Safia Elhillo on Vulnerability and Anger in “Girls That Never Die”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2022

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

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.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.8	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.5	Safia El Hillo came into the spotlight in youth poetry slams in Washington, D.C., where she grew up.
0:20.4	She's the child of Sudanese immigrants.
0:23.0	She published her first poetry collection in 2017,
0:26.1	and she wrote a novel in verse called Home is Not a Country.
0:30.7	El Hillo's new collection is called Girls That Never Die.
0:34.6	When I first read Safia's poetry,
0:37.2	I was really struck by just how raw it is.
0:42.2	Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a poet herself. She's obviously someone who's
0:47.5	really deeply interested in language and nuance and subtlety, but there's something so candid and embodied about the work
0:59.1	that really was what grabbed me.
1:03.8	Most of Safia's work up to this point has really focused on questions of identity, how race,
1:10.5	culture, religion, country of origin, define who you are.
1:14.8	And in this book, she's doing all of that, but she's also made it incredibly personal, and that
1:21.0	feels really different. When we spoke, I asked her to read a poem from the new collection.
1:26.8	The poem's called,
1:28.1	On Eid, we slaughter lambs, and I know intimately the color. Here's an excerpt.
1:34.6	I ride an Uber spilling the last of the day's ginger light. Driver handsome enough to pull
1:41.0	listening sounds as he chats. Our talk is casual at its center,
1:45.5	but at the edges I taste an old brittleness, memory of something burnt. He circles his mouth to
1:52.5	an electronic cigarette, and its vapor braids into the earth and vinegar smell of sweat.
	...

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