yes.

So this poem, actually funnily enough, is about how I can't really swear in Arabic. All my swears are kind of soft and they're like animal words and stuff. I don't know any like good, proper swears in Arabic. Profanity. One. I know 99 names from my God and none from my redact. A failing not of my deity, but of my Arabic. Not the language itself.

Rather, the over-eager mosaic I hoard. I steal. I borrow from pop songs and mine from childhood fluency. I guard my few swear words like tinkling silver anklets, spare and precious, and never nearly enough to muster a proper Arabic anger. Proper Arabic vulgarity. Only a passing spar, always using the names of animals. I am not polite.

I am only inarticulate, overproud of my little arsenal. A stranger blows a wet tobacco kiss through the window of my taxi, and I deploy my meager weapons, dog, pig, donkey. And finally, my crown jewel. I pass my tongue across my teeth, crane my neck about the window, and call, your mother's redacted. Two. Now I know the worst profanity.

What men use when they need to curse one another. To cut. Word I only know as a swear. Your mothers, your sisters, mine. In Arabic, the word hisses, traps the tongue between the teeth, spits. Words so similar to an English kiss, turn to a word. venom by inflection, to rot in the mouth, sight of shame, birthplace of the profane. But what word can I use to call my own?

How, without disgrace, can I name my innocent parts, my wounds? I am saying, if asked in Arabic, I could not tell you where I open. Safia, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for having me. poet Safia El Hillo. Her new collection is called Girls That Never Die. She spoke with Dana Goodyear, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker.

I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week, with the World Cup about to begin, I'll talk with the investigative journalist Heidi Blake, who's recently joined the New Yorker staff. She co-wrote a remarkable book called The Ugly Game. It's a deep look at how Cutter came to host the World Cup this year and all the corruptions surrounding it. I hope you'll join us.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tunei, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breita Green, Calalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabwele. Along with Adam Howard, Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May.

And we had assistance from Harrison Keith-Line, Meher Batia and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.