Session details
Wednesday 9 October, 18:00
Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS)
Join us in-person for Session IV, with Sudanese-by-way-of-Washington, DC. poet Safia Elhillo (joining remotely) and South African poet and series curator Maneo Mohale.
As space is extremely limited (max 20), RSVP is essential.
Sudan, TX
Safia Elhillo
Land of the Blacks, they named my country—at the driving school my instructor seized the wheelwhen I continued to drift into the left lane, not yet taught to regardthe great machine as more of my body. My first years here I would growalert, as if called, thinking it was that name I heard being spoken,of our dark concentration of bodies, only to learn it is a kind of car,the sedan, blackening the air with exhaust, waste gases I imagineto be named for the act of depletion, tired lungs of the car sighing for rest.
I say they who named my country & don’t know to whom I refer—British, Ottoman, Egyptian, crossing the threshold & declaring, This land.Black. Everywhere the smell of metal, known to me only as the copper smellof blood. I did not pass that test & have since forgotten what I learned,30 years old & still unfit to drive, to drive as in to thrust, to plunge,to learn the responsibility of great violence. Machine in which I sit & becomea hazard, meaning danger but also meaning chance or venture or fate.
Its etymologies claim Arabic, al-zahr defined as chance or luck thoughI only know it as flower. The Arabic which also names my country,Jumhuriyat al-Sudan: Republic of the Blacks. In the elevator a womandraws her child closer to her side, handbag flattening between them,when my brother & I enter & smile, threatening great violence. I learnof a Sudan in Texas, population 958, named by its postmaster, who neversaid why, & without the prefix Bilad, meaning land of, the name of the cityis Blacks. In the photographs it could be anywhere, long flat stretchof road, power lines & grass. But I want what I am promised. Thick coughof exhaust, then the great machine arriving, my body sighing for rest.
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link to the poem on Project Muse
Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), and the novel in verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor.
Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work appears in POETRY Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.
Image credit: Aris Theotokato