Asmarani

included in New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Tatu)

Akashic Books

Intricacy is a key word here, as Elhillo is a writer who operates on multiple levels concurrently, interweaving family history and autobiography with a broader analysis of Sudan’s socio-political history—a narrative that must encircle colonialism, civil war, genocide, resource conflict and exile. Water is a motif that saturates many of the poems—and one which serves the dual purpose of bearing ecological insight and emotional freight.

Karen McCarthy Woolf, from the preface

Excerpt

i do not always survive

across boundaries i pull

sweet blue smoke from a coiled

hookah pipe i sometimes

lie bleeding painted gold

& you need not find me beautiful 
Safia Elhillo, from “first interview for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl”