Sudanese poet, Safia Elhillo, feels very differently now about the idea of belonging than she did at the time of writing her award-winning collection, The January Children. Looking back, she was ‘so concerned with a sort of diasporic longing that centered nationhood and nationality as the primary sites of belonging, and I just really don’t believe that anymore.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
If your life at this moment was a line from a poem, what poem would that be and what line?
A representative line of my life at the moment can be found in Aracelis Girmay’s poem, You Are Who I Love. It goes this way: ‘Finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love.’
What is your writing process: edit as you write or draft first, then edit?
I definitely draft first, then edit. If I try to bring my editor brain into a fragile first draft, I’ll never get the draft out.
The January Children, which won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, is a ‘deeply personal collection of poems that describe the experience of navigating the postcolonial world as a stranger in one’s own land’. Looking back, what’s one thing you might revise/do differently if you were to write it again?
I feel very differently now about belonging than I did at the time of writing that book, which was so concerned with a sort of diasporic longing that centered nationhood and nationality as the primary sites of belonging, and I just really don’t believe that anymore, so I would write a lot of those poems differently...
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