A deep, incisive look at an instant classic from 2021 asks questions about the origins of a genre that is currently enjoying a fast rise among younger readers.
By Akumbu Uche
Verse novels are hardly a new phenomenon but they seem to be having a moment in contemporary Young Adult literature. Perhaps the popularity of narrative poetry has to do with adolescence being the stage of development when young people are most self-conscious, and eager to self-actualise, they begin to experiment with poetry and journaling.
With ‘Home is not a Country’ (Make Me a World, 2021), the Sudanese-American poet and spoken word artist Safia Elhillo joins authors like Elizabeth Acevedo (The Poet X), Kwame Alexander (The Crossover series), and Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) who use the medium to portray black teenage experiences and in so doing, reflect teenagers to themselves.
Welding prose to poetry, Elhillo’s novel, set in 2001, is narrated by Nima, a 14-year-old Sudanese-American Muslim girl. Coming of age in the wake of the September 11 tragedy means living in an America where Islamophobia is overt and socially acceptable. Growing up is never easy but Nima appears to be having a rougher time of it than most of her peers. Not only does she have to deal with the ambiguity of adolescence and the emotional harm she suffers from the school bullies who taunt her with “terrorist”, growing up with one foot in Africa and the other in America leaves her feeling like she is on shaky ground. Her angst echoes Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s oft-quoted poem, Diaspora blues:
So, here you are
too foreign for home
too foreign for here.
never enough for both.
Nima’s sense of displacement manifests itself linguistically. Ostensibly bilingual, she struggles with language – her American English is Sudanese-inflected while her Arabic is halting at best. Even though her family regularly consumes Arabic media at home, she finds it difficult to keep up.
i can’t follow the story & feel/how clumsy my arabic is/i start/& falter & start again
In sociolinguistics, this cultural quagmire is often referred to as the third space. It is a concept the author is clearly familiar with as she teaches a ‘Poetry of the Third Space’ course at Stanford. One gets the sense that although the novel is not autobiographical, the author has definitely drawn from the well of personal experience. Born in the United States to Sudanese parents in 1990, Elhillo’s early childhood was spent in several European and African countries, after which she returned to the US at the age of 10. This diasporic upbringing has resulted in her exploring identity and migration in her work.
As a coping mechanism, Nima retreats into her thoughts and toys with the possibilities of what might have been had she been raised in Sudan as Yasmeen, the name her parents originally intended for her.
The pervasive mood in the text is nostalgia. Nima obsessively yearns for a past she can only access through the sepia-coloured photographs of her parents’ youth and old-school khaliji music preserved on cassette tapes.
There are sprinklings of folk horror too like when Yasmeen, her alter ego ceases to be a figment of her imagination and becomes flesh.
i retreat into my head/&/remember mama fatheya’s warnings about the spirit world at twilight/stories/of children trapped on the other side/but the girl/before me can’t be a jinni/
she’s me/maybe she’s/ my sister/a twin i never knew
Could this be a paranormal phenomenon, magical realism, or a Jungian exploration of the shadow self? Your guess is as good as mine.
Elhillo makes some interesting stylistic choices; she forgoes full stops and commas in favour of a blank space caesura. Her atypical punctuation and use of lowercase letters throughout the text, reminiscent of E.E. Cummings’s rejection of poetic convention, is as inviting to the eye as it is insightful into young Nima’s emotional state.
It takes a lot of skill to write from a child-like perspective without devolving to writing in a childish manner, and Elhillo excels in this regard. It is very easy to see why the author of The January Children (2017) and the forthcoming Girls That Never Die (2022) has been lauded with multiple awards from the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize to Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner fellowship, and one suspects there will be more accolades in her future.
There is plenty here in Safia Elhillo’s sophomore outing to comfort and challenge book-loving teenagers, and it is an equally perfect read for adults.
Akumbu Uche is a Nigerian writer whose work has appeared in Bella Naija, Brittle Paper, Nowhere Magazine, and Open Letters Review. She lives in Owerri.
